MITCHELL S JACKSON
AUTHOR
In his Pulitzer Prizewinning account, the New York novelist explores race and the culture of running
One Sunday afternoon in February 2020, a young man named Ahmaud Arbery went out for a run and was shot dead in the street. More than a year later, the question of how we can make the world safer for all athletes is as pertinent as ever. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning article, Mitchell S Jackson tells Arbery’s story and asks: Who deserves to run? What does a runner look like? And is the community failing its black members?
IMAGINE YOUNG AHMAUD “MAUD” ARBERY ON THE PRACTICE FIELD OF THE BRUNSWICK HIGH PIRATES AMERICAN FOOTBALL TEAM.
The coach has been taunting his defensive players. “Y’all ain’t ready,” he says. “You can’t stop us.” In the next bit of action, Maud – who, at 5ft 10in and a shade under 76kg, is small for his defensive linebacker position – bursts between blockers and makes a tackle that echoes across the field. It’s a feat that the teenage Maud intends as a message to his coaches, his teammates and anyone else who still needs to hear it: don’t test my heart. Some teammates smash their fist to their mouth, saying, “Oooh.” Others slap one another’s pads and point. An assistant coach runs to the aid of the tackled teammate. And the head coach blows his whistle. “Why’d you hit him like that?” he shouts. “Save that for Friday.” That Friday, in Glynn County Stadium (one of the largest high school stadiums in American football-loving Georgia), the Pirates, clad in their white jerseys with blue and gold trim, stampede out of the fog-filled mouth of a blow-up tunnel onto the field. The school band plays, and cheerleaders shake pompoms. There’s a raucous sea of blue and gold in the stands, including plenty of Maud’s people. Game time: the opposition calls the same play that Maud put the fierce kaput on in practice, and beneath a floodlit glare that’s also a gauntlet, Maud barrels towards the running back and – boom! – makes a hit that sounds like trucks colliding. It’s a noise that resounds into the stands, that just might ring all over Brunswick. The fans send up a mighty roar of appreciation, but Maud merely trots to the sidelines, almost insouciant. Assistant coach Jason Vaughn grabs him by his face mask. “Now, that’s how you hit,” he says, tamping down his astonishment that a boy his size could tackle that hard. But that’s young Maud through and through – undersized in the physical sense, supersized in heart.
SUNDAY 23/02/2020 1.04PM
Time-stamped security footage from an adjacent home shows Maud, who is out for a run in Brunswick’s Satilla Shores area, wandering up a sunny patch of narrow road and stopping on the spotty lawn of a sand-coloured, underconstruction bungalow addressed 220 Satilla Drive. There’s a red portable toilet in the front yard. The garage is wide open.
Maud, dressed in low-top Nikes, white T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, loafs on the lawn for a moment before drifting into the building. The security camera records him inside; it’s a skeleton of beams and plywood and stacks of piping and wire. There are boxes of materials scattered about and a small forklift in a corner. Maud doesn’t touch any of those things. He looks around, then gazes beyond the frame of the camera towards the river behind the house. Maybe he conjures an image of a family who could afford to live in a place so close to water.
Maud isn’t the first person to wander onto the site. Its security cameras have recorded others, including a white couple one evening and a pair of white boys another day. On four occasions, it also recorded what appears to be the same person: a slim, young, black man with wild, natural hair and tattoos on his shoulders and arms, a man who, by my eye, does not resemble Maud. Let me add that the homeowner will confirm that nothing was stolen or damaged during any of the visits.
Meanwhile, a neighbour spies Maud roaming the site and calls the police. “There’s a guy in the house right now,” he reports. The man waits near the corner of Jones Road and Satilla Drive. “I just need to know what he’s doing wrong,” says the officer. “He’s been caught on the camera a bunch before. It’s kind of an ongoing thing out here,” says the caller. It’s a statement of which he can’t be sure, though he does get right Maud’s physical description: “Black guy, white T-shirt.”
To fathom what it meant for Maud to be out for a run in Glynn County, Georgia, you need to know a thing or two about recreational running in the US. Before the 1960s, unless you were a serious athlete, your attitude to jogging would likely have been: “Now, why would I do that?” But in 1962, track coach and Nike co-founder Bill Bowerman visited New Zealand and met fellow coach Arthur Lydiard, who had developed a cross-country training programme. Bowerman returned to the US excited by what he had seen. He launched a similar programme in Eugene (home of his employer, the University of Oregon) and wrote a pamphlet on the subject in 1966. The next year, he published a co-written book called Jogging: A Medically Approved Physical Fitness Program for All Ages, Prepared by a Heart Specialist and a Famous Track Coach. That book became a bestseller and kick-started jogging as an American pastime and the first global running boom.
I am one of the rarest of Americans
– a black Oregonian. As such, I feel compelled to share a truth about my home state: it’s white. I’m talking banned-blacks-in-itsstate-constitution white. At the time Bowerman was inspiring Eugene residents to trot miles around their neighbourhoods in sweatpants and running shoes, the city was a stark
97% white. One could argue that the overwhelming whiteness of running in America today may be, in part, a product of Eugene’s demographics. But the monolithic character of running can be credited to the ways in which it has been marketed and to the systemic forces that have placed it somewhere on a continuum between impractical extravagance and unaffordable hazard for scores of people who aren’t white.
Around the time Bowerman visited New Zealand, millions of black
Americans were living in the Jim Crow (segregated) South. By 1968, blacks had mourned the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. And by the late 1960s and beyond, the black Americans of the Great Migration from the southern states were pressed into ever more depressed sections of northern and western cities, areas where the streets were less and less safe to walk, much less run. Forces aplenty discouraged black Americans from reaping the manifold benefits of running. And though the demographics of runners have become more diverse over the past 50 years, by and large it remains a pastime pitched to privileged white people.
I invite you to ask yourself: who deserves to run? Who has the right?
Ask who’s a runner. What’s their so-called race? Their gender? Their class? Ask yourself where they live. Where do they run? Where can’t they live and run? Ask what the sanctions are for asserting their right to live and run in the world. Ahmaud Arbery, by all accounts, loved to run but didn’t call himself a runner. That is a shortcoming of the culture of running. That Maud’s jogging made him the target of hegemonic white forces is a certain failure of America. Black people have never owned the same freedom of movement as whites.
1.08PM
Maud strolls out of the house and begins to jog. He is unaware of the witness who called the police, a man still surveilling him. “He’s running right now. There he goes right now,” says the witness. “OK, what is he doing?” says the officer. “He’s running down the street,” says the man.
The footage shows Maud jogging past the Satilla Drive home of Gregory and Travis McMichael – a father and son. Gregory McMichael, an ex-cop stripped of his power to arrest for failure to attend use-of-force training, notices Maud passing his house and deems him suspicious. “Travis, the guy is running down the street,” he shouts. “Let’s go.” For reasons the McMichaels must now account for in court (though months passed before their arrest, both were indicted on nine counts in June last year, including felony murder and
“By and large, running remains a pastime pitched to privileged white people”
aggravated assault, and in November they were denied bail), they arm themselves – the son with a Remington 870 shotgun and the father with a .357 Magnum pistol – and hop in a white Ford pickup truck.
Part of the golden isles, which lie along Georgia’s Atlantic coast between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida, Satilla Shores is a neighbourhood of upper- and middle-class families; of blue- and white-collar retirees; of seasonal holiday-home owners and lifelong denizens. The small neighbourhood features narrow roads canopied by moss-draped live oaks, tall southern pines and crepe myrtle, and one- and two-storey homes with landscaped lawns. Homes on one side of Satilla Drive back onto the sediment-coloured Little Satilla River.
Maud’s family home in Brunswick, the one where he lived at the time he was killed, is a mere two miles from Satilla Shores but, in meaningful ways, it’s almost in another country. The median household income for all of Glynn County is $51,000 (£38,000); in Brunswick, that figure is $26,000 (£19,000). The poverty rate in what young black residents call “the Wick” is a staggering 38%.
The Wick is where Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was born on 8 May 1994. He was the third child of Wanda Cooper-Jones and Marcus Arbery Sr. Their workingclass family also included his elder brother, Marcus “Buck” Jr, and sister, Jasmine. The family called Ahmaud “Quez”, a shortened version of his middle name, while his friends called him Maud. Maud had a slight gap in his front teeth and dark skin forever burnished by hours spent outside. He attended Altama Elementary School and, around that time, Maud met his best friend, Akeem “Keem” Baker, a fellow resident of the Leeswood
Circle apartment complex.
Keem, who in those days was a chubby introvert, recalls Maud being one of the popular kids. The “sandlock brothers”, as Keem called them, were soon inseparable: sitting together on the bus to school, playing a football game called Hot Ball, or a basketball game they christened Curb Ball.
In those days, Maud’s brother, Buck, just three years older, was a hovering protector. Buck also introduced Maud to American football. He began playing with Buck’s friends, boys who were two and three years older or more. During an early neighbourhood contest, one of those friends tackled Maud so hard that Buck moved to defend him. Before he did, Maud sprang to his feet and shook it off. “I knew then he was tough,” says Buck. “That he was going to be able to take care of himself.”
Around that time, Maud’s parents gave his sister a Yorkshire terrier that she named Flav. Maud might have been hard-nosed on the football field, but he spent hours frolicking with Flav outside and helping his sister with caretaking duties.
The family moved to a small, white house on Brunswick’s Boykin Ridge Drive, and in the new place Maud continued to share a room with his brother. “I was a neat freak,” says Buck. “But Maud would have his shoes scattered everywhere – have his T-shirts where his boxers go, his polos with his socks.”
At high school, Maud got a job working at McDonald’s, to put some cash in his pocket and to help his mother, who often worked two jobs. By then, Maud had adopted some of his brother’s tidiness and become fashion-conscious. He favoured slim jeans and brightly coloured polo shirts and kept his hair shorn low with a sharp hairline. Some days, Keem
– the first to have a car – would drive Maud to the Golden Isles YMCA and play basketball and/or work out for six or seven hours straight, jaunt across the street to Glynn Place Mall for a fries-and-wings combo, and head back for hours more of playing/training.
Brunswick High coach Jason Vaughn met Maud in his second year there, when a fellow coach promised him a tough linebacker for his squad. When Maud, slim and undersized, walked out, Vaughn was quick to doubt him. “What’s this little guy gonna do?” he said. He soon had his answer. “He was fearless on that field,” Keem remembers.
When Maud tore his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and meniscus in a game, a less dedicated player might have given up, but he completed an arduous rehab. He reinjured his leg the following summer and committed again to a tough rehabilitation. “Our parents used to tell us, if you start something, don’t quit,” says his sister, Jasmine. Maud needed to wear a leg brace, which hampered him and his prospects of a college scholarship. Still, the fact that he played at all in a league that included a number of future pros is further proof of his strong character.
1.10PM
The McMichaels, both armed, tear off after Maud in their pickup and stalk him down Burford Road, a narrow street shaded by lush oaks, pines and magnolias. From his front yard, William “Roddie” Bryan sees his neighbours hounding Maud, and for reasons he’ll have to explain in court (he has been indicted on nine counts, including murder and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment), jumps in his pickup and joins them.
The McMichaels race ahead of Maud and try to cut him off, but Maud doubles back, only to find himself facing down Bryan’s pickup. Bryan tries to block Maud, but he skirts the truck and runs around a bend onto Holmes Road. The elder McMichael climbs from the cab to the bed of his son’s truck, the one with a Confederate flag on its toolbox, armed with his .357. They track Maud as he sprints down Holmes Road.
Maud played in the prestigious Florida-Georgia War of the Border All-Star game after his senior season but didn’t land a college football scholarship. After graduating, he enrolled in South Georgia Technical College (SGTC) and set his sights on becoming an electrician.
Like Maud, I was a high school athlete (my sport was basketball) who was not recruited to a major college. And, like Maud, I attended a small college in my home state. Both Maud and I saw friends win scholarships, float off to towns and cities elsewhere and continue playing the sports we loved. Maud quit SGTC after a year and returned to Brunswick and his mother’s home.
I, too, quit my first community college. But I didn’t have to return to my mother’s apartment, because I already lived there. James “JT” Trimmings, another of Maud’s old friends, believes that homesickness was the cause of Maud’s premature return from college. But I
“The McMichaels, both armed, tear off after Maud in their pickup and stalk him”
suspect that Maud also doubled back because his life as an athlete was over, and disappointment can grind on even the toughest of us.
The year after he graduated, Maud was arrested for carrying a gun and sentenced to five years of probation, which he violated by shoplifting.
A few years after I graduated from high school, I was arrested with drugs and a gun and spent 16 months in a state prison. But Maud is dead and I, by grace, am a writer-professor hurtling towards middle age.
If Maud nursed thoughts of re-enrolling in SGTC, that idea lost its appeal once he met his first serious girlfriend in 2013. Shenice Johnson noticed Maud when he strolled into McDonald’s one day and convinced the manager to give him his old job back. The pair were soon eyeing each other up on their shifts.
According to Shenice, their five-plus-year relationship began when she offered the boy at work a free McFlurry. On their first date, Maud, wearing a white-collared shirt and sparkling Nike Air Force 1 shoes, treated Shenice to a seafood feast, opened doors, pulled out her chair and paid the bill without hesitation. “When I was with him, I didn’t have to worry about anything,” she says, a smile in her voice. On the couple’s first Valentine’s Day, Maud drove all the way to Savannah, bought Shenice a Build-a-Bear he named Quez and delivered it to her along with a gold, heart-shaped promise ring.
1.14PM
Mobile phone footage captures Maud on Holmes Road, bolting away from Bryan’s truck but towards the McMichaels’ white pickup. Bryan, about this time, pulls out his phone and starts to film. Meanwhile, Gregory McMichael calls the police. “Uh, I’m out here at Satilla Shores,” he says. “There’s a black male running down the street.” He’s asked where. “I don’t know what street we’re on,” he says.
“Stop right there. Dammit. Stop!” the tape records him yelling at Maud.
Maud, fleeing now for no less than six minutes, runs towards a red-faced Travis McMichael, who stands inside the door of his truck with his shotgun aimed, and towards Gregory McMichael, perched in the truck bed with his gun in hand. He runs into what must feel like a trap, but perhaps it feels like another time his courage has been tested. Maud zigs one way, zags the other. He darts around the right side of the truck and crosses in front. Travis McMichael heads him off at the nose of the truck and shoots Maud in no more than a heartbeat. The blast cracks over Bryan’s cell footage. “Travis!” screams Gregory McMichael and he drops his phone in the truck bed.
The buckshot blast hits Maud in the chest, puncturing his right lung, ribs and his sternum. And yet, somehow, he wrestles with Travis McMichael for the shotgun; and yet, somehow, he manages to punch at him. Gregory watches for a moment from his roost. Meanwhile,
Bryan continues to film. Travis fires his shotgun again, a blast that occurs outside the view of Bryan’s phone, but sends a spray of dust billowing into the frame.
Maud, an island of blood now staining his white T-shirt, continues to tussle with Travis McMichael, fighting now for what he must know is his life. In the midst of the scuffle,
Travis McMichael blasts Maud again point blank, piercing him in his upper chest. Maud takes a weak swing, staggers a couple of steps and falls face-down. Travis, shotgun in hand, backs away, watches Maud collapse and makes not the slightest effort to help him. His father, still clutching his revolver, runs to where Maud lies, blood leaking out of his wounds.
Maud jogged alone on the day he was killed. No one can know for sure the route he took before reaching Satilla Shores, but he had set off from his home, so there’s a strong chance that on his run he encountered homes flying a Confederate flag. To reach Satilla Shores from Boykin Ridge, he would have also had to cross US Route 17, a highway that for years served as a de facto border between the area’s blacks and whites.
Maud had been running for years, but the origin of his practice lacks consensus. According to his sister, Jasmine, who was also once an avid runner, sometime in 2017, Maud asked her how many miles a day she ran, and soon after began doing it himself. She says it was natural for her brother, because he loved the outdoors and “wanted a release”. Akeem agrees that Maud used running as a kind of therapy, but thinks his main motivation
was staying fit after football. This theory would locate the timing of when he began running to a few years before 2017.
Maud would run in a white T-shirt and khaki shorts. He would run shirtless in basketball shorts. Or, as Keem sums it up, “He could run in anything.” Sometimes, Maud would persuade JT and a couple of other friends to drive out to the North Glynn Country Recreational Complex and run around the park’s freshwater lake. Other times, when Keem was home from college, he and Maud would cruise to one end of the Sidney Lanier Bridge, do some warm-up stretching and run back and forth across it, a distance of just under three miles. The pair would keep a steady pace. “But sometimes he’d push me,” says Akeem.
There’s no evidence of Maud training for 10Ks or full or half marathons, or obsessing over his mileage or PBs. Yet it’s obvious that he was a young man who loved to run and who, by all accounts, was a gifted runner.
1.15PM
According to the police report, Gregory McMichael rolls Maud onto his back to check for a weapon. He checks despite the fact that Maud hasn’t brandished or fired a gun during any part of his flight, not even when caught between two armed white men and what he couldn’t have known was an unarmed white man behind him. Glynn County police officers will arrive within seconds of the shooting, their sirens screaming along
Satilla Drive. But before those squad cars reach the scene, Travis McMichael – according to Bryan’s statement to investigators in May last year – will call Maud a “f**king [N-word]”.
The bridge that Maud and Keem used to run on is named after the 19thcentury poet and Confederate Sidney Lanier. It’s hard to imagine a Georgian with honorifics on a par with Lanier. Along with that bridge, there’s also the eponymous Lanier County in southern Georgia and a Lake Lanier. Keem seems surprised when I mention Lanier’s Confederate ties, which makes me wonder how much Maud knew about the history of his home. Whether the young men were aware of Lanier’s hagiography or not (who stops to read the plaque on a bridge?), every single run across that bridge was an insult, an insidious means of humiliating them and their people. Yeah, the tiki-torch-toting bald-faced racists are a menacing spectacle. But what about the legions of bigoted invisible men and their myriad symbols?
Lanier died in 1881, which is to say, near the end of Reconstruction and the outset of Jim Crow. In 1964, a few months after the Civil Rights Act ushered the de jure end to Jim Crow, a documentary film crew from National Educational Television profiled Brunswick, because it was managing to integrate without the bloodshed that was occurring almost everywhere else in the South. The Quiet Conflict won numerous awards and was a key reason for Brunswick’s reputation as a “model southern city”.
While Brunswick might not have equalled the bloodletting of its southern counterparts, its segregationists still put up stern resistance. In one example, the Ku Klux Klan was called in to threaten blacks attempting to integrate a local bowling alley. In another, whites filled a public swimming pool with dirt rather than let black kids swim in it. Several residents have gone on record to proclaim their surprise at Maud’s killing and to downplay the significance of race. And for those who would argue that the spirit of Sidney Lanier and the segregationists is long gone, or that the younger McMichael might not have said what Bryan claimed in his statement to police, evidence – including McMichael’s own social media posts, cited by US investigators – suggests something different. I submit, as another example, this Facebook post from Chris Putnam, who went to high school with Travis McMichael: “I’m not going to be one of the classmates of Travis McMichael’s that sat here saying nothing. He was always the very definition of a racist, gun-loving redneck and we all knew something like this was going to happen one day. I remember plenty of people that were themselves very openly racist and joked about how ‘at least [they weren’t] Travis’.”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the US once defined lynching as a death in which 1) There was evidence that a person was killed, 2) The death was illegal and
3) A group of at least three actors participated in the killing. According to Lynching in America, a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, there were 4,084 southern-state lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Of the 594 reported in Georgia during that period – one of only four states yet to pass a law on hate crimes – three occurred in Glynn County. Between 1920 and 1938, the NAACP New York headquarters flew a flag that announced “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” to mark a murder that fit their criteria.
1.16PM
“Two subjects on Holmes Road. Shots fired. Male on ground, bleeding out,” radios a police officer. Maud musters his last breath near the intersection of Holmes Road and Satilla Drive, a mere 300m from where, not 10 minutes earlier, he’d wandered inside a construction site. The officers will cordon off the scene and investigate. They will question the McMichaels – Gregory’s hands bloody from rolling Maud onto his back – and William Bryan. And in an act that is itself another violence, they will let all three go about their merry way as free men – for almost three months. On 23 February 2020, a young man out for a run was lynched in Glynn County, Georgia. His name was Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, called “Quez” by
his loved ones and “Maud” by most others. And what I want you to know about Maud is that he had a gift for impressions and a special knack for mimicking the actor Martin Lawrence. What I want you to know about Maud is that he had a sweet tooth and requested his mother’s fudge cake for the birthday parties he often shared with his big sister. What I want you to know about Maud is that he signed the cards he bought for his mother “Baby Boy”. What I want you to know about Maud is that he and his brother would don the helmets they used for go-karting and go heads-up on their trampoline and that he never backed down from his big brother.
What I want you to know about Maud is that he jammed his little finger playing basketball at school and instead of getting it treated, like Jasmine advised, he let it heal on its own: it remained forever crooked. What I want you to know about Maud is that he didn’t like seeing his friends whining; that when they did, he’d chide, “Don’t cry about it, man. Do what you gotta do to handle your business.”
What I want you to know about Maud is that Shenice told me he sometimes recorded their conversations, so he could listen to her voice when they were apart. What you should know about Maud is that he adored his nephews Marcus III and Micah Arbery; that when they were colicky as babies, he’d take them for long walks in their pram until they calmed. What you should know about Maud is that when a college friend asked Jasmine which parent she’d call first if ever in serious trouble, she said neither, she’d call Maud. What I want you to know about Maud is that he was a connoisseur of the McChicken sandwich with cheese. What I want you to know about Maud is that he and
Keem were so close that the universe coerced each of them into breaking a foot on the same day in separate freak gym accidents, and that when they were getting treated in the trainer’s office, Maud joked about it. You should know that Maud dreamed of a career as an electrician and of owning a construction company. You should know that Maud gushed often of his desire to be a great husband and father. You should know that he told his friends that he wanted them all to buy a huge plot of land, build houses on it and live in a gated community with their families.
You should know that Maud never flew on a plane but dreamed of trips to Jamaica, Japan, Africa. What you must know about Maud is that when Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William Bryan stalked and killed him less than three months shy of his 26th birthday, he left behind his mother, Wanda; his father, Marcus Sr; his brother, Buck; his sister Jasmine; his maternal grandmother, Ella; and his nephews, six uncles, 10 aunts and a host of cousins, all of whom are unimaginably, irrevocably, incontrovertibly poorer because of his absence.
Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video. He was more than a hashtag, or a name on a list of tragic victims. He was more than an article or an essay or posthumous profile. He was more than a headline or a news package or a part of the news cycle. He was more than a retweet or shared post. He was more than our likes, or emoji tears, or hearts, or praying hands. He was more than an RIP T-shirt or placard. He was more than an autopsy or a transcript, or a police report, or a live-streamed hearing. He was more than a rally or a march. He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He was loved.
Some of those loved ones got to see Maud play his last high school game, away at Lakeside-Evans High School. Maud is a team captain, so he swanks onto the 50-yard line to call the coin toss. Maud, who will earn the team award for most tackles that season, blazes around the field, but still his Pirates trail by 20 points at half time. But the team mounts a second-half comeback, one no more promising than when Maud leaps to snatch an interception, zags here, jukes there and bursts down the field, the wind whispering through his helmet, his lithe legs floating him oh, so close to – but not into – the end zone.
Ultimately, the Pirates lose the game and miss the playoffs. While their opponents celebrate, Maud and some of his teammates circle in the middle of the field. There they stand, hand in hand, tears running. Boys who will soon be young men mourning a season-ending loss, boys mourning the eternal end of their football seasons. Maud could use his gift for humour to lighten the mood, but he concedes to the moment’s gravity. Yes, some will play on at college. Others will attend as students alone. And some will forsake a campus altogether for work. But here’s the truth: under that final gleam of Friday night lights, neither Maud nor any of his teammates can be sure of what lies ahead.
“Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video or a name on a list of tragic victims”