Ta-Nehisi Coates is a Black man striving to come to terms with what he’s been through and seen. His 2015 bestseller Between the World and Me is his attempt to teach his fifteen-year-old son, Samori, about how to survive as an American Black man — men whose bodies get discarded far too often — without rage eating them alive from the inside.
Coates relays what he ‘d learned from the firm grip of his mother’s hand: “She knew the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine.”
Coates’s story begins not with attacks from those outside the community but from those who lived within it. He grew up in gang-infested Baltimore. At eleven, standing outside a 7-Eleven, another boy fixed his eyes on him, pulled out a gun, and seemed ready to end Coates’s life. Coates sensed the boy’s surging rage, a rage that could easily have erased his body right then and there. Luckily, the boy’s friends talked him down. Coates went home and didn’t tell a soul. That was just the way things were back in the 1980s.
He later realized what the other boy had gotten from doing what he’d done: an affirmation of the order of things — the boy’s power, and Coates’s selection, which placed him at the boy’s mercy. Violence had seeped into the community from without—from how Blacks historically had been treated, which threatened every Black man’s continued existence. It’s a threat that leaves a blood-like stain on the souls of young Black men, a threat that harkens back to trees and dangling nooses.
Beneath the swagger or young Black men, Coates sensed pervasive fear—the ever-present danger one might not survive, the fear of what another might do to your body for the simple reason it’s of another color. The boys in his hometown “walked loud and rude” because it was the only way they knew to feel powerful and secure. “They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power.”
Coates is painting a picture — for his son and his readers — of how much mental energy it took to stay vigilant as a young Black boy in that world. Samori will likely be spared a gun in his face; his family is upwardly mobile, living at a safe distance from such conditions. But he’ll still have to endure a communal Black experience: living through random murders that, for no good reason, erase one Black life after another. How do Black men survive experiences that could easily make them crazy with rage?
Such aren’t anything like those I faced growing up in an upper-middle-class white family. I had my own brush with death, foolishly crossing a busy thoroughfare and coming inches from being hit by a speeding car. I can still hear the screeching breaks. Then there was Mark, the kid up the block who got ejected from the convertible he was racing — the last anyone saw of his just-turned-sixteen life. Such instances can’t compare with the death as an imminent threat, which no Black man can ever forget. My life didn’t hang on the rage or mercy of others. Both Mark and I had chosen poorly. No one did that to us; we did it to ourselves, and that makes a ton of difference. Death of one’s own making can’t compare to death at the hands of another.
The Black experience is colored by mental images of lifeless bodies hanging from trees. Whether I, as a white man, can rightfully use the word noose is debatable. Coates’s grandfather and two of his uncles died from “unnatural causes.” A college acquaintance was slaughtered by a Black police officer — a known liar — who claimed the young man, who’d never been in trouble, had tried to run him over. Sound familiar? That senseless murder ignited a fire in Coates that will last the rest of his life. His career as a journalist helped him get by — witnessing and reporting what goes down. Not everyone is so lucky.
As a father, I will never have to cope day by day knowing my son could get gunned down. How does a father get on knowing such things could happen? How does he cope knowing how little he can do to ensure his son’s safety? What must he teach his son about living in a world where such things happen to his brother? Coates isn’t entirely sure, but he doesn’t see the task as futile. There must be a way to help his son carry on when he hears of yet another killing, Black men downed like targets in a carnival rifle range.
Coates cautions his son not to hold out hope for a better tomorrow the way some, drunk on optimism, tend to do. It’s not that Coates is pessimistic — he’s trying to be realistic about what’s achievable. He’s arguing against Kumbaya mentality. Coates, the son of a Black Panther, isn’t buying it, and he’s advising his son to be skeptical of such wishful thinking. He never references King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but he seems close to questioning its premise.
The conditions of Coates’s childhood left him a guarded and wary man. His son’s radically different experience has left him more trusting and outgoing. Coates has to fight his own knee-jerk urge to wake him too early to the need to be more guarded rather than assume that things will work out for the best. At a preschool tour the family is taking, described by Coates as “a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children,” Samori runs uninhibited into the thick of it, triggering a strong reaction in his father. To his credit, Coates felt, then suppressed, the urge to grab his son’s arm: “We don’t know these folks. Be cool.” And for that restaint, he must be saluted.
Coates charts what Black men must grapple with on a daily basis: fear learned early, anger that is reasonable rather than pathological, and a hypervigilance born of knowing how easily a Black man’s body can be plundered.
He describes another instance, when Samori was five. Coming down an escalator on the Upper West Side after attending a performance, Samori is dawdling, A white woman has the temerity to prod the boy’s body and demand he move along. The audacity! Coates reads this as her “pulling rank,” sanctioned by the mostly white crowd. He turns to her and speaks with words “hot with all the moment and all of his history.” The woman is aghast. How dare he speak to her in such a fashion! A man gets in Coates’s face; Coates physically pushes back. It becomes a scene. The man threatened, “I could have you arrested.”
This is not Coates’s proudest moment, and he knows as much — acting this way is uncharacteristic of a non-violent man. But there’s only so much a man can take. He feels an impulse to keep fighting, then thinks better of it, seeing the scene through his son’s eyes. Losing control was not what he wanted to model. He felt ashamed for reverting to the law of the street. Then again, what would it teach his son to merely back down and slink away.
In the end, Coates concludes that fighting back changes little. But the struggle assures one an honorable and sane life. His hardest-won wisdom to Samori: the struggle is all he has to offer, because it’s the only portion of this world under one’s control.
Coates cannot save his son — and isn’t, he admits, all that sorry for it, because part of him believes vulnerability brings one closer to the meaning of life. Samori has been born into a race “in which the wind is always in his face and the hounds always at his heels.”
What Coates offers Samori — and the rest of us, by writing the book — is the modern father’s hardest task: to tell your son the truth without crushing him under its weight, and to reveal your own inner world and struggle rather than hide behind a performance of strength. That is the work. The struggle changes little in the world. But it changes the man who undertakes it — and the son who watches him do so. That, in the end, may be all any father has to hand down.