SEPTEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 129
He laughs again. “How many fucking Mob
movies are there? Jesus Christ!”
We should have the luxury of telling our
stories, all our stories, he insists. They are
legion, and they are varied; the miseries
repeated, but the human experiences did
not. “Since when are we like, ‘Oh, shit, that
person got a book about somebody being
sold’? But I suspect there will be a lot of sto-
ries about the Underground Railroad. You
know what I mean? I expect there will be
many, many more. The very fact that we feel
like there might not be room for all of us to
live here—now, white people never feel that
way. Look, I came up reading a lot of fantasy
novels. I can’t tell you how many fuckin’ sto-
ries there are about elves and dwarves. They
don’t care about that shit. They could care
less.” At that moment, I feel the urge to pump
my fist in the air: I barely resist.
Several hours later, Coates asks me, “Are
you hungry?” I waffle, wired on coffee and
conversation, until he makes an executive
decision. “Let’s get something to eat.” He
stands. He’s tall. My head is approaching
his elbow or something, and I realize he
was slouching much more than I thought,
probably to accommodate me, adjusting
in that way that I assume taller people do
for shorter people: perpetually bending to
be at eye level with the height-challenged.
I half-walk half-run as he lopes to the train
station, and we head south to West Fourth.
Because we spoke briefly about fame earlier,
I wonder if anyone recognizes him in the
train car, but I look around, and the train
is mostly empty; some people doze, some
people stare off into the tunnels or at their
reflection in the glass, some stare into them-
selves, eyes glossy, as they listen to their
headphones. Everyone looks tired.
A part of Coates must be vigilant about
being recognized, because as we ascend the
subway station stairs and re-enter the upper
world, we talk about fame. A few years ago,
Coates made news not for his writing but
for buying a brownstone in his old Brooklyn
neighborhood, Prospect Lefferts Gardens;
he never moved in once the news broke, and
he resold the house. Not only can fame be
dangerous, Coates believes, but it flattens
you. You have all these ideas about who
you are, what you do, what you believe. But
people don’t see that. They only see what
they want to see. And then Coates utters
something that strikes me as so insightful
and true, something like: This erasure of
the authentic self for the famous (reflec-
tive, wish-fulfilling, stardust-glazed) self
is only good for people who dislike them-
selves, because it allows them to erase who
they are and become someone totally new.
In order to be really good at being famous,
in order to embrace it wholeheartedly, you
have to dislike yourself.
Downton Abbey WHO’S WHO ON PAGE 118( 1 ) Penelope
Wilton: Isobel
Crawley ( 2 ) Jim Carter:
Mr. Carson ( 3 ) Phyllis Logan:
Mrs. Hughes ( 4 ) Laura
Carmichael: Edith,
Marchioness of Hexham
( 5 ) Lesley Nicol: Mrs. Patmore
( 6 ) Dame Maggie Smith:
Violet, Dowager CountessKeyI think about this as we walk toward the
restaurant. The day is perfect: balmy and
sunny. Ice cream parlors and coffee shops
and diners have rolled up their awnings and
set their tables on the sidewalks, welcoming
those stunned by the cold and dark months,
now blinking in the sun. Coates leads us to a
nondescript glass door, and when he opens
it, I smell the sea, briny and sharp, tempered
by butter. We take a seat and then we are eye
level again. Miraculous, I think.
One of the reasons fame is so difficult
for Coates to navigate is because he doesn’t
hate himself. He knows who he has worked
so hard to become, and he is proud of that.
New York Times writer David Carr, his first
editor, saw that he had talent and encouraged
him early on, even though he wanted to quit.
Carr, who died in 2015, had known Coates
since they worked at the Washington City
Paper. Coates has spoken affectionately of
Carr’s occasionally aggressive support—Carr
was known to chase Coates into the elevator
yelling about perfecting story copy. (Coates
will contribute the foreword to a forthcom-
ing collection of Carr’s own work.) But the
two became close friends over “a relationship
built on the mutual interests of journalism,
typing, and fun smack talk,” says Erin LeeCarr, who wrote a book, All That You Leave
Behind, about her dad. “My father believed
in T because he knew he would get there, that
the writing demanded it, and it was up to the
media landscape to take note. How lucky we
all are that Ta-Nehisi kept going. What an
incredible loss that would have been.”
“I was good at two things,” Coates says.
“Writing and driving.” He insists that before
his big break, he intended to leave writing and
become a taxi driver. “My wife was like—abso-
lutely not. She was like—keep going.” He had
stories to tell, she insisted. “She saw that in
me,” he says, when he couldn’t see it in him-
self. She led him to nurture it, to embrace it,
to hone it. When one of the most remarkable
things about you has been born from your
beloved’s estimation of you, from their vision
of you, how can you not love what you are?
How can you not love what those who love you
have had a hand in ushering forth, fed fat on
nectar through the winter in your life? How
can you abhor the emergent self? How can you
rend those wings and still the heart that beats
beneath the downy, golden skin for fame?My nerves have faded, and that sense
of familiarity I feel when I’m with other
Black writers, that sense of spending time1
of Grantham ( 7 ) Brendan
Coyle: Mr. Bates
( 8 ) Hugh Bonneville: Robert,
Earl of Grantham
( 9 ) Sophie McShera: Daisy
( 10 ) Rob James-Collier:
Thomas Barrow ( 11 ) Elizabeth
McGovern: Cora, Countessof Grantham ( 12 ) Joanne
Froggatt: Anna Bates
( 13 ) Kevin Doyle:
Mr. Molesley ( 14 ) Matthew
Goode: Henry Talbot
( 15 ) Raquel Cassidy:
Miss Baxter ( 16 ) Michael
Fox: Andy Parker
( 17 ) Michelle Dockery:
Lady Mary Talbot