1.
Consider the scene in the movie Forrest Gump, when the title character proceeds to run across the highways of these United States in an attempt to subdue the spell that is unattainable love which, in his case, has been the source of his decades-long heartbreak. &, in speaking of heartbreak, in this interpretation of the film, which, yes, is my interpretation of the character who is Forrest Gump, I assert that Gump is not only running across this particular US-American construction into a void that has left him without the language to express his emptiness, but is also running from the myth that has created him, as he, Gump, the “former college football All-American kick returner [&] Vietnam [War] veteran” who, in front of a national audience receives his Medal of Honor from then-president Lyndon B. Johnson, & later tours as an international ping pong player, perhaps, on behalf of US-American post-war initiatives to promote “diplomacy,” becomes an advertising beacon even as he runs the length of the country a mute sage.
2.
& still I love the movie, perhaps for the same reason you love the movie—because it is distinctly “American;” but, in my interpretation (which is where our paths might diverge), Gump reveals very plainly who has access & mobility within a country that names its children after generals who professed to preserve “States’ rights.”
In other words, I love the kind of truth this film reveals about its effort to rearview the nation’s praxes through a likeable character who is himself the product of dumb luck and/or the performance of self-making.
3.
Growing up in Southern California, I was not much of a distance runner; though, during Track & Field Day at Barton Elementary, I would confidently win (nearly) all the events.
(Imagine me in my basketball shorts & shoes which, in the 1990s, were akin to highwater pants & flood-proof boots—my shorts large enough to swallow a floatable quantity of air—my off-brand kicks heavy & thick—worn from the half-mile walk to & from school, or, if I am being honest, from the running Daryl & I did once his neighbor’s hand balled into a fist beating off-rhythm onto the apartment’s rib cage upon hearing Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison” on repeat—& this, of course, was after several games of Tecmo Super Bowl, the joysticks which neither of us could pry from the thumbs of our older brothers on a good day, with the exception of these mornings when they parted for school first & left the sticks to our hands to do with as we pleased, which was to simulate how Randall Cunningham’s six-foot four-inch frame could evade a blitz & tunnel through a wall’s closure to plant the ball into the numbers of his receiver with impeccable precision—& when he did not throw the ball, with the odds stacked against his Black body, we ran him toward the goal post—moving the chains—always in a forward progression—
4.
In a recorded discussion with Saidiya Hartman on conceptualizing “The Black Outdoors,” Fred Moten says,
“When I am walking
in the forest, I always
hear someone running.”
& Dave Chappelle tells Killer Mike, “The one thing about being a nigga in America [is]…you gotta keep runnin’…”.
& all I can think about is how the optics of one man running differs from that of another man running.
5.
My father grew up in a small town in Alabama, not far from where his great-grandmother (living during his childhood) was emancipated. Her husband was said to have been sold by his father, who was said to be indigenous & a chief.
At least one of my ancestors in the state of Alabama obtained a large plot of land, post-Emancipation. & I wonder if this allotment was tied to Field Order No. 15. The document reads: “…alias Richard Jackson…owned only forty acres…at the time of his death.”
6.
My maternal grandmother, born & raised in Mississippi, birthed at least two of my aunts & two of my uncles within the state, but I have never lived there myself, so my understandings of place are limited by what I am, at this moment, unable to imagine.
My mother shares with me in passing how her mother mentioned a flood. Then our conversation moves from ear-hustling around older folk to a listing of Black joys.
7.
A few listings of Black joys:
- Playing basketball with my father.
- Watching a five-year-old dive into the deep end without a pair of floaties or a parent waiting nearby. My ten-year-old life-grip clutching the pool’s edge in a state of marvel when he appeared on the other side.
- Dancing into dampness with my mother. The both of us belting “I’m so excited. & I just can’t hide it…”.
- Chasing lightning bugs into near darkness.
- My great-grandmother’s home above the Alabama red clay.
- The cactus I cut beyond her front porch that my wife & I potted & placed at the window.
- The seagull that shitted on my head during lunch (not a Black joy) & how Veronica did not laugh but turned & said “Let’s wash it off.”
- My nephew shooting a plastic ball (in near perfect form) into a mop bucket.
- The brown cardinals I swore I observed during my childhood in St. Louis–how I confessed to my wife years later believing them to be a mistake. & here they are outside our window several mornings in a row–so close now, we nearly kiss…
8.
I say “nearly” in the third strophe because I did come in second during the final event against my friend Domingo, who taught me that his name means “Sunday” in Spanish, which is to say that, out of my performed act of good faith, which really meant I knew my lungs were gassed & my legs were slick with fatigue & my shoes lacked the traction necessary to outrun Domingo in a head-on sprint, I suggested to my friend that we should forego first place bragging rights & do our best to cross the finish line in tandem.
9.
Killer Mike’s 2023 song, “Run,” provides a counter-narrative in his visual & lyrical making that, too, is a depiction of running as marronage. Running, then, can be viewed as a movement toward a more liberatory existence. Therefore, what Samuel A. Cartwright diminishes as drapetomania (a pseudo-medical condition applicable to enslaved persons in flight from unfreedom) is in fact a radical forward motion, wherein the whole body determines departure from/to.
10.
Perhaps this is not the time to tell you I lost the race.
11.
According to Neil Roberts,
[t]he term maroon derives etymologically from the vocabulary of indigenous Arawaks and Tainos in the Caribbean…[He adds, marronage] means ‘flight,’ and the term maroon and marronage are each nouns…[Aimé] Césaire, therefore, invents a verb to denote the action and collective agency against slavery entailed in marronage…[so] [f]light [then] can be both real and imagined…[&] the theory of marronage [suggests] [f]reedom is not a place; it is a state of being…[This is to say that] [f]light is multidimensional, constant, and never static.
12.
My eldest brother was a football standout. Two-point-something G.P.A. From a low-income household. Black. The first in our family to envision a Division I athletic scholarship.
I imagine his football scouting report in 1992 reading: Quarterback. Junior Year. Number 12. 6’4.” 185 lbs. A young Randall Cunningham.
I remember those Friday nights vividly. I was twelve shivering next to my father on the silver bleachers that served as stairway & bench watching my brother move fluidly across the field.
13.
A field reminds me of my high school history teacher who stopped me at the doorway of his classroom to tell me if I did not run track for him I would fail his course—& fluid reminds me of a shoreline the way memories lap upon hearing “The Negro Speak of Rivers.”
14.
& speaking of rivers, it is necessary to recognize that Langston Hughes published his collection Shakespeare in Harlem, which opens with his “Seven Moments of Love: An Un-Sonnet Sequence in Blues,” against the backdrop of a country in economic decline, or, as Clyde Woods explains in Development Arrested:
From the onset of the [Great] Depression, the blues as the voice of the African American community captured every intimate detail of the challenges faced by their audience…The songs were indicative of the times: “Broke Man Blues,”…“Collection Man Blues,” “Depression Blues,”…“Insurance Blues,” “Mean Old Master Blues,” “WPA Blues.”
Under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Works Progress Administration, & later, the Works Project Administration, or the WPA that Hughes references in “Seven Moments of Love,” was established as a nationwide federal program to support & reinvigorate US-American employment & infrastructure. However, Woods paints a different reality of the conditions created on the ground, when he posits:
Under the WPA, Black [workers] received a maximum wage of $30 a month while White [workers] received $42. Skilled Black [laborers] were classified as unskilled and unskilled White [laborers] were classified as skilled. Of the 10,000 white-collar WPA positions in the state [of Mississippi, for example], only six were occupied by Black [persons]. In September 1936, thousands of African American WPA workers in Mississippi were dismissed in a matter of several days only to be replaced by White workers. The purpose of this action by federal authorities was to force Black [bodies] into the fields to work as cotton pickers for 50 cents per hundred pounds of cotton.
Hughes himself was no stranger to such circumstances. He witnessed the conditions firsthand when he & others traveled down to Mississippi as members of the Colored Advisory Commission to assess the treatment of communities of color shortly after the Great Flood of 1927. Upon witnessing the aftermath, Hughes would document how “[s]ome [Black residents] were surrounded by National Guardsmen. Negroes were not allowed outside the gates without the permission of their landlords who were waiting for the water to subside so they could force these refugees back into semi-slavery.”
15.
As for semi-slavery, my beautiful, ear-hustling mother tells me how her grandmother spoke of Black bodies being sold on the riverfront in St. Louis well into the 1950s.
& my Google results lead me to “[o]ne of the most significant WPA projects in St. Louis [which] was flood control on the River des Peres (meaning River of the Fathers).”
& when I Wikipedia “River des Peres” I envision how “WPA workers lined the riverbanks with stone to prevent flooding” & how, long before the lining with stone, “a group of Kaskaskia Indians crossed the Mississippi [during the late 1600s to] establish…a settlement near the river’s confluence.” & from there I cannot tell you where they have gone.
Therefore, one might say that memory, too, “enters underground culverts from north of Forest Park [before] emerg[ing] south…into concrete channels [that flow] into the Mississippi.”
16.
You are also running along this particular US-American construction—that is, too, a roadway & its history of mythmaking where Gump will soon turn to face his people with his back to a future we all know is paved with “good intentions.”
17.
I turn to greet you as well, my audience, as I should have greeted you long before you followed me so patiently along my meanderings wherein I attempt to belabor the point of existence within these constructed confines—
& so my gratitude to you for understanding: Where my economy of language has failed, you have kindly endured without taking leave, or lead, as someone who might have influenced others to overthrow my own house of good intentions where I have held you in attempt to historicize the idea of endurance against one’s privilege to express: “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”
18.
Speaking of endurance, & since you are still here, may I also confess that I, too, would like to imagine that I have been in this position before, were someone to ask why it is that I insist on employing the ampersand instead of spelling the coordinating conjunction and out right, thus using this part of speech correctly.
& if I were to answer that my decision is not purely cosmetic & that it goes beyond the way it rests upon the page—& that it allows me to introduce more characters on a given line, which is, when it comes to writing in a particular structure, imperative, I imagine my listener raising their eyebrows with the expectation that I might have responded with “It was for no particular reason” which is perhaps less popular than “instinctual” which is less acceptable than “improvisational” which is unlike what those following Gump might have thought as they stilled, punctuated in silence, expecting to hear something no doubt wonderous, forward-thinking, conscious, & downright intelligible in his delivery, as if to say,
“As you know, the ampersand is a logogram. I liken the ampersand to the fourteenth century coordinating conjunctions, it being the third cousin of distant relatives, twice removed, who were excommunicated from the eight parts of speech & thus exiled from their familial plot—&, as a result of the ampersand’s unwillingness to assimilate within the ‘natural order of things,’ it was purposed to set off on its own course with a small gathering of reasonable followers who were led into the deep recesses of the forest to establish tight-knit communities—&, had e.e. cummings understood this context in his poem, ‘in Just-spring,’ he could have strengthened, symbolically, the already inseverable ties between eddieandbill & bettyandisbel if he had simply considered more deeply the bonding nature of the ampersand, which carries with it its own connotation within said communities.”
But, alas, he did not. & if you, like I, were to attempt an expedient Google search pertaining to Gump’s actual reasoning for running x number of miles under the elements, predictable & unpredictable alike, perhaps, you, too, would have stumbled across something valuable & yet unpleasantly offish, since, as you know, “shit happens,” which, in Gump’s case, “shit” becomes lucrative. &, as a result of your finding “shit,” you might internalize how fertilizers enhance the production of a field, which is not accidental when following the capital that is whiteness, which, in Gump’s case, yields expected fruits belonging to an imaginary resident within an imaginary town who was said to have been running “for no particular reason.”
19.
Or, if I may rephrase the eighteenth strophe in this way: All of this can be said to have prompted Gump’s running along the stretch of roadway that promised him thousands of miles that are themselves both metaphorical & ideological constructions gesturing him forward in a manner that some might liken to an invisible hand for as long as he might endure (provided that he does not stray from what has been established before him), while keeping in pace behind him are the runners who have followed Gump along this road & who I shall soon bring to a gentle pause, purposely, before you.
20.
So, when my colleague, the graduate student who fancies himself an ally, asks me if I have published my “running while Black” poem because he has written his “running while white” poem, should I ignore the fact that he has been gifted with the dictum to “steal”? Should I, out of a perceived solidarity that reflects my own desires for attainable love, downplay his advances toward my wife?
& when another in workshop says he always feels comfortable walking down the street, should I understand him to mean “any street” where I may not find my presence welcome?
21.
& speaking of presence, in Teju Cole’s essay “Reframing Vermeer,” Cole writes:
My relationship with art has changed…It is an artifact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness—the world when [Vermeer’s art] was made and the world now. Looking at [works of art in their context] this way doesn’t spoil them. On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal, divulging all kinds of other things I need to know.
& so I reframe for you a motion picture, not to diminish, but to consider how landscapes of enjoyment & complicity coexist.
22.
Given this terrain, I must not hold back from you any longer how I thought to write my meanderings as an essay but then returned them to the poem. & how, after Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for running while Black, my white wife & I put on our shoes & ran the 2.23 miles his coach suggested. & when a man who mirrors my presence was harassed in our city by his white neighbor on account of him jogging, we ran again. & I know my writing this does not resolve. & yes, my running is different from my wife’s running. & yes, there is something offish about the air. & still, I have not revealed anything to you that you do not already know.
Bubba’s narrative
is running through the under
-story of forest.
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