MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Ten years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates published the book "Between The World And Me. The memoir, written as a letter to his then-15-year-old son, was a literary phenomenon. Ten years later, as Ta-Nehisi points out in his latest book, "The Message," nearly half the country's school children are under state orders to be protected from, quote, "critical race theory" and other, quote-unquote, "divisive concepts." "Between The World And Me" is now out in paperback, on the tenth anniversary of its publication. So we thought this would be a good time to check back in with Ta-Nehisi Coates, and he's with us now. Welcome back to the program.
TA-NEHISI COATES: Thanks for having me, Michel. It's good to talk to you again.
MARTIN: You know, we actually spoke 10 years ago about this book. And I...
COATES: Did we really?
MARTIN: Yes, we did.
COATES: Oh, my God. Wow.
MARTIN: We - you know, we actually have the tape of my talking to you 10 years ago. I think we'll drop it in.
COATES: Oh, please play a little bit of it. Oh, God. That'll be great.
MARTIN: Sure. Let's hear it. Why not? OK.
COATES: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
MARTIN: Do you feel that there is now some pressure to be kind of an oracle of race in a way that...
COATES: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...You did not feel before? Do you want that job?
COATES: No, no, no. When I - whenever - I've been, you know, very, very careful to tell people what I am qualified to talk about and what I'm not qualified to talk about. And no one person should be, you know, the spokesperson, you know, for that experience, or no one person should be the oracle or be the articulator.
Yeah, I still agree with that.
(LAUGHTER)
COATES: I haven't changed on that.
MARTIN: All right.
COATES: Yeah. That's wonderful.
MARTIN: And so I know that this is kind of a crazy, unknowable question - is this what you hoped would happen as a result of this book?
COATES: Wow. That's a great question, and it's a great question 'cause I'm conflicted. Yes, to some extent. I wanted to be well-read, like any writer wants to be well-read. I wanted to be well-respected as a writer, like any writer wants to be well-respected. I remain somewhat flummoxed at the notion of writers as a kind of oracular presence, or the idea that because you wrote a book or two or three that, you know, people really enjoy, that that means you have some sort of greater thing to say beyond what's actually in the book. So, like, when I think about "Between The World And Me," for me, the most riveting part of that book was, you know, not so much what I had to say, but what Dr. Mabel Jones, Prince Jones' mother, had to say, you know?
MARTIN: So let me go back to that - back to why you wrote "Between The World And Me." You dedicated your National Book Award and the book to a young man named Prince Jones, whom you knew at Howard University.
COATES: Yeah.
MARTIN: Would you just say what happened to him and why it imprinted itself on you so strongly?
COATES: Well, Prince was killed by a Prince George's County police officer undercover. And that officer followed my friend Prince from Prince George's County, through the District of Columbia, into Virginia, where he shot him, you know, a short distance away from the home of the mother of his child and, you know, where he was going to see his young child.
And it imprinted on me because I watched the dialogue about it in the days afterwards, where they speculated, was he a drug dealer? Was he this? Was he that? And Prince was, like, a - you know, a born-again Christian. He was the exact opposite of everything. You know, like, this model of who you want, you know, your son to be, you know, publicly, you know, presenting that I think Black parents often fashion - he was, like, the walking example of it, you know? He was well-spoken - yes, sir, no, sir - you know, this kind of Southern, you know, yes, ma'am, no ma'am thing he would have, very gentlemanly. I mean, at Howard, he pledged Gentlemen of Drew. And, like, he got killed by a police officer. I mean, it was just the most - and I spent 15 years weighing how that happened and, like, why the dialogue around him was so different than the person that I knew. And that was the seed of "Between The World And Me," all those years before.
MARTIN: Why do you think "Between The World And Me" had the impact that it did? Do you have a sense, 10 years later, of what it captured in the moment that captured the public attention?
COATES: I think there are things that are in your control and things that are not in your control. The thing that was in my control - I should say our control, 'cause I'm about to talk about my wonderful editor, Chris Jackson - was to - like, we had this test. And the test was, could a 14-year-old kid who liked reading read the book? And then the thing that is outside of your control, and that is just where the country is or where the audience is at that particular moment. The Mother Emanuel massacre had happened that summer. And actually, the book was not supposed to come out until, I think, end of September, August. And they moved it up after the massacre because I think people were just searching, you know, for answers as to, like, how this, you know, had happened.
MARTIN: So let me now quote from your latest book, "The Message," which has also caused quite a stir.
(Reading) It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library, that a counter-revolution in defense of brutal policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and art. But in the months after George Floyd's murder, books by Black authors on race and racism shot to the top of the bestseller lists and most-borrowed lists. Black bookstores saw their sales skyrocket. The cause for this spike was, in the main, people who had been exposed to the image of George Floyd being murdered, who suddenly began to suspect that they had not been taught the entire truth about justice, history, policing, racism and any number of other related subjects.
You know, here your book was so celebrated 10 years ago. And then 10 years later, people are trying to ban it, or at least make it harder to access. And I just wonder what you make of that.
COATES: Probably go hand in hand. Probably go hand in hand. I mean, one of the things that - and I - you know, I went and researched this when I was working on "The Message." It's like, you know, Toni Morrison faced bans for, like, the vast majority of her literary career. Certainly, you know, the greatest novelist of the latter half of the 20th, early 21st century - you know, people put her, you know, in that sort of ranks. And yet she consistently faced bans in a way that - in a way that I would point out other writers who might contend for that same title did not. Not in the same degree that she did.
MARTIN: So what kind of conversations are you having? Or do you - do you have a sense of what kinds of conversations you're going to have now, or is the lack of conversation a statement in itself?
COATES: About "Between The World And Me?"
MARTIN: Yeah, "Between The World And Me."
COATES: You know, I - it's hard to talk about it. I mean, even now, like, it's weird to talk about the book 'cause it's like - I feel like - again, you know, I talked about this in "The Message," about how these - you know, these books are like kids. And they go on, and they have their lives. It's like - I really, really believe that once you publish the book, it really doesn't belong to you anymore. It's not yours, you know?
MARTIN: Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of "Between The World And Me," which is celebrating a decade in print, and it's available in paperback now. Ta-Nehisi Coates, thanks so much for talking to us once again.
COATES: Thank you, Michel.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAKUYA KURODA'S "RISING SON") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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