It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but world-renowned, Baltimore-based cinematographer Bradford Young came this close to being a mortician.

“I come from a long tradition of morticians,” he explains. “My uncle was a mortician. My great-grandfather was a mortician. My grandfather. My cousins. My aunts were in the game, as well. It was expected—in my mind that’s what I was always going to do.”

Growing up in Louisville, he’d always been exposed to the arts, especially Black-focused arts. His grandparents took him to see Porgy and Bess at The Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts. There was work by mainly Black artists on the walls. He had an uncle, Leon Bibb, a musician, activist, and actor, who was close friends with Paul Robeson and had marched at Selma. (In a full circle moment, of sorts, Young was the cinematographer on Ava DuVernay’s Selma). His cousin Eric Bibb is an internationally famous blues guitarist and songwriter.

Still, the 43-year-old Young admits, “I was too scared to be in that narrative.” At that point in his life, he had yet to see himself as an artist.

As a “crusty little weird kid” growing up in the South in the ’90s, he found a small pocket of friends like him—kids who were into art, and especially hip-hop music, which shaped his worldview.

“Hip-hop was teaching us how to be African-centered,” he says. “How to be Black.”

Then, in 1993, something happened that rocked his world—and changed the trajectory of his life. His mother, who was divorced from his dad, got sick, and, after a long illness, she died. Young was 15. He moved to Chicago to live with his dad. And living in the Windy City changed everything.

“Leaving Kentucky was difficult, but in a way, it was also the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says.

If he had stayed in Louisville, followed that family business, he says, “I would’ve been living a lie.”

“I BEGAN TO SEE HOW IMAGE CONNECTS TO STORY …THAT’S HOW IT ALL STARTED.”

In Louisville, it had been easy to find the kids like him—because there were so few of them. But Chicago was different—lots of kids were into hip-hop. But not all were into art and culture like he was. He admits things could’ve gone badly for him—especially since he was new in town and grieving. But he was supported by his father, his two sisters, the rest of his family, his friends.

“They held me up. I could’ve gone in a totally different direction,” he says. “I could’ve gone down a self-destructive route. Dropped out of school. But that never happened.”

One day, he went to a Common show (another full-circle moment: Young would go on to direct the film short companion to Common’s Black America Again album). He saw a girl there—her name was Candace. He liked her vibe. They exchanged numbers and became friends (they’re still good friends to this day). One night, she invited him to her apartment in Hyde Park, where she lived with her mother. When he got there, he fell in love with the space—the books, the music, the art on the walls.

Her mother was watching a movie, Like Water for Chocolate, which he’d never seen before. His knowledge of film was fairly limited, especially when it came to “indie” film, where the only director he was really familiar with was Spike Lee.

On the coffee table, there was a book about the groundbreaking Julie Dash film Daughters of the Dust. He started flipping through the book, fascinated by the beautiful images of mostly Black women in pastoral settings, dressed in flowing white garb. In the back of book, there was an essay by the film’s cinematographer, Arthur Jafa.

“I learned he was from Mississippi, which made me feel a connection,” Young says. “The language he was using to describe the images of the film was so smart. I never thought about movies that way. It really stuck with me.”

The next year, Lee’s Crooklyn came out. “And I realized that [Jafa] shot it, and it was just like, ‘Wow, this film thing is amazing.’”

Another time, he was driving with his father when, out of the blue, his dad began talking about Spike Lee’s other famous cinematographer, Ernest R. Dickerson.

“The cinematography thing kept coming up,” Young says. “But I was like, “That’s not me. I don’t even know what film school is. How do you do that?”

From Chicago, he went on to Howard University with plans of becoming a writer, though the notion of pursuing film was definitely rattling around in his head. It just so happened that he was at Howard the same time as the late actor Chadwick Boseman, the producer and curator Kamilah Forbes, and the public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. They were his age, but he looked up to them.

“I always felt like I was the little brother. These were 18-year-old kids who were already fully realized, fully robust artists,” he says. “I was just like a little skinny kid walking around observing all these giants.”

Young joined the Howard University Film Organization, not necessarily to be a filmmaker, but to hang out with the students in the department.

A professor at Howard, the filmmaker Haile Gerima, expanded his film vocabulary. Gerima showed him his own film, Sankofa, as well as other Black-helmed films such as Killer of Sheep and Black Girl.

Suddenly Young realized there was this whole world of Black film out there that he had not been privy to—a thriving universe outside the mainstream. He began to think about how the exclusionary world of white film was a “weapon against my humanity.”

“I WAS JUST THIS LITTLE SKINNY KID WALKING AROUND AND OBSERVING ALL THESE GIANTS.”

He took a year abroad in England and expanded his filmic horizons even further, feasting on the works of Godard, Tarkovsky, and others.

“I started watching films for images. I began to see how image connects to story and how story connects to image,” he says. “That’s how it all started. And I decided, I’m going to finally claim this. I’m a cinematographer.”

Back at Howard, he made three student films with Boseman.

“He was such a force of nature,” Young says. “He was no less positive and bright and brilliant then. I loved him.”

Boseman, Forbes, and Coates taught Young a lot about how to be an artist, and how to value and nurture Black art and culture, he says. He left Howard with the understanding that, “If there’s no art, there’s no culture, and if there’s no culture, there’s no people.”

After graduating in 1999, he moved to Brooklyn and started getting his first gigs as a professional cinematographer. There was his debut feature, Mississippi Damned, about growing up poor and Black in the south.

There was also a short film, Pariah, directed by a friend of a friend, Dee Rees. Thanks to a Sundance grant, Rees was able to turn her short into a feature. That was a turning point. Pariah became a buzzy Sundance hit.

Young won Best Cinematographer there in 2011 (he would win again the following year). And around that time, he caught the attention of a rising young director named Ava DuVernay. With her, he ended up making some of the most critically acclaimed work of his career: Middle of Nowhere, Selma, and the gut-wrenching miniseries about the Central Park Five (now the “Exonerated Five”), When They See Us.

Young credits DuVernay with a lot—he talks about her “wisdom and wonderfulness”—but he especially appreciates that she, “left her foot in the door”—that is, allowed more young Black artists to follow her into the Hollywood mainstream. Which is something Young is more than slightly ambivalent about.

If Young’s relationship with Hollywood were a Facebook status, it would read: “It’s complicated.”

That moment in college when he realized there was rich, dynamic Black film world outside the scope of so-called cinematic canon was revelatory for him. He realized that he needed to carve out his own space in the film world, with his friends, with the people he wanted to collaborate with, the ones who inspired him.

“We want real freedom for ourselves to tell stories the way we wanted to, structurally and artistically,” he says. In other words, he wasn’t chasing Hollywood success. He was building success on his own terms.

“What makes Bradford great is his commitment to his ancestors backward and forward in time and his faith in cinema,” says the filmmaker Terence Nance (Random Acts of Flyness), who, along with Young and director Jenn Nkiru, cofounded the Ummah Chroma (“community of color”) artists’ collective.

But as that success grew, Hollywood came calling. Young was the cinematographer on Arrival. He was asked to join the Lucasfilm project Solo: A Star Wars Story. (Despite some of the well-documented tensions on the set, he says he had a great and fulfilling time and would happily work with Lucasfilm again.) In fact, he was in London, on pre-production for Solo, when a co-worker turned to him and said, “Congratulations.”

“For what?” Young said.

He had been nominated for an Oscar for his work in Arrival. He was the first African American to receive a Best Cinematography nomination.

His 2017 Oscar nomination, Young says, was “bittersweet.”

“I’ll be honest. I have a very contentious relationship [with the Oscars]. Maybe there’s something to appreciate about them, but I haven’t found that space for myself yet,” he says. He admits that he didn’t even want to attend the ceremony.

“I just wanted to stay in London and focus on my work,” he says. But a conversation with his friend, the filmmaker Malik Sayeed, changed that.

“He said, ‘You’re being put in this place for a reason. I’m going to send you something.’ And when I hung up, he sent me a picture of four kids in alleyway somewhere in Africa, and there’s a kid with a broom pole and a camera made from a box and here’s two kids facing off like an action film. And I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, for those kids, or the kid in Baltimore who has faith in the country that they can be part of the culture, for them, maybe it’s important for me to be there.’ And I decided to go.”

“SHE SAID, ‘COME TO BALTIMORE. IT’S A COOL SCENE…IT’S EVERYTHING WE’VE ALWAYS IMAGINED.’”

Young moved to Baltimore with his wife, Stephanie Etienne, a midwife and maternal activist, in 2016, right before he went to film Solo. They already had two young sons and a daughter on the way. As a cinematographer, Young had gone where the work had taken him—and the family had always packed up their stuff and gone with him.

There were stints in London and Hollywood. He had lived in Brooklyn for a while but hated how gentrified the neighborhood had become. The family also lived in Takoma Park, an area Young was familiar with from Howard University. It was his friend, the producer, artist, and filmmaker Elissa Blount Moorhead, who had suggested Baltimore.

“She basically said, ‘Come to Baltimore. It’s a cool scene…[There are] all these Black families here. All these Black children running around. It’s everything we’ve always imagined.’”

So he came. Bought a house in Reservoir Hill, specifically choosing that neighborhood not just for its beautiful architecture but because it wasn’t fully gentrified yet. “I want my kids to see their people,” he says. “I want them to walk outside their house and see low-earning Black people and high-earning Black people. A lot of American cities don’t have that. And that’s their loss.” He fell in love with the city.

“Baltimore has such a beautiful vibe,” Young says. “What’s great about Baltimore is that all the people that are from here, they really welcomed us here. We’re still in this process of asking permission to be in a town that has such a beautiful, sacred culture.”

He immediately found a community of Black parents and artists and makers—“framily,” Moorhead calls them. He and Moorhead collaborated on an experimental art film, Back in Song, that was installed at the BMA. They’re working on another, top secret project, right now. She explains what’s so great about Young’s work.

“He doesn’t possess a disingenuous bone in his body,” she says. “His lens is a reflection of his heart. He has a deep understanding of who he is and where he fits on the continuum of Black history and Blackness. The biggest thing is that he doesn’t lie in his work. Also, he works really hard, and he’s a master craftsman.”

And what Young is doing in Baltimore represents what he hopes is the next chapter of his career. When asked if he wants to direct, he hesitates and says, “Yeah, I have stories I want to tell.” But not necessarily in the traditional sense. “I don’t want to create in the space of the push and pull of filmmaking culture. I just want to make it private with a few friends and let it be what it’s going to be. What I’m really looking for now is uninterrupted freedom to tell stories however I want to.”

He says he’ll keep making commercials to make money between projects. (He rattles off some of the brands he’s lensed for, some you may have heard of: Apple, Audi, Nike, IBM, and Facebook.)  He’ll continue to make “Hollywood” films that call out to him and work with artists and directors he admires and trusts. But he’s not courting mainstream success.

“I’m happy to make films that may not ever open in a theater,” he says. “That may only open in Sankofa Video and Book store in D.C. or the Underground Museum in L.A. Or maybe we project it on a wall somewhere in Sandtown. That’s all it needs to be for me.”

Paul Coates has lived a rich life, but enter his name in a Google search and not much comes up. Sure, you’ll find that he’s the father of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the famed writer and intellectual, who has occasionally examined their father-son bond in his writings. But those accounts belong to the son, not the father. Dig a little deeper and you’ll probably find mention of Coates’ time as leader of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s and his connections to several controversial figures. But again, very little of the information is firsthand. 

Persevere further and you might discover that Coates is the founder and director of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, one of the nation’s leading publishers and distributors of literature by and about members of the black diaspora. The press is celebrating its 40th year in 2018, and, during those decades, it has resurrected and distributed texts by seminal African-American scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois, J.A. Rogers, and Carter G. Woodson; published fiction by contemporary writers such as Walter Mosley; and championed little-known histories of ancient African societies. 

But even though one of its goals is to rescue forgotten or overlooked black figures from obscurity, you’ll find nary a biographical sentence about Coates on the business’ website. Obscurity may not be okay for others, but it suits Coates just fine. 

“I came from on the corners talking,” Coates explains. “One of the things that I fell into early on is I wouldn’t spend a lot of time talking. ‘They will know you by your work.’ It’s one of them things. I don’t like to talk unless there’s something to say.”

Sitting in his office, which is located in a nondescript office park in Arbutus, Coates cuts a thoughtful, professorial figure. The rhythmic hum of printers resounds through the walls as he parleys and reflects on a life that has had few constants, save literature.

“The largest preoccupation with my time is reading,” he acknowledges. “I get immense pleasure. It’s comparable to sex. Almost.”

Coates was born in 1947 in West Philadelphia to Douglas Cryor and Edna Coates. Cryor was a violent alcoholic who fathered at least 14 children with several women, including three sisters. As a result, Coates grew up with aunts who also doubled as stepmothers. His neighborhood was equally chaotic. His refuge was the nearest library, where the young bookworm plowed through comics, crime novels, and history titles. At the earliest opportunity, he quit high school and joined the Army.

“The service gave an option to see the world,” he says. “It [also] had to do with the military feeling safer than being on the street. You talkin’ about friends getting shot down.”

His time in the Army was uneven at best. He faced nonstop harassment and racism. One incident, a run-in with a fellow soldier, changed his life forever.

“I’d had a conflict with a Native American guy who folks used to call Chief. One day Chief . . .  calls me nigga . . . so we get to rollin’,” he says. “We got separated, [and] I’m really upset. I went into [a] room, where I paced. I saw this book that said Black Boy. I figure, somebody’s f—–’ with me. I ended up . . . going back to my room and reading it.”

Black Boy by Richard Wright is a memoir detailing the author’s early life in the Jim Crow South. For the first time, Coates had found a book that spoke to his experience as a black man in America. It was an awakening.

“It occurred to me that this was a whole genre,” he says, gesturing as if holding a book.

From there, he discovered the works of black writers such as Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and James Baldwin.

In 1965, Coates was sent to Vietnam, where he worked as a military policeman in a K-9 unit. He served 18 months, and was discharged in 1967. While at war, he corresponded with his sergeant’s niece, a Baltimore woman. Soon after his return from Southeast Asia, he relocated to Charm City and married her. By 1968, Coates was living in Cherry Hill with a wife and child, and he had procured a job as a baggage handler at what was then Friendship International Airport.

Then, as now, the city was a hotbed of racial strife and poverty with trust in law enforcement at a low ebb, particularly in black communities. Coates, newly socially aware, sought to do his part for Baltimore. He began volunteering in a community breakfast program run by the Black Panthers, the legendary black nationalist and socialist organization that was created in 1966 to witness interactions between the police and citizens and address economic and social inequality. Though he was not then a member, Coates shared many of the group’s ideals.

“I admired what they stood for. I wanted to be identified with that,” he says.

His affiliation with the Panthers—however initially tenuous—was not without risk. Then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had declared the Black Panther Party a national threat and directed undercover agents to infiltrate its chapters. This adversarial dynamic led to the shooting deaths of several Panthers and law enforcement officers across the country. Gradually, pressures mounted on the Panthers, internal divisions grew, and some party members turned on each other, resulting in more homicides. The party dissolved in 1982.

In 1970, Coates, still not yet a member, found himself caught in the middle. He was helping several Panthers load rifles into his car—a legal act then and now—when police swarmed and arrested everyone. Tensions had been running high in the city because a police officer had just been murdered and three local Panthers were charged—spuriously, some said—with the crime. Coates suspects the raid was an attempt by law enforcement to intimidate the Panthers and drain their financial resources.

“There was no basis for them to arrest us,” Coates says, noting that the guns were for self-protection and unloaded. “There was nothing wrong with transporting guns. We were concerned that the police were going to come and kill us. We did not want to die like that.”

About a week later, Coates and the others were released on bail. Shortly thereafter, John Clark, the leader of the Baltimore chapter, was taken by a bail bondsman to California, where he faced outstanding charges. Clark’s absence left a power vacuum in Baltimore, giving rise to internal disputes. Coates reported the group’s status at regional Panther headquarters in New York.

“They asked me who was left, and I told them, ‘Nobody.’ They said, ‘Nobody but you.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not a Panther.’ And the brother looked at me and said, ‘You a m—-f—–’ Panther now!’ I didn’t want to do it. I had a family. The last thing I wanted to do was be in charge of the Black Panther Party.’”

Reluctantly, he became defense captain of the Baltimore Black Panthers, managing all activities in Maryland.

“We started a free clothing program [and] free food programs. We’d help people with their rent. Whatever the pain was . . . we would try to intercede,” Coates remembers.

He also ensured that the Panthers, who preached a philosophy of armed self-defense, maintained a physical presence wherever blacks felt threatened.

“I never will forget; a woman from Dundalk was afraid to go to the store because she was harassed by white folks,” he says. “We sent folks down there to make sure she didn’t get f—-d with.”

Coates emphasizes that, contrary to popular misconception, the Panthers were not anti-white. In his view, capitalism was the great evil. It brought about racism, which resulted in oppression.

“The last thing I wanted to do was be in charge of the Black Panther Party.” 

“The people who benefit the most from manipulating those factors are the people who control the lines of capital. [They] bring the most pressure to bear on blacks, such as myself, and even whites,” he says.

In the winter of 1971, as legal troubles put pressure on imprisoned Black Panther members, Coates traveled to the Panthers’ Oakland headquarters for help. It would be a momentous trip.

“I’d gone to California to get aid for the guys who were in jail,” he says. He pressed to speak to the leadership, but to no avail. Disillusioned, he vowed to leave the group.

“When I came back, I was no longer with the party,” he says. “[But] the people that were in jail in Baltimore, including Eddie Conway, I still felt responsible for.”

Marshall “Eddie” Conway was one of three Baltimore Panthers convicted in 1971 for killing Baltimore police officer Donald Sager. The case against Conway, who has always maintained his innocence, rested largely on police testimony and circumstantial evidence. Conway was released in 2014 after an appellate court ruled his jury had been given faulty instructions. He and Coates remain close.

“I’ve had, over my 44 years [in prison], people come and go. I could always, no matter what, depend on Paul,” Conway says, speaking from the offices of The Real News Network, where he is a producer and host. “That was one of the things that kept me stable because, obviously, in the middle of prison there’s so much instability . . . Without his support when I got out, my life would have been a lot different than it is now. We’re brothers.”

It’s mid-October and Coates strides through his printing factory, books stacked high on shelves, ready to be boxed and shipped. The efficiency and solidity of the operation belie its humble beginnings, which can be traced back to an initiative Coates developed with other activists in 1972 called the George Jackson Prison Movement. The idea was to bring progressive and Afrocentric literature to inmates in an effort, as Coates says, to “retrieve the souls and minds of the incarcerated.” The program was run out of a bookstore Coates owned first on Pennsylvania Avenue and later on North Avenue called The Black Book. By 1978, the store had closed and the program had morphed into Black Classic Press. BCP Digital Printing followed in 1995.

Coates says Black Classic Press’ largest milestone came in 1997, when Walter Mosley, a black novelist known for crime writing (including the award-winning Devil in a Blue Dress), granted it the domestic and foreign rights to his latest novel, Gone Fishing.  

“He wanted to do it with an independent black publisher,” Coates explains. “We’re very good friends.”

Though Coates knows he has made an important cultural contribution, he has never made a fortune. Most of the company’s revenue—some 90 percent, Coates estimates—comes from the digital printing side, which churns out fliers, posters, brochures, and the like for clients ranging from libraries to online customers.  

“We have to print a lot of stuff . . . so Black Classic Press can be the voice that it is,” Coates notes. “But brother, you’ll know us through our actions—and that’s the way it is.”

Coates’ acceptance of this stems from the fact that, more than 40 years after leaving the Panthers, he holds economic views similar to those he held as a revolutionary.

“I think of myself as a communalist . . . One of the first things we did was organize ourselves as a union. I hold that the principles of unionism are closer to the fair view that I have of community,” he explains.

For Coates, family is at the center of community. He used the G.I. Bill—which paid veterans to attend college—for income while working toward a bachelor’s degree from Homestead-Montebello Center of Antioch University, later to become Sojourner–Douglass College. He then earned a master’s degree in library science from Atlanta University that he would put to use working in Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where he would comb the stacks for out-of-print black literature. Another perk of this position was that his children received reduced tuition. Coates is the biological father of seven children by four different women. Two were wives and two were women in the Panthers. He is currently married and has two additional adult children through this marriage, bringing his total brood to nine.

“My family is the family I created,” he says simply.

All of his children—Kelly, Jonathan, Malik, Menelik, Ta-Nehisi, Darius, Jared, and Damani and Kristance, who both work at Baltimore Classic Press—have earned their father’s pride. Ta-Nehisi, of course, is the most widely known, writing for The Atlantic and receiving—among a host of other honors—a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2015. When asked about Ta-Nehisi’s success, Coates answers with cautious approval.

“As long as he’s not doing it to convince the world he’s cool. He comes from a tradition, and he is very connected spiritually to that tradition. That’s what gives him the power that he has. It ain’t that I raised him,” he says.

That said, Coates does think he made at least one important paternal contribution.

“I think I’ve opened up a path that all of my children have an awareness and a curiosity. I have absolutely accomplished that . . . with the help of their mothers, their grandparents, [and] the help of the community that helped to raise them,” he says.

Leading the way out of the factory, Coates points to the framed art bedecking the office walls and hallways. The array includes a portrait of Ta-Nehisi, African-themed paintings, and other works created by some of his 10 grandchildren.

“I’m connected to a tradition of black people speaking for themselves,” he says. “That’s what gets me up in the morning! I’m clear on why I do this. I’m real clear what I’m responsible for. That’s what Black Classic Press is, brother.”

---

Editor’s Note: An earlier draft of this article said that Coates’ father, Douglas Cryor, fathered children with three of his sisters. He did not. He fathered children with three women who were sisters. The article has been updated to rectify the error. Baltimore regrets the error.

We Were Eight Years In Power 

Ta-Nehisi Coates
(BCP Literary Inc.)

Perhaps you’ve read Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay in The Atlantic entitled “My President Was Black,” in which he discusses what he perceives as the vicious backlash to Barack Obama’s presidency that resulted in the election of Donald Trump—the man he calls America’s “first white president.” This is not the first time in our country’s history that a period of progressiveness has resulted in a turn towards white supremacy, he argues. He points to the decades following the Civil War, when eight years of Reconstruction-era policies were followed by segregation, Jim Crow, and other racist tactics that kept blacks as second-class citizens. Coates uses this book as an opportunity to showcase eight essays that have previously appeared in The Atlantic, along with brand-new works that analyze the Obama years and highlight the voices, ideas, and movements for justice that arose during this time. Coates’ customarily eloquent and pointed prose is at its best here, as it forces all of us to reflect on our own beliefs and actions, as well as our identities as Americans.

What Counts As Love

Marian Crotty  
(University of Iowa Press)

As the title might suggest, the characters in Marian Crotty’s short stories are locked in a search for love—both romantic and filial. In many cases, they end up with a subpar version of what we’ve all been told it should look like. Take Karleen, a woman working a construction job to escape the clutches of her abusive husband in the title story. Or Evelyn, a mother trying desperately to maintain a relationship with her heroin-addicted daughter. Crotty, an assistant professor at Loyola University Maryland, writes her characters with an authenticity and dignity that immerses us in their worlds and causes us to examine our own quests for love. (Haven’t we all pined in vain or questioned a decision made from the heart?) This collection won the coveted John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and garnered a cover quote from none other than Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan. We can’t wait to see what this fresh voice has in store for us next.

Read our full interview with writer Marian Crotty.

Vinegar Girl

By Anne Tyler (Hogarth)

You could say that The Taming of the Shrew is one of Shakespeare’s most problematic works, due to the implication that its headstrong main character Kate should submit to her husband (let’s just say gender politics were different in the 1590s). Tyler tries her hand at updating this tale, setting it in her usual North Baltimore and bypassing some of the gender issues. Instead of Kate’s father forcing an arranged marriage, he asks her to wed his lab assistant for immigration purposes. While it doesn’t have the depth of her other works, Tyler’s smooth prose makes Vinegar Girl, one of a series of renowned authors’ Shakespearean updates, a light, summer read.

---

Black Panther

By Ta-Nehisi Coates (Marvel)

The buzz has built ever since word got out that Coates, the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and National Book Award-winning Baltimore native, was trying his hand at comics. Now his first installment is here, and it’s riveting, demonstrating how Coates’s talent extends beyond books and essays. The comic is set in the fictional African nation Wakanda, where Black Panther, otherwise known as T’Challa, returns to the throne following his sister’s death. Wakanda has faced an invasion, a coup, and a flood, and Coates drops us into the action, with plenty of cliffhangers. We hope the next chapter is as enthralling.

Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)

It was as a child that Coates began to live in fear. He realized his body could be taken from him at any time: by the boys in West Baltimore whose own fear prompted them to carry guns or by a police force and society with no value for black lives. Meanwhile, Coates grew aware of another world, “suburban and endless,” of manicured lawns and blueberry pies, which he could never be a part of. “I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to . . . achieve the velocity of escape,” Coates writes in this searing, polemic memoir framed as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori. Watching his son learn what it means to be black in America, Coates mines his own rage and grief—his interview with the mother of a deceased friend shot by police is particularly poignant—both for the sake of catharsis and as a doleful warning from father to son. Between the World and Me is a wake-up call, a mind-altering analysis of why our country has failed to provide equality for all, regardless of color.

See our Q&A with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

---

The Hired Girl
Laura Amy Schlitz (Candlewick Press)

Young adult literature has had a bit of a moment recently, with grown-ups crossing genres—and generations—to read titles such as The Hunger Games and the Harry Potter series. Baltimore has its own doyenne of this genre in Schlitz, who won the prestigious Newbery Medal in 2008 and looks poised to bridge the age gap with her latest book as well. In The Hired Girl, we’re introduced, via her diary, to Joan Skraggs, a 14-year-old in 1900s Pennsylvania who longs for a life of love and adventure beyond her farm, where she has been ordered to forgo school to care for her father and older brothers. She accepts work as a hired girl, which brings her to Baltimore, where society life stands in stark contrast to cow pastures and chicken coops. The diary format gives Schlitz, who is a librarian at The Park School of Baltimore, the ability to transport you to a different time with page-turning ease. Following a young woman’s desire to transform her life is not a new premise, but Schlitz’s talent for identifying a theme that crosses generations will keep readers of all ages hooked.

---

The Beast Side
D. Watkins (Skyhorse Publishing)

To Watkins, there are two Baltimores—one white, the other black. This is something he continues to realize as an adult in his home city, through dinners with community leaders in a Hampden restaurant and his appearance at The Stoop Storytelling Series (see page 136) in March 2014. That night, he joked to a supportive, albeit mostly white, crowd at Center Stage, “This ain’t the stoop I’m used to. There’s no pit bulls, red cups, or blue flashing lights.” With his unsentimental prose and sharp eye for detail, Watkins takes you to his stoop in East Baltimore, the so-called beast side. He recounts his own drug-dealing past, police brutality, systemic inequality, and the murders of friends and family. What helps the arguments in Watkins’s essays hit home are the sobering and enlightening slices of life and characters he weaves throughout—resurrected drug users, hard-working grandmothers, the ex-con friend who asks Watkins to tell him what his daughter said in a letter because he can’t read. By the end, you’re left with an advanced understanding of this man’s love for the community that formed him, and how neighborhoods such as East Baltimore fit into the national debate for social change.

Baltimore-born writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has become one of the most acclaimed voices of his generation. Coates, a correspondent for The Atlantic, is widely known for his essay “The Case for Reparations” and his first book The Beautiful Struggle. His second book, Between the World and Me, debuted in July, and he joined us to talk about how the book was written, the inspiration of James Baldwin, and his reaction to Freddie Gray’s death.

You’ve said that James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time was part of your inspiration for this book. Did you intend to write in the letter format as Baldwin did?
It’s funny because the distinguishing feature for me of The Fire Next Time was not the letter format. Several people have written letters as essays, so there’s a tradition there. You know what it was, it was the ranging nature of the way that book is written. It’s so beautiful, it’s so short, it’s so seemingly structureless. It’s a very wandering, epic book for such a small length. You begin with this letter to his nephew, you then proceed to his childhood in Harlem, you come out and you’re meeting with the black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, then you come back out into his pronouncement of the future of our country. I thought that was incredible, the landscape of it, to use Baldwin’s deep knowledge of history, his opinions, his memoir, then on top of that his journalist expertise. It, to me, was a tour de force.

If you think about it like a ball player, he was using all of his game at the same time—got his defense going, got his three-pointer going, just showing you all sorts of ranges and styles. I thought that was absolutely incredible, and beyond that I thought it was of great use for what Baldwin was trying to do. It was necessary for the time. I really looked up to that, and I called my editor Chris Jackson and I said, ‘Why doesn’t anyone write like that right now? Why aren’t essays written in that way?’ Particularly African-American essays, dealing with politics in this country. He said, ‘I don’t know, but I think you could. It’s hard, but it’s worth taking up and trying.’ That’s really how it came about. And then when I got into it, when I started writing, I probably had three to four drafts before we decided to orient it towards the letter. And really, that was a literary technique so I could focus my writing to who I was talking to and why I was talking.

Your book is written as a letter to your 15-year-old son. Has he read the book, and if so, what does he think of it?
Yes, he has. He read several versions, pre- and post- letter. He likes it quite a bit, he’s very proud, he told me.

Where were you in the writing process when Freddie Gray died?
When Freddie Gray died, I was pretty much done. I was putting the finishing touches on at that point. You know what’s funny, even when Ferguson happened, I had already turned in a draft. Ferguson was put in relatively late, all that stuff is late. And Eric Garner, too, that came in with the letter.

What’s it been like for you to watch what happened in your home city after Freddie Gray died?
Well, it’s just unsurprising. I hate saying that, but it’s true. I wouldn’t say it’s what I was expecting, but it’s unsurprising.

What about the officers being charged in his death?
I was surprised by that. I’m always surprised by that. Even in the process of everything that’s happened after the officers were charged, you can see why officers are rarely charged, with the amount of political pressure that’s now being applied.

Is there a specific message you are hoping white Americans will take away from the book?
No, there isn’t, it wasn’t really in my mind when I was writing the book. And that doesn’t preclude white Americans from taking anything out of it. It doesn’t preclude them from taking a variety of messages, but those are probably for them to tell me. I was very interested in expressing a feeling that I’ve heard African-Americans express in our conversations, and that being fear. I guess it would give me some degree of comfort if some African-Americans read this book and realized they were not crazy . . . But you have to understand, when my editor said to me, ‘I think you can do it,’ it was a hell of a challenge to try to write the book. It was so difficult you really have very little room to think, ‘I hope someone gets this particular message from it.’ You’re trying to make the whole thing work, so it’s a coherent piece. That was really my obsession, and we were doing that up until two months ago.

In the book, you write about an enlightening trip to Paris. Did you think about James Baldwin, who made the city his home, while you were there?
[Laughs] You know, I didn’t. I didn’t really have folks like him or Richard Wright in my head. It’s a really interesting question to think about because I can’t candidly tell you what that has to do with my attraction to France, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that is has something to do with him. Maybe that we attracted to the same thing, and maybe that we were all drawn to a thing that many Americans find themselves to be drawn to.

What’s next for you, what’s the next step in your journey?
[In a sinister voice] If I told you, I’d have to kill you. [Laughs] No, I’m gonna write. I hope as long as I’m alive I’m going to write books.