Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation.

I was barely out of the fog of childhood, where questions simply died in my head.

Journalism gave me another tool of exploration, another way of unveiling the laws that bound my body.

The truth of us was always that you were our ring.

I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s sake. I must survive for you.