The Beautiful Struggle

Chapter 3 opens the chapter again referring to Coates’s father: “My father was not a violent man” (65). He roughs up his children but no one else, and as a father he believes in their potential above all else. When Coates doesn’t stand up for himself when another boy throws his housekeys in the trash, his father trades in his black leather belt for fists. He describes how his father was “not meant to make a life on the block” (70); he was semi-conscious, eventually going to fight in the Vietnam War. Upon Malcolm-X’s death, he became more conscious and eventually joined the Black Panthers.

Coates’s father went on to found a publishing house to reprint the long-lost propaganda and remnants of black liberation. This is how Coates’s parents met: his mother was involved in some Panther activities and came to his father’s publishing house. Still, whereas other Panthers would simply talk about the Knowledge, Coates’s father actually does something: “But when Dad went to publishing, he scaled back into matrimony and left the world of mass upheaval. History would be altered, not in the swoop but with the long slow reawakening” (91).

Coates loves fantasy, and he draws a parallel between his youthful imagination and the world his father wanted him to understand through the “Knowledge of Self” (93).