“Between the World and Me” is an open letter from a father to his son. Its tone was mostly familiar to me; the author Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his son in a way that balances mentorship, friendship and what I can only assume is the parental instinct to help a child “learn from my mistakes,” but Coates brings something novel with his language and perspective.
In the book, which is this year’s common reading requirement for incoming freshman, Coates recounts the story of how he learned from his grandmother to write, by which he means “not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation.” Coates later returns to this idea of writing mirroring cognition; when he received feedback in college on his “bad poetry,” the notes his friends gave him were about “how to write, and thus how to think.”
And indeed, Coates’ words seem to almost exactly match his thoughts. The nearly stream-of-consciousness prose that Coates performs is of course eloquent, but more conspicuous is its urgency. He retells the episode when the decision came down of no indictment of the Ferguson police, including officer Darren Wilson, who fatally shot Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014. He and his son saw the news on the television together. He frames this as a turning point for his son, who grew up in a much different environment than Coates.
“When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid,” Coates writes.
This fear, Coates writes, is based in the jeopardy that black bodies face. This is an idea that runs through the book; that if you are seen as black, “your body was in constant jeopardy.” When Michael Brown was killed, his body was taken from him. Coates says he learned the rules of the streets as a child better than he learned his colors and shapes “because these laws were essential to the security of my body.”
Insecurity goes hand-in-hand with this idea of the black body being in jeopardy. Out of this sense that one’s body is in constant jeopardy comes fear, the vital sense that preserves the body. As Coates was being raised, the love of his parents was expressed through this fear.
Coates’ father beat him as a child out of love and fear; as his father is quoted in the book, “either I can beat him, or the police [will].” This was severe punishment in the name of instilling a severe lesson; jail, drugs, guns and more had all taken children of Coates’ neighbors. His parents feared the taking of their child’s body because they had seen it happen all around them. The beating that Coates received were in the name of teaching him how to prevent receiving beatings from anybody except his parents.
Coates’ book takes us through multiple stages of his personal growth, most of them endured in college, as will and has been the case for many of us. He went to Howard University, location of what he calls “The Mecca,” the place where he met energetic individuals from around the world, from a wealth of backgrounds and with a wealth of interests. “I was admitted to Howard University, but formed and shaped by The Mecca.”
It is at The Mecca that he meets a man who would later be shot by police. It is from the taking of this acquaintance’s body that Coates pulls many threads of thought, including about the personal impact of that person’s body being taken. He writes about the conversation he had with the deceased’s mother. He also writes how forgiving “the killer” seemed empty in the face of a larger problem of police violence because “The killer was the direct expression of all his country’s beliefs.”
“Between the World and Me” is a difficult read. It is challenging. To use Coates’ phrasing, the suburb where I was raised in Durham is a galaxy apart from the streets where Coates was raised in Baltimore. There is a barrier to understanding this book for people like me who have not feared for the security of their body, or for their child’s body. It is not easy to accept the realities of what Coates has seen and experienced, but it is reality. The topics I care about most deeply are the hardest to grasp.
The personal barriers — real or imagined, constructed or not, meaningful or not — that are created between two people with different upbringings, genders, skin or beliefs: these barriers are to be examined. Maybe they are there. Maybe they are not. I think we should be talking about that. “Between the World and Me” is a great place to generate some understanding and questions about these barriers.
