Brandon Chang

Collins

Writing 37

February 11, 2017

                Son of a Father, Father to a Son

Between the World and Me, is not only about race, but also about family. Addressed Coates’ son, Samori, the book seems to pose the question: What does it mean to be father to a black son living in America today? The answer to that question is not an easy one. Coates demonstrates that to help him live within the history of a country, he must understand that it has made destruction of the black body part of its heritage. The form of help is the book itself which is a kind of training manual for the kind of struggle in which Coates wants for Samori to engage with as he grows and matures.

    Coates is many things, but in the book the most important role he has is him as a father. He begins by opening the book with “Son,” (5) a term of endearment that is supposed to close the gap that the reader of the letter may have with Coates, which is Samori. Throughout the book, he presents himself as a hip father when he  describes his romantic relationships in college with Samori’s mother who brought “the blunt to her plum-painted lips” (64) and then wanting “to embrace her, to be exhaled by her, to return to her, and leave her high” (64). This relationship that Coates has with Samori, just like he had with his father, is very unique in helping him grow and understand the standard of living that he is in because as mentioned in Pinckney’s review it took some time for Coates to “realize how different his family was” as “Most of his friends were fatherless.” The relationship between the two of them shows the uniqueness of their family.

For Coates, family is more than simply just people in your life, they are a “Mecca.” Family for him is the source of  African-American identity and this was made apparent when he was accepted into Howard University, “the crossroads of the black diaspora” (40). The combination of its history, location and alumni  “formed and shaped” (40) him. Coates saw Nigerian aristocrats, “bald-headed Qs” and “California girls turned Muslim” (40) who had all “hailed from the same tribe” (42). Being at The Mecca, Coates was able to realize that with the blend of cultures there was enough for them to be “cosmopolitans” (43) and figured that the black diaspora was not only their world, but that it was a reflection or product of “the Western world itself” (43).  Coates wants Samori to know that there is a vast world outside the one which he is born into and when he was, his “world had shifted” (67) and he knew that “he must survive for something more than survival’s sake” (67) while living with fear for his son growing up.

Now having to look after Samori, Coates is very cautious about how he acts around others, showing since he is African-American he has to go an extra mile to behave. Coates recalls the moment when the woman at the theater who pushed his son and expected him to swallow it made him feel as though “someone had invoked their right over the body of my son” (94). Worse, he says, his natural reaction in trying to defend Samori, actually endangered him. When Coates remembers this moment, he remembers being yelled at in return as if he was “the beast” (94). He did not want one of Samori’s earliest memories to be of his father getting tased or clubbed. The moral, he tells Samori, is that “the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen” (96).

When trying to help Samori understand the importance of his body, a big part of Coates’ relationship to him involves the real possibility of his death. He explains the fear he has for Samori growing up, he is going to be responsible for not only his body, but “must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies” which will undoubtedly “always be assigned to you” (71).  This is what Samori will have to be held accountable for, actions that are ultimately not his. Coates wants him to be aware that he lives with the fear of “the destroyers” who are “rarely held accountable” (9). While telling Samori that he is going to have to be aware and responsible for his body, he also tries to explain to him that history is not a story of progress and that “he must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity” (70).

To remember this past, Coates visits Petersburg Battlefield with Samori and his cousin and explains the importance that the black body has contributed to the history of the country. He means to say that history is being represented through the view of the lens of whites. Coates uses this experience to show that the “war against the black body” (98) is something that has been ongoing. Though the fall of the Confederacy was ultimately for the best of the country, it was seen as “the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee” (99). Blacks have struggled since then with the “strange birthright” that whites like George Pickett, member of the Confederate army, have “to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body” (102). The bodies of blacks was worth four million dollars at the time of the Civil War They were then exploited for the production of cotton, becoming “22 million black victims of Americanism” (Malcolm, 7). Pinckney describes that the “struggle is what he has to bequeath to his son,” where the enslaved “were people turned to fuel for the American machine” (70). As people want to believe that history is progressing towards a better tomorrow, it is still prevalent that is not the case.

The most clear example of progression still not being able to be achieved is the story of Prince Jones. Son to a doctor, going to Howard University with Coates, he was on his way to achieving a life of having “made it through,” (77) but “still they had taken him” (77). This act was done by a black officer, but what is most telling is that Jones was killed by someone who was blinded by “the Dream.” Something that was conjured by historians, then fortified and gilded was a lie of innocence and “The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white” was what had  “murdered Prince Jones” (111).

This is the same dream that Coates does not want Samori to fall victim to. It is made most clear when Samori had stayed up for a hearing of Michael Brown’s killers, also law enforcement who were set free. Samori cries, but Coates does not comfort his son because he “never believed it would be okay” (11). All hopes and idyllic views about how the dream is something to yearn for are laid to rest with that single moment. That is the country that Samori is going to have to live in, one where killers are set free, he will have to “live within the all of it” (12). He will have to learn to “live in a country lost in the Dream” (12). These events are happening in modern times when segregation is illegal and social injustice should not be a problem, where “the birth of a better world” (71) is not going to be up to Samori himself. It is because of this exact reason that Coates wants him to struggle, as he was named after Samori Touré, struggling against French colonizers, “for the right to his own black body” (68). He should not fall victim to the idea of chasing the dream, which is not real, but instead struggle for his body, a real, legitimate experience.

In many ways, Samori can be seen as the future for Coates because he is going to be carrying on his legacy as well as ancestors before them. They are all sharing the same struggle, a unique experience, to learn to live within their bodies and every black is going to have to go through the injustice and discrimination that is present in the country. In the book, “America’s uniqueness” (Pinckney) is taken away and what is exposed is “the machinery of criminal power” (Pinckney). It seems as if there is nothing more to be expected socially or politically as everyone is too disillusioned, not being able to comprehend the concept of the black body and what it means to be father to a son where there is a very real likelihood that his son will be killed.

One picture that exemplifies the unique relationship between Coates and Samori is the one below. This moment is “a joyous moment, beyond the Dream” (149) that was “more gorgeous than any voting rights bill” (149). It emanates this feeling of black power that “births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors” (149). It is teaching Samori he should not have to determine his future on the consciousness of the dreamers and is not required to be or do so. Most importantly, what can be taken away from the photo is, to do the best you do you.

When reading the book, one can expect that it will provide explicit answers on how to take some kind of political or social action to combat racial inequality. In fact it “raises numerous critically important questions that are left unanswered” (Alexander). Even though this is the case, the book is not addressed to whites and it is not aiming to “communicate and enlighten” (Pinckney). He wants readers “to wrestle with the questions” on their own (Alexander), to know “the true nature of the Dream and what it means to be engaged in meaningful Struggle” (Alexander), where Coates withdraws the answers from everyone who reads to reflect.  A few lines from Nas that I connect with Coates is:

Who want beef now?

My heat shall annoint them, plaow!

Works cited:

• Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Print.
• Pinckney, Darryl. "The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates." The New York Review of Books. The New York Review of Books, 26 Jan. 2016.
• Michelle Alexander, “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me,’” August 17, 2015
• Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet?” (April 12, 1964)
• Nas, What Goes Around, Stillmatic, December 18, 2001