My personal history spans four states, but my emotional life is less transient. The incessant violence that is such a normal part of the Black American experience has rooted itself deep in my consciousness. It’s made a home there, with a place to rest and constant nourishment through daily headlines. It has become more of a home to me than all of the places I love and have inhabited.
Philadelphia has given me urgency and grit. New Jersey, a love affair with the ocean. Austin’s southern charm softened my manners, and Portland has unearthed a desire to explore so much of what remains unknown to me about this country, in its landscape and people.
All of these places are a reflection of self and have contributed to my identity. I remain protective of these spaces. Despite the feelings of pride and enjoyment I have experienced, however, I am faced with deep contradictions.
Travis Scott Jordan 1 Low Reverse Mocha Shirts Sneaker Match Brown Ballin Worldwide quantity New Jersey FedEx employee mocked the severity of the issues by pretending to kneel on a coworker’s neck. Amid sottolineato come il CSI ha sposato con entusiasmo lAvon Running Tour, nearly 150 people, mostly men and nearly all of them white, took to the Fishtown neighborhood to “protect” police officers from Black Lives Matter protesters. In Austin, my alma mater is reevaluating the history of “The Eyes of Texas,” a minstrel song that all first-year students learn at orientation that is supposed to be representative of the pride and tradition of excellence that exists in the student body. And Portland has become an epicenter of violence where peaceful protesters are clashing with white supremacists and federal troops.
“I Can’t Breathe” has become synonymous with the man-made destruction and violence that we see toward Black people by police, and now the man-made violence in the denial of the consequences of climate change.
Sparks of hate, violence, and oppression have turned into literal flames. Our country is burning, and resentment coupled with anxiety are the only tools it feels like we have to extinguish it.
I know one action or symbol does not reflect a place in its entirety. But these moments happening so closely to one another have made me reevaluate my attachment to these homes—and my needing and wanting to feel a part of something that so clearly rejects people who look like me.
We champion ourselves as the redeemer nation, the shining city upon the hill that is the epitome of democracy. But embedded in our American story are our horrific failures.
How do you live robustly, freely, even rebelliously in the confines of a nation that constantly reminds you of the fragility of your existence? That demands you play small in order to live, and sometimes even that is not enough?
This tension between wanting to belong to the only homes I’ve ever known and escaping to something that can offer me more made me run. Run to visit the small town of Amelia, Virginia, where my mom spent summers as a child, 50 years ago. I grew up listening to stories of her sleeping in rollers all night to ensure the perfect set of curls for Sunday service. Laughter etches in her voice when she recalls the exchange of city sounds for the buzzing of country flies. There are tales of my great-grandfather drinking moonshine in the backyard and playing cards, while a half a dozen women awaken at 3 a.m. to prepare a wooden stove to fry the chicken for church meals. The small town in Virginia taught my mom how to cook and offered her adventure in the countryside she couldn’t get living in New York.
We drove through winding backcountry roads piecing together handwritten directions from my cousin and my mom’s memory, abruptly making U turns in driveways when we went too far in either direction. We made a final stop at Chester Grove Baptist Church, a small brick building sitting on less than five acres, with our family’s burial plot.
The etchings in a pearl-colored grave stone for my great-great grandfather revealed a life spanning nearly 100 years that began the year before the abolition of slavery. I haven’t felt immense comfort during the pandemic or a swelling of connection visiting Virginia, but that date created feelings of familial pride in all that’s been accomplished through the generations since that date, and all that’s still possible.
The history and the conflict of this nation is part of our collective DNA, and that is so very different from what gives me my feelings of belonging. Pride in possibility belongs to me. Running belongs to me.
I chose running for myself. I chose it when I was 10 years old, and every morning when I wake up I choose it again. I wasn’t born there, but I have made a place of it.
The preconceptions of who I am, what I can be, and what spaces I can occupy are set free by running. It’s where I show up to see my most powerful self.
It creates connection and community. The kind of connection that helps you survive a pandemic, a family thousands of miles away, and a country whose distance between its ideals of racial equality and its reality spans miles I believe I will be covering for a lifetime. I still choose the run, I still choose transformational possibility, because that is my original story.
So much of Black life says that we are not allowed to have original stories, that we are not anything more than the sum of our disasters. Slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow have been the pillars of our narratives. There is momentum now to better understand our home and the racial construct of America through anti-racist readings, but I hope through all of these reckonings that we don’t forget the art. The novels, the poems, the actors, the athletes—they, too, have a life-altering power. They have been and are still at the center, they remain the drivers of global cultural activism. They, too, can be home.
I am invested in wanting to do as much as I can for my communities, which have contributed to who I am, but also wanting to make a life that feels separate from the hostility that has manifested itself there.
I’m realizing that I can’t just claim the good parts of my communities, the parts that make me proud. I have to also own up to its wrongs. Building new stories means using a critical lens in order to engage in the margins of the issues.
The flames have dismantled many things, but they have also created opportunities for growth and regeneration.
There will always be conflict, and differences in viewpoints, but the tipping point we have reached and the escalation we are experiencing is man-made. We can bring the temperature down. The fever will break. It has to.
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The idea of a physical space being the only way I’ve learned how to qualify home has been a lesson in my own privilege, and a reminder that for a lot of people in this country, making a home outside of a physical archetype is not new.
Running has provided me with a sanctuary and has been a motivating force to navigate loss, hatred, and disease.
If this pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that creating communities of love and inclusion has been essential work long before 2020. These are the places that allow us to reveal core parts of ourselves, to dig into our own interior without cost. They hold us responsible to not adjust to injustice, but to sit in it until we make change. They allow us to replenish so we can join the fight again and again. A physical space doesn’t mean it’s a home and a feeling or a physical activity that provides love, protection and belonging doesn’t mean it can’t be home.
Marielle Hall is training to make her second Olympic team in 2021. She belongs to the Bowerman Track Club and lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
