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.

For you there can be no real distance between writing and politics. And when I saw that in you, I saw myself.

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?”

But something had happened to me in this process. As a reader, I changed. I was no longer merely turning words over in my head or on my tongue—I was now turning over entire stories.

But all around me violence actually was winning. That was the year when I first remember a child being shot over a trendy article of clothing; stories like that would soon become the background of my adolescence. And now danger swirled all around me—tales of razors slipped into candy apples, four-year-olds impaled with lawn darts. Stingley’s story pulled all this together and illuminated a new idea: Evil did win, sometimes—maybe most times. Bad things did happen, if only for the simple reason that they could. Disturbing as this knowledge was, it made me stronger because it made me wiser. And the weight of this wisdom was intimately associated with the method of its delivery. Journalism. Personal narrative. Testimony. Stories.

the methodology: journalism. personal narrative. testimony. stories. — what else is there?

And always at these moments I was taken back to the obsessions of my childhood: the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories. And to that I added the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation, and the private ecstasy it all brought to me. And I saw, considering the phrase “I am one, my liege, / Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world,” that there was magic in Shakespeare’s repetition of a sound represented in the b, and that this was the same magic used by Rakim, only this time with the sound represented by the r: I’m the arsenal, I got artillery, lyrics are ammo Rounds of rhythm, then I’ma give ’em piano I was about your age when I began to understand what I had first glimpsed in that copy of Sports Illustrated—that sound and rhythm are even more powerful when organized into narrative. That is to say, words are powerful, but more so when organized to tell stories. And stories, because of their power, demanded rigorous reading, interpretation, and investigation.

It was clear that such power must serve something beyond my amusement—that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence I saw around me, that beauty must be joined to politics, that style possessed must meet struggle demanded:

To write like this, to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act. For Black writers it has been so often employed that it amounts to a tradition—one that I returned to that summer in Virginia with you. I think this tradition of writing, of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future, if only because what must be cultivated and cared for must first be seen.

And what I see is this: a figure standing at the edge of a sprawling forest tasked with mapping that forest with such precision that anyone who sees the map will feel themselves transported into the territory. The figure can see the snowy peaks in the distance and might conjure some theories as to what lies between them and those peaks—pine trees, foothills, a ravine with a stream running through it. The figure is you, the writer, an idea in hand, notes scribbled on loose-leaf, maybe an early draft of an outline. 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.

how to be a writer: imagine it, empathy it.

clarify.

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.

I’ve addressed these notes directly to you, though I confess that I am thinking of young writers everywhere whose task is nothing less than doing their part to save the world.

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. When I was a boy, back in Baltimore, it was never enough for some kid who wanted to steal your football, your Diamondback dirt bike, or your Sixers Starter jacket to just do it. A justification was needed: “Shorty, lemme see that football,” “Somebody stole my lil cousin bike just like that one,” “Ay yo, that look like my Starter.” Debating the expansive use of the verb “see,” investigating the veracity of an alleged younger cousin, or producing a receipt misses the point. The point, even at such a young age, was the suppression of the network of neurons that houses the soft, humane parts of us. For men like Nott, who sought not to plunder toys or kicks but whole nations, the need was manifestly greater. It was not just the conscience of the enslaver that had to be soothed but multiple consciences beyond his: the slave drivers and slave breakers, slave hunters and slave ship captains, lords and congressmen, kings and queens, priests, presidents, and everyday people with no real love for the slave but with human eyes and human ears nonetheless. For such a grand syst...

to justify enslavement: one must tell a story with words. — liberation is going to need at least the same kind of energy.

We ate at a small, quiet restaurant on the coast. A line of pebbled steps led from the dining area to the ocean. Again, my mind flashed back to the other side of this dark ocean, and I saw myself with the blue-and-yellow raft, and I felt something pulling me down to the water. 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? What indeed.

writing justice: writing the story. writing oneself INTO the story.