Between the World and [Him]...

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in brutal prose of his experience as a black man in America where he uses his body as a motif for the realities of existing in a place that is built on the destruction of bodies. It is a letter to his son that tells of growing up in Baltimore, the school system, his family, his college education at Howard and his time overseas--of the recent spate of well publicized deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and of a man named Prince Jones whose story comes to us in part from Prince's mother's perspective, a woman born of soul crushing poverty who had risen through hard work, determination and persistence to be a successful medical professional and had built a home and life based on all of the rewards she has earned, but her son, too, was killed. Those rewards could not save her son. Coates is the sum of his experiences which have led him to fear for the safety of his son, and, while his son grows up in a different world than he did, it is still too familiar to allow complacency to undermine one's ability to forget the road traveled. To forget that road is to forget the lessons and warnings that portent the ever-present possibility of the destruction of one's body.