The Beautiful Struggle

“My father was Conscious Man. He stood a solid six feet, was handsome, mostly serious, rarely angry. Weekdays, he scooted out at six and drove an hour to the Mecca, where he guarded the books and curated the history in the exalted hall of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. He was modest—brown slacks, pale yellow shirt, beige Clarks—and hair cut by his own hand.” 

This image of Coates's father as a Conscious Man recurs throughout the book, and yet his father grows in complexity over the course of Coates's childhood. Coates’s description here of his father’s all brown and beige apparel creates a color scheme that fits within the confines of his father’s ethos. His dutiful commitment to the research archive at Howard University, which Coates refers to as Mecca, represents his broader commitment to the cause of liberating black histories.

“I came into all this dazed by the lack of shade, by the quickness between child and child-man. But, as always, Big Bill was clear, and after Murphy Holmes he probed his connections until he found a merchant of arms. He stashed it in our bedroom, in his brown puff leather jacket. He showed it to me without bravado, its weight gave it authority, and I knew it was real. And from that point forward when walking the land, my brother Big Bill was strapped.” 

Coates’s use of the term “merchant of arms” and the phrase “when walking the land” carries through his stylistic embrace of the mythic Arthurian tale, turned here toward his older brother Bill’s purchase of a gun. This device works to characterize the ways Big Bill and his friends saw themselves as heroes, setting out to defend their honor on the streets, living in somewhat of a fantastical delusion.

“The world was filled with great causes—Mandela, Nicaragua, and the battle against Reagan. But we died for sneakers stitched by serfs, coats that gave props to teams we didn’t own, hats embroidered with the names of Confederate states. I could feel the falling, all around. The flood of guns wrecked the natural order. Kids who minds should have been on Teddy Ruxpin now held in their hands the power to dissolve your world into white. But Dad pledged to sire us through.” 

Coates’s sentiment here rings of the epic tragedy. He is remarking how blacks are dying for the smallest of causes, causes that do not even benefit them: systems that they either cannot participate in or are racist in their attitude. With the influx of guns, these kids are even further set up to fail. The savior amidst all of this turmoil is Coates’s father—again, in language that harkens to the honorable knight—siring them through.

“The Knowledge was taught from our lives’ beginnings, whether we realized it or not. Street professors presided over invisible corner podiums, and the Knowledge was dispensed. Their faces were smoke and obscured by the tilt of their Kangols. They lectured from sacred texts like Basic Game, Applied Cool, Barbershop 101. Their leather gloved hands thumbed through chapters, like “The Subtle and Misunderstood Art of Dap.” There was the geometry of cocking a baseball cap, working theories on what jokes to laugh at and exactly how loud; and entire volumes dedicated to the crossover dribble. Bill inhaled the Knowledge and departed in a sheepskin cap and gown. I cut class, slept through lectures, and emerged awkward and wrong.” 

Coates, in signature fashion, makes the banal have epic proportions in his description of the “Knowledge.” Describing these life lessons as an entire educational curriculum built around street credit and the art of the cool, Coates upends normative educational value systems by putting these street skills on par with traditional subjects. He then explains how his brother, in this world, was a star student, whereas at school he was ditching class. This narrative shapes Coates’s coming of age as he eventually grows into acquiring the “Knowledge.”

“But I was still me and the alley was not my natural habitat. My default position was sprawled across the bed staring at the ceiling or cataloging an extensive collection of X-Factor comic books. This never cut it for Dad, who insisted I learn the wavelengths of my world. In the quiet chaos of my room, everything was certain. I’d be thumbing through the origin of Beast’s feral blue coat or Jean Grey’s telekinesis. And then my father would suddenly loom, a shadow in the doorway of my Eden. Get outside, he’d tell me. This is your community. These are your people.” 

Just as Coates is not very schooled in the Knowledge, he does not find “the alley” where the other boys play basketball to be his “natural habitat.” Coates’s loves of sci-fi and fantasy is at odds with his father’s desire for him to participate in his community; he would rather float away to another world than deal with the intensity (and potential violence) of his real one. 

“Dad walked up the steps and came back with his black leather belt, folded so that the buckle met the tip. He jabbed me in the chest and asked who I was more scared of—him or them. I bring this here to intimidate, he said. To show you what I am. To show you that I mean business. But this isn’t what it’s about anymore. Then he dropped the belt on the brown carpet and started swinging.”

Coates presents his father’s beatings of his children as a fact of life, an act emerging out of the specific cultural conditions of his upbringing. With violence all around, Coates’s father sees beating his sons as a way to deal with the harshness of their environment without actually having to put them in front of real danger on the street. When his father abandons the black leather belt that had come to stand in for his iron hand, Coates implies that a change has taken place, in which the brutality of his father’s fists now stand in for the growing harshness of the world. There is no longer the symbol of the black leather belt for Coates to deal with; instead, he must reckon with his father in the flesh.

“Now he began to come to. When on leave, he stopped at book stands in search of anything referencing his own. He read Malcolm’s memoir, and again saw some of his own struggle, and now began to feel things he’d, like us all, long repressed—the subtle, prodding sense that he was seen as less. He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?” 

In this passage, Coates describes his father’s awakening to the oppression of black lives and histories. He describes the consciousness that his father slowly acquired, paralleling his own experiences coming into awareness of the gravity of the black struggle. In referencing Malcolm and Baldwin, Coates acknowledges the ways writing had a profound impact on his father. Perhaps the power of the pen that Coates’s father illustrated through his commitment to these writers and to publishing influenced Coates’s desire to become a writer himself, for he had seen the ways the written word had influenced his father.

“What I loved about the New York noise was that, like our lives, none of it made sense. Viola loops got the best of me, garbled voice samples flying in from impossible angles, and then where there should have been a bridge, melody, a jangling hook, there were only drums—kicking, booming, angry 808 drums.”

Coates’s relationship to specific musical forms foreshadows his coming into Consciousness, as he feels roused by the ideas proffered in the songs, especially as they relate to his own life. He uses vivid description to personify the music, making it something that physically acts upon him. The number 808 references the police code for a noise violation, also signifying that the cacophony of instruments represents the unity of the black boys against any opposition. 

“When we reached stall number 40, we pushed open the narrow door and looked uneasily into the vacant darkness. The stall was about ten by twenty feet and empty except for three folded Army cots lying on the floor. Dust, dirt, and wood shavings covered the linoleum that had been laid over manure-covered boards, the smell of horses hung in the air, and the whitened corpses of many bugs still clung to the […] white-washed walls.” 

This passage describes the moment at which Coates truly gained Consciousness. Upon realizing that he has a real personal connection outside of his father’s—and then noting that his father’s story is also inspiring—Coates gloms on to the myths of the Black Panthers. He positions his grasping on to these black ideas of liberation as the mystical religion that he needs. In his portrayal, the blacks of Baltimore are the frontier, not yet colonized with religion and searching to create their own myths. They look to the Black Panthers for that inspiration.

In this quote about Uchida’s students in the camps, a few pages into Chapter 6, Uchida furthers the theme of the erasure of Japanese-American identity. The camps replace children’s homes, calling the future of Japanese American identity into question on both physical and symbolic levels. 

Here, Coates describes the democracy in the ribbing the boys did while playing basketball. Since most everyone wasn’t an NBA player, they all had something to be teased for. Ultimately, for Coates, this signified the ways that for them, being good at basketball was more about attitude and confidence than it was about skill. For the young Coates, who was certainly not a gifted player, this insight allowed him to eventually come into his own power as a person. 

“When I got the news, my mother was at home. I do not remember the color of the envelope or the length of the letter. But I remember jumping up and down and hugging my mother. I remember her smiling at me in actual pride, and this was new. She was often proud of me and demonstrated as much, but it was over potential and possibility, something I had said which made her expect that some unknowable future date, I would amount to something more than what I seemed to be. Now she smiled at the tangible, at the real, not at what I dreamed I’d be but at that moment what I was.” 

In this passage, Coates provides an anecdote from the perspective of the present, clearly looking back on the past rather than pushing the reader to get swept up in the past moment as if it were the present. From this vantage point, he recognizes the elements of memory that stay and those that fade away. In this instance, what stays is his mother’s pride in his present success—a rarity given that she is most often proud for some as-yet-completed future endeavor. Overall, the passage reveals Coates’s concern with time and the ways it infiltrates human emotions and experience.

“I was alone, but now Original Man and unafraid. I had survived jumpings and kids in hoodies, hands in deep pockets threatening to pull out. I had survived my father, his man books and hands that were boulders. I had survived the shadow of Big Bill and emerged not a man of streets but of Knowledge.” 

Coates struggles at Baltimore Polytech; ironically, he is now unafraid as a fighter and man now that he has survived his childhood threatened by gun violence and “jumpings.” He had emerged powerful and confident, despite the looming shadows of his father and Big Bill. It is this power that makes him apathetic at school and leads him to brazenly fight with his English teacher, getting him expelled.

“My father swung with the power of an army of slaves in revolt. He swung like he was afraid, like the world was closing in and cornering him, like he was trying to save my life. I was upstairs crying myself to sleep, when they held a brief conference. The conferenced consisted of only one sentence that mattered—Cheryl, who would you rather do this: me or the police?” 

“By the time we passed the bay, we could only look out from the edge of the drawn shades, but we could see the lights of the bridge sparkling across the dark water, still serene and magnificent and touched by the war. I continued to look out long after the bridge had vanished into the darkness, unutterably saddened by this fleeting glimpse of all that meant home to me.” 

“By the time we passed the bay, we could only look out from the edge of the drawn shades, but we could see the lights of the bridge sparkling across the dark water, still serene and magnificent and touched by the war. I continued to look out long after the bridge had vanished into the darkness, unutterably saddened by this fleeting glimpse of all that meant home to me.” 

When Coates witnesses a performance at NationHouse, the black cultural center his father sends him to for camp after his struggles at Polytech, he is hypnotized. He recognizes the excitement in connecting to his African roots, even if people are exaggerating how the music and dance take hold of them. Coates’s reference to the “Virginia darkland” situates this experience of traditional African culture in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. As Coates is likely the descendent of slaves, he seems to point out how cultural forms were stolen from his ancestors, just as his own childhood has been stolen to an extent through the daily violence and societal expectations to “rise above” the circumstances that one must confront as a young black boy in Baltimore. 

“We were jogging down Georgia Avenue, the main artery of black D.C., when we saw them pulling up in another minivan. I think back on it now, and am amazed at how violence was everywhere, even in our theater. In their minds they were prepping us for some amorphous war. By now the Conscious had come to grips with the nonrevolution but still clung to the hopeful thought that an army in waiting was needed for the moment when things turned.” 

Again, Coates’s narration allows him to comment on the events of his childhood with striking insight. He positions his summer camp activities as a theater, reenacting a revolutionary war for the black revolution that he acknowledges may never come. From his present position, he can recognize the violence permeating every aspect of his young life, even if then it was so normalized he thought nothing of it. Coates’s reference to theater also ties in with his theme of positioning the everyday as the mythic—a common trope in epic plays from Ancient Greece until now.

“Son, all my life I’ve lived among the people. I’ve lived in cramped quarters since I was born. I am forty-four. I have never had a big yard.” 

These are Coates’s father’s words to his son, explaining why he wants to move to the suburbs. Coates takes his father to task for acting without principle, but his father responds with the banal desire that he wants a big yard. In this way, Coates’s father is more complex than simply a Conscious Man; he has desires that move him away from his principles, something which is hard for the young Coates to understand at first, as he has always seen his father in a particular light. This coming into understanding represents another thread of maturity that Coates finds over the course of the book. 

“Son, you’re growing into a big man. You’re going to have to be more conscious of yourself. You are not a mean kid, but because of your size you will do things that will be seen as a threat. You need to be conscious especially around white people. You are big, and you are a young black man. You need to be careful about what you do and what you say.” 

Coates writes out the speech his father gives him about self-policing his actions given the circumstances of his size and blackness, especially in relation to the fragility of white people. Coates is surprised by his father’s speech, as it is merely a verbal beating rather than a physical one. For him, this represents a final shift into an adult relationship with his father.

“I felt, for the first time, what I wished I had felt years ago, that someone had tried to take something from me, that he’d attempted to reduce me to a status below my station. And that I didn’t let it happen.” 

After years of feeling apathetic toward schoolyard brawls and avoiding them at all costs, Coates finally experiences the anger of feeling disrespected that leads him to punch another boy in the cafeteria. For him, it almost comes too late: it is such a new experience to him that he alludes to a certain regret and not having felt it before. Coates’s ability to finally feel this anger is largely due to the confidence he has gained over the years and the social world he has come into; now that he has a station to protect, he has something to fight for. 

“I was born under a lame sign. Big Bill could make them yell, Go, William, and do the whop. Dad had his flock and thus direct evidence that, in these matters, his was the arm of Thor. But I had taken a wrong exit, picked up a manual written in French, because, in truth, my greatest disaster was that I just did not understand.” 

In the realm of flirting, Coates again positions himself in relation to Big Bill and his father, who are gods when it comes to girls—in his eyes. As elsewhere in the book, Coates treats this realm as mythic, referencing astrology and attributing his poor “game” to his “lame sign,” whereas his father is “the arm of Thor.” As he did earlier, Coates makes a parallel between this social Knowledge of “game” and the traditional academic study of French; in his metaphor, Coates cannot read French, so he does not understand the rules of flirtation.

“You can have your little eyes on whoever you want, for whatever you want. But you remember that these little black girls are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister—your sister, and someday, somebody’s mother, and when it comes down, the white man won’t take time to make distinctions. You need to check yourself, little boy.”

This passage shows Coates’s mother chiding him for having stated his preference for light-skinned African American girls over darker-skinned girls. His mother reminds him that those darker-skinned girls are people’s family, even his family. Furthermore, she indicates that Coates needs to respect them as part of his people and not make distinctions within the black community, since their larger struggle as a community is with “the white man.” Coates writes her dialogue with subtlety, repeating the word “little” as a diminutive to undermine what she sees as his abhorrent preference. 

“It was written in that vague, noncommittal way of a girl who wants you to know what she feels but wants to protect herself all the same. I did not know what I was holding, and was caught on the price in self-esteem for figuring it out. I talked to her that night and thanked her, but I did not push like I was supposed to. I could not see that beneath the shield, beneath the smiles and laughter that were her armor, behind the glowing ax, all of us are waiting to be swept away.”

Coates describes here a love note from Ebony, the girl he has grown close to and positioned his life around throughout his final year of school. She is a positive influence on him. Here, he describes his own ignorance at her veiled love note, noting how it would have taken experiencing potential embarrassment on his part in order to confirm her intentions. Coates, as a young man, does not yet understand how he needs to have the confidence and boldness to manifest the romantic relationship that Ebony wants. He paints her as a mythic character, with a shield, armor of laughter, and a glowing ax (of intellect, likely). His turn to the first-person plural in “all of us are waiting to be swept away” indicates his own desire to be pursued, and perhaps explains part of why he did not pursue Ebony with fearlessness.

“When my father opened his marriage, when he explained this new joining in that brown Honda Accord, it was just another bizarre step in our bizarre lives. It was how I was raised. It was what I’d come to expect. 

When Coates’s father tells him, sitting in their “brown Honda Accord” that he is opening his relationship with Coates’s mother to pursue a romantic relationship with their friend Jovett, Coates is disturbed but also unsurprised. Coates has come to expect living outside the norm; just as his family doesn’t celebrate traditional holidays or eat meat because of the radical principles his father ascribes to, this seems to be just another offbeat tune. Coates acknowledges that in affairs of the heart, his father’s steadfastness waivers more than anywhere else in his life. 

“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 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.” 

Coates is late for his final djembe performance at NationHouse because of his driving test. He runs in, hearing young women singing in African languages they didn’t actually know. As Coates indicated in his earlier description of falling in love with the djembe, the “reality” of comprehension is irrelevant to the mystical intensity of the performative experience of African song and dance. His use of the word “jackboot,” a tall military boot, is critical of the imperialist, colonizing forces of history. The point for his African American community in the Greater D.C. area is to touch a cultural experience that was stolen from his people through the transatlantic slave trade. Coates clearly alludes to the oppressive history of slavery without naming it explicitly; he seems to want to focus on the beauty and solidarity emerging in his contemporary community rather than focusing on an oppressive past.