The Beautiful Struggle

“But we were another country, fraying at our seams. All the old rules were crumbling around us. The statistics were dire and oft recited—1 in 21 killed by 1 in 21, more of us in jail than college.” 

Coates begins his memoir with a statistic, setting the scene for the era in which young black boys are dying and being jailed, all around due to gun violence, drug addiction, and the system that is set up to fail. Coats makes it clear that he considers this statistic a cultural construction, and the rest of his novel goes onto prove the ways he and his brethren works to change these circumstances.

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

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

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

Coates’s use of the term “merchant of arms” and the phrase “when walking the land” carries through his stylistic embrace of the mythic Arthurian tale, turned here toward his older brother Bill’s purchase of a gun.