The Beautiful Struggle

Following a map of old Baltimore—annotated with the events of Coates’s life—and a family tree, Ta-Nehisi Coates begins his first chapter with a vivid description of “them”—a Baltimore crew who “had no eyes” (1). Coates is “spaced out as usual” (2), so he doesn’t realize that they he and his brother Big Bill are walking into a street fight. He only notices once Big Bill is running, and the crew, named Murphy Homes for its neighborhood, turns to the younger Coates.

Baltimore then was full of factions, “segmented into crews who took their names from local civic associations” (2). Murphy Homes was the most mythical of the crews. Coates is punched by a “goblin” (3) and bolts, fleeing from the gang. He picks up a pay phone to call his father, who tells him to “stand next to an adult” (3).

Coates and his brother had gone out that night to see some wrestling. Coates describes their obsession with wrestling and with the grace and style “that made an eye gouge a ritual” (4). The boys’ father does not support this interest. Big Bill calls their father “the pope” (5) for his commitment to work and discipline. Coates attempts to remember the rest of their experience seeing wrestling at the arena—“white people everywhere […] the most I’d ever seen of them” (6)—but all he can remember is the run-in with Murphy Homes and the way it changed his brother Bill.

Coates and his family live in a row house in Tioga Parkway in West Baltimore. Big Bill is the oldest sibling at home and seeks to turn all his younger siblings into warriors. Worth in the neighborhood is measured by “the width of his blond cable-link chain” (10). Big Bill buys into this and purchases rings, which his father quickly points out are fake, returning to the mall and speaking “[t]he magic words […] ‘fraud,’ ‘Black community,’ and ‘State’s attorney’” (12).

Coates’s father is a “Conscious Man,” (12) committed to reviving lost histories of African American culture. He is a teacher of “Knowledge” (14), who prints books out of his basement through his self-run publishing house, Black Classic Press. The father of seven kids by four different women, Coates’s father does not want his sons to fall prey to black teenhood and its dangers.

He is strict with his young son, who has his heads in the clouds, and eventually, “Ma and Dad” (21) send Coates to William H. Lemmel Middle School (“Lemmel”), a school that “waged Dad’s kind of fight” (23). Simultaneously, Big Bill is under pressure from the streets, so he finds a “merchant of arms” (28) to sell him a gun: “And from that point forward when walking the land, my brother Big Bill was strapped” (28).