NOTE: I'm still pretty new to these conversations, so anything grossly offensive is out of ignorance. Thank you for bearing with me as I learn! :)

Coates narrates a letter in three parts to his son about being a black man in the 20th-21st century, woven with recollections of events in his life concerning his heritage and things that happened to him and his friends that have shaped him and how he's learned to recognize and move beyond his fears...and how he wants something different than fear for his son.

Essential reading for everyone. Coates' poetry soul shines through and paints gorgeous word pictures about hard truths. I knew very little about this book before I read it, and I'm so glad I read it.

I love the way he used the word "bodies" not just speaking about physical bodies, but also as a literary device. I'm not quite sure how to explain this just yet. I will definitely be re-reading.

A few quotes:

"...I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black, and the other =, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape." (p. 20-21)

"But the American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan." (p. 102)

"You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people uncomfortable." (p. 108)

""I examined the pictures of these giant doors in our small Harlem apartment. I had never seen anything like them. It had never even occurred to me that such giant doors could exist, could be so common in one part of the world and totally absent in another. And it occurred to me, listening to your mother, that France was not a thought experiment but an actual place filled with actual people whose traditions were different, whose lives were really different, whose sense of beauty was different." (p. 119)

"...And though I could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us. I had read too much by then. And my eyes–my beautiful, precious eyes–were growing stronger each day. And I saw that what divided me from teh world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do." (p. 120 - the rest of this section is amazing)

"...And watching him walk away, I felt I had missed part of the experience becuase my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible. I wanted you to se different people living by different rules." (p. 126-27)

"But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos." (p. 151)