Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates

f Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

SPIEGEL & GRAU

NEW YORK

i Between the World and Me is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random who believed House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Spiegel & Grau and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

The title of this work is drawn fix>m the poem “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright, from White Man Listen! copyright © 1957 by Richard I Wright. Used by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright: Excerpt from “Between the World and Me” from White Man Listen! by Richard Wright, copyright © 1957 by Richard Wright. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.

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Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote stu dio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroU of words, written by me earHer that week. The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, al though she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to inteUigent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 7 6 TA-NEHISl COATES that Americans imphcidy accept but to which they make that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of no conscious claim. Americans beheve in the reahty of those Americans who beheve that they are white, was buht “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this ques people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them— tion is the record of the beHevers themselves. The answer inevitably follows firom this inalterable condition. In this is American history. way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as be their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and Amer yond the handiwork of men. ica’s heresies—^torture, theft, enslavement—are so common But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the among individuals and nations that none can declare them process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of selves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln de Difference in hue and hair is old. But the beUef in the pre clared, in 1863, that the batde of Gettysburg must ensure eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can “that government of the people, by the people, for the correcdy or^nize a society and that they signify deeper people, shall not perish firom the earth,’’ he was not merely attributes, which are indehble-this is the new idea at the being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United heart of these new people who have been brought up hope States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage lessly, tragically, deceitfully, to beheve that they are white. in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln tridy These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But meant “government of the people” but what our country unlike US, their new name has no real meaning divorced has, throughout its history, taken the poHtical term ‘ peo from the machinery of criminal power. The new people ple” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother were something else before they were white—Catholic, or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our na Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government tional hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be of the people,” but the means by which “the people ac something else again. Perhaps they will truly become quired their names. American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I can- This leads us to another equally important ideal, one 8 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 9 not call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of note the great evil done in aU of our names. But you and I washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the have never truly had that luxury. I think you know. behef in being white, was not achieved through wine tast I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you be ings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging cause this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; death for seUing cigarettes; because you know now that the chaining of limbs; the stranghng of dissidents; the de Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John struction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of chil Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department dren; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they bodies. were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s has been, at some point in history, some great power whose grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of you did not before, that the pohce departments of your other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to dis country have been endowed with the authority to destroy cover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result America, because America makes no claim to the banal. of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it America beHeves itself exceptional, the greatest and no originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the blest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing be destruction springs from a fooHsh pohcy. Sell cigarettes tween the white city of democracy and the terrorists, without the proper authority and your body can be de despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civflization. One stroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen s claims of body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I pro accountable. Mostly they wiU receive pensions. And de pose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral stan struction is merely the superlative form of a dominion dard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face and humiliations. AU of this is common to black people. value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to And aU of this is old for black people. No one is held re look away, to live -with the fruits of our history and to ig- sponsible. BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 11 10 TA-NEHISI COATES most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream aU my life. It There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men en cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is forcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smeUs Hke its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our peppermint but tastes Hke strawberry shortcake. And for phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial so long 1 have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves my country over my head Hke a blanket. But this has never to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dis been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the lodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, know cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from ing that the Dream persists by warring with the known this. You must always remember that the sociology, the world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those famihes, history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regres I was sad for my country, but above aU, in that moment, I sions aU land, with great violence, upon the body. That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried was sad for you. That was the week you learned that the killers of Mi to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But chael Brown would go free. The men who had left his at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared body in the street Hke some awesome declaration of their picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my a white poHce officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that were young and stiH beheved. You stayed up till 11 P.M. 1 had expected to fail. And 1 wondered again at the indis that night, waiting for the announcement of an indict tinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I ment, and when instead it was announced that there was came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your calm December day. Famflies, beheving themselves white, room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I bundled in stroUers. And I was sad for these people, much thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not teU as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there you that it would be okay, because I have never beheved it watching and revehng in a specious hope. I realized then would be okay. What 1 told you is what your grandparents why I was sad. When the journahst asked me about my tried to teU me: that this is your country, that this is your body, it was Hke she was asking me to awaken her from the 12 TA-NEHISI COATES world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to Hve within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should hve within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my Hfe, and the pursuit of this question, 1 have found, ultimately an swers itself. This must seem strange to you. We hve in a “goal- oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is fuU of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in aU its forms. This rejection was a gift firom your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterhfe and were skeptical of preor dained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of his tory and the fact of my total end, I was fieed to truly consider how I wished to hve—specifically, how do I hve free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my read ing and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationahst myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant inter rogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my coun try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment. 14 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 15 And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies. was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfoUy ada I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and mantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young Ufe, though I had not always recognized it as such. bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own hves, their own streets, and their own bodies. I rings and medallions, their big pufry coats and full-length fiir-coUared leathers, which was their armor against their saw It in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and aU I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts’ name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vas- round their grandfathers so that the branches of th? black elined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each body might be torched, then cut away. The fear hved on other. m their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Phila delphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a cata- og of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I t at these boys were in firm possession of everything they knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle desired. ^ Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two shirdess boys circle each other close shpped me money to care for you. My father was so very and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is 16 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 17

exactly what was happening aU around us. Everyone had from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had their teenage boys for sass would then release them to just received a GED and had begun to turn their Hves streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, great fear. but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers Have they told you this story? When your grandmother twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. humor to cope. We stood in the aUey where we shot bas The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one ketballs through hoUowed crates and cracked jokes on the else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, that she might remember how easily she could lose her extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our par hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me ents resorted to the lash the way flageUants in the plague that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she years resorted to the scourge. would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and naked before the elements of the world, before aU the found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness minutes looking for me. When they found me. Dad did is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the cor what every parent I knew would have done—he reached rect and intended result of poUcy, the predictable upshot for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, of people forced for centuries to hve under fear. The law awed at the distance between punishment and offense. did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has be Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat come an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society AU I know is, the violence rose from the fear Hke smoke that protects some people through a safety net of schools. 18 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 19

government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but tember, then piled up overtime hours so as to have the can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. I focused in on a either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has suc Hght-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was ceeded at something much darker. However you call it, scowHng at another boy, who was standing close to me. It the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of was just before three in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade. the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting white or black—what matters is our condition, what mat weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here? ters is the system that makes your body breakable. Who could know? The revelation of these forces, a series of great changes, The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket has unfolded over the course of my hfe. The changes are and pulled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as still unfolding and will Hkely continue until I die. I was though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun eleven years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then un the 7-Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near tucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging the street. They yelled and gestured at... who? ... another rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was boy, young, Hke me, who stood there, almost smiling 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news gamely throwing up his hands. He had already learned the reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very lesson he would teach me that day; that his body was in often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon constant jeopardy. Who knows what brought him to that great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful knowledge? The projects, a drunken stepfather, an older children—fell upon them random and relendess, hke great brother concussed by poHce, a cousin pinned in the city sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not under jail. That he was outnumbered did not matter because the stand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. numbers matter? This was a war for the possession of his The boy did not shoot. His friends pulled him back. He body and that would be the war of his whole life. did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the I stood there for some seconds, marvehng at the older order of things. He had let it be known how easily I could boys’ beautiful sense of fashion. They all wore ski jackets, be selected. I took the sub-way home that day, processing the kind which, in my day, mothers put on layaway in Sep- the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents. 1 did not tell 20 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 21

my teachers, and if I told my friends I would have done so gravity, was black and that the other, hberated portion was with aU the excitement needed to obscure the fear that not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the came over me in that moment. breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation be I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise tween that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up hke injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, ir fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the repressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins Hved; that velocity of escape. the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there be different from my own. The grandness of the world, the yond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. other worlds where children did not regularly fear for And you have no need of dispatches because you have their bodies. 1 knew this because there was a large televi seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants sion resting in my Hving room. In the evenings 1 would sit their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t know what it before this television bearing witness to the dispatches means to grow up with a black president, social networks, from this other world. There were Httle white boys with omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their complete collections of football cards, and their only want natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sun age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even daes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. us. You stiU beheve the injustice was Michael Brown. You Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives world, 1 came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, obsessed over the distance between that other sector of by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the space and my own. I knew that my portion of the Ameri- people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles can galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt it- 22 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 23 self. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series these neighborhoods flowed downward and became the of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat- security of the bodies Hving there. You steered clear of Jo- down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives un Jo, for instance, because he was cousin to Keon, the don of scathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant Murphy Homes. In other cities, indeed in other Balti- danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thriU- mores, the neighborhoods had other handles and the boys This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce went by other names, but their mission did not change: themselves addicted to the streets” or in love with **the prove the inviolabihty of their block, of their bodies, game.” I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, through their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms. This rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to practice was so common that today you can approach any live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have black person raised in the cities of that era and they can teU never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less you which crew ran which hood in their city, and they can “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not tell you the names of all the captains and all their cousins fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there, and ofier an anthology of all their exploits. nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protec To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I tion of my body. learned another language consisting of a basic comple The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear ment of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the prohibited blocks. I learned the smell and feel of fighting blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it weather. And 1 learned that “Shorty, can I see your bike?” was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel was never a sincere question, and “Yo, you was messing any sense of security and power. They would break your with my cousin” was neither an earnest accusation nor a jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that misunderstanding of the facts. These were the summonses power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their that you answered with your left foot forward, your right wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their names ring foot back, your hands guarding your face, one sHghdy out. Reps were made, atrocities recounted. And so in my lower than the other, cocked like a hanamer. Or they were Baltimore it was known that when Cherry Hill rolled answered by breaking out, ducking through alleys, cutting through you rolled the other way, that North and Pulaski through backyards, then bounding through the door past was not an intersection but a hurricane, leaving only splin your kid brother into your bedroom, pulling the tool out ters and shards in its wake. In that fashion, the security of of your lambskin or from under your mattress or out of 24 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 25

your Adidas shoebox, then caUing up your own cousins Stand that there is no real distance between you and Tray (who really aren’t) and returning to that same block, on von Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a that same day, and to that same crew, hollering out, “Yeah, way that he could never terrify me. You have seen so iiiggsT. what’s up now?” I recall learning these laws clearer much more of all that is lost when they destroy your body. than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these The streets were not my only problem. If the streets laws were essential to the security of my body. shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to I think of this as a great difference between us. You have comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. some acquaintance with the old rules, but they are not as But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your essential to you as they were to me. I am sure that you have body later. I suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the had to deal -with the occasional roughneck on the subway schools more. There was nothing sanctified about the laws or in the park, but when I was about your age, each day, of the streets—the laws were amoral and practical. You fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was rolled with a posse to the party as sure as you wore boots walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of in the snow, or raised an umbrella in the rain. These were our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I rules aimed at something obvious—the great danger that smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of haunted every visit to Shake & Bake, every bus ride down which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a town. But the laws of the schools were aimed at something culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. I do not distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told long for those days. I have no desire to make you “tough” us, “grow up and be somebody”? And what precisely did or “street,” perhaps because any “toughness” I garnered this have to do with an education rendered as rote dis- came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow, aware of cipHne? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant the price. I think I somehow knew that that third of my always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working qui brain should have been concerned with more beautiful etly. Educated children walked in single file on the right things. 1 think I felt that something out there, some force, side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, nameless and vast, had robbed me of... what? Time? Ex and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated perience? I think you know something of what that third children never offered excuses—certainly not childhood could have done, and I think that is why you may feel the itself The world had no time for the childhoods of black need for escape even more than I did. You have seen all boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, the wonderful Hfe up above the tree-hne, yet you under- and EngHsh were not subjects so much as opportunities to 26 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 27

better discipline the body, to practice writing between the Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of hnes, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the coun extracted from the world they were created to represent. try. But it does not, and while I couldn t crunch the num All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my bers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the I was there. I did not know any French people, and noth schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed ing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another of this thing might be known. ^ sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to in this classroom? be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master The question was never answered. I was a curious boy, the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, hon but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They estly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would were concerned with comphance. I loved a few of my knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it, teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. puU guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their Some years after I’d left school, after I’d dropped out of knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out college, I heard a few hnes from Nas that struck me: of their parents’ homes and discovered that America had guns and cousins, too. I saw their futures in the tired faces Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s hue, it is poison of mothers dragging themselves onto the 28 bus, swatting Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison and cursing at three-year-olds; I saw their futures in the men out on the corner yelling obscenely at some young That was exactly how I felt back then. I sensed the girl because she would not smile. Some of them stood schools were hiding something, drugging us with false outside liquor stores waiting on a few dollars for a bottle. morahty so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: We would hand them a twenty and tell them to keep the Why—^for us and only us—is the other side of free will change. They would dash inside and return with Red BuU, and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a Mad Dog, or Cisco. Then we would walk to the house of hyperbohc concern. When our elders presented school to someone whose mother worked nights, play Fuck tha us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but Pohce,” and drink to our youth. We could not get out. The as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed between THE WORLD AND ME 29 28 TA-NEHISl COATES That was the message of the smaU-eyed boy, untucking the was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not piece—a child bearing the power to body and banish get out. other children to memory. Fear ruled everything around A year after I watched the boy with the small eyes puU me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was out a gun, my father beat me for letting another boy steal connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost nightly beamed into our television sets. me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. But how? Religion could not tell me. The schools We could not get out. I was a capable boy, intelligent, well- could not teU me. The streets could not help me see be hked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, yond the scramble of each day. And I was such a curious that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced boy. I was raised that way. Your grandmother taught me to to Hve in fear was a great injustice. And what was the read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythago investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was rean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the differ quite often) she would make me write about it. The writ ence between life and death, were the curtains drawing ing had to answer a series of questions; Why did I feel the down between the world and me? need to talk at the same time as my teacher?Why did I not I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and believe that my teacher was entided to respect? How its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned would I want someone to behave while 1 was talking? the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought just God was on my side. “The meek shall inherit the they would curb your behavior—they certainly did not earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in curb min^but because these were the earhest acts of in West Baltimore, stomped out atWalbrook Junction, bashed terrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. 30 TA-NEHISI COATES subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing— myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfading virtue. And feeHng that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not inno cent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they teU? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God? Now the questions began burning in me. The materials for research were aU around me, in the form of books as sembled by your grandfather. He was then working at Howard University as a research Hbrarian in the Moorlafid- Spingarn Research Center, one of the largest collections of Afficana in the world. Your grandfather loved books and loves them to this day, and they were all over the house, books about black people, by black people, for black peo ple spilling off shelves and out of the Hving room, boxed up in the basement. Dad had been a local captain in the Black Panther Party. I read through aU of Dad’s books about the Panthers and his stash of old Party newspapers. I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed hon est. The guns seemed to address this country, which in vented the streets that secured them with despotic poHce, in its primary language—violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew. Every February my classmates and I were herded into 32 TA-NEHISI COATES’ BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 33 assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Move I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the ment. Our teachers urged us toward the example of free same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state dom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and and It seemed that the month could not pass without a violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. camera. The black people in these films seemed to love Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent the worst things in life—^love the dogs that rent their chil back to those same streets, where they would take your dren apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire body. And I began to see these two arms in relation— hoses that tore off-their clothes and tumbled them into the those who failed in the schools justified their destruction streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the in the streets. The society could say, *He should have women who cursed them, love the children who spat on stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him. them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they show It does not matter that the “intentions” of individual ing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any speak not of the moraHty of nonviolence, but of the sense institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary. Our that blacks are in especial need of this morahty. Back then world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people pulhng out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents being left to the streets. But a very large number of Amer wielding extension cords, and “Yeah, nigger, what’s up ' icans -will do aU they can to preserve the Dream. No one now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under failure and destruction. But a great number of educators slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across spoke of “personal responsibihty” in a country authored the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. this language of “intention” and “personal responsibihty” How could the schools valorize men and women whose is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were values society actively scorned? How could they send us broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing aU that they our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a were, and then speak of nonviolence? sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 35 34 TA-NEHISI COATES

An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by exploded out of the small gatherings of his surviving apos- des and returned to the world. Hip-hop artists quoted him the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, in lyrics, cut his speeches across the breaks, or flashed his and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my fa Hkeness in their videos. This was the early ’90s. I was then ther, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead approaching the end of my time in my parents’ home and referred me to more books. My mother and father were wondering about my hfe out there. If I could have chosen always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a the answers they themselves beheved. I don’t know that I portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best holding a rifle. The portrait commtinicated everything of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being I wanted to be—controUed, inteUigent, and beyond the “poUtically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a fear. I would buy tapes of Malcolm’s speeches—“Message state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, to the Grassroots,” “The BaUot or the BuUet”—down at questioning as exploration rather than the search for cer Everyone’s Place, a black bookstore on North Avenue, tainty. Some things were clear to me: The violence that and play them on my Walkman. Here was all the angst I undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during felt before the heroes of February, distilled and quotable. Black History Month, and the intimate violence of “Yeah, “Don’t give up your hfe, preserve your life,” he would say. nigger, what’s up now?” were not unrelated. And this vio “And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven.” This lence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design. was not boasting—it was a declaration of equahty rooted But what exacdy was the design? And why? I must not in better angels or the intangible spirit but in the sanc know. I must get out ... but into what? I devoured the tity of the black body. You preserved your life because books because they were the rays of hght peeking out your life, your body, was as good as anyone’s, because your from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold another world, one beyond the gripping fear that under for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable here girded the Dream. after. You do not give your precious body to the billy In this blooming consciousness, in this period of intense clubs of Birmingham sheriffi nor to the insidious gravity questioning, I was not alone. Seeds planted in the 1960s, of the streets. Black is beautiful—which is to say that the forgotten by so many, sprung up from the ground and bore black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded fruit. Malcolm X, who’d been dead for twenty-five years, 36 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 37

against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin colm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walk must be protected against modern surgery. We are aU our ing home from school, in my lack of control over my body. beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before bar Perhaps I too might Uve free. Perhaps I too might wield the barians, must never submit our original self, our one of same old power that animated the ancestors, that hved in one, to defihng and plunder. Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Nanny, Cudjoe, Malcolm X, I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never hed, unhke the and speak—no, act—as though my body were my own. schools and their facade of moraHty, unhke the streets and My reclamation would be accomphshed, hke Malcolm’s, their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him through books, through my own study and exploration. because he made it plain, never mystical or esoteric, be Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday. cause his science was not rooted in the actions of spooks I had been reading and writing beyond the purview of the and mystery gods but in the work of the physical world. schools all my hfe. Already I was scribbUng down bad rap Malcolm was the first poHtical pragmatist I knew, the first lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with mak with the call for a return, to old things, to something es ing the people who believed they were white comfortable sential, some part of us that had been left behind in the in their beHef. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he mad dash out of the past and into America. hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the This missing thing, this lost essence, explained the boys enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would on the corner and “the babies having babies.” It explained not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the man for you. He would not be your morahty. Malcolm bleached skin of Michael Jackson. The missing thing was spoke like a man who was free, Hke a black man above the related to the plunder of our bodies, the fact that any claim laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that I knew that he had chafed against the schools, that he had braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable. almost been doomed by the streets. But even more I knew This was two years before the MiUion Man March. Al that he had found himself while studying in prison, and most every day I played Ice Cube’s album Death Certificate: that when he emerged from the jails, he returned wielding “Let me hve my life, if we can no longer hve our life, then some old power that made him speak as though his body let us give our life for the hberation and salvation of the were his own. “If you’re black, you were born in jail,” Mal black nation.” I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes on BETWEEN THE WORLD AND 39 \ the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by .^he shadow of my father’s generation, by Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Mal-\. colm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I be- \ heved that we had left ourselves back there, undone by ^

COINTELPRO and black flight and drugs, and now in the crack era all we had were our fears. Perhaps we should go back. That was what I heard in the call to “keep it real.” Perhaps we should return to ourselves, to our own pri mordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own rude hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca.

My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard Uni versity. I have tried to explain this to you many times. You say that you hear me, that you understand, but I am not so sure that the force of my Mecca—The Mecca—can be translated into your new and eclectic tongue. I am not even sure that it should be. My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own. You can no more be black like I am black t-ban I could be black like your grandfather was. And stiU, I maintain that even for a cosmopohtan boy hke you, there is something to be found there—a base, even in these modern times, a port in the American storm. Surely I am biased by nostalgia and tradition. Your grandfather worked at Howard. Your uncles Damani and Menelik and your aunts Kris and Kelly graduated firom there. I met your BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 41 40 TA-NEHISI COATES and tan Timbs. There were the high-yellow progeny of mother there, your uncle Ben, your aunt Kamilah and aunt AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There Ghana. were Cahfornia girls turned Mushm, born anew, in hijab I was admitted to Howard University, but formed and and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian shaped by The Mecca. These institutions are related but cultists. Tabernacle fanatics and matheniatical geniuses. It not the same. Howard University is an institution of higher was like listening to a hundred difierent renditions of education, concerned with the LSAT, magna cum laude, “Redemption Song,” each in a different color and key. and Phi Beta Kappa. The Mecca is a machine, crafted to And overlaying all of this was the history of Howard itself. capture and concentrate the dark energy of aU African I knew that I was hteraUy walking in‘the footsteps of all peoples and inject it directly into the student body. The the Toni Morrisons and Zora Neale Hurstons, of aU the Mecca derives its power from the heritage of Howard Uni Sterhng Browns and Kenneth Clarks, who’d come before. versity, which in Jim Crow days enjoyed a near-monopoly The Mecca—the vastness of black people across space- on black talent. And whereas most other historically black time—could be experienced in a twenty-minute walk schools were scattered hke forts in the great wilderness of across campus. I saw this vastness in the students chopping the old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington, D.C.— it up in front of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall, Chocolate City—and thus in proximity to both federal where Muhammad Ah had addressed their fathers and power and black power. The result was an alumni and mothers in defiance of the Vietnam War. I saw its epic professorate that spanned genre and generation—Charles sweep in the students next to Ira Aldridge Theater, where Drew, Amiri Baraka, Thurgood Marshall, Ossie Davis, Donny Hathaway had once sung, where Donald Byrd had Doug Wilder, David Dinkins, Lucille Clifton, Toni Mor once assembled his flock. The students came out with rison, Kwame Toure. The history, the location, the alumni their saxophones, trumpets, and drums, played “My Favor combined to create The Mecca—the crossroads of the ite Things” or “Someday My Prince Will Come.” Some of black diaspora. the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain I first witnessed this power out on the Yard, that com Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, munal green space in the center of the campus where the clapping, stepping. Some of them came up from Tubman students gathered and I saw everything I knew of my black Quadrangle with their roommates and rope for Double self multiphed out into seemingly endless variations. There Dutch. Some of them came down from Drew Hall, with were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business their caps cocked and their, backpacks slung through one suits giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers 42 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 43 arm, then fell into gorgeous ciphers of beatbox and rhyme. The result is a people, black people, who embody all phys Some of the girls sat by the flagpole with bell hooks and ical varieties and whose Hfe stories mirror this physical Sonia Sanchez in their straw totes. Some of the boys, with range. Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our their newYoruba names, beseeched these girls by citing own segregated body politic, cosmopohtans. The black di Frantz Fanon. Some of them studied Russian. Some of aspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, them worked in bone labs. They were Panamanian. They the Western world itself. were Bajan. And some of them were from places I had Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never never heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible, directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. exotic even, though we hailed from the same tribe. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, The black world was expanding before me, and I could black beauty, was never celebrated in moyies, in television, see now that that world was more than a photonegative of or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any that of the people who believe they are white. “White import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious were rebelling against the history books that spoke of (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domina black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black five- tion and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, star general, first black congressman, first black mayor and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for always presented in the bemused manner of a category of want of reasons. There will surely always be people with Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all his was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once tory. But some of these straight-haired people with blue read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difler- I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. ence between their world and ours. We did not choose “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped. Tol our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters stoy was “white,” and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that connected to the fear that passed through the generations, separated the “white” from the “black,” even if it meant to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. visible spectrum, beyond civflization. Our history was in- 44 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 45

ferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies ends. Here was the primordial stuff of our own Dream— were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly the Dream of a “black race”—of our own Tolstoys who be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. hved deep in the African past, where we authored operas, Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civiHzed, pioneered secret algebra, erected ornate walls, pyramids, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use? colossi, bridges, roads, and all the inventions that I then Contrary to this theory, I had Malcolm. I had my mother thought must quahfy one’s lineage for the ranks of civihza- and father. I had my readings of every issue of The Source tion. They had their champions, and somewhere we must and Vibe. I read them not merely because I loved black have ours. By then I’d read Chancellor Wilhams, J. A. music—I did—but because of the writing itself. Writers Rogers, and John Jackson—^writers central to the canon of Greg Tate, Chairman Mao, dream hampton—^barely older our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa than me—^were out there creating a new language, one that Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black, I intuitively understood, to analyze our art, our world. This and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black and the black was, in and of itself, an argument for the weight and beauty race” was a thing I supposed existed from time immemo of our culture and thus of our bodies. And now each day, rial, a thing that was real and mattered. out on the Yard, 1 felt this weight and saw this beauty, not When I came to Howard, Chancellor Wilhams’s De just as a matter of theory but also as demonstrable fact. And struction of Black Civilization was my Bible. WiUiams him I wanted desperately to communicate this evidence to the self had taught at Howard. I read him when I was sixteen, world, because I felt—even if 1 did not completely know— and his work offered a grand theory of multi-millennial that the larger culture’s erasure of black beauty was inti European plunder. The theory reheved me of certain mately connected to the destruction of black bodies. troubhng questions—this is the point of nationalism and What was required was a new story, a new history told it gave me my Tolstoy. I read about Queen Nzinga, who through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, ruled in Central Africa in the sixteenth century, resisting had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the the need addressed in my father’s books. It was in the Dutch. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate promise behind their grand tides—Children of the Sun, her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Kushite Empire, The Afri ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human can Origins of Civilization. Here was not just our history rhair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought, hut the history of the world, weaponized to our noble and the story of our own royalty became for me a weapon. 46 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 47

My working theory then held all black people as kings in Europe underdevelop Africa? I must know. And if the exile, a nation of original men severed from our original Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were ahve today, would they names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was Hve in Harlem? I had to inhale all the pages. the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any I went into this investigation imagining history to be a people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful unified narrative, free of debate, which, once uncovered, as us? would simply verify everything I had always suspected. I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the The smokescreen would Hft. And the villains who ma greatest collections of books could be found in the nipulated the schools and the streets would be unmasked. Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grand But there was so much to know—so mucTi geography to father once worked. Moorland held archives, papers, col cover—^Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, the United lections, and virtually any book ever written by or about States. And all of these areas had histories, sprawling hter- black people. For the most sigmficant portion of my time ary canons, fieldwork, ethnographies. Where should I at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into begin? the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for The trouble came almost immediately. I did not find a three different works. I would take a seat at one of these coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my and factions within factions. Hurston batded Hughes, Du black-and-white composition books. I would open the Bois warred with Garvey, Harold Cruse fought everyone. I books and read, while filling my composition books with felt myself at the bridge of a great ship that I could not notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences control because C.L.R. James was a great wave and Basil of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and Davidson was a swirhng eddy, tossing me about. Things I request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer believed merely a week earHer, ideas I had taken from one I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: book, could be smashed to splinters by another. Had we Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia San retained any of our African inheritance? Frazier says it was chez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, all destroyed, and this destruction evidences the terrible Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Ster- ness of our capturers. Herskovitz says it fives on, and this Hng Brown. I remember believing that the key to all hfe evidences the resilience of our African spirit. By my sec lay in articulating the precise difference between “the ond year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day me Black Aesthetic and “Negritude.” How, specifically, did diating between Frederick Douglass’s integration into BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 49 48 TA-NEHISI COATES Mecca. He was, hke me, from one of those cities where America and Martin Delany’s escape into nationalism. everyday Hfe was so different than the Dream that it de Perhaps they were somehow both right. I had come look manded an explanation. He came, like me, to The Mecca ing for a parade, for a miHtary review of champions march in search of the nature and origin of the breach. I shared ing in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a with him a healthy skepticism and a deep beHef that we herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as could somehow read our way out. Ladies loved him, and often marching away from each other. what a place to be loved—for it was said, and we certainly I would take breaks from my reading, walk out to the beheved it to be true, that nowhere on the Earth could vendors who lined the streets, eat lunch on the Yard. I one find a more beautiful assembly of women than on would imagine Malcolm, his body bound in a ceU, study Howard University’s Yard. And somehow even this was ing the books, trading his human eyes for the power of part of the search—the physical beauty of the black body flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the ques was all our beauty, historical and cultural, incarnate. Your tions that I had not yet understood to be more than just uncle Ben became a fellow traveler for life, and I discov means, by my lack of understanding, and by Howard itself. ered that there was something particular about journeying It was still a school, after aU. I wanted to pursue things, to out with black people who knew the length of the road know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of profes because they had traveled it too. I would walk out into the city and find other searchers sors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right at lectures, book signings, and poetry readings. I was stiU to declare your own curiosities and follow them through writing bad poetry. I read this bad poetry at open mics in aU manner of books. I was made for the hbrary, not the local cafes populated mostly by other poets who also felt classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s inter the insecurity of their bodies. All of these poets were older ests. The hbrary was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was and wiser than me, and many of them were weU read, and discovering myself. The best parts of Malcolm pointed the they brought this wisdom to bear on me and my work. way. Malcolm, always changing, always evolving toward What did I mean, specifically, by the loss of my body? And some truth that was ultimately outside the boundaries of if every black body was precious, a one of one, if Malcolm his life, of his body. I felt myself in motion, still directed was correct and you must preserve your life, how could I toward the total possession of my body, but by some other see these precious Hves as simply a collective mass, as the route which I could not before then have imagined. amorphous residue of plunder? How could I privilege the I was not searching alone. I met your uncle Ben at The BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 51 50 TA-NEHISI COATES Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage.” And I was stunned by spectrum of dark energy over each particular ray of light? how much Hayden managed to say without, seemingly, These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how saying anything at aU—he could bring forth joy and agony to think. The Dream thrives on generaHzation, on Hmiting without Uterally writing the words, which formed as pic the number of possible questions, on privileging immedi tures and not slogans. Hayden imagined the enslaved, dur ate answers. The Dream is the enemy of aU art, courageous ing the Middle Passage, from the perspective of the thinking, and honest writing. And it became clear that this enslavers—a mind-trip for me, in and of itself; why should was not just for the dreams concocted by Americans to the enslaver be aUowed to speak? But Hayden’s poems did justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had con not speak. They conjured: jured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to You cannot stare that hatred down civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question or chain the fear that stalks the watches the logic of the claim itself. I had forgotten my own self interrogations pushed upon me by my mother, or rather I I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so had not yet apprehended their deeper, Hfelong meaning. I much of what I’d felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own hu immortal wish, and the timeless wiU, I saw in Hayden’s manity, of my own hurt and anger—I didn’t yet realize that work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never the boot on your neck is just as Hkely to make you delu like this—quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the sional as it is to ennoble. craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of The art I was coming to love hved in this void, in the what my mother had taught me all those years ago the not yet knowable, in the pain, in the question. The older craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an poets introduced me to artists who pulled their energy economy of truth—^loose and useless words must be dis from the void—^Bubber Mdey, Otis Redding, Sam and carded, and I found that these loose and useless words were Dave, C. K. Williams, Carolyn Forche. The older poets not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was were Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore. It not simply the transcription of notions ^beautiful writing is important that I teU you their names, that you know that rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, I have never achieved anything alone. I remember sitting still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my with Joel Dias-Porter, who had not gone to Howard but own innocence, my own rationahzations. Poetry was the whom I found at The Mecca, reviewing every line of 52 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 53

processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell pie who seemed, as much as anyone, to have seized control away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life. of their bodies. This enclave was Prince George’s County— These truths I heard in the works of other poets around “PG County” to the locals—and it was, to my eyes, very the city. They were made of small hard things—aunts and rich. Its residents had the same homes, with the same uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking backyards, with the same bathrooms. I’d seen in those tele from mason jars. These truths carried the black body be vised dispatches. They were black people who elected yond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus re their own politicians, but these politicians, I learned, su flected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of perintended a police force as vicious as any in America. I my alhterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the had heard stories about PG County from the same poets lost dynasties of Afirican antiquity. After these readings, I who opened my world. These poets assured me that the followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or re PG County police were not poHce at all but privateers, pair to a cafe and argue about everything—^books, politics, gangsters, gunmen, plunderers operating under the color boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant of law. They told me this because they wanted to protect tradition I d found in Moorland, and I began to see dis my body. But there was another lesson here: To be black cord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of and beautiful was not a matter for gloating. Being black power. I was learning to hve in the disquiet I felt in did not immunize us from history’s logic or the lure of the Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnaw- Dream. The writer, and that was what I was becoming, ing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his an alarm. It was a beacon. own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, It began to strike me that the point of my education was precisely because it was his own. a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award I began to feel that something more than a national me my own especial Dream but would break all the trophy case was needed if I was to be truly free, and for dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and that I have the history department of Howard University everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all to thank. My history professors thought nothing of telling its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, me that my search for myth was doomed, that the stories I even among us. You must understand this. wanted to teU myself could not be matched to truths. In Back then, I knew, for instance, that just outside of deed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weapon- Washington, D.C., there was a great enclave of black peo- ized history. They had seen so many Malcohmtes before BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 55 54 TA-NEHISI COATES I took a survey of Europe post-1800.1 saw black people, and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did rendered through “white” eyes, unlike any I’d seen black skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes. What about before—the black people looked regal and human. I re the blacks who’d practiced slavery for millennia and sold member the soft face of Alessandro de’ Medici, the royal slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a bearing of Bosch’s black magi. These images, cast m the trick. Would those be the same black kings who birthed all sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were contrasted with of civiUzation? Were they then both deposed masters of those created after enslavement, the Sambo caricatures I the galaxy and guUible puppets all at once? And what did had always known. What was the difibrence? In my survey I mean by “black”? You know, black. Did I think this a time course of America, I’d seen portraits^ of the Irish drawn m less category stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it the same ravenous, lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there be supposed that simply because color was important to had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure. me, it had always been so? Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their bodies. Perhaps I remember taking a survey class focusing on Central being named “black” had nothing to do with any of this; Africa. My professor, Linda Heywood, was sUght and be perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for spectacled, spoke with a high Trinidadian lilt that she em being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object ployed like a hammer against young students hke me who confused agitprop with hard study. There was nothing turned to pariah. This heap of reahzations was a weight. I found them romantic about her Africa, or rather, there was nothing physically painful and exhausting. True, I was coming to romantic in the sense that I conceived of it. And she took enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any it back to the legacy of Queen Nzinga—my Tolstoy the odyssey. But in those early moments, the unceasing con very same Nzinga whose life I wished to put in my trophy tradictions sent me into a gloom. There was nothing holy case. But when she told the story of Nzinga conducting or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and negotiations upon the woman’s back, she told it without heritage. There was no nobftity in falling, in being bound, any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a sucker punch. in Hving oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago, black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skm wasnt my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fear even black. And now I looked back on my need for a tro ful in the schools, was not closest to the queen’s but to her phy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bel adviser’s, who’d been broken down into a chair so that a low, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear queen, heir to everything she’d ever seen, could sit. 56 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 57 again-fear that “they,” the aUeged authors and heirs of the Clan in the canon. A dude in a Tribe Vibe T-shirt walks up, universe, were right. And tHs fear ran so deep that we ac cepted their standards of civihzation and humanity. gives a pound, and we talk about the black bacchanals of But not aU of us. It must have been around that time the season—Freaknik, Daytona, Virginia Beach—and we that I discovered an essay by Ralph Whey in which he wonder if this is the year we make the trip. It isn’t. Because responded to BeUow’s quip. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the we have aU we need out on the Yard. We are dazed here Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing because we stiU remember the hot cities in which we were born, where the first days of spring were laced with fear. o umversal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted BeUow’s And now, here at The Mecca, we are without fear, we are the dark spectrum on parade. ‘ premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I These were my first days of adulthood, of living alone, c ose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA My of cooking for myself, of going and coming as I pleased, of great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s my own room, of the chance of returning there, perhaps, dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need with one of those beautiful women who were now every for escape, and the invention of racecraft. where around me. In my second year at Howard, I fell hard And stiU and aU I knew that were something, that we for a lovely girl from California who was then in the habit were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no of floating over the campus in a long skirt and head wrap. less real. The reaUty was out there on the Yard, on the first I remember her large brown eyes, her broad mouth and warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, bor cool voice. I would see her out on the Yard on those spring ough, affihation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora days, yell her name and then throw up my hands as though had sent a delegate to the great world party. I remember signaUng a touchdown—^but wider—hke the “W” in those days like an OutKast song, painted in lust and joy. A VTiat up? That was how we did it then. Her father was baldhead in shades and a tank top stands across from Black- from Bangalore, and where was that? And what were the bum. the student center, with a long boa draping his mus laws out there? I did not yet understand the import of my cular shoulders. A conscious woman, in stonewasli with own questions. What I remember is my ignorance. I re her dreads puUed back, is giving him the side-eye and member watching her eat with her hands and feeHng laughing. I am standing outside the hbrary debating the wholly uncivilized with my fork. I remember wondering Republican takeover of Congress or the place of Wu-Tang why she wore so many scarves. I remember her going to India for spring break and returning with a bindi on her 58 TA-NEHISI COATES head and photos of her smiling Indian cousins. I told her, “Nigga, you black” because that’s all I had back then. But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me—the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the hneage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body. I fell again, a short time later and in similar fashion, for another girl, tall with long flowing dreadlocks. She was raised by a Jewish mother in a small, nearly all-white town in Pennsylvania, and now, at Howard, ranged between women and men, asserted this not just with pride but as though it were normal, as though she were normal. I know it’s nothing to you now, but I was firom a place—^America— where cruelty toward humans who loved as their deepest instincts instructed was a kind of law. I was amazed. This was something black people did? Yes. And they did so much more. The girl with the long dreads hved in a house with a man, a Howard professor, who was married to a white woman. The Howard professor slept with men. His wife slept with women. And the two of them slept with each other. They had a httle boy who must be off to col lege by now. “Faggot” was a word I had employed aU my life. And now here they were,The Cabal,The Coven,The 60 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 61 Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The cause I had no idea what else to do. I was afraid. I did not Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am black, and understand what was happening. I did not know whom to have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I caU. I was lying there simmering, half-awake, hoping to too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take an recover. My supervisor knocked on the door. Someone other human’s body to confirm myself in a community. had come to see me. It was her. The girl with the long Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the dreads helped me out and onto the street. She flagged fag, the bitch illuminate the border, iUuminate what we down a cab. Halfway through the ride, I opened the door, ostensibly are not, iUuminate the Dream of being white, of with the cab in motion, and vomited in the street. But I being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus remember her holding me there to make sure I didn’t fall confirmed in the tribe. But my tribe was shattering and out and then holding me close when I was done. She took reforming around me. I saw these people often, because me to that house of humans, which was filled with all they were family to someone whom I loved. Their or manner of love, put me in the bed, put Exodus on the CD dinary moments—answering the door, cooking in the player, and turned the volume down to a whisper. She left kitchen, dancing to Adina Howard—assaulted me and ex a bucket by the bed. She left a jug of water. She had to go panded my notion of the human spectrum. I would sit in to class. I slept. When she returned I was back in form. We the hving room of that house, observing their private ate. The girl with the long dreads who slept with whom jokes, one part of me judging them, the other reeling fiom ever she chose, that being her own declaration of control the changes. over her body, was there. I grew up in a house drawn be She taught me to love in new ways. In my old house tween love and fear. There was no room for softness. But your grandparents ruled with the fearsome rod. I have this girl with the long dreads revealed something else— tried to address you differently-^n idea begun by seeing that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or aU the other ways of love on display at The Mecca. Here is hard, love was an act of heroism. how it started: I woke up one morning with a minor And I could no longer predict where I would find my headache. With each hour the headache grew. I was walk heroes. Sometimes I would walk with friends down to U ing to my job when I saw this girl on her way to class. I Street and hang out at the local clubs. This was the era of looked awful, and she gave me some Advil and kept going. Bad Boy and Biggie, “One More Chance’’ and “Hypno By mid-afternoon I could barely stand. I caUed my super tize.’’ I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was visor. When he arrived I lay down in the stockroom, be crippled by some childhood fear of my own body. But I 62 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 63 would watch how hlack people moved, how in these cluhs questions simply died in my head. Now I could call and they danced as though their bodies could do anything, and ask people why a popular store closed, why a show had their bodies seemed as free as Malcolm’s voice. On the been canceled, why there were so many churches and so outside black people controlled nothing, least of aU the few supermarkets. Journahsm gave me another tool of ex fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by ploration, another way of unveiling the laws that bound the pohce; which could be erased by the guns, which were my body. It was beginning to come together—even if I so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed. But in could not yet see what the “it” was. the clubs, under the influence of two-for-one rum and In Moorland I could explore the histories and tradi Cokes, under the spell of low lights, in thrall of hip-hop tions. Out on the Yard, I could see these traditions in ef music, I felt them to be in total control of every step, every fect. And with journahsm, I could direcdy ask people nod, every pivot. about the two—or about anything else I might wonder. So All I then wanted was to write as those black people much of my Hfe was defined by not knowing. Why did I danced, with control, power, joy, warmth. I was in and out Hve in a world where teenage boys stood in the parking lot of classes at Howard. I felt that it was time to go, to declare of the 7-Eleven puUing out? Why was it normal for my myself a graduate of The Mecca, if not the university. I was father, Hke all the parents I knew, to reach for his belt? And publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in the local why was life so different out there, in that other world past alternative newspaper, and this meant contact with more the asteroids? What did the people whose images were human beings. I had editors—^more teachers—and these once beamed into my Hving room have that I did not? were the first white people I’d ever really known on any The girl with the long dreads who changed me, whom personal level. They defied my presumptions—they were I so wanted to love, she loved a boy about whom I think afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they saw in my every day and about whom I expect to think every day for unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be the rest of my hfe. I think sometimes that he was an inven treasured and harnessed. And they gave me the art of jour- tion, and in some ways he is, because when the young are nahsm, a powerful technology for seekers. I reported on killed, they are haloed by aU that was possible, all that was local D.C., and I found that people would tell me things, plundered. But I know that I had love for this boy. Prince that the same softness that once made me a target now Jones, which is to say that I would smile whenever I saw compelled people to trust me with their stories. This was him, for I felt the warmth when I was around him and was incredible. I was barely out of the fog of childhood, where slighdy sad when the time came to trade dap and for one 64 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 65 of us to go. The thing to understand about Prince Jones is her, to be exhaled by her, to return to her, and leave her that he exhibited the whole of his given name. He was high. handsome. He was tall and brown, built thin and powerful She had never known her father, which put her in the like a wide receiver. He was the son of a prominent doctor. company of the greater number of everyone I’d known. I He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected. felt then that these men—these “fathers”—were the great He was kind. Generosity radiated off of him, and he est of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing seemed to have a facihty with everyone and everything. with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in This can never be true, but there are people who pull the our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and illusion off without effort, and Prince was one of them. I she understood something more—that all are not equally can only say what I saw. what I felt. There are people robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set whom we do not fully know, and yet they Hve in a warm out for pfllage in ways I could never truly know. And she place within us. and when they are plundered, when they was the kind of black girl who’d been told as a child that lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place she had better be smart because her looks wouldn’t save becomes a wound. her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skirmed girl. And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I fell m love at The Mecca one last time, lost my balance I’d glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach and all my boyhood confusion, under the spell of a girl from Chicago. This was your mother. I see us standing for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy there with a group of friends in the Hving room of her trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great home. I stood with a blunt in one hand and a beer in an barrier between the world and me. other. I inhaled, passed it off to this Chicago girl, and when Nothing between us was ever planned—not even you. I brushed her long elegant fingers, I shuddered a bit from We were both twenty-four years old when you were the blast. She brought the blunt to her plum-painted lips, born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the pulled, exhaled, then pulled the smoke back in. A week class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage par earher I had kissed her, and now, -watching this display of ents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we smoke and flame (and already feehng the effects). I was lost planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield and runmng and wondering what it must be to embrace against other women, other men, or the corrosive monot- 66 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 67

ony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and projects all over Baltimore, but nothing so expansive as I knew too many people who’d married and abandoned this. The housing occurred to me as a moral disaster not each other for less. The truth of us was always that you Just for the people fiving there but for the entire region, were our ring. We d summoned you out of ourselves, and the metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you de with their quiet acquiescence tolerated such a thing. But served all the protection we could muster. Everything else there was so much more there in those projects than I was, was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it even in all my curiosity, prepared to see. shouldn t. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Your maternal grandmother once visited us during the Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my pregnancy. She must have been horrified. We were Hving own skin in the game, and that was reaUy nothing at all in Delaware. We had almost no fiirnituite. I had left How because I was a young man, and not yet clear of my own ard without a degree and was living on the impoverished human vulnerabihties. But I was grounded and domesti wages of a fireelance writer. On the last day of her visit, I cated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was not go down alone. her only child, as you are my only child. And having This is what I told myself, at least. It was comforting to watched you grow, I know that nothing could possibly be believe that the fate of my body and the bodies of my fam more precious to her. She said to me, “You take care of my ily were under my powers. “You will have to man up,” we daughter.” When she got out of the car, my world had tell our sons. “Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the to be a father. This is what they had told me all my life. It foyer of my hfe and into the living room. Everything that was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope was the past seemed to be another Hfe. There was before with the human sacrifice that finds us no matter our man you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were hood. As though our hands were ever our own. As though the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and plunder of dark energy was not at the heart of our galaxy. I knew then that I must survive for something more than And the plunder was there, if I wished to see it. survival’s sake. I must survive for you. One summer, I traveled out to Chicago to see your You were born that August. I thought of the great spec mother. I rode down the Dan Ryan with friends and be trum of The Mecca—black people from Behze, black held, for the first time, the State Street Corridor—a four- people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers mile stretch of dilapidated pubHc housing. There were firom Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, CK?Oo oo-

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 71 70 TA-NEHISI COATES our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is ah. and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born we have because the god of history is an atheist, and noth in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and ing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her least of ah the promise of waking up at ah. This is not de mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and spair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imag over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. ine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women the world—^which is really the only world she can ever who teU you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. because of the actions of these same men and women. I am It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it length of that night is most of our history. Never forget more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be respon were born into chains—^whole generations followed by sible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, more generations who knew nothing but chains. somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its responsible for the bodies of the powerfiil—the poUceman nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his ex urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, tovrard cuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The en to just you—the women around you must be responsible slaved were not bricks in your road, and their hves were for their bodies in a way that you never will know. You not chapters in your redemptive history. They were peo ple turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our pres how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, ent circumstance—no matter how improved—as the re demption for the hves of people who never asked for the cotton, and gold. posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their chil dren. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps