The Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  I never talked to Kier about any of this, though I was told that he’d been informed. What I saw of him and my father continued as normal—Dad would hand him parables from Up from Slavery, or Kier would perfect his imitation of Dad’s ’70s cadence. By then, Kier had chosen the glittering path. I always thought he had what mattered—the cool hand, the fresh Ewings, Champion hoodie, the badass dimes. Yet he craved frenzy, life on the random and quick. Like all boys, I saw the appeal. I would not live on lucky numbers but a long blessed grind. I thought Kier labored in the shadow of his father’s death, and even today I’m not sure that Dad helped. By the time that last summer came, the footprints we left were hardening in the sun.

  But soon I’d be loose from it all, and I felt the freedom of eighteen on the approach. I was a high-school senior, with an assigned dorm room. Everything in front of me was green sky.

  All year, I’d been working toward better drumming, showing up early for classes, teaching young children, and tinkering with the threading and tightness of my own djembe. I bought a third drum, decked out with carvings of the Continent, a brown stain, and a polyurethane glow. By March, even my breath was a djembe beat, and everything revolved around my next rehearsal, drum class, or show. In the meantime, Sankofa was prepping for our biggest concert of the year, the spring recital.

  The spring recital was always a coming out—we wore different sets of costumes, tied fabric around our heads, or wore leather helmets with straw spiking out like Mohawks. Dancers and drummers spanned all the ages, from five to seventy-five. This year was bigger, because demand had grown so much that two concerts had been scheduled on two different nights. At the last spring recital, I was young with this, and when they called me out to solo during drum call, all I could do was amble to the middle of the stage, bend slightly forward, and murmur something that got some polite applause but didn’t rupture time and space. Now my hands had been cleaned by practice in the breezeway, shaving goatskins in the basement, and the simple rigors of repetition.

  Spring recital came on the week of my driver’s ed classes, and as much as I loved drumming, driving was too old a fantasy to sacrifice for Sankofa rehearsals. The dream crystallized back in middle school. One day I spotted Big Bill’s homeboy Anthony while I was standing on Garrison waiting for the number 91. Anthony was an MC in my brother’s high-school collective, nasty with the lyrics, the sort of odd, quiet kid who sits off in the corner, nodding his head, then grabs a mic and unveils the Cain Marko. Whenever I saw him, I heard his signature couplet—“So they’ll read in the morning with papers delivered / Another whack rapper found dead in the river.”

  Anthony’s parents had sprung for a neon-green Jeep with a brown retractable hood, which he later crashed. I was enamored when he offered me a ride, and noted how his system shook the roof and, more than usual, robbed our small talk of any real point. The whip made him limitless. He could have driven to Old Crow and never looked back. From then on, in my feature dreams, I cruised down Garrison pumping Maxi Priest and Shabba, unleashing the base, until I caught the eye of an original Spinderella, Isis, or Terrible T, her tennis skirt fluttering over matching slouch socks, all-white Classics, or pink Air Force Ones.

  For driver’s ed, I missed almost every drumming rehearsal that week, which tore my heart and left me mourning in the back of class, while my instructor went off on rights of way, the exact distances from curbs, stop signs, fire hydrants, the weight of a cop’s hand versus red lights. I just placed my palms on my thighs in ready position, leaned back in my wooden chair until I was five hundred years away, until I stood in the court of Mansa Musa, in a kufi and a dark robe. My djembe hung from my shoulders, and when the Lion of Mali nodded, my hands fired and called across the Sahel. The teacher would lower the lights and show films on driver safety. But I would play lead on my lap, imagining dancers who kicked and leaped through the dark like great black flamingoes.

  That whole week I felt sidelined and disarmed. I didn’t think about Ebony, pretty boy, or the prom. I didn’t think about my dorm room awaiting me at Morgan or Ma lobbying the Mecca for my admission. In the back of class, I traced my fingers like maps. Back on Tioga they had teased me, said I had the hands of a very glamorous blonde. But now my palms were Himalayas. Callous skin shielded my joints. I was harder now. I could play the traditional rhythm for the dance, Lamba, for hours, just me, a lead, and a djun-djun. I could sit in my father’s basement armed with rope, goatskin, and wood, and yank and pull until spirits said my name.

  On Friday, our last day, they gave us a driving test so easy that even I, with all my day-tripping, managed to ace. Ma scooped me up and headed straight for the studio on Eager Street. At yellow lights I exhorted her on—Go, go, go. She laughed and looked cockeyed—Boy, you gonna cause an accident. She dropped me off at the door and I dashed up the staircase in doubles, and now I could hear the drums roaring, and young sisters singing in tongues that they did not understand. But that was always irrelevant. The whole point was to reach beyond the coherent and touch what we were, what we lost, when the jackboots of history pinned us down.

  The drumming was so loud when I entered the studio that when the mamas and babas smiled and greeted—they always smiled for me—I could only see them mouthing above the din. The brothers were working the prelude to Mandiani, which is slow like the gathering of warning clouds. Salim, the youthful master, was playing my drum, which normally was nothing, but I was in the mode of a full fiend and had just put on a new slamming off-white skin with a few black freckles. He saw me and stood up and offered me a space and the lead. I sat down and promptly went out of my head. I snowballed high above everything and drove the pace like a warhorse pushed into pursuit.

  By the time the sisters got to solos, I’d sweated through my red Sankofa tee. I was standing, my djembe suspended from my waist by my long white strap. They were all lined up, banging their feet in rhythm against the wooden dance floor. They extended their hands like pharaohs, waiting for me to summon them one at a time with a break. But I showed off first, because what Sankofa taught me was that deep down, I loved the crowd, that after days of Dad’s isolationism, I simply could not get enough of the people. I wish I could remember the order in which I brought the dancers out. It must have been by age. It’s all now a blur of images—Milcah’s attitude, me playing slaps and pointing to the floor; Elishibah’s hands reaping the air, her long dreads pulled back on her head and spraying out like a crown of snakes. I know Menes was off somewhere and Salim finished us all up, and afterward we laughed and gave dap.

  That whole summer I felt on. It wasn’t just the annual concert—it was AFRAM, Artscape, the random events at community centers, weddings in mosques, to which we were invited to bring our drums. The crowds lost their balance when the djembe hit. Sisters would dance in the aisles. Mamas from other companies would jump on stage. Fat women in tight denim would leap up and move with power and grace. Teen dancers would rush out before their cue. Mama Kibibi could not hold them back. And then there were the faces of my family when I came out to solo—Big Bill, clapping and pumping his fist before adding a few bucks to the pile of money at the front of the stage. Sometimes I’d look out and spot my father, nodding with his eyes closed, letting the drums roar over him.

  I could have stayed like that forever, drumming my way in and out of various corners of Baltimore. I did not know where it led, but I would have slept on heat grates, worn scraps and overalls, shaken my cup down on Charles Street, and dined in the basements of churches, if I could have just left things as they were. My talent was second tier and I knew I would always be a workman, a support player for someone else’s glorious show. But I was so in love, and so of the spirit, that I just did not care.

  I got Ebony down to class at Sankofa during that summer. She tried dancing, and afterward I cracked jokes because she could barely tie her lappa, because she was behind the beat. She just smiled and jabbed at my arm. Afterward, we’d head down to the harbor to the movies, then out to Burger King
and debate Boyz in the Hood versus Menace. Still, we were teenagers, and so always closest on the phone. I apologized late one night, told her I should have taken her hand, that I should have been stronger in what I saw and felt. But we were both the best we could have been. At that age, the deep attractions, the ones that threaten your open future, may thrill you, may kidnap your days, but more powerful is the flood of terror, the nakedness you feel when she only starts walking your way.

  The heat rolled in around June, and with it visions of my actual future. I awoke at dawn and saw my mother out back, turned south toward Mecca in prayer, then grinding rabbit bones, collecting herbs, muttering incantations. Even through expulsions, fights, and idleness, she had not lost faith in a voyage to Howard. What I could not understand was that she believed that I was owed, that no matter what I’d done in high school, somehow, I was entitled to see the Mecca, to find my place in the great black cosmopolis. My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from the Book of Fallen Children—Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I’d be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways they could help their kids get ahead.

  She was still working in D.C., and weekly she would appear, unannounced, in the admissions office and demand a status report. That June, Howard sent notice that they wanted to see my final grades and another letter of recommendation. Ma felt the walls weakening and continued her assault—morning prayer, regular visits where she dropped Dad’s name and those of the three kids who had, by now, either graduated or were still on campus.

  The fat packet struck, like LT from the blind side. There I am, having the summer of my life, and then this day I walk up Campfield hill, my bagged drum strapped to my back, and checking the mail, see this envelope long and heavy and when turned over note that it bears the seal of the Mecca. By Gabriel Prosser’s ghost, I thought. This is it. I ripped it open before I made it in the front door, and did not even have need for the acceptance letters. They don’t send brochures and leaflets to rejects. When Ma came home, I showed her the packet and she laughed in that loud, joyous, voluminous way that is the signature of all her proper sisters. She would have leaped and pumped her fist, if that was how she got down. This was her acceptance, after all. What had I done my whole life but obstructed my own way out?

  Back when I first got Conscious, the Mecca seemed natural, the only place to bring me into line with spirit of the El-Hajj Shabazz. But with each failing year, I lowered myself, once to the point that I didn’t even think a college would take me. True, the Mecca was only an hour away, and there were drummers in Chocolate City. But the bond I felt here was more than music: it was an enveloping community, a circle so tight that it reverberated in me even when I was gone for days. What I knew even then was that I would never be in love like that again, was that nothing that healthy would ever feel that carnal, lush, and complete.

  I’m going to Morgan, I told my parents. They were sitting down in my father’s office. My mother gave a speech about opportunity and responsibility. Dad sat back, with his patented face of stone and just listened to me and Ma go back and forth. At the end, he placed his palms on his lap and said, Son, it’s your choice. You’re grown. You can make up your mind.

  I walked out of the office with a fool’s smile. How I ever thought I’d prevailed, how I ever thought that I would win against my mother is beyond me now. I had turned it around, but not so much that I was scholarship worthy—my parents would still be carrying the bill. And I was in the burgeoning class of kids whose families made too much for financial aid but not enough to make tuition payments anything less than a war.

  We had two more conversations. In the first, Dad continued the charade of options. Son, it’s still your choice. But your mother is my woman, and, Son, she has power. I think she’s right, but you’re grown and can make your own decision. I am trying to let you know that. But your mother, Son. Your mother has power.

  I want to go to Morgan, I told him.

  Okay, Son.

  But by the next week, he was flipped. We were in his office again. My mother had that thin smile like You Know What This Is. The conversation was short.

  Dad: Ta-Nehisi. You’re not going to thirteenth grade.

  And like that, it was done. All over again, I was exiled from home and destined for Mecca.

  Or this is what I saw. Fact was, I was only months from eighteen, and could have done what I wanted. I was split on leaving Baltimore, and the wishes of my parents were an easy out. I did not know then that this is what life is—just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

  But I had survived my formative world and all its trappings. Down on Tioga, the reports of my old friends floated back to me. Their fates were maddeningly clichéd. Even the ones in whom I saw a tighter head game fell into shadow, became a statistic in the cold hands of some pundit, who looked out on our streets and rolled up his windows. I still walked under a cloak of doubt. I could wake up one morning like—Time to start the revolution, or I could wind up in rags, sleeping on heating grates, permanently retired to the dreamworlds that I’d conjured since childhood.

  I spent my last week closing it all out. I played a final set with my Sankofa brothers. We argued because the sound wasn’t tight. We said that it wasn’t the end, that I was merely a weekend commuter train away. But already, I felt the distance. I said good-bye to Ebony the way we did everything important—over the phone. I took one of the teen dancers to see some smooth jazz. Another girl from my Poly days visited the night before I left. The weathermen were predicting a meteor shower behind heavy cloud cover, and when we looked up we could see the sky flashing like lightning in a thunderless storm. She must have handed me a gift. We talked for an hour or so on my back porch, then she rose, gave me a hug, and pulled off in a blue minivan.

  The next morning, I brought boxes and suitcases to the front door. Jovett and my parents were seated at the dining room table. On the table were various gifts from Jovett—a set of screwdrivers, a fire extinguisher, a flashlight, several packs of rubbers. Dad would not have loaded up that car without a lecture, but what he said, I can’t even remember. I was caught between competing things—the bliss of leaving the dominion of my father and the sorrow of the impending loss of my brothers.

  We pulled off, drove down Campfield hill, up Liberty Road, to the Beltway, and down 95, until we reached the new world. We found Big Bill right off Georgia Avenue, sitting on the shallow wall in front the Howard Plaza Towers—where he had once let off, sprayed the night sky with a gun—which was now my home. He was sitting with two of his friends, in a fisherman’s cap, khaki shorts, white tee shirt, Timbs. He had never looked so at ease. He was sitting there talking when we pulled up, loose with the sort of casual humanity that Baltimore never allowed. The old anger, which guarded him and maybe saved him during the days of Murphy Homes, was drained and what was left was all my father, all my people, ever wanted. Was a man.

  When I took hajj at the Mecca, my parents didn’t open an ancient bottle of wine. They didn’t take any vacations. I was not the last child but the last of that perilous bunch, the sixth in seven years, born into lust, a frenzy of variables, and many futures tossed in the air. Now, for the first time in almost twenty years, there was space to reflect. Who would they be now that the great labors lay behind them? Now that they’d shielded the kids from the era of crack?

  There was still my young brother, Menelik. But the air and water just weren’t the same. He had a Sega Genesis. He went to Fallstaff. His only vice was Gundam Wing. He was not a wanderer or insurgent but was balanced, had a sort of everyday aesthetic that I’d always wanted. He was mostly quiet, and on the weekends would go see foreign flicks with my father. He barely remembered Tioga; and Campfield, the sort of Avalon I prayed for ba
ck at Lemmel, was his formative home.

  For him, for everyone, the old rules were falling away. A month before I left, Sankofa had a cookout in a small park in Woodlawn, to celebrate the Fourth of July. It was my father’s birthday, but we’d never celebrated the date. Babas and mamas brought out potato salad, grilled turkey burgers, and veggie dogs. That was the summer, when Super Soakers were wild. I had never owned so much as a water gun, because in our time, so many kids were falling that such toys were a mark of the enslaved 85. But that whole afternoon gunfights broke out. Some fool strapped two tanks to his back and started spraying like Blowtorch. I grabbed someone else’s double barrel and went to work. Amid the crossfire, the whole cookout laughing and wet, I saw my brother, small and shirtless, clutching a baby water pistol with a orange neon tank on the top. Menelik ran through the streams of water, until he found himself in the clear. Then he raised the iron at an oblivious target, smiled, and fired.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The acknowledgments begin with the love of my life, Kenyatta Matthews, without whom this book simply could not have been. There is no other way to say that. I thank my mother (Ma, you’re only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I’d done and why I’d done it. This book begins with her, to whom I am, obviously, immeasurably indebted. Love to my grandmother Anna Waters. Love to my aunt Ava and my aunt JoAnn. Love to my cousins Jeff, Kevin, and Jo-Jo.

  A shout-out to my father, Paul Coates, who, when I was thirteen, handed me a copy of Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk. I didn’t know what the hell Greg was talking about. But I knew that somewhere in the world there were people whose life work it was to play with language and unpack the diction of Chuck D. That was all I needed to know. Peace to Greg Tate, for that initial spark.