I am surprised.When I meetTa-NehisiCoates,
All of the photos I’ve seen of him are
somber and inscrutable, but when I
walk into the café where he’s suggested
we meet, he’s not like that at all. He’s one
of those people who looks young at any
age: There’s a kind of weightlessness
and buoyancy in the way he holds him-
self, with a serious, clear eye that looks
knowing and hesitant all at once. He also
has a baby face. But even though he looks
at me with kindness, I’m nervous.
Every seat in the place is taken, with
most folks staring desultorily at laptop
screens. I am dismayed to find Coates
sitting at the very back of the restau-
rant, tucked into a corner. I am naturally
clumsy, often self-conscious, and shy,
and 20 minutes ago, I texted the man
frantically. I called him “Mr. Coates,”
wary of disrespecting him, my anxiety
pulling out my southernness, and told
him that my GPS insisted I would be
there 15 minutes after our scheduled
meeting time. Instead, here I am walking
in 10 minutes earl y, dreading that this is
a sign from the cosmos that I will ask the
wrong questions. I list through the tables
and sweat. When I sit down I awkwardly
throw my phone on the table to record
our conversation, introduce myself,
and shake his hand to a ri si ng wail in my
head: He’s going to despise me.
There are so many reasons for self-
doubt. Coates is a formidable writer
and thinker. After his virt uosi c memoir
The Beautiful Struggle was released in
2008 , he found an audience who was
solidly impressed not only by the qual-
ity of his wri ting, which careened along
and rose and fell like a song, but also byhis intellectual prowess, his curiosity,
his ranging mind. The book revolves
around what it meant for Coates to grow
up Black in Baltimore in the ’80s and is
heavily informed by his father, who
worked as a librarian at Howard Uni-
versity, and whose life was driven by the
desire to equip his children with the tools
they would need to survive in America—
perhaps in a quest to figure that out for
himself. Coates’s father started his own
press, which sought out and published
works by writers of the African diaspora.
Coates grew up in a home and a world
where consciousness in thought and
deed was the ultimate reflection of what
it means to be a human being, where
books and papers surrounded him and
reflected him. He sought other stories in
comic books and novels. Baltimore in the
’80s demanded a different education of
him, one where he was bored by teach-
ers, fell asleep in class, walked through
the streets assessing the landscape and
the people incessantly, wary and aware
that at any moment, at any time, he could
be jumped and beaten for any number of
imagined offenses by boys who looked
like him. That world trained Coates to
navigate violence with his body and his
mind, pressured his inner self to become
the man he is today, a man with a baby
face and easy bearing whose looks belie
the weapon within, a self honed to a
scythe’s sharpness.
He brandished that weapon in 2015’s
Bet ween the World and Me, an epistolary
revelation to his son on what it means to
live and die as a Black person in America.
The book did something Coates hadn’texpected: It rose to the top of the best
seller lists, and all hell broke loose. He
won the National Book Award for nonfic-
tion, and damn near every cable show,
every magazine, every reader was hun-
gry for his insi ght. Now a huge reader-
ship knew Coates for what his longtime
editor Chris Jackson describes as “a
poetic style drawing from hip-hop, black
nationalist rhetoric, comic books, and
wrestling—a language that was declar-
ative and galvanizing, that had a kind
of swag and strut, that named its own
world unapologetically,” one centered
on love and fear. “Everything that makes
him such a powerful and seemingly
unique—he would dispute that charac-
terization—voice,” says Jackson, “was
there from the beginning.”
After Between the World and Me,
though, fame elbowed her way into his
life like a belligerent drunk: loud, impe-
ri ous, and blind to her sloppy need. The
café we are meeting at, where Coates
walked to work and sat for hours in
his corner, drafting and rewriting his
articles, his books, for years, was no
longer the dim safe haven it had always
been, especially in the literary bubble of
New York. After Between the World and
Me came out, he says, “I would look on
Twitter, and people would tweet I was
here, and then people would come up
to me. I would run into people and they
used to say, ‘I hear you write here.’ ” So
he stopped coming to this dim pastry
shop so often.A
As our conversation properly begins
with my first question, which is why he
chose this café as his office, I learn that
Coates has his own reasons for self-doubt
and self-consciousness. I learn that I’m
not the only one who is nervous today,
because after writing dozens of lauded
articles and three book-length works
of creative nonfiction, Coates has writ-
ten a novel, a wondrous, unpredictable
novel set in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and
Virginia called The Water Dancer; it fol-
lows an enslaved man named Hiram as
he attempts to find his way to freedom.
But it is not straightforward and cutting
like his nonfiction, where he wields his
mind to devastating effect. In The Water
Dancer, amid love and covetousness and PHOTOGRAPHS: TOP, BY PAUL COATES; BOTTOM, BY PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVÁIS/A.P. IMAGES