Ta-Nehisi Coates writes of father Paul in 'Beautiful Struggle'
The son's memoir pays tribute to the ex-Black Panther and publisher.
IT WAS brief. It was beautiful: that moment just after the smoke cleared and the air felt charged with possibility. Black people organized, overcame and began to bask in the promise, started constructing 3-D dreams out of what had been abstract potential. Black Pride and Black Arts and Black Awareness provided the atmosphere in which Paul Coates -- Vietnam veteran, ex-Black Panther, autodidact and soon-to-be book publisher -- had begun to raise his young family.
But something unsettling loomed on the horizon: A couple of decades after the landscape-altering legislation, speeches, protests and lives lost in the name of civil rights, the delicate new world had begun to splinter. Even Coates' young son Ta-Nehisi (who was given an Egyptian name for ancient Nubia) was able to discern discrepancies on either side of the race divide that he didn't quite have language for.
"If the newspapers Dad left around the house were true, the greater world was obsessed over Challenger and the S&L scandal. But we were another country, fraying at our seams. . . . The statistics were dire and oft recited -- 1 in 21 killed by 1 in 21, more of us in jail than college," writes the younger Coates in his new memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle."
There were those, like Paul Coates and Ta-Nehisi's mother, Cheryl Waters (to whom the book is dedicated), who remained steady at the task, raising their sons (Ta-Nehisi and Menelik), fortifying the foundation, buttressing the support beams of the soul, as America's inner cities seemed to collapse from within. They were at ground zero of gang warfare, wrong-place-wrong-time street violence, the escalating crack cocaine epidemic. The most vulnerable and visible target: young black men.
For Ta-Nehisi Coates, now 32, the book was a way to sketch not just time and place but an intricate support system that came into being, the other side of the story -- intact families, men who got up and went to work, young men who stayed away from drugs, black girls who didn't get pregnant, black kids who devoured books.
"Too often people tell our stories," Coates said on a recent Wednesday morning over breakfast downtown at the Pacific Dining Car. He'd arrived early. His notes and cellphone were spread before him, his nose three-quarters deep in a book he'd bought the night before -- Paula Giddings' biography of Ida B. Wells ("Fantastic!"). He is well over 6 feet tall, soft-spoken and quick to his feet, extending a hand. He lives in Harlem now but was in L.A. with his father for a reading at Eso Won Books in Leimert Park and some interviews -- a test run for a father and son tour they've scheduled to begin in the fall. Between interviews, Paul Coates was off to get a quick haircut before their "Tavis Smiley" taping but mostly to allow Ta-Nehisi some alone time to reflect and talk about his book.
