Right off the bat: this is one of the most well-written books I’ve read in my adult life. For context, I read James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and No Name in the Street just last year. I also read Juneteenth by the masterful Ralph Ellison not too long ago.
If you’ve read these books, you understand the gravity of my claim.
Coates’ Beautiful Struggle
The Beautiful Struggle is essentially a coming-of-age story in which Ta-Nehisi Coates poignantly describes the multiple, and multi-faceted, struggles he experienced through his childhood and adolescent years.
The struggle of a boy becoming a man.
The struggle of having a militant father whose relationship with his children was mired in deep complexity.
The struggle of never quite living up to the expectations of what a Black boy should be like in West Baltimore in the age of crack.
“My dreams shrank into survival and mere dignity and respect”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, p. 192)
The struggle between fitting in and standing out.
The struggle of living in a world so foreign to those outside of it.
And on and on…
Knowledge
One of the most central themes carrying the book is Coates’ Knowledge, (capital K).
The Knowledge he writes of comes in two different forms: that Knowledge used to navigate and survive the gritty streets he inhabited, and the Knowledge which his father tried so desperately (and eventually succeeded) to impart on him.
“But in Mondawmin the vultures among us corrupted everything. They were not growing into something better; they were not finding their deeper selves. The Knowledge was a disease. Some took to it faster than others. But eventually we all got it.”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, p. 61)
The first Knowledge was often learned the hard way. This was the type of Knowledge that made violence, aggression, and brutality an everyday occurrence in Coates’ and his friends’ lives.
“At some point we grew tired of crumbling under their boots and embraced the Knowledge, became like all the rest groping for manhood in the dark”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, P. 61)
Growing up in this world, surrounded by this Knowledge, young boys became men far before their time. And still, those same men were forced to reckon with the “corner bully” (Coates, 2008, p. 66) that was their world.
The other Knowledge, in contrast, is the essence of Coates’ politics. This type of Knowledge had Coates reading about his ancestors and the birthplace of civilization; the type of Knowledge imbued with Black Panther politics and “the spirit of El-Hajj Shabazz” (Coates, 2008, p. 218)
“That was how I found myself, how I learned my name”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, p. 111)
This other Knowledge, or Consciousness, wasn’t always at the forefront of Coates’ mind, though it was without question front and center for Paul Coates, Ta-Nehisi’s father.
The Two Coates
The relationship Coates had with his dad understandably undergirds much of the book, for his dad has the sort of presence in Coates’ and his siblings’ lives that they could not ignore even if they tried.
Describing his father as a “practicing fascist” (Coates, 2008, p. 20), who mandated books and banned religion, Paul was a force to be reckoned with. In a particularly illustrative scene early on in the book, Coates recounts how one night Big Bill, his older brother, sat down and began to pray at the dinner table when their father order Bill to stop, saying “You want to pray, pray to me. I put the food on the table” (ibid).
From the beatings to lectures and odd ways of making Ta-Nehisi feel the ridiculousness of some of his more stupid acts or decisions, Paul Coates instilled fear and kept Ta-Nehisi and his siblings guessing.
To be clear, though, this is not a story of an abusive father who simply berated his children for the fun of it. Far from it, at least in the way Coates tells it.
Paul Coates had a story himself, one that saw him fighting a war in Vietnam for a country that could care less about him. A story in which he rose through the ranks of the Black Panther Party and dreamed of revolution. The same story in which the books and histories about America’s ugliest realities, as well as the beauty and struggle of all Black people, served as the dominating force in his life.
In this way, the reader, and seemingly Coates, can’t blame his father for the ways he tried to prepare his Black children for the world that awaited them.
“All our friends were fatherless, and Dad was some sort of blessing, but he made it hard to feel that way”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, p. 20)
Writing about Black Classic Press, Paul’s publishing company which specialized in the Knowledge of Self, Coates states: “[The company]—like Lemmel, like the many books suggestively strewn across the house, like Upward Bound—was another tool Dad enlisted to make us into the living manifestations of all that he believed and get us through” (Coates, 2008, p. 99)
It’s apparent that, at least as an adult, Coates understands why his father was the way he was. But, he readily admits that as a kid, “in bed at night, [he] conspired on many ways out. [He] thought of allegations of child abuse… [He] thought of matches dropped in the garage, book burning as liberation. [He] thought about the romance of runaways…But [he] never advanced these plans beyond the fantastical mind space kids reserve for windfall fortunes and birthdays every day.” (ibid)
He goes on to say that he was “oppressed, persecuted under the rule of this enlightened despot” (ibid)
It is this dynamic that makes the book especially noteworthy.
I personally understood where his father was coming from. Yet, I’m a grown adult now and have had time to sit with the atrocities that face Black boys and men in America. It would be unfair for me, at best, to say that Coates should have felt grateful all those years under his father’s rule.
A Note on Coates’ Writing
This man can write his tail off!
Throughout the book, I found myself writing “wow”, “so poetic”, “beautiful”.
“But the price tags and fat-ass honeys made boys turn killer. One misstep onto suede Puma’s, and the jihad begins. In those days, cocaine was in the air, and though I never saw a fiend fire up, the smoke darker everything, turned our hometown into a bazaar of cheap ornaments bought expensively, a Gomorrah on the inner harbor. A Young man’s worth was the width of his blond cable-link chain”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, p. 10)
What struck me most, though, was the sharpness of his writing. He has this ability to make the reader feel what he is saying using such few words. I kept marveling at the fact that one could be so concise yet say so much.
You can sense the (increasingly self-imposed) challenges he faced with the simplicity of a statement like, “just as soon as I dropped anchor, I was afloat again” (Coates, 2008, p. 160)
“My head was Penn Station, and every half hour a train arrived dropping off a new batch of thoughts and possibilities, pushing out everything else that was old”
— The Beautiful Struggle (Coates, 2008, p. 167)
Truth be told, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this: it was gritty, personal, and wild yet cohesive, beautiful, and raw.
Part of why I am so enamored by Coates is his ability to tell a story.
The book is largely about his life and how he came to be who he is. Yet there are all these smaller stories which were not always about him within the memoir that serve as integral pieces to his understanding of the world and of himself.
Far from simply recounting events, he makes it so the reader feels they are right there with him. And for the events before his birth or for those of which he was not present, his masterful abilities shine through as the reader begins to question whether this is actually the case.
This Book is For You
I mean that. This book is for you.
It’s for everyone.
For those who can appreciate brilliant writing and superb story-telling.
For those who also grew up in the Age of Crack.
For those who are seeking an education into the realities that face Black boys in the United States.
And for all those who simply value amazing works of literature.
Till’ Next Time Travel Friends!
