Between the World and Me

Coates describes his obsession with poetry as a college student, which he would perform at open mics in local cafés. At these cafés, he met older and more experienced poets who challenged his work, asking him questions like, what he did he specifically mean by the loss of his body? Reflecting back on these times, Coates assesses, “These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think” (51). He begins to understand poetry as a path to truth-seeking, mirroring his mother’s early teachings about writing as a form of investigation.

Coates’s engagement with black and African history deepens. He realizes that he does not simply need to “create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization,” which he sees as just another version of “the Dream” (51). Coates learns from his history teachers at Howard that no culture or civilization can or should be mythologized, not even his own. They counter his claims of an idealized Africa with facts about Africans who sold slaves across the Sahara over a millennia ago or questions about what blackness truly means. Coats realizes that he had been holding his cultural legacy in a “trophy case” (57).

Coates remembers all the girls he fell in love with at Howard, and how they opened him up to new worldviews and perspectives. The first girl he falls in love with is from California, but her father is from Bangalore, and she spends spring break with her family extended family in India. The second girl Coates loves was raised by a Jewish mother in small-town Pennsylvania. She is bisexual and polyamorous, and lives with a Howard professor and his wife, who are also sexually fluid and happily in an open marriage. When Coates falls suddenly ill, the Pennsylvania girl nurses him to health at the Howard professor’s house, where the couple also shows him kindness. Through his relationship with this woman, Coates confronts his internalized homophobia and male privilege for the first time. Coates writes, “She taught me how to love in new ways” (61). Coates begins to view love as a type of heroism.

Coates remembers watching his Howard peers dance “as though their bodies could do anything, and their bodies seemed as free as Malcolm’s voice” (63). From then on, Coates aims to write as they danced, “with control, power, joy, warmth” (63). Coates pursues the field of journalism, delighted that he can ask questions for a living. He describes journalism as “another way of unveiling the laws that bound my body” (64).

The last time Coates falls in love is with his son’s mother, whom he refers to as “the girl from Chicago” (65). She does not know her father and has an acute understanding of the vulnerability of women’s bodies, especially women of color. As a young woman she was told that she was “pretty for a dark-skinned girl” (66).

Both Coates and the girl from Chicago are 24 when their son Samori is born. They do not marry, seeing their son as the ultimate symbol of their love. Coates writes, “The truth of us was always that you were our ring” (67). When his son is born, Coates understands the profound responsibility he has to protect his body so that his son is not harmed by his absence. Survival in the name of fatherhood becomes Coates’s first priority. They name their son Samori, after Samori Touré, who resisted the French colonization of West Africa. Coates places the legacy of struggle within Samori’s name to remind him that struggle has meaning. Coates urges Samori to remember the legacy of slavery, even when he is urged to erase it, be it in schools or among his colleagues. Coates connects this remembering of struggle to Samori’s responsibility for his body. Coates maintains that as a black boy, Samori will have to be more responsible for his body than his non-black peers, and that the errors of other black bodies will be assigned to him. Coates insists that Samori “make peace with the chaos” without minimizing the past of how white America “transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (73).