Between the World and Me (excerpt)
And that night, I boarded a starship. The starship punched out into the dark, punched through the sky, punched out past West Baltimore, punched out past The Mecca, past New York, past any language and every spectrum known to me.
My ticket took me to Geneva first. Everything happened very fast. I had to change money. I needed to find a train from the airport into the city and after that find another train to Paris. Some months earlier, I had begun a halting study of the French language. Now I was in a storm of French, drenched really, and only equipped to catch drops of the language—“who,” “euros,” “you,” “to the right.” I was still very afraid.
I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Alpine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It happened right then. The realization of being far gone, the fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it—the horror, the wonder, the joy—fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I’d gotten watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto West Broadway. It was all that that I’d felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive—even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating.
I arrived in Paris. I checked into a hotel in the 6th arrondissement. I had no understanding of the local history at all. I did not think much about Baldwin or Wright. I had not read Sartre or Camus, and if I walked past Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots I did not, then, take any particular note. None of that mattered. It was Friday, and what mattered were the streets thronged with people in amazing configurations. Teenagers together in cafés. School children kicking a soccer ball on the street, backpacks to the side. Older couples in long coats, billowing scarves, and blazers. Twentysomethings leaning out of any number of establishments looking beautiful and cool. It recalled New York, but without the low-grade, ever-present fear. The people wore no armor, or none that I recognized. Side streets and alleys were bursting with bars, restaurants, and cafés. Everyone was walking. Those who were not walking were embracing. I was feeling myself beyond any natural right. My Caesar was geometric. My lineup was sharp as a sword. I walked outside and melted into the city, like butter in the stew. In my mind, I heard Big Boi sing:
I’m just a playa like that, my jeans was sharply creased.
I got a fresh white T-shirt and my cap is slightly pointed east.
I had dinner with a friend. The restaurant was the sie of two large living rooms. The tables were jammed together, and to be seated, the waitress employed a kind of magic, pulling one table out and then wedging you in like a child in a high chair. You had to summon her to use the toilet. When it was time to order, I flailed at her with my catastrophic French. She nodded and did not laugh. She gave no false manners. We had an incredible bottle of wine. I had steak. I had a baguette with bone marrow. I had liver. I had an espresso, and a dessert that I cannot even name. Using all the French I could muster, I tried to tell the waitress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off in English. “The best you’ve ever had, right?” I rose to walk, and despite having inhaled half the menu I felt easy as a featherweight. The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musée Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at I party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I would want to do. All around me there were people who did this regularly.
It occurred to me that I really was in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished. I was the one the police stopped on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I was the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black woman, a freighted symbol of black love. But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a lailor—landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational chains—my body confined, by history and policy, to certain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner. I remember, that night watching the teenagers gathering along the pathway near the Seine to do all their teenage things. And I remember thinking how much I would have loved for that to have been my life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or in memory. But I had you.
Questions to Think About and Discuss
- First year Xavier students answer questions about Coates’s book from other members of the group.
- What experiences are new and unfamiliar to the author when he arrives in Europe? What feelings do those experiences evoke for the author?
- In what ways are Coates’s experiences different from or similar to those described in other primary sources you have read for this group? How would you account for those differences and similarities?
- According to Coates, Paris seemed to lack “the low-grade, ever-present fear” he felt in New York and other U.S. cities. “The people,” he says, “wore no armor, or none that I recognized.” What adjectives would you use to describe Coates’s emotional responses to this situation? What other adjectives could you use to describe the responses to being in a new location as it is described in other readings? Do you think he is correct that Parisians in their city were less fearful than he was in his?
