The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I guess it begins with our institution, and the fact that it was founded to combat the long shadow of slavery—a shadow that we understood had not yet retreated. This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate.

But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.

Later I discovered that there were MCs—human beings seemingly born and reared for the sole purpose of matching the music of language to an MPC snare or 808 kick—and the ensuing alchemy felt as natural to me as a heartbeat:

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?”

If you bore witness to such a feat—as I did with Allen—it lived in memory until the broadcast gods decided you could see it again.

But a magazine like Sports Illustrated existed beyond the garden, out in the street where journalism and literature collided. And out there was neither magic nor myth—only the realest of monsters.

Only a few paragraphs in, I wanted to put the magazine down forever, to escape the story, but I was held fast by forces I could not then understand. I knew that there was something different in the storytelling, something in its style, that pulled me toward it with the gravity of a star, until I was there, I was on the field, yelling, pleading with Stingley to watch out for the incoming hit, and then in the hospital, right next to him, helpless to relieve the horror blooming in his eyes as he realized his fate. And then the star became a black hole, and I crossed an event horizon where I was no longer imagining myself there with Stingley, but was Stingley himself, and it was my body pinned to the bed, and the spokes were drilled into my skull, and it was I crying out to a heedless god.

If a reader came, as I did, looking for some profound meditation on a catastrophe, it was not to be found. And so I was left again to grapple on my own—no Google, no Wikipedia, no social network through which to commiserate with others. Just me and this terrible story of an acrobat entombed in his own body playing over and over in the back of my mind.

for it nodded to the shame one might feel or the paradox of a game that valorizes violence and then is horrified by its consequences.

What I felt then was that the story of Darryl Stingley broke some profound invisible law of justice, one that reigned in all my cartoons. I knew football was violent—it was the violence that backlit Tony Dorsett’s escape act. But violence was the antagonist in a story with a happy ending. It could never win, could it?

maybe I could go from the haunted to the ghost, from reader to writer, and I too could have the stars, and their undeniable gravity, at my disposal.

Douglass’s freedom is not banners or anthems, but terror that he nonetheless embraced. The contrast—the bright good of freedom in principle, set against the dark unknown reality—evokes the cliché “the devil you know.”

But to write, to draw that map, to pull us into the wilderness, you cannot merely stand at the edge. You have to walk the land. You have to see the elevation for yourself, the color of the soil. You have to discover that the ravine is really a valley and that the stream is in fact a river winding south from a glacier in the mountains. You can’t know any of this beforehand. You can’t “logic” your way through it or retreat to your innate genius. A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. “Genius” may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.

And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.”

The systems we oppose are systems of oppression, and thus inherently systems of cowardice. They work best in the dark, their essence tucked away and as unexamined as the great American pastime was once to me. But then a writer told me a story and I saw something essential and terrible about the world. All our conversations of technique, of rhythm and metaphor, ultimately come down to this—to the stories we tell, to the need to haunt, which is to say to make people feel all that is now at stake.

These too were works of revolutionary art, because all these packages featured Black people, and none of them in the shuffling and shucking style that so plagued my parents’ youth.

He comes home with the weight of it all upon him. He is thirty-two, and maybe now he can feel the dread that strikes you at that age—a realization that the years really can slip away, like all those dreams of revolution, without leaving a trace. And his response to all that weight is incredible: He picks up a book. Daddy says he reads to learn.

He would have pointed to the arsenal of histories, essays, novels, ethnographies, teleplays, treatments, and monographs, which were not white supremacy itself but its syllabus, its corpus, its canon.

It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.

For such a grand system, a grand theory had to be crafted and an array of warrants produced, all of them rooted in a simple assertion of fact: The African was barely human at all.

Nott and Gliddon dedicated their lives to clearing up any confusion about the racial composition of Egyptians. They authored the treatise Types of Mankind, which sought, among other things, to cleanse Ancient Egypt of any taint of Blackness.

When the record failed to support a total absence of “Negroes” from Egypt, Nott and Gliddon put them where they needed them.

“Let them prove, if they can, to the full satisfaction of their narrow souls and gangrened hearts, that the Black faced, woolly haired, thick lipped and flat nosed Egyptians of ancient times did not belong to the same branch of the human family that those negroes do who have been the victims of the African Slave-trade for the past four centuries.”

I was born into what the historian St. Clair Drake calls the “vindicationist tradition,” that is, to Black people who sought to reclaim the very history weaponized against them and turn it back against their tormentors.

I felt the sadness now increase, expanding from a pinhole until it was wide as the sea itself, rippling with each wave that crested and fell on this African shore. I had traveled back to a kind of Big Bang. A universe would be born on the other side of the water, but first countless worlds would have to die. And I realized I was sad, not because I was alone but because I was not. I had indeed come home, and ghosts had come back with me.

So I got up and got dressed and paid a driver to take me into town, resolved to see the reality of this home that I did not know.

And so I walked down the steps until I was right at the edge of the ocean, the water lapping against the stony shore. I bent down, and when I felt the water rush between fingers, a joy came with the cold of the wave, and I heard the ghosts singing. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a deeper sense of triumph in my life. I felt that I had somehow beaten history itself. I thought of all my exponential grandmothers taken from this side of the world and into the vast ocean. I thought of their frustrated dreams of getting back home. I thought of the home they tried to make on the other side, despite it all. I carried a part of all of them with me, every one of them. And I had come back. And looking out on that rocky beach, I felt the whole of the land speak to me, and it said, What took you so long?

Even my server that day, with her dreadlocks curling around her head like a crown, was striking in all the ways we are told to think we are not. Everywhere I went in Dakar, I was amazed—too amazed, I think. The remarking on Senegalese beauty, the tone of it, betrays a deep insecurity, a shock that the deepest and blackest part of us is really beautiful.

America’s master race practiced, in their words, “African slavery,” and when they went to war to save this institution, they went with a story on their lips and a warrant in their hand: Slavery must endure and the races must be separated to save their “wives and daughters” from “pollution and violation” on account of “the lust of half-civilized Africans.” Before that war, they had already transfigured slaveholding into the work of God, which sought to save “the African, coming from a barbarous state and from a tropical climate,” and transform these captives into “the happiest set of people on the face of the globe.”

And from this foundational notion of “ape-like men,” “half-civilized Africans,” and “tropical barbarians,” the cinematic universe of Niggerology follows: the Gold Dust Twins, Korn Kinks cereal, Niggerheads, Nigger Hair tobacco, Sambo, Uncle Ben’s, Aunt Jemima, and Marse Chan—icons meant to denigrate our world and elevate theirs.

Jean Harlow is the anchor for Morrison’s claim that “physical beauty” is “probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought.” It is a grand pronouncement, made grander by use of contrast: the superlative (most destructive) enhanced by the chancy (probably), like sea salt over dark chocolate.

Here is a woman whose condition is defined by a Jim Crow order, defined still further by a Jim Crow story—“A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment.”

But even now I am wondering what was there and what I projected, and whether this feeling of having tracked down long-lost siblings was real or imagined.

The one-drop rule had shaped us and then reached across the ocean to shape them, so that even here in Senegal, Pauline was pining for Jean Harlow. Except the Jean Harlow was us.

The valuing of light skin was obviously not new to me as a Black American, but to encounter the idea here, to know that even “back home” Pauline would not be safe, was chilling. I had come back to the origin point of all of us to see my lost siblings, the ones who had evaded sale and slavery. But, of course, the warrant had gotten there first.

But, here again, no amount of scholarship could have stopped me from feeling what I felt at that moment as the boat pulled away from the coast of Africa, away from home.

I saw the waves crashing, and the familiar sadness that I’d felt that entire trip every time I looked out into the sea came over me again. In my mind, I was traveling across an epic dating back some five hundred years, when the first of us were carried off. Entire worldviews, systems of study, political movements, wars, and literature were birthed by that one act. And such deep suffering. Standing on that hill, I felt it all personally. My mind returned to Baltimore, to the sketch, to my father trying to read his way out.

That patented move of his, the one he pulled when I was still grappling with Darryl Stingley, where he led me back into the library and let the books talk for him, reflected his deepest faith. The answer to everything was in a book, he believed, which is to say in the record.

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.

I had spent my trip alone, walking and wandering, grieving and marveling, so that the Dakar I saw was not so much a city of people but, like Gorée itself, a monument to the Last Stop before we were remade.

I began to feel there was something deeply incurious in the approach of a man who insists on walking through the rooms of his childhood home to commune with ghosts, heedless of the people making their home there now.

We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. We know the beauty of this house—its limestone steps, its wainscoting, its marble baths. But more, we know that the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic. We know that there is both tragedy and comedy in this condition. Our own lives and culture—our music, our dance, our writing—were all crafted in this absurd space beyond the walls of “civilization.” This is our collective power:

That last night sitting there, I was a writer surrounded by people who too knew the fire. They did not need to have the hypocrisies, the lies, the Niggerology explained. I knew slavery and Jim Crow, and they knew conquest and colonialism. And we were joined by an inescapable act: The first word written on the warrant of plunder is Africa.

Now the amazement was my own: There I was on the other side, among family divided from each other by centuries. I had come back. But my own writing had gotten here first.

The only book learning we ever got was when we stole it.

I was six years old, and I had already begun to suspect that something was wrong with me.

But when it came to fulfilling the basics of what school required—sitting in my chair, paying attention to directions, walking in a single file, raising my hand for the lavatory pass, packing the correct number of pencils, sharpeners, and erasers—I could not cope.

My report cards offered testimony about a problem child who shouldn’t have been—a kid who was seemingly “smart” and yet “restless” who “wasted time,” whose “conduct” needed improvement and who could not “follow directions.”

I’ve always been ashamed of this sense that I did less with more, that I had one job and could not complete it.