We were young, drunk on ourselves, and could not know that all the alleys we took as original, he’d stepped through before. He found a place to smelt the gold, do the math. And I don’t know what was worse—the negative results or Dad’s rueful chuckle and sermon
Young black boys who was born and raised in bad regions of the big cities as a rule were choosing not the most legal ways of entertaining and it was something a kind of natural. They didn’t have enough money to pay for studying and spent too much time in the streets with boys like them, looking for trouble. Ta-Nehisi and his elder brother Bill used to do it as well and, as all young people who thought that they own the world, they didn’t listen to their parent’s advice. Dad, who was a deep faithful man, used to tell them that the way they live is wrong and they should take care of themselves because one day they will go too far and nothing could be changed since that time. As it always happens, children didn’t want to listen to their parents because they think that they are too old to understand their life, their desires and motifs, but it is not the way it is. Parents are always right because they know the life better and want to protect their children from possible mistakes.
It was the sound of our era, and in it we beheld all our wants and great fears
The era, what the narrator is talking about, was 1986 onset of the Crack Age. It was the period, when Ta-Nehisi and Big Bill realized that there were many moments when all they would have were themselves and nobody would be around to give a hand. It was the period when “People started dying all around us—Nana, Aunt Joyce, Bill’s grandmother Ms. Verla, and then the record 250 other Baltimoreans gone missing by murder”. It made them to be afraid of death because it is more powerful than human with all his desires and aspirations. The future was unclear for them but they knew that they had a mission in this life and they have to live it with dignity and meaningly.
No matter what Civilization says, academic intelligence is overpraised and ultimately we are animals. When I saw one of these true disciples, almost-men like my brother Bill, I knew there were vital things that I had missed. The Knowledge was taught from our lives’ beginnings, whether we realized it or not
Ta-Nehisi and his brother were educated mostly by the street. They weren’t good students at school because mostly they were not interested in it and they didn’t what to blindly accept all what “Civilization” says because they couldn’t believe in much of this. People are animals and instincts are prior to mind. Real life and real science is out of the school – it is in the streets, among other people, whose life is not like that depicted in books and science articles: “There was the geometry of cocking a baseball cap, working theories on what jokes to laugh at and exactly how loud; and entire volumes devoted to the crossover dribble.” We educate every minute of our life no matter whether we realize it or not, each event of our life, each victory and lost is a lesson which changes us, no matter what grade we get.
I was split on leaving Baltimore, and the wishes of my parents were an easy out. I did not know then that this is what life is—just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles
Life is a lesson, and every event in our life is a small part of it. We study every day, every minute we become wiser and wiser. And life is a movement, when one knows the place perfect, masters its “geometry”, the moving forward stops and then comes degradation. So, order to develop on need to move, because otherwise, the world seems to be tiny and dull and all hopes for the future slowly fade because then one day looks very like another. Ta-Nehisi understood that and although it was hard for him to leave his family, the place where he grew up, he felt that he needed to do that. Here comes new life, new part of a lesson and he is ready to learn it.
