Three thoughts

On car trouble, 'The Barn' and THM in your city (maybe?)

Car Trouble. Lately, I’ve found myself getting pretty down about the state of the world. (It’s not hard to do, right?) Yesterday, though, I remembered something that happened to me years ago, when I was rushing to get to work on a Monday morning.

It was 9:00 a.m. and I was at my desk, after having just slayed my way through Atlanta’s traffic. In the back of my mind, there was something bugging me; was I forgetting something? Some appointment I’m supposed to remember, something I’m supposed to do?

Sure enough, I looked in the work bag that carried my laptop, and there it was: an envelope addressed to me, from the Fulton County courthouse with the words “JURY SUMMONS” splashed in bold red letters across the front. When I opened it up, there was a number to call to find out whether you needed to be at the courthouse or not for jury duty. So I called.

What I heard on the other line was, “your group has been called for jury duty, arrive by no later than 9:00 a.m.” Immediately, I called a friend of mine who is an attorney and had experience trying cases in that court, hoping she’d tell me it’s no big deal if you miss jury duty. Her response was actually the opposite: “It totally depends on the judge trying the case,” she replied. “Some judges really hate it when jurors don’t show up, and they’ll issue a bench warrant for your arrest.”

(Gulp.)

So, I made a quick explanation to my boss, ran down to my car and rushed as quickly as I could downtown. I had to park at a parking lot far away and take a shuttle bus to the courthouse where jury selection was taking place. All the while, I’m watching time tick away on my watch, getting more nervous with each passing minute.

Finally, I made it inside, rushing past people in the hallway to the front desk, where a woman who works for the court is registering each potential juror as they arrive. I’m a wreck at this point, blurting out to her an apology for being late and trying to explain that I’d forgotten to check when I needed to be there, talking a mile a minute the whole time.

She could see the anxiety on my face, and replied with words I’ve never forgotten:

“Honey, you had car trouble.”

No, no, no, I said, urging her to accept my frenzied explanation. And that’s when she said it again, to make sure I understood her.

“Honey,” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “You had car trouble.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh….. I realized, now finally getting it. “You’re right,” I said. “Thank you.” And with a slight raise of her eyebrow and a little wave of her hand, I took a seat in the waiting area, realizing what an amazing thing she’d done for me.

Sometimes little miracles happen, you know?

‘The Barn.’ I’ve been reading this incredible book by ESPN magazine writer and native Mississippian Wright Thompson, on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and the forces that led up to this unspeakable crime, which helped to galvanize the then-burgeoning civil rights movement in America.

One of the most amazing facts you learn right away? That Thompson, who grew up on a farm less than two dozen miles away from the barn where Till was taken and subsequently beaten and murdered, had never heard his name until he left home for college. It took a history class, far away from the actual site, for him to be introduced to Till. That just astounds me.

(Though, I grew up in Georgia around the same time Thompson did in Mississippi; I doubt I’d heard his name either until I saw the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize, which aired when I was in high school.)

This passage especially — from the book’s first section, which details how the lives of Till and the men who killed him came to converge — put my jaw on the floor:

Emmett Till died [here] because that’s where Leslie Milam farmed, and Leslie Milam farmed there because for a very long time human beings have been trying to extract wealth from this square of land. The secret history of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people, by extreme structural value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life, is the story of how a group of people all ended up in the same barn on the same night in 1955. The Milams and the Bryants had been pushing westward for generations, cursed by greed and a kind of naive simpleness that would have made them almost sympathetic characters had their failure not curdled to unforgivable violence. They intersected with Till because the forces acting on him were in opposition to the forces acting on them. Where Milam and Bryant saw a setting sun Till saw a towering sky. Where they saw boundaries to protect he was just beginning to see boundaries to explore. They saw endings where he saw beginnings. Why was Emmett Till murdered? Why was he taken to Leslie Milam’s barn? The answers live in the soil itself. In the land.

The book, as Thompson explained so movingly on Ryan Holiday’s podcast back in September, goes both “wide and deep.” It’s a story that digs deep into what actually happened to Till all those years ago — which, Thompson adds, we’ll still be trying to explain to ourselves 200 years from now — but it’s also about the whole of America, how our whole story led up to that moment. It’s a fascinating, riveting read.

A THM run club in your city? Perhaps the most surprising, and rewarding, thing about writing this newsletter is the community that has grown up around it — which I couldn’t have imagined would happen when I first started writing it almost ten years ago, sending it out via Mailchimp.

When I moved it over to Substack in mid-2018, and opened up the comments on each newsletter to start hearing from you, I was blown away by the response. And then when Covid hit in 2020, and we all were more or less forced to stay home, I realized how much we needed a feeling of community, even when we couldn’t be together.

A few years on, and — especially after our race meetups in Richmond and Athens — I realize how great it is to get together in person and nurture the relationships we’ve built online here. Scott Douglas, in his great book Running Is My Therapy, says of the run clubs he’s been a part of:

“In the past year, I’ve run with people in their twenties and people in their seventies, as well as all ages between. Some are women, some are men. Some are married, some divorced, some never married. Some have grown children, some are childless, some started recently. We grew up in different times and different places and spend our days doing different work. Our lives are so much richer for the varied friendships we continually develop through running. How else would it be the case that the best friend I’ve made in the past decade is a mother of two who was born after I started running? How many depressed men my age have a way to nurture such relationships in just one or two hours a week?”

So I’ve been thinking: what if we could get together in person on a regular basis, even if it’s just once a month? Would you be interested in a THM run club in your city? It’s something I’ve always dreamed about as an extension of the newsletter, but have shied away from just because it seemed logistically difficult to pull off. But what if it’s not?

Would you be interested? Are there already enough run clubs where you live? I’d love to hear your thoughts. As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell