The Message
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
One World, 256 pages
Published October 1, 2024
“Read the book.”
This is how Ta-Nehisi Coates chose to close a contentious interview on CBS Mornings about his book The Message.
And this is what I say, days after the 2024 election.
The Message will not command much of your time. But, along with the more publicized challenges you will encounter, you will find deep rewards.
From the first word, (“Comrades”) we peer over Coates’ shoulder as he addresses his writing students at Howard University. Two years earlier, he’d promised them an essay of his own. He’s handing it in late, he says, but the three essays and an engaging, achingly beautiful introduction are worth the wait. The latter tells of growing up in Baltimore in a house filled with books. When he’d ask his father a serious question, the ex-Black Panther would select a book for him to read. Coates’ observations of how good writing can haunt its readers are powerful and engaging.
He follows with three essays describing trips to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine. My favorite is the account of his visit to Mary Wood in Columbia, South Carolina. A high school teacher, Wood was the eye of the storm as her school district challenged her AP Literature class study of Coates’s Between the World and Me. In contrast to the grandeur of Africa or the gritty texture of Jerusalem, Coates’ description of a school board hearing around Wood and his book and a tour of the state capitol grounds with statues of enslavers and segregationists feels like home.
The essays on the author’s trips abroad felt as if I, too, walked the roads of Palestine or gazed west toward the Atlantic, where Coates’ ancestors were shipped into enslavement. He is fond of defining an arc and connecting the circle, of hiking Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal — mythologized as the final point of departure of slave ships sailing West. But in Palestine, an arc breaks open. In his 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations,” Coates cited the reparations Germany paid to Israel. Now, on the ground in Palestine, months before October 7, 2023, Coates is overtaken by a land of colonialism and apartheid — and he regrets having used that citation.
When Coates concludes with a history lesson about the violent birth of modern Israel, I learned much but lost my place walking beside him; I became a student.
The Message is well suited for groups interested in myriad topics: the current Middle East war, the banning of books, of colonialism alive to this day, and how racism threads through them all. Coates’ gifts as a writer make the book hard to put down even as he lays all of this before us.
Even more recently, I attended a keynote address author David Baldacci offered at the 100th anniversary of the Petersburg (Virginia) Public Library, an institution that remained racially segregated into the 1960s. He named the two pillars of autocracy: ignorance and fear of the other. Neither can stand alone, he said, and hence the importance of reading. Coates confronts the twin pillars throughout The Message. It is indeed an important book to read.
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