My dad always worked. He worked his day. He worked at his small publishing business when he got home. He worked on weekends and birthdays. He worked through the Lord’s Season, reveling blasphemous through holidays. When I think of him, work is the first image in my mind. I see him unloading boxes of books, mashing saddle-stitched staplers. I see him in the kitchen frying fish for his brood of children, mixing cornbread from scratch. I see him whacking kids, quashing our brief rebellions.
We were all enrolled in his life. And though he’d surely deny it, we worked. We hauled books for the business. We did inventory, packed, shipped, and sold books at festivals across Baltimore. When we weren’t working, we were reading ― remanded to Ayi Kwei Armah, doomed to Ishmael Reed. My father would sit in an easy chair, with reading glasses low, and lecture from Booker T. Washington’s “Up From Slavery.” He had been a late ‘60s radical. But at his heart, he was a puritan conservative dispensing a strange gospel rooted in the acquisition of knowledge, the inevitability of violence, and everywhere, the work.
My dad is from Philadelphia, and he labored there from the start ― sweeping floors, delivering papers, running groceries, grasping at whatever his chid-hands could handle. His money went to his mother, who was saddled with three kids and alcoholism. He devoured books even then. He would cut class for libraries and museums. He would walk downtown, running his hand along large buildings, feeling the unrelenting textures, dreaming of something, somewhere, larger than the poverty and despair of Old Philly.
How my father came to love the French language, I do not know. I’ve asked him, but he can’t remember. He’s always loved movies, so perhaps a few spare words from the moving pictures. One year he saved his change and sent off for a series of records that promised, by sheer listening and repetition, to imbue him with this beautiful language of waves and undulation. He remembers lying on his bed playing the record over and over, repeating the words, summoning France through incantations of greeting.
He was, like me, like nearly every other boy bearing the name Coates, a poor student. It is a curse with us. A thing embedded deep in the strands and nuclei. Someday a great scientist shall stick us in a big machine. Electrodes will crown our heads. On a large screen, a teacher puts chalk to blackboard. The scientist grows wide-eyed. Data spits across the scene showing our neurons not so much firing as stretching back to yawn.
Left alone, my dad would play that record like it was music. Because it was music. This word “Bonsoir” is its own magic. It is beautiful coming off your tongue. Your mouth makes its own happy ending. Your lips draw in for a kiss. And this magic is regardless of literal meaning. It is held in the very form.
My father only recently told me about his love of that language, after I announced to him, seemingly out of the blue, that I’d begun studying French. I’ve thought about my father’s work every step of the way ― the work he did for others, and the work he did alone listening to that record, and why it did not come to more. To be black is to be able to reach back and touch people whose lives were, by law, foreclosed of certain possibility. No one cared about your intelligence or curiosity. You were assigned to a certain lane, and there you stayed lest you tempt all the violence the state brought to bear.
I understood education as a means of warding off death. You went to school to not go to prison. To not get shot. In so many neighborhoods education must be about saving lives. But if you are a ranger, this is slavery. Wonder took my father to the French language. Wonder took my father to Vietnam. Wonder took him into the radical ‘60s. Wonder took him to my mother. And wonder carries me now to you. I studied French in school as a child but mostly understand foreign language as a list of conjugations, not as magic, not as a portal to some unseen place. To see wonder reduced to plastic is another kind of death.
I like to think that I am, in every way, my father’s child. Usually this means an obsession with the amount of work I’ve completed on any given day. But perhaps the truest expression is the attempt to link that work to that old childhood spirit of wonder. Those of us who are rangers have seen so much more than our fathers. But they walk with us. I imagine my father in the evening, sprawled across his bed, a child again. Record on. Lights off. Music forking down through darkness. Striking green imagination. Catching fire.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer and senior editor for The Atlantic and its website. His blog can be found at www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates. ― Ed.
(Tribune Media Services)
