It’s barely 7:00am and I am running. I am the only runner on Cross Seminole Trail. Someone just called me the n-word, directly. I find it strange, to couple slur with greeting, a gross inarticulation of Maya Angelou’s presidential inaugural exhortation. Why not just holler, ‘nigger!’ I’m unnerved but also curious, so while I neither slow, stop, nor pick up my pace, I do swivel my head to see who’s pierced my calm, the meditative Zen I’ve deliberately sought on this finally cool, late summer Sunday morning in Central Florida.
[The white man sits alone at a picnic table under a large spreading oak dripping with Spanish moss behind a somewhat dilapidated white house bounded by white PVC stanchions and “No Trespassing” signs. Our eyes meet.]I think to shout ‘morning,’ or ‘peace,’ or even, ‘god bless,’ but Amaud Arbery. I keep running, unable to hear what else he hurls at my retreating back.
My run is ruined. You don’t hear, “Morning, nigger,” and just keep running in the same vein. No more marveling at multi-colored bougainvillea and late blooming myrtle and the silvering morning sky. No more counting black racer snakes warming in the rising sun. No more cardinal spotting. My run spirals into ugly meditation: how long until my children face a racist assault; other, less overt, racist encounters I’ve had to negotiate; and, is Florida wearing me down?
In 2016 when I moved from Brooklyn to Orlando for a tenure track position teaching Creative Writing, my new campus community asked constantly after my wellbeing. I wonder now if the on replay, “How are you?” wasn’t more, “How are you?” a subtle concern for a black woman new to Florida, and thus likely to encounter reasons to not be okay. I answered those solicitous inquiries with honesty: I was good. I’ve never moved with a hyper awareness of my blackness, even in situations where I was the only black body in the room; growing up in a majority black nation, even if it is a small island in the Caribbean Sea, will give you that confidence. I knew how America perceived me, but that spectre of me was America’s problem.
I did miss my New York life, but in Florida, securely employed, I could attend to the business of my adulthood: realistically save for a house, send my children to the neighborhood public school, be closer to my in-laws. In the 2008 and the 2012 election cycles, the state had voted for Obama. I could live with purple politics, and so much greenery and lakes and the ocean not too far away.
But, there was an early warning moment, right before the 2016 presidential election, when on a drive through wealthy Winter Park, I noticed Trump/Pence lawn signs where before I’d only ever seen a staunch one. Now, like mushrooms after an August rain, was another one, and another one, and still, another one.
Shaken, I drove to Publix and stood at the deli counter. No line, just me waiting to be served. When the man came up and started looking at the cold cuts in the case, I considered, but didn’t actually think he would, except when the server said next and he looked pointedly at me before drawling, “Yeah, lemme have,” I thought, oh, he did.
“I’m next,” I said. And the way he stopped and turned confirmed no mistake had been made. In my world, if in error, that exchange proceeds with an apology from him, and me saying, ‘it’s fine, go ahead.’ But the look he gives me, the red-faced glare, the curled lip, the absolute revulsion I read in those blue eyes, frighten me.
The following day, I abandon office hours and run across the manicured lawn to the Black Sister Circle gathering. At that moment what I needed was home, not to excavate a freshly seeded wound to convince someone who could never know how I’d been demeaned and humiliated by a look.
The women in my group nod. Their repeated refrain: “Welcome to Florida.”
A year ago we bought a home. Our many older neighbors are unfailingly nice. Bring over homemade pumpkin loaves nice; bring over ripe mangoes and sweet pineapples nice; offer a spare grass edger for your unruly lawn nice. Minor sallies toward politics hint at radical divide, and we quickly pull back from those exchanges.
We have been made to feel welcome, although I did consider getting my children a puppy because who would question two adorable black kids’ right to belong if they were frequently seen walking a non-threatening breed? I recognize this impulse for what it is, puppy as respectability prop to stay a shallow fear that it only takes one mistake for my children to be endangered. It’s another chink in the confidence armor.
On this Sunday I am no longer a woman who runs, a mother of two, an extrovert, a college professor, a homeowner.
This June, after George Floyd’s public murder, I didn’t write. I had nothing new to say. My social media accounts unearthed anniversary posts for Mike Brown’s killing, Dajerria Becton’s assault, and other past summertime police atrocities.
I sometimes reposted those, resigned at the ever relevant repeated sentiment. Mostly, instead of working on my novel-in-progress, I try to enjoy my home with a vengeance. I spend hours by the pool and cook complicated family meals. I dominate at Uno. I read many new works of fiction and do difficult crossword puzzles. I drink vinho verde and negronis. I fuss over my houseplants.
I will normal.
My husband, also a white man, offers his proximity, to bike alongside me when I run. He suggests if this happens again, I stop and call the police (I fail at side-eye restraint). Carry pepper spray, he tells me. And, we need a gun. I’m not anti-gun, but am I supposed to run with a gun? Am I supposed to shoot someone?
I’m not willing to take any of these steps in order to go for a run on a Sunday morning. I run for exercise, but also for peace and solitude, to commune with nature, and sometimes with my god and my ancestors.
I’ve run for thirty years. To start running with an escort or armed is to surrender something fundamental to my freedom and individualism; my pursuit of happiness. I will have lost the talisman that allows me to remain resistant to forces intent on my destruction. If that reads to you like an exaggeration, you know not of what I speak.
I continue to insist on space for sanity and refuse to live watched. On Monday morning after the assault, I could have chosen to run east, away from the scene. Instead, I headed west, daring to face the waiting hate.
Reading Suggestions:
The Black Interior by Elizabeth Alexander
The Sovereignty of Quiet by Kevin Quashie
The Book of Little Axe by Lauren Francis Sharma.
Victoria Brown is an English Professor at Rollins College. She writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has been published in the Guardian, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. Her novel, Minding Ben, is published by Hyperion.
