Growing up black and angry
A memoir that tracks the love-hate relationship between a father and son impresses, writes Nicholas Reid.
It’s fascinating to read a book that centres so much on lovehate. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir The Beautiful Struggle takes him up to the age of 18, when he is about to set off for college. He dedicates the book to his mother, who pushed and cajoled him through high school, even when he was an unwilling teenager who didn’t want to do what he was told.
But the real driving force in his life was his father, Paul Coates, and this is where the love-hate comes in.
As a young African-American man in the 60s and 70s, Paul copied much of his behaviour from his father, a serial philanderer. Paul himself fathered seven children with four different women. Not exactly a model of behaviour for young Ta-Nehisi, especially when Paul’s firm discipline of his children is factored in. There lies the hate part of the equation.
Yet Paul did care and provide for his children. Also, he was for his son a model of AfricanAmerican intellectual development in the late 20th century.
Paul began as a super-patriot and went off to fight in Vietnam. So disillusioned was he by this that he returned to America and chose the revolutionary path, becoming a Black Panther in the belief that only an armed response could advance the lot of African-Americans.
But when the Black Panthers degenerated into what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls ‘‘gang warfare’’, Paul Coates left them, convinced that what young black American males needed was pride in their African heritage and higher education. He infused his son with this love of learning, even if the son was sometimes rebellious. For this, the son adds love to his reaction.
Now in his early 40s, Ta-Nehisi tells what it was like to be young and black in Baltimore. The Beautiful Struggle is a story about the threat of gang violence, the plague of crack cocaine, and all those things which his parents wisely steered him away from.
It’s also about young Ta-Nehisi discovering the opposite sex and trying to be cool as a drummer, even as he gradually realised that his real strength was writing.
Parts of it are hard to read because his hip-hop slang is so insistent. Even so, the message – the need for concerned parents and good education – is quite clear.
As a voice for black Americans, some critics have already compared Ta-Nehisi to James Baldwin. This comparison isn’t excessive.