The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Author:Ta-Nehisi Coates [Coates, Ta-Nehisi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

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When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing—I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it. There was so much I did not understand, and what I did understand I could never say with all the layers and color that would truly convey that understanding to my reader. I would fall in love with some girl and find my emotions so dominated that the only vent I had was writing it down. But when I pulled out my black-and-white composition notebook and put pen to paper, what I saw instead were the words of a thousand other men who had gone before me. I had no voice, which is to say no cadence, no lexicon, no sense of beauty I could call my own. I would stay up late reading Etheridge Knight’s “As You Leave Me,” over and over wondering how the hell he did it. What does it mean to watch a woman you love “disappear in the dark streets/to whistle and smile at the johns”? I was so young. I knew what it was to want one way and to be wanted in another—but not like this, not with a woman who went out “to whistle and smile at the johns.” That phrase was such an elegant description of sex work that I think that even if Etheridge Knight himself had never had that experience, he knew enough about the life to make us feel like he had. There was a lesson for me in that. I know there are writers who can imagine a world from nothing. But I’m not one of them. The sense of beauty I was seeking had to emerge from knowledge.

Ten years ago, I acquired the sense that all of the skills and techniques I have discussed with you—the beauty inherent in the feel and rhythm of words, the great import of direct reporting and deep research, the force of active and intentional language, the power of tense, the gravity of history—was at last in my clutches. I did not think myself a master of this entire arsenal, but I felt that I well understood its uses. And more, I had, shockingly to me, found myself writing for The Atlantic—a storied magazine, with the resources to gird and strengthen my writing. This was crucial. I trace myself back to a line of autodidact writers, men and women who felt themselves in possession of some essential truth but were forced to testify to that truth without fact checkers, copy editors, and access to distant archives and expensive databases to perfect that testimony. But I now had those tools, and I understood that whatever power I now felt I possessed as a writer, the amplifying power of the institution around me was indispensable.

All this I brought to bear, at length, in an essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” As I wrote, I could feel it flowing

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