Big Up, Brother Coates.

Ta-Nehisi’s been on his grind, doing pub for his very, very good book — including today’s big profile in USA Today.

His father was a Vietnam vet, Black Panther, intellectual and serial womanizer, a strong-armed disciplinarian determined his sons were not going to be lost to the streets. “Wake up, boy,” he used to say. “Walk like you got business. Walk like you got somewhere to be.”

On Sunday, Father’s Day, the elder Coates, 61, can bask in a certain success. Ta-Nehisi made his way to Howard University, a career in journalism and now the ranks of published authors.

The opposite of Ta-Nehisi, Damani, 37, was a street fighter who was drawn to the lure of gang life. His father pulled him in, too. He now works for his dad at Black Classic Press.

But as the memoir’s title suggests, none of it was easy. The streets of Baltimore were mean in the ’80s, and at home the Coateses were not the Cosbys. Far from it. Paul Coates had seven kids by four different women, two of whom he married. Ta-Nehisi is the second-youngest child.

“This is all a mess on paper, but it was all love to me and formed my earliest and still enduring definition of family,” he says.

But it was he and Damani, two very different brothers, who ended up living with their father and Ta-Nehisi’s mother, Cheryl Waters. They divorced when Ta-Nehisi was in his mid-20s. (Paul Coates also was married to and divorced from Damani’s mother.)

Ta-Nehisi dedicates the memoir to his mother, who he says “dragged” him along as much as his father did.

“She was the day-to-day person in my life. The one checking the homework,” he says.

But his father was the enforcer, the drill sergeant, the force.

“He had his faults,” Ta-Nehisi says, “but I wanted people to know my father in full. I think he has a great story.”

(I can’t get the video trailer for the book to post, but you can view it here.)

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.