Ahmaud Arbery
A cool, bright Southern springtime afternoon, the air chewy with oak pollen, sweet with fringe tree and peony. I’m out running. The neighborhood is quieter than usual, until it’s not. Quieter than usual until late afternoon, when the streets briefly fill with the silvery shrieks of little-kid playtime, just before the returning hush of little-kid dinnertime. The cars stay parked in driveways now, waiting, fuzzier and yellower by the day. The trucks of lawn crews and contractors dominate what traffic remains; exhaust fumes curl like foul honeysuckle down my throat. Even in a pandemic, the mulch must be neat, plentiful, and spread by someone who can’t afford to hang around here after his work is done.
Twenty years ago, in high school, I considered myself a serious runner. That’s a relative phrase: I was a serious runner mostly in that I was a runner who took herself seriously. Spring and fall, after school, my head still swarming with lines from Chaucer and the angst of chemistry class, I’d churn through wind sprints and hills, compel myself around the track once and then again, again, again. I didn’t love running, except on rare fall days when the temperature was just right and we rode the school van out to broader pastures, denser woods. Those runs I loved purely and truly, but the other days, which were most days, I kept running mostly to be better — than the other girls, yes, sure, but more keenly I wanted to be better than myself. I didn’t want to improve the girl I was; I wanted to run so fast and so long that I ran into a reincarnated, reinvented self. Maybe, just maybe, if I could trim away those pesky few seconds that separated my mile time from what I thought my mile time should be — maybe then I would not feel so trapped, so fixed in my own skin.
Maybe I would lengthen my stride so well that I would stay aloft. Maybe I would fly. Every once in a while, I would feel the nearness of flight. Both feet off the earth at once, my limbs suspended, it seemed I was close to unlocking the secret of remaining afloat as long as I pleased. If I could only hold myself there a single breath longer, surely I could extend my freedom there until I, not gravity, decided when I would come back down to earth.
When I was 25 years old, my brain forgot how to walk, let alone run. Sick with a neurological condition brought on by too much liquor and not enough nourishment — dual and equally ineffective defenses against grief’s ravages; my mother had died a few years earlier — my very clear mental commands failed to reach my legs. First you, I’d will my refusing left leg, then you, my defiant right. Neither would commit to lifting me off the ground, not for a quarter-second. Months later, after torturous physical therapy, walking returned. Running waited far longer, biding its time. But it did return. One autumn afternoon, hurrying on account of a chill, I picked up my stubborn legs and found myself flying through the air once more.
When Ahmaud Arbery was 25 years old, a father-son mini-militia shot him to death while he was running in his Georgia neighborhood. He will have no opportunity to rebuild his mind and muscles through physical therapy, no grace note of an autumn afternoon to try once more. He went out running, as he did often, and that was that. The father and son, white men both, who trapped him behind their pickup truck and fired into his black body at close range, saw to it that there will be no return to the air for Arbery. The two decided — for no particular reason, it seems, and incorrectly — that Arbery must have been the same young black man they believed to have been breaking into houses. And then decided, insanely, inhumanely — because they wanted to, and they could — that he deserved to be hunted and ended.
Anna Traverse Fogle
The wild, unrooting unfairness of these men’s whims howls like a sudden tornado, one produced by familiar weather patterns. As trapped in my own skin as I might sometimes have felt and feel, I have never felt any waking fear that another person would trap and kill me because of that skin’s color. I’ve felt endangered by men, more often than I can possibly remember, but not concerned that they will strip me of my life. The only time I have been on the receiving end of a gun barrel, I lost a purse and its contents, my only physical damage an overactive adrenal system.
I suppose the father and son who shot Arbery felt they were defending their community. That their white wives and daughters would be safer if they, the menfolk, took matters into their own hands. After I was robbed, men asked me for months if I was planning to arm myself. If I was planning to be ready, next time. No, I answered each time, no, of course not. How would anything have been better if I had been carrying a gun that evening? How would the outcome not have been reconciled to one of assured tragedy? Common follow-up questions: Could they loan me a gun? Take me to a shooting range? Walk me through the process of securing a concealed-carry permit? No, no, and no.
When I run, I’m seeking freedom. I imagine Ahmaud Arbery might have been, too. I want the feeling of being unconstrained, and untethered, able to fly myself into the air. I want to see how quickly I can go, and for how long; where my limits are, and how far I can adjust them.
So many of us are running lately, this spring and early summer, this pandemic season. Gyms are closed; our stress levels are up. Spring’s beauty is startling in the midst of so much fear and strangeness; we can’t ignore her call. On social media, my timelines undulate with grief over Arbery, and flutter with pride over newfound running accomplishments. Both things, all things, all at once. For some of us, running is a simple reclaiming of strength and mobility at a time when we feel powerless and stuck. For others, running has become ineluctably associated with grief and terror. ‘Look for the similarities, not the differences,’ people tell you. Sometimes, instead, I think we need to look at the differences head-on, and realize just how powerfully our perceptions of them have tracked and fixed the courses of our lives.
As I’m typing this, a news alert flashes on my phone: the father and son who cornered and killed Arbery have been arrested, charged. A single step of progress, though one that does nothing to rectify death’s finality. We all know that there will be another story like this, and another. The lynchings will continue, until or unless we somehow, collectively, transform ourselves.
I’ll go out running again tomorrow. I’ll dodge cars that fail to signal, trot out of the paths of oncoming cyclists and fellow runners. Maintaining six feet of personal distance makes the roads a weird obstacle course. I will not worry about what or who awaits me behind the pickup trucks that still clog the neighborhood roads, not unless I encounter someone who dares breathe or wheeze too close to me. I will be a white woman running alongside her white husband. I have the incredible, unearned privilege of being supported by systems that generally appear to help me when I am in need. The neighborhood will be perfumed with freshly opened roses and honeysuckle. I will complain about the pollen. I’ll run until I decide to stop.
