The Beautiful Struggle

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 5 Summary: “This is the Daisy Age”

At this point, Coates is 13 and is riding high as he begins his classes at Baltimore Polytech. He has just spent the prior summer doing a college prep program at the University of Maryland, and he describes an early encounter with a girl. She comes into his room and lies down next to him; he asks if she’s all right, and then goes back to sleep: “The next morning, all the girls giggled and asked if I was gay. They were so advanced” (130).

Big Bill, meanwhile, is “transitioning into life at the Mecca” (132). He is skeptical of Howard University, but “his prejudice melted in the first week” (132). He quickly finds his people and begins to deal marijuana. At home, Coates and his friend Kier are tutored in the SATs by their mothers. Coates’s Consciousness grows, and he devours his father’s books, sometimes treating them with negligence.

Coates struggles at Polytech, as his mind is obsessive and unable to focus: “I considered myself capable of student awards and honor, and sometimes I even longed for them. But I longed more to live in my own head” (138). Coates is failing out of Poly, and one day he snaps and “mushes” (140) his English teacher in the face: “All my life, I played my position. I was tired. Here was my declaration of borders and respect. But of course there was a price. And the merchant was my father” (140).Coates’s father beats him for his actions, and intent on setting Coates on the right path, his father sends him to NationHouse. The black coalition holds a summer camp in Washington, D.C. and is building the revolution. Coates is taught about white supremacy and introduced to the djembe drum, which transfixes him. He describes it as “virility itself” (148) and obsesses over it.

Chapter 6 Summary: “Float like gravity, never had a cavity…”

Coates begins the chapter with a description of the survival rituals NationHouse puts him and the other boys through. These are part of “the Great Rites, a series of labors meant to instill the warrior code in boys who would, always too soon, be men” (153). Coates and his brothers succeed at the final rite of making their way back to the NationHouse headquarters after being dropped in the no man’s land of Chocolate City. Coates realizes how these rites “were a great web tying me to all my people in all times, from West Baltimore to Dakar, from Mondawmin across the haunted waves to Gorée” (157).

NationHouse celebrates their initiation with a ritual through the streets of D.C. and a final ceremony in a middle school cafeteria, in which Coates recites his pledge and holds his spear.

Soon, the Coates patriarch decides to move the family to a big suburban house, which the young Coates takes issue with. Coates, “proud that Mondawmin, with all its allure of danger” (159) was his backyard, airs the “ideals at stake” (159), but his father explains that he has never had a big backyard and that he wants one.

Back at Howard, Big Bill has assembled a crew of sorts. One night, he eggs his friend on to get in a fight with another guy over a girl. Big Bill fires his gun into the air. This prompts university police to nearly catch him, which shocks Bill into the realization that “the old customs and styles of being, the Knowledge which had saved him […] could not help him here” (167).

Coates is not doing well at Polytech, and at one point, a boy calls him a “punk,” and he feels “an old burning in [his] chest” (175). He suddenly becomes aware of the value of respect, as “all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit” (177). He is expelled from Poly and his father tells him, “Ta-Nehisi, you are a disgrace to this family’s name” (180).

Chapters 5-6 Analysis

Chapter 5 and 6 dive into the beginnings of Coates’s adolescence. They depict a young man struggling to live up to his parents’ expectations, who knows he has ability but does not know how to follow through with those abilities. At this point, Coates has started to adopt his father’s Consciousness and to style himself appropriately.

The Coates writing from the present sets his early self against the backdrop of a changing Polytech high school, with Coates’s first white teacher who once taught all white students. With this section, Coates positions his personal experience as representative of a broader evolving racial landscape of Baltimore. With his description of Bill at Howard University, he again makes a commentary about the changing landscape of drugs, in which black boys raised on cocaine turned to marijuana, “the antidrug of our generation” (133).

With Coates’s failure at Polytech and his participation in NationHouse, the writer conveys a certain disdain for normativity. Rather than conform to the high achievement expected of him at Poly, he fails his classes while daydreaming. It is only by finding the djembe and the Knowledge at NationHouse that he is able to commit himself to anything, revealing a staunch individualism in the author, which parallels his father’s journey to Consciousness.

A key moment between father and son occurs in Chapter 6, when Coates questions his father’s principles for moving out of black Baltimore and into the suburbs. Here, his father’s reply that he has never had a big yard emblematizes a larger struggle within Coates’s book, within himself and definitely within his father: how to balance one’s personal politic and principles with joy and happiness.