My Dad Was Tough. But At Least He Was There.

When I was young, I lived in a modest rowhouse in the slope of West Baltimore's Tioga Parkway. There were three bedrooms and two bathrooms (but only one that any of us bothered to use). Out back there was a terrace with a rotting balcony. I almost died out there one day -- leaning against the crumbling wood, I tumbled headlong when it gave way, but caught myself on the small back-door roof and fell, luckily, feet-first to the ground. My neighborhood was an enclave in a city under siege. These were the Reaganomics years: Crack cocaine filled the air, and the only refuge was the latest offering from the hip-hop pioneer Rakim. Among the many plagues that assaulted us -- the sweep of HIV, the flood of Saturday Night Specials, teen pregnancy's shocking ascent -- nothing laid us low like the vanishing of fathers.

The vacuum was acute and persistent, made clearest by the lack of pressure on most of my school friends. Their mothers worked constantly, came home dog-tired and tried to parent in between. The result was summer school, truancy and the crudest understanding of the opposite sex. Fights bloomed over nothing, because so many of us had no other model of manhood to emulate, nothing beyond the final demand of America's walking lowest rung -- respect. If my crew consisted of 10 beautiful big-eyed boys, three of us didn't know who our fathers were, three more hadn't seen theirs in years, another three would see theirs on the occasional whim, and one would be the rebel blessed, with a father in the home -- for good or for ill.

I was that one, and my father, flawed in the manner of all those cursed with opposable thumbs, was more than a presence. Judged against the void of paternity around us, he was fanatical. This was as much by choice as by chance; I was the sixth of seven kids born to four women. Some of us were born to mothers who were best friends. Some of us were born in the same year. It was all a tangled mess on paper, but measured against "Family Ties" or even "The Cosby Show," it was love, and it formed my earliest and most enduring sense of family.

We were not allowed to refer to each other with the prefix "half" (as in "half-brother" or "half-sister"), as Dad always told us that the half gets in the way, and when the mother of one spoke, it was law, as sure as if the mothers of all were speaking at once.

My father emerged from a particular archetypal experience. He grew up poor in the hovels of West Philadelphia, went off to Vietnam flush with John Wayne fantasies and came back radicalized by the great unwinnable war. He joined the Black Panther Party, and although he ultimately became disillusioned and left it, the notion of dying for your country, of living for something more than yourself, stuck with him, and will stick with him until the end of his days. He manifested that belief through Black Classic Press, the business he founded in 1978, which specialized in reprinting the obscure works of black authors and lay historians who recorded black Americans' experiences at a time when much of the country thought that we had none.

But Dad's belief in and commitment to the black community were made most evident in the only way that ultimately matters -- in grinding, thankless dedication to his children. Though I make the situation sound its worst, it must be said that there are too many paeans to fatherhood, too many overwrought accolades for what is, at its root, a dirty job. My father approached his duties with the attitude of Emerson -- "Your goodness must have some edge to it, -- else it is none" -- and showing his edge was what he specialized in. He sent us out early in the morning to cut the lawn with a push mower. He made us work for his business and paid us less than minimum wage. He showed up at fifth period in my high school, sat in class and embarrassed me in front of my buddies whenever I was acting out. And like all fathers of that era, when the need was extreme, he reached for the black leather belt. My father's mantra was simple: "I am not here to be your friend. I am here to get you through and into college -- alive, healthy and whole."

His methods were unconventional. I can see him now, sitting in his easy chair, his glasses pulled low on his nose, reading to me from Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery." He worked on Christmas and other holidays. He made us fast on Thanksgiving and meditate on the horror of gluttony and the great tragedy of Manifest Destiny. He would drive us through the city streets with the local NPR station playing on the radio, asking us what we thought about the topic of the day, debating with us, coming at us from all sorts of angles.

Once, one of my older brothers and I broke his bed while doing our finest imitation of the wrestlers Dusty Rhodes and Ric Flair. We tried our best to reset the wood, hoping that Dad wouldn't notice. He got home late that night, and when he finally pulled from us what had happened, he put us out in the backyard and told us to wrestle. Then he went to bed. My mother came out an hour or so later and let us back in.

My father was hard core, and like all children I rebelled -- staying out past curfew, stumbling home with Mad Dog 20/20, the cheapest alcohol we could find, on my breath. My friends and I knew about the danger out there, just as he did, but mostly I was obsessed with defining myself through exploration and whatever I wanted at any random moment. I never got his message about school, and it took some time for me to understand what I'd really squandered in those 12 years of waste.

When I think of my father, I think of a dynamic, tyrannical consistency. He cut his children off at every pass, and his message was terrifying: "I am bigger than you, stronger than you and smarter than you. I will win." We felt a constant pressure, a pervading sense that ending up as a nothing corner-boy was not an option. We lived by a kind of Bushido that simply held: Be somebody or die.

So much has changed since those days. The streets are, as they always were, marked by peril. But the murder rate has fallen, and Magic Johnson is still alive. And yet in the homes of so many black children, the father remains invisible. I don't want to slip into the lazy mythology of Ward Cleaver and the vanishing nuclear family. What's done is done, and as we move forward, families will no longer be what they were. So many fathers -- unable to be breadwinners, frustrated with the mothers of their children -- simply check out. But in these times, we must remember the core of fatherhood: that it is nasty work, that it is the dark art of manipulating children into striving for their higher selves, and that it will be many years before the children themselves see that this was best.

It's my turn now, and my own 8-year-old son is reaching for adolescence. Already, he is whipping out tricks that I minted in middle school that my father and his father had patented years earlier. I like to think that I am relentless too, and if not, that I can at least project the illusion of this to my son -- to make him believe, as I once did, that there is no shortcut, that there is no way out, that I will always win.

tanehisi@gmail.com

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer in New York, is the author of "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood."