The Beautiful Struggle Read online

  But most of these kids learned early that they were not funny or fast. They might have a jump shot or a spin move when running back a kick. But their talents were mostly elsewhere, and the other boys and girls gave them no respect. But somewhere about third grade they got the message: Fists could equalize it all. That if they could raise their dukes, they could cut a lot of the bullshit. It did not matter if their jab was wild or the headlock was no more than a firm hug. That they stood instead of ran made them hard targets and served notice to the bandits that there was no free lunch. Now they’d survived the early battles of elementary school and were here at Lemmel, in the midst of a bad combination. There was the bubbling pubescent machismo that under most circumstances eventually resulted in blows. There was the absence of men and fathers, men who could teach nuance and intelligence to boys. There were the girls, now sprouting attitude and curves, who we all desperately wanted to impress. And then there was class 7-16—the Marshall Team—the school nerds, easy marks.

  By then almost every boy in my class had heard the talk in the halls—that 7-16 was soft, that its boys could not hold their hallway down. So my classmates rolled a little thicker than usually required, since sooner or later, one of them was bound to be touched.

  This is how the Marshall Team, Lemmel’s best and brightest, became a gang. They assembled in their own area before school. They had their own table at lunch. They would throttle one another at random moments, testing for a weak link. In bathrooms and at lunch tables they’d beat on each other and critique the response, because all this was a dry run for what we faced outside.

  But I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move on to an actual fight. It was the mark of unKnowledge, a basic misreading of nature and humanity. The fallacy was brought to light outside Ms. Hines’s Latin class just before lunch. The 7-16 boys circled around us. Kwesi Smith stood a few feet away. We were both new to Lemmel, and we’d already bonded over this fact. But he was a quicker study and when 7-16 formed an arena around us, and my eyes frantically scanned the wall of boys for a doorway out, Kwesi put up his dukes because he understood.

  I got to know Kwesi as time went on. He invited me to his home for cookouts and birthday dinners at fish spots near the bay. He was like me, wore Bugle Boys, parachute pants, turtleneck sweaters with brass medallions and cryptic branding like “Fifth Patrol.”

  All that was months later. Today was different. Someone—maybe Merrill, Gerald, or Leon—set this all in motion. They wanted a fight. A voice came through the crowd, said something like, Let’s see if you can take this mutherfucker. I raised my fist, thought, I’ll only swing if he—and that was it. I was in midthought when Kwesi reached in and slapped me across the jaw. The rest of the Marshall Team was changing classes. I heard the entire hallway laugh at once, then it echoed throughout the school, then the city, and somewhere else I felt Big Bill shaking his head.

  It was disrespect—I didn’t even warrant knuckles. I got in a few lazy tags before a teacher broke it up. But that’s how it started—with a blow that didn’t even hurt. At lunch the story reverberated across tables and into the line. People I did not know were retelling the episode in grander terms—

  That nigger was like, What the fuck you goin’ do, bitch. And Tana—this is how they shortened my name—busted out crying.

  I felt my tenuous status slipping into dangerous territory. I tried to talk it down, but did not understand what had really happened. I would have had to murder Kwesi in the lunchroom to get back any respect.

  From then on, I was the weakest of the marks, and my weakness was despised. By the gifted kids, most of all. Some of my whippings were just macho show, but mostly they were pure logic. 7-16 looked at me and saw everything that their world said they were—soft and weak—and that could not be allowed. I didn’t make many more friends on the Marshall Team that year. The few that I did could never understand why I would not fight.

  I fit only slightly better back home. Our neighborhood was calm and could not compare with the rest of Mondawmin. We had only a smattering of Section 8, and no colorful legacy—no older gods regaled us with tales of knife fights and smack. All our houses were sedate and brick. They had bad self-esteem, were built on a natural incline, slumped down and into each other, had tiny backyards, basement doors embedded in the ground like bomb shelters. Insignificant lawns. Covered porches. But still, better—and yet worse than—the projects.

  We had no rec centers or courts infested with ball hawks whose handles were legend. The courts at Druid Hill Park were beyond reach. I would launch kites from broad parking lots or get with Leroy and some friends to toss snowballs at buses and cabs. On the grass hill between Mondawmin and the crib, we drew up plays in our palms, hiked, and went deep. Behind our houses, we measured broad alleys and plotted courses for our Diamondback and Mongoose bicycles.

  I had enough Knowledge to know that the athletes were our kings—Jordan, Tyson, and LT. And then there was Len Bias at the University of Maryland and his obnoxious array of shots. His game should have been locked in a cell. Bias had a first step that was unreal but was so complete that when everything pointed to a windmill or double pump, he’d pull up from eighteen feet and calmly shoot out the lights. Big Bill was entranced. He followed box scores in The Sun, cut out headlines, and fantasized about the Sweet 16.

  Bill would ball up scrap paper in Dad’s basement office and take aim at the trash can. He would bang and bend wire hangers until they rounded into a hoop and could be jammed between a door and the sill. Then he’d make a ball from the Sunday Sun and cover it with packing tape. His addiction was all consuming. He put me to work gathering Dad’s tools, then boosting milk crates from the supermarket on the side of Mondawmin. In the alley between Forest Park and Liberty, Bill, Jay, Dante, and all the neighborhood boys convened. For Bill, turning an alley into a court was nothing—back in the projects he’d once conjured Madison Square Garden from a bicycle rim. He cut out the crate bottom, climbed a ladder while one of his boys held it secure, then nailed the makeshift goal to a backboard and phone pole. Then he grabbed the orange-striped rock, christened his creation with a short fadeaway and began chanting: Bias from eighteen feet, Bias coast to coast, Bias for the game.

  The rules were organic. Breaks in the alley and cement were foul lines and boundaries. We were honorable and yelled “Ball!” when hacked. Starting with the rock, the alley flowered into a center of civilization. Bill would bring out his boom box and tapes of Frank Ski. Fools would pass around air pistols and shoot the threading out of old ski jackets. It did not end in the winter. Clouds gathered and dumped snow over the city. But the next day, we’d be shoveling until we’d reclaimed a broad patch of gray. Then we’d go to war in our skullies. The crate would stand for months, until one morning we’d arrive and find only plastic bits and bent nails. I suspected ghosts, invoked by the new moon, rising up like Darryl Dawkins’s revenge.

  But I was still me and the alley was not my natural habitat. My default position was sprawled across the bed staring at the ceiling or cataloging an extensive collection of X-Factor comic books. This never cut it for Dad, who insisted I learn the wavelengths of my world. In the quiet chaos of my room, everything was certain. I’d be thumbing through the origin of Beast’s feral blue coat or Jean Grey’s telekinesis. And then my father would suddenly loom, a shadow in the doorway of my Eden.

  Get outside, he’d tell me. This is your community. These are your people.

  So I’d gather myself and meet Bill at the alley toting the world’s ugliest game. I double dribbled, carried, hacked. My shot was swatted into gutters. I might get off two dribbles before the pickpockets went to work.

  Back at home, Bill would catch me daydreaming and punch me in the arm, hoping I’d finally rise up and swing out of rage. But mostly I squealed and fell to the ground.

  It was about that time that Bill started eyeing all of Tioga’s honeys, schem
ing on ways to make me a man.

  Yo, why don’t you holler at Terra, Bill said, raising his eyes suggestively in the exaggerated way he borrowed from Ric Flair, a vestige of the boy still under his toughening skin, which made me groan. Shorty’s phat to death.

  Of course I’d noticed that all the girls around me had begun to hourglass. When I caught my first whiff of hair permed, pulled back, and tied with a red ribbon; of brown girls in teal dresses fluttering in the Sunday wind; of single mothers regal in Jordache, I thought of nothing else for days. There was too much of Dad in me, but never quite enough. I was debilitated by fear in the presence of girls, and that fear concealed a bedrock belief that I had nothing to offer or worthy to say.

  So there was Terra, rocking the mushroom bob, her hips tapering down to her calves like the angles of an ice cream cone. She did not smile or laugh. She rarely talked and ran with older dudes, and this was horrifying. When in her area, my tongue swelled in my mouth. I went dumb and blind. I would slump my shoulders, stare at the ground, and wander home. Straight up the steps I’d flop on the bed and fall through sheets, box springs, and floors. Fall through green and gold leaves, until I arrived in a world where the rules were reworked. Terra floated across an ocean of pastel, until she stood before me, her lips parted with wanting. I reached out to close the distance, and the world shook and quaked. Big Bill was standing over me, punching me in the arm.

  He must have taken all of this personally. He believed in the Coates’s diaspora and his role as deputy patriarch. The kids were scattered across the area. Malik was out in East Baltimore. John in Randallstown. Kris and Kell off to the Mecca. But when we gathered under the roof of Tioga, Bill implanted himself on the throne. He would lead us to a matinee of The Last Dragon or keep score for a tournament of Summer Games. At night Tioga creaked and moaned. Bill would pass out hammers and joysticks to battle the burglars of imagination.

  He assumed our weight, even if we didn’t ask. I think it gave him a grander sense of self. But he was heir to even more than he could articulate. In those years, we looked at Dad, and misunderstood so much. On the side of my mother, we had cousins who were Americans. They cavorted out in suburban Columbia. They played Little League on sprawling well-funded fields. Their fathers were veterans, unbittered by Vietnam. They talked up barbecue, lug nuts, and golf. Their houses were detached. Their streets had names like Dove’s Fly Way and Evergreen Road. They hung Christmas lights and had bathrooms where towels and washcloths matched. We were the same as them, and yet Dad had marooned us in this almost ghetto.

  But Dad was unapologetic, and there were larger forces in play. Here we were in the throes of a second Maafa—or maybe an extension of the first. All around us the old order of black fathers was tilting toward disgrace, trading in their honor for wine and dice, and leaving in their wake legions of boys, dizzied, angry, and confused. But Dad resisted the heathen call, parted the stagnant lake of fallen knights, and reached for his blade.

  To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.

  He was not humorless. One winter he tossed out our green couch and didn’t buy another one for four years. Bill would fume over the lack of furniture, but when friends and family would come past, Dad would look over the empty space and say, Oh hey, Gary, have a seat on our new couch, man. It’s leather.

  Some Sundays he’d watch football with me, the two of us lying on that empty stretch of floor. He’d cheer for the Eagles as they whipped on my beloved Dallas Cowboys and I’d switch sides.

  Son, you aren’t a real fan if you switch.

  But even here he was not free. In the days when there were no other black quarterbacks, he loved Doug Williams, rooted for him in Tampa Bay. Then in the winter of 1987, Williams, now with the Redskins, came hobbling off the bench in the Super Bowl and my father stood in front of the TV shaking his fist, yelling Go, Dougie, go! Williams smoked Denver for all of us—four touchdowns in one quarter—and became the first brother to raise the Lombardi Trophy. Dad glowed when Williams’ dark hands wrapped themselves around the prize. And Dad didn’t even like the Redskins.

  But he looked at everything through the lens of his people. He’d read the prophecy of Marcus Garvey—and my father believed. Dad took up that call, the charge to make Garvey’s kingdom real, and to us, he was unbreakable.

  But he was also unbearable. In the late ’70s my parents bought a house on Woodbrook Avenue. In 1979, my father went away to Atlanta University for grad school in library science. My mother, barely thirty, would sit on the bed and cry.

  Dad was working on his own version of halaal. He was always dangerous when given too much time to think. At varying points he banned white flour, white rice, sugar, and all meat. Before, he’d made ice cream and cookies adorned with peaches. Our treats were raisins and peanuts and carob brownies. He served whole-wheat pancakes with honey. Fish became the family treat. But I was allergic and would break out in hives if they brought too much of it in the house. By the time we moved to Tioga, Dad had loosened up, forced into compromise by the practicalities. Sugar and poultry were back. Ma would bake carrot cake from scratch and barbecue chicken legs.

  But when Bill moved back in with us, he was used to steak, ribs, sausage—the regular fare when he lived with his mom. Once he looked on as Ma prepared a pack of Leanies—hot dogs engineered for vegetarians.

  This isn’t a hot dog, he helpfully pointed out to my mother.

  In this house, it is, she replied. You want something different, go buy it yourself.

  Bill and Ma had all the distance you could imagine. She was his stepmother, but that sort of technical phrasing—along with half brother, and half sister—was never allowed in my house. Still, Bill was a loyalist to the core. Dad would leave the crib for days, off to do the math on a forgotten historian, track down the copyright for a book, or persuade someone to donate their papers to the Mecca. Dad was great about the grand vision, but he often left details to others; and while Bill lived on Tioga, my mother often had to work to keep him in check.

  At Tioga, Ma did the legwork and caught the blowback. When it came to the day-to-day discipline, Dad was a worst-case scenario, summoned when we’d gone too far. In those moments, Ma would cock her head and walk away. It was left to us to wait in our bedrooms, until late night or early morning, when the wraith got to swinging his black belt.

  We had to do something ignorant for that, a feat I managed annually. But Ma was hard core in her own right, and most dangerous when she lowered her voice slightly a few decibels above a whisper. She was raised in the projects down on Gilmore, and as a girl, never saw a fight she didn’t want. Dad generated a fear that was supernatural, but my mother was his earthly, overseeing manifestation. I was closer to my mother in those days, mostly because while Dad lectured from Olympus and could descend like a plague, she talked easily and discussed everything like it was a local weather report, even sex.

  Now, boy, she once told me, in one of her many renditions of the Talk. Whenever you start, be gentle. Don’t get there and start jumping up and down on the girl. Remember to be gentle.

  But she didn’t protect us from Dad, and in his stead, she could be ruthless. My mother delivered my first beatings. Once while I was mouthing off, she reached for a high heel. I took off running, and then felt the sudden impulse to dodge to the right. The shoe whizzed past me and smashed a dent into the wall. I turned around in shock. Ma laughed and walked away.

  Bill resented the awkward relationship between my mother and him. Once, I came home and caught him in full rage. He was on the phone with a friend. He threatened to pull tool on Dad. He called my mother—with her short, Conscious natural hair�
��a bald-headed bitch. I walked past him quickly and didn’t say anything. I was never comfortable with anger. I would feel the claws of rage digging into me, but my nature never allowed them to hang on for long. I thought that the rage just went away. It took years to find out I was wrong. But back then, I did not know where to go.

  I didn’t say much to him for the next week. I knew the rules about insulting mothers, the obligations of the son. I should have been thinking of arsenic-laced cookies, a hot poker in the eyes while he slept. But I was bad at holding on to the dark burn that feeds revenge. Instead, I almost understood. We were of different mothers, what we saw in the world was not the same. He was a terrible bear, but still I held Bill in that place that most young boys hold their heroic brothers. I pilfered his old Nike tees, and gray Adidas sweat suits in hopes that all his heart, his stones, his terrifying bop had seeped through in the wash and would now react with something latent and manly in me.

  That was, of course, fantastic folly. Back at school, I marveled as my man Fruitie went from herb to culture hero. We were down by law, both awkward and out of sorts with the Lemmel ecology. His handle on the rock was questionable. His choice of fashion was pedestrian. He had the sort of easy temperament that most of the other boys tried to cover with armor. His slave name was Antwan Smith, but the Marshall Team addressed him as Fruitie because he laughed at anything, told bad jokes, and cared nothing for the mask and shadows seemingly necessitated by the street. Like me, he had some height on him and came from one of those nameless places that the goblins did not fear. But that was where our parallels reached a dead end.