The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

A few weeks after I got back he called me. He’d just finished a history of the rebellion of the enslaved in eighteenth-century Guyana. He loved the book but was pained by how the rebellion concluded—not just in defeat but with its leaders turning on each other and ultimately collaborating with the very people who had enslaved them. He sighed as he recounted it to me and said, “I don’t think we are going to get back to Africa.” My father did not mean this physically. He meant the Africa of our imagination, that glorious Eden we conjured up as exiles, a place without the Mayflower, Founding Fathers, conquistadors, and the assorted corruptions they had imposed on us. That Africa could no longer even be supported in his imagination because the corruption was not imposed at all but was in us, was part of the very humanity that had been denied us. That is where his skeptical searching landed him—not on the shores of a lost utopia but in the cold fact of human fallibility. And yet here I was, on this boat from Gorée, my eyes welling up, grieving for something, in the grips of some feeling I am still, even as I write this, struggling to name.