The Beautiful Struggle

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “Africa’s in the house, they get petrified”

Chapter 3 opens the chapter again referring to Coates’s father: “My father was not a violent man” (65). He roughs up his children but no one else, and as a father he believes in their potential above all else. When Coates doesn’t stand up for himself when another boy throws his housekeys in the trash, his father trades in his black leather belt for fists. He describes how his father was “not meant to make a life on the block” (70); he was semi-conscious, eventually going to fight in the Vietnam War. Upon Malcolm-X’s death, he became more conscious and eventually joined the Black Panthers.

Coates’s father went on to found a publishing house to reprint the long-lost propaganda and remnants of black liberation. This is how Coates’s parents met: his mother was involved in some Panther activities and came to his father’s publishing house. Still, whereas other Panthers would simply talk about the Knowledge, Coates’s father actually does something: “But when Dad went to publishing, he scaled back into matrimony and left the world of mass upheaval. History would be altered, not in the swoop but with the long slow reawakening” (91).

Coates loves fantasy, and he draws a parallel between his youthful imagination and the world his father wanted him to understand through the “Knowledge of Self” (93). By 1984, Coates and his family move out of their house and to Tioga. Back in West Baltimore, “it became clear that we were all in proximity to great heaving change” (97). Coates’s father’s response is to continue to indoctrinate Coates into Consciousness. Coates’s task is to put mailing cards in each of the books his father prints to send out, for which he is paid the “Paul Coates wage—a dollar an hour and no plucks upside the head” (98).

To close the chapter, Coates describes his obsession with “the New York noise” (101), especially music by Mike G, with lyrics like: “They fought back with civil rights / That scarred the soul, it took the sight” (102). Slowly, Coates explains, he comes to understand that these lyrics are “capes, masks, and muscle suits” and that “[he] was not the only one who was afraid” (102).

Chapter 4 Summary: “To teach those who can’t say my name”

Big Bill soon starts a band, the “West Side Kings, which meant Marlon cutting breakbeats and Bill reciting battle rhymes” (103). Coates describes the rise of rapper Chuck D, how “Chuck was one of us, and once we got it, we understood that he spoke beautifully in the lingua franca of our time” (105). Coates is not yet “Conscious,” but one day he is listening to Chuck D with his friend Sekyiwa and she hears the name of her aunt, a Black Panther. Coates immediately reads African Glory, taking “to Consciousness because there was nothing else, no other sorcery” (107).

His father is attempting to prepare Coates and Big Bill before their respective 18th birthdays, and change is coming: “Big Bill was touched by the transformation, trading the everyday struggle for the Struggle” (109). Coates also begins to understand how his “world, though mired in disgrace, was more honorable than anything” (112).

He turns his attention to basketball, “my people’s national pastime” (113). He isn’t naturally talented at the game, but he learns quickly that he’ll gain respect for showing confidence. Around that time, he sets his sights on Baltimore Polytech for high school because “what we saw in the citywide schools was not great academics but cessation of gun law” (117), a way to avoid the gun culture he was used to. At Lemmel, Coates gets a second chance at a fight, as he is now the tallest boy in the Marshall Club. What happens is “not glorious and triumphant but a blind rolling around” (119).

Meanwhile, Big Bill is back home, “juggling the new Consciousness with everything the streets had told him” (119). A girlfriend of Big Bill’s is pregnant, and she comes to their house asking for money for her abortion, the cost for which they had agreed to split. He becomes angry and slams her to the ground, which prompts Bill’s mother Linda to come out and their Dad to force Bill to be responsible for his half. After that, Bill is cut loose, close to manhood at age 17.

Coates is becoming ever more Conscious: “My new heroes and narrative gave meaning to everything I’d once hated about my life […] and Dad noticed, but uttered not a word of pride” (122). When Coates gets in to Baltimore Polytech, his mother is proud, and the rest of his year is easy and magical. When Class 8-07 comes for the Marshall Team at the end of the year, Coates is geared up for a fight, but is instead met with an “open hand, universal and at peace. [He] reached out and gave him a pound” (126).

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Chapter 3 expands upon Coates’s characterization of his father that began in Chapter 1. Here, he provides a broad-strokes history of his father’s inculcation into the new Knowledge (civil rights). In this way, as in much of the book, Coates writes a biography within his memoir, profiling the experiences of his father with an intense level of detail, albeit from his limited perspective as son. Coates does not devote as many pages in the book to his mother’s story, even though he does provide a brief history of her life in Chapter 3, describing how she met his father.

Describing his father’s “bookstore days” (90)—where he met Coates’s mother Linda—Coates employs a motif of representative dialogue that recurs throughout the book, using a back-and-forth exchange between an anonymous “Conscious” person and Dad: “Conscious: You read J.A. Rogers’s “Hitler and the Negro”? Do you carry 100 Amazing Facts? Dad: It’s in the back” (90).

In both Chapters 3 and 4, Coates describes the music that both him and Bill are obsessed with. He drops the names of bands and rappers easily, assuming the reader to be informed of the cultural landscape. As in elsewhere in the book, he doesn’t explain these reference points for the reader, which creates a kind of coded in-group conversation between Coates and lovers of “the New York noise” (101).

Coates links his early rap writings to the fantasy readings and shows he loves, describing his pen as a “Staff of the Dreaded Streets” and his “flow” as a “Horn of Ghetto Blasting” (110). This conflation of rapping with a fantastical superpower upholds Coates’s depiction of the streets as a mystical and mythical larger-than-life land.