That whole summer I felt on. It wasn’t just the annual concert — it was AFRAM, Artscape, the random events at community centers, weddings in mosques, to which we were invited to bring our drums. The crowds lost their balance when the djembe hit. Sisters would dance in the aisles. Mamas from other companies would jump on stage. Fat women in tight denim would leap up and move with power and grace. Teen dancers would rush out before their cue. Mama Kibibi could not hold them back. And then there were the faces of my family when I came out to solo — Big Bill, clapping and pumping his fist before adding a few bucks to the pile of money at the front of the stage. Sometimes I’d look out and spot my father, nodding with his eyes closed, letting the drums roar over him.
I could have stayed like that forever, drumming my way in and out of various corners of Baltimore. I did not know where it led, but I would have slept on heat grates, worn scraps and overalls, shaken my cup down on Charles Street, and dined in the basements of churches, if I could have just left things as they were. My talent was second tier and I knew I would always be a workman, a support player for someone else’s glorious show. But I was so in love, and so of the spirit, that I just did not care.
I got Ebony down to class at Sankofa during that summer. She tried dancing, and afterward I cracked jokes because she could barely tie her lappa, because she was behind the beat. She just smiled and jabbed at my arm. Afterward, we’d head down to the harbor to the movies, then out to Burger King and debate Boyz in the Hood versus Menace. Still, we were teenagers, and so always closest on the phone. I apologized late one night, told her I should have taken her hand, that I should have been stronger in what I saw and felt. But we were both the best we could have been. At that age, the deep attractions, the ones that threaten your open future, may thrill you, may kidnap your days, but more powerful is the flood of terror, the nakedness you feel when she only starts walking your way.
The heat rolled in around June, and with it visions of my actual future. I awoke at dawn and saw my mother out back, turned south toward Mecca in prayer, then grinding rabbit bones, collecting herbs, muttering incantations. Even through expulsions, fights, and idleness, she had not lost faith in a voyage to Howard. What I could not understand was that she believed that I was owed, that no matter what I’d done in high school, somehow, I was entitled to see the Mecca, to find my place in the great black cosmopolis. My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from the Book of Fallen Children — Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I’d be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways they could help their kids get ahead.
She was still working in D.C., and weekly she would appear, unannounced, in the admissions office and demand a status report. That June, Howard sent notice that they wanted to see my final grades and another letter of recommendation. Ma felt the walls weakening and continued her assault — morning prayer, regular visits where she dropped Dad’s name and those of the three kids who had, by now, either graduated or were still on campus.
The fat packet struck, like LT from the blind side. There I am, having the summer of my life, and then this day I walk up Campfield hill, my bagged drum strapped to my back, and checking the mail, see this envelope long and heavy and when turned over note that it bears the seal of the Mecca. By Gabriel Prosser’s ghost, I thought. This is it. I ripped it open before I made it in the front door, and did not even have need for the acceptance letters. They don’t send brochures and leaflets to rejects. When Ma came home, I showed her the packet and she laughed in that loud, joyous, voluminous way that is the signature of all her proper sisters. She would have leaped and pumped her fist, if that was how she got down. This was her acceptance, after all. What had I done my whole life but obstructed my own way out?
Back when I first got Conscious, the Mecca seemed natural, the only place to bring me into line with spirit of the El-Hajj Shabazz. But with each failing year, I lowered myself, once to the point that I didn’t even think a college would take me. True, the Mecca was only an hour away, and there were drummers in Chocolate City. But the bond I felt here was more than music: it was an enveloping community, a circle so tight that it reverberated in me even when I was gone for days. What I knew even then was that I would never be in love like that again, was that nothing that healthy would ever feel that carnal, lush, and complete.
I’m going to Morgan, I told my parents. They were sitting down in my father’s office. My mother gave a speech about opportunity and responsibility. Dad sat back, with his patented face of stone and just listened to me and Ma go back and forth. At the end, he placed his palms on his lap and said, Son, it’s your choice. You’re grown. You can make up your mind.
I walked out of the office with a fool’s smile. How I ever thought I’d prevailed, how I ever thought that I would win against my mother is beyond me now. I had turned it around, but not so much that I was scholarship worthy — my parents would still be carrying the bill. And I was in the burgeoning class of kids whose families made too much for financial aid but not enough to make tuition payments anything less than a war.
We had two more conversations. In the first, Dad continued the charade of options. Son, it’s still your choice. But your mother is my woman, and, Son, she has power. I think she’s right, but you’re grown and can make your own decision. I am trying to let you know that. But your mother, Son. Your mother has power.
I want to go to Morgan, I told him.
Okay, Son.
But by the next week, he was flipped. We were in his office again. My mother had that thin smile like You Know What This Is. The conversation was short.
Dad: Ta-Nehisi. You’re not going to thirteenth grade.
And like that, it was done. All over again, I was exiled from home and destined for Mecca.
Or this is what I saw. Fact was, I was only months from eighteen, and could have done what I wanted. I was split on leaving Baltimore, and the wishes of my parents were an easy out. I did not know then that this is what life is — just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
But I had survived my formative world and all its trappings. Down on Tioga, the reports of my old friends floated back to me. Their fates were maddeningly clichéd. Even the ones in whom I saw a tighter head game fell into shadow, became a statistic in the cold hands of some pundit, who looked out on our streets and rolled up his windows. I still walked under a cloak of doubt. I could wake up one morning like — Time to start the revolution, or I could wind up in rags, sleeping on heating grates, permanently retired to the dreamworlds that I’d conjured since childhood.
I spent my last week closing it all out. I played a final set with my Sankofa brothers. We argued because the sound wasn’t tight. We said that it wasn’t the end, that I was merely a weekend commuter train away. But already, I felt the distance. I said good-bye to Ebony the way we did everything important — over the phone. I took one of the teen dancers to see some smooth jazz. Another girl from my Poly days visited the night before I left. The weathermen were predicting a meteor shower behind heavy cloud cover, and when we looked up we could see the sky flashing like lightning in a thunderless storm. She must have handed me a gift. We talked for an hour or so on my back porch, then she rose, gave me a hug, and pulled off in a blue minivan.