Room to Breathe

 A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

For every Trayvon Martin there was an Emmett Till

How many more kids will we wait for them to kill?

- Black Thought, “Rest in Power”

 

_________________

 

We begin on a bridge.

A highway spanning the Mississippi River. Not the sprawling, torpid Mississippi of the southern United States, but the river closer to its inception, the stretch that courses through downtown Minneapolis, not far from its northern headwaters.

This bridge, Interstate 35-West, would typically hum with traffic at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, but tonight it is strangely, almost absurdly, carless. The vehicles have been replaced by a legion of protesters, a throng of perhaps 6,000 marching from U.S. Bank Stadium at the south end of the crossing toward the University of Minnesota campus on the opposite side.

A massive, boisterous crowd — caught in transit.

Local news helicopters hover overhead, a common sight after days of marches following George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers six days prior. The perspective from above offers a sense of scale and magnitude, but no hint of intimacy or urgency. 

For that, you need to get down to street level.

Down into the crowd, where Joe Fahnbulleh, a 2019 graduate of nearby Hopkins High, is at the heart of the march.

Currently a freshman at the University of Florida, Fahnbulleh, like nearly every college student in the country, is back home due to the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering campuses across the nation. He didn’t expect to be in a protest march in late May; he was hoping to be preparing for the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships as a sprinter for the Gators, but he’s here instead, out on this bridge.

He scrambles up a concrete barrier that divides the northbound lanes from the south, surveying the scene: blue skies, low clouds, chants and cheers, fists in the air, homemade signs and banners.

A sea of people. (Photo by Joe Fahnbulleh)

“It was nice at that point,” he says. “People on the bridge having a peaceful protest, getting along.”

The highway, slated for an 8 p.m. closure in anticipation of the nightly upheaval the city has experienced since Floyd’s death, was seized almost three hours early by marchers flooding up ramps from the surface roads. City officials rushed to close the arteries feeding onto the bridge.

When Fahnbulleh made his own ascent, he noticed a handful of cars still attempting to weave through. The confused drivers were largely supportive, honking horns and throwing encouraging fists out their windows.

“Like they were with us,” he says.

And now, as Fahnbulleh scans the crowd, the bridge feels fully claimed.

No more cars, just protesters and handmade signs. Still plenty of daylight remaining, good energy in the crowd, no real drama.

Nice.

And then he sees the barreling truck.

At first, there’s no way to make sense of that. No way to wrap his brain around what he’s witnessing. It’s more like a Hollywood special effect than a thing you might see in person: A massive gasoline tanker racing at full speed toward thousands of marchers.

The way bodies scatter and flee. Crushing to the highway edges.

“It’s shocking,” Fahnbulleh says, “like this cannot be happening. Why would a semi-truck run through a crowd of people when the highway was closed off?”

Later, state officials will determine that the 35-year-old driver, Bogdan Vechirko, acted with no malicious intent, that he was already on the highway system when the closures began. But no one on the bridge knows that now — how could they? The only reality is the red rig bearing down, the gleaming tanker full of gasoline.

The semi skids past — impossibly close — air brakes heaving, horn blaring, a debris field of crushed water bottles, abandoned signs and crumpled bicycles in its wake.

Fahnbulleh helps one person over the barrier, then leaps off to assist others.  

“People are in a panic,” he says. “We’re trying to calm them down, get them away safely.”

The truck grinds to a halt farther down the highway. Protesters swarm the cab. Miraculously, there are no bodies trapped under the tires, no one appears to have been directly hit. A rumor rips through the crowd that gas is leaking from the tanker, that angry marchers are trying to shoot the truck.

Fahnbulleh becomes more frantic in his efforts.

But even as he struggles to drag fellow marchers to safety, police cruisers arrive and begin deploying tear gas on the crowd.

“We’re trying to escape the semi-truck,” Fahnbulleh says, “and they throw tear gas at us?”

The disbelief in his voice is unmistakable.

“It’s just, like, crazy to me that all this could happen.” 

 

 

Dispatcher: And you said someone’s breaking into (the house) right now?

Caller: No, it’s all open. It’s under construction — and he’s running right now, there he goes right now!

Dispatcher: Okay, what is he doing?

Caller: He’s running down the street.

- 911 call made shortly before Ahmaud Arbery was killed, February 23, 2020.

* * * 

Running was the thing that brought them together.

Joe and Ty. George and Sam and Wyatt. Jaylen and Ben.

Countless hours at the track running warm-up laps, ripping through repeats, practicing starts, perfecting handoffs. Buying into the idea that Hopkins High might warrant the ambitious moniker of “Track Town Minnesota” that the team’s coaches had bestowed after the Hopkins girls made consecutive trips to Nike Track Nationals in Eugene, Oregon, in 2010 and 2011.

That they might live up to the standard that head coach Nick Lovas and others had set over the course of a decade at the school west of Minneapolis.

If anything, the 2019 campaign only served to burnish that reputation.   

The Hopkins boys had an historic season, claiming the Minnesota True Team state championship, the MSHSL AA state team title and a hypothetical DyeStat Dual Meet National Championship over perennial power Hoover High of Alabama.

Fahnbulleh — Coach Lovas had started calling him “Joe the Show” — was the breakout star, emerging as the best sprinter in Minnesota prep history with personal bests of 10.23 for 100 meters and a wind-aided 20.67 for 200, but it was the entire team, with remarkable balance across events, that claimed the big trophies.

After their state meet triumph, Lovas offered one more opportunity to some of his standout sprinters.

“Coach sat us down,” recalls George Jackson, then a precocious sophomore, “and said,  ‘If you all want to go to New Balance Nationals, we can make it happen.’”

The offer to attend the championship meet in Greensboro, N.C., might have seemed abrupt, but most of the pieces were already in place.

Although finances had been an issue in the past, Lovas had secured the use of a district-owned Suburban for the 19-hour trip to Greensboro. He would drive half the seven-member squad in that vehicle, while assistant coach Austin Salargo drove the others in Lovas’ Toyota mini-van. Housing was also covered; Salargo had arranged a place to stay with his grandparents in North Carolina. 

The senior core of Fahnbulleh, Jaylen Champion, Wyatt Lubarski, Sam Leervig and Ben O'Black were all on board. As was Ty Bennett, a junior, and Jackson, the lone sophomore.

Nineteen hours, seven sprinters, two cars.

Next stop, Nationals.

In the Suburban, Lovas drove while Fanhbulleh rode shotgun. The gregarious senior spent the hours angling back to play cards with Leervig, watching his coach chew sunflower seeds and attempting to exert some influence on the fluctuating music selection.

“There was a lot of exchanging of the aux cord,” Lovas recalls.

The team introduced their coach to Khalid, an artist he only vaguely recognized, while the coach got his team excited about a Christian hip-hop artist named LeCrae.

Over in the mini-van, Salargo drove while his girlfriend, Kayla, served as co-pilot. Bennett dozed for long stretches, Jackson and Champion alternated between Super Smash Bros. on a Nintendo Switch and answering a stream of riddles Salargo was firing from the front seat.

Kayla handled the road trip soundtrack; there were no arguments about the music.

“That van with me, Ty and George?” Champion says, laughing. “That was the chill one.”

Over the course of two driving days, the caravan hung together until they reached their destination: Salargo’s grandparents’ home in Carthage, N.C., a solid 65 miles from the New Balance Nationals site in Greensboro.

“It was out there,” Jackson recalls. “We probably had to walk like 400 meters just to get to the street where we could run a little and practice.”

“It was definitely country,” Champion confirms.

But the welcome they received from Michael and Cathy Salargo left a deep impression.

“They were the nicest grandparents I’ll ever meet,” Fahnbulleh says. “They welcomed us with open arms, treated us like we were part of their family.”

“Like we were their own children,” Jackson says.

That hospitality, and the way it permitted everyone to lower their guard, more than made up for the 75-minute drive to the Greensboro track.

“Honestly,” Lovas says, “that separation was what made the trip special. Not just a trip of competition, but a trip that fortified relationships.”

The teammates ate outside, went swimming, played dice and cards and board games well into the night. There were jokes and banter, no one putting up a front or a façade.

“Just messing around,” Jackson says, “being boys.”

In a shared upstairs bedroom, Bennett pulled up a Juice WRLD song that neither Champion nor Fahnbulleh had heard. It quickly went on repeat, full volume, became an anthem for the trip.

“Me, Ty and Joe were so hyped because we just loved the song,” Champion remembers. “We were up in our little room going nuts to it.”

If Michael and Cathy Salargo heard the ruckus, if they minded at all, they never said a word. They were thrilled to have the house full again, to have the rooms and the yard and the pool echoing with the energy of seven Minnesota teenagers.

Meanwhile, on their daily trips to the North Carolina A&T track, the Hopkins crew was piling up impressive results, preparing to stun a stadium full of fans unaccustomed to Minnesota sprinters making noise in the finals.

“There wasn’t much pressure,” Jackson says. “We weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, so we just decided to show out. One last hurrah.”

Fahnbulleh more than lived up to his nickname.

Joe was definitely “the Show.”

He swept the 100 and the 200, anchored the 4x100 to a runner-up finish against a potent Fort Bend Marshall squad from Texas, and carried his 4x200 teammates to a fourth-place finish.

It would have been easy, then, for Fahnbulleh to bask in the limelight. Soak up his big arrival on the national stage. But in the interview zone after his races, the only thing the Florida-bound senior wanted to discuss was the importance of his team. POST-MEET INTERVIEW

His boys.

The way they’d learned to love each other, sacrifice for each other, become more like brothers than teammates.

“We learned about each other on that trip,” Fahnbulleh says, “because we sat there and talked each night, for hours on end. Playing board games, card games, going swimming, frisbee…we sat there and really talked to one another. It was like — it was just nice, man.” 

 

 

Dispatcher: Are you following him?

Zimmerman: Yeah.

Dispatcher: Okay, we don't need you to do that.

- 911 call placed by George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012, the night he fatally shot Trayvon Martin. 

* * * 

Jaylen Champion knows how it feels to be followed.

So, does George Jackson.

The abrupt awareness that they’re being trailed by someone. In a store, a restaurant, a shopping mall. Marked by security guards the moment they enter.

Subject to scrutiny.

“All the time,” Joe Fahnbulleh says.

He likes to wear the hood pulled up on his sweatshirt — “it’s just comfortable that way” — but knows it leads to profiling. “I’ll get looked at walking into Target. This tall — like, six-one — male walking into Target and people look at me weird. And when I ask for help, they’ll give me the bare minimum.”

Champion, who graduated with Fahnbulleh last spring and now a student-athlete at Colorado State University, acknowledges the exhaustion that comes from experiencing acts of racism, large and small, over the course of a lifetime.

“I’ve been followed in stores,” he says, “I’ve been told I ‘speak white’ sometimes…stuff like that. Very micro that I just live with, but it all adds up.”

Jackson, who was prepared for a breakout junior year as Hopkins’ top hurdler before Coronavirus canceled the season, recalls being the only Black student in his third-grade class at a new school. He wasn’t placed in an advanced learning group, even though his work warranted it. In the school yard, he overheard classmates casually using the n-word.

“We were so young,” he says now, “I couldn’t fully wrap my head around it then, but now it’s crazy to me that we were kids — just children — and they already had that hate.”

His mom pulled him out of the school. 

“She explained to me,” Jackson recalls, “that because of the color of my skin I have to be more aware of my surroundings, no matter where I’m at or what I’m doing. I have to be more aware because I’m going to be held to a different standard.”

Champion and Fahnbulleh say they’ve had similar parental conversations.

And when they hear, in reference to the protests that swept the nation after George Floyd’s murder, euphemistic phrases like, In light of recent events… or With all the uncertainty of the last few weeks…, it’s impossible not to bristle.

Nothing about their experience growing up Black in the United States has felt like a recent development.

In the last decade alone — the one in which the members of the 2019 Hopkins track team came of age — they have seen Trayvon Martin gunned down in Florida in 2012, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Michael Brown killed in 2014, Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland in 2015, Minnesota’s own Philando Castile in 2016.

Ahmaud Arbery, murdered while jogging in February.

Breonna Taylor killed in March by police officers while sleeping in her bed.

An enduring, heinous succession of violence against Black citizens.

“Growing up,” Jackson says, “you don’t really see too many people who look like you on the news, unless they’re getting, like, arrested or they’re an NBA player or a rapper. So, when you only see people who look like you getting arrested or getting killed, even if you don’t experience it firsthand, you can feel like, ‘Man, that could be me at any time.’”

And when George Floyd was killed on May 25, his neck pinned under a white police officer’s knee for more than eight minutes, that feeling — that sense of impending calamity — only intensified.

It was a day or two before the bystander video went viral. Champion, Jackson and Fahnbulleh all remember first learning of Floyd’s death on social media.

“I was just trying to educate myself,” Champion says, “as I began seeing more about it.”

His father, Bobby Joe Champion, is a state senator whose district includes portions of downtown and north Minneapolis. The two had lengthy talks about Floyd’s murder and the city’s response as the news started to spread.

For Jackson, it took some time for the enormity of what had occurred to register.

“I never watched the videos of it,” he says, “because it feels inhumane to watch somebody be killed on film. Out of respect for him, I didn’t want to watch it.”

Lovas, too, was repulsed by the videos, but acknowledges that the visual nature of Floyd’s death was also what made it impossible for the world to look away. (Photo by Joe Fahnbulleh)

“You could so clearly see, not just the humanity of George Floyd,” the coach says, “but the depravity and lack of judgement in another human — the police officer. It was really apparent how much time was available, not only for officers to form their perspective, but also to have the opportunity to change course, and it just did not happen.”

As awareness spread and Minneapolis shuddered with daily demonstrations, Champion, Fahnbulleh and Jackson each took their own approach.

“I was completely comfortable going to the protests,” Champion says. He acknowledges it’s not his style to be out front, leading the march or initiating chants, “But I’m definitely there to support.”

He also accompanied his dad on trips to deliver food and supplies to nursing homes in some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by looting and fires.

For Jackson, two years younger, the decision to march was more nuanced.

“I was hesitant,” he says, “because there’s so much hate in the world and I don’t want to have more pain be brought to my family.”

While he didn’t participate in the marches, he’s gone out in the aftermath, typically in the mornings when things are quieter, photographing and documenting his city’s upheaval. 

Fahnbulleh, despite his near-miss with the tanker, has continued to show up in the streets.

“I went out the next day,” he says. “I was shook, but people are doing that every single day.”

His mother, Charlotte Graham, a nurse who has worked through the Coronavirus, worries about her son, but supports his efforts.

“She tells me, ‘Be safe, and make sure you call me when you’re on your way back home.’”

She bought him a shirt that says: I STILL CAN’T BREATHE. It’s a reference to the final words spoken, not only by Floyd, but numerous Black men who have died in police custody.

The words have a special resonance for Fahnbulleh.

As a track athlete, he’s spent a great deal of time thinking about his breath. Breathing patterns. Controlled breathing, efficient breathing.

He’s been out of breath before, hands on knees, lungs heaving.

And yet —

“When I can’t breathe, I’m just out of breath. I have the liberty to regain my breath. But when a knee is on your neck, and you’re saying, ‘I can’t breathe’? That’s a whole different story. It’s so hard to grasp what the true feeling of ‘I can’t breathe’ is actually like.” 

 

 (Photo by George Jackson)

Operator: 911, what’s the address of the emergency? 

Caller: Yes, yeah, we just watched Officer #987 kill a, ah...a citizen in front of a Chicago [Avenue] ah...store. He pretty much just killed this guy that wasn’t resisting arrest. He had his knee on the dude’s neck the whole time...

- 911 call from a bystander witnessing George Floyd’s death, May 25, 2020. 

* * * 

The intersection has become a memorial.

A makeshift shrine, erected around a corner convenience store. There are haunting portrait murals and cellophane flower bouquets. Sidewalk chalk. Lit candles and fresh graffiti.

The curb where Floyd gasped his final breaths is now a place to pause and ponder, pray and protest. A sacred space.

Thirty-eighth and Chicago.

Six days after Floyd was killed, Lovas and his wife drove their three young sons — aged 5, 7 and 9 — down there.

“We wanted to make sure we did everything we could to help them see the world for what it was,” Lovas says. “And bring them into the conversation about ways we can help to make things right.”

The family also brought supplies and groceries to the Lake Street community about 20 blocks from where Floyd was killed — a neighborhood that had been devastated by fires and looting.

“It was important for our kids to see that there were a lot of people who cared about what happened — people like them, like us…and a lot of people unlike us.”

His sons were prepared for what they might see, but also encouraged to observe, watch and process, and then ask questions when the family arrived back home.

Lovas, a youth minister before joining the Hopkins staff as an assistant in 2007, says those were challenging, uncomfortable conversations. But also necessary, and probably overdue.

“We’ve had conversations that we felt we needed to have,” he says, “and that is the push that white people like me need, to be pushed into conversations that might be uncomfortable.”

For the young men he’s coached, Lovas’ decision to bring his children to the intersection, his willingness to have those conversations, speaks volumes.

“Lovas is like my father,” Fahnbulleh says. “For him to bring his boys down and educate them about what’s happening? I can’t help but love that.”

Jackson echoes that sentiment.

“It means a lot because — look, he’s a teacher, he’s a dad — and my dad wasn’t really there in my life. So, Lovas being a father to his kids, teaching them the right way to do things, the right way to treat people, is very important.”

Lovas doesn’t take that influence lightly.

He has spent months wrestling with all of this.

First, with his dispersed team, scattered to their homes by a global pandemic, and then with the protests and riots that have convulsed his community.

Pondering what it means to be a team when that team never meets.

What it means to be a community, when the community fractures and frays. 

What it means to live in a society that was never built to ensure the success of all of the young people he loves, only some of them.

He’s considered it from so many angles.

How can we hold together, even as we lose so much? 

Where are the points of connection?

What’s my role with the guys who’ve graduated? How do I stay involved in their lives? 

Make sure they’re okay? 

Fifteen years of coaching experience, leveraged in the service of a single, thorny question: 

“How do we not lose the fabric of who we are?” 

 

 (Coach Nick Lovas, photo courtesy Hopkins Track)

 

He called Emmett Till a mansion,

a mansion of a boy

whose rooms we

must fill.

 - Kevin Simmonds, from “The Poet, 1955” 

* * * 

Sometimes, Joe Fahnbulleh still thinks about that house.

When he looks back on that trip to North Carolina, he rarely focuses on the hardware they collected, the double individual gold or the relay podium finishes. He thinks about a home in Carthage with a stone path out front, rocking chairs on the side porch, a little ways off the road.

He remembers a kitchen table and a card game.

He’s playing gin with Coach Salargo and his grandfather.

Lovas and the other guys are on the back porch playing a game the coach taught them — Liar’s Dice. He can hear their laughter through the open door. The porch is screened-in to keep the bugs out. It’s a humid June evening, so different from the Minnesota nights they left behind.

He’s winning this hand — or losing. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this moment. How there’s room to spread out here. Room to relax.

Room to breathe.

Here, he doesn’t have to be “Joe the Show.” Doesn’t have to carry the weight of the team or anyone’s expectations. He can just be Joe, contemplating this gin hand.

He can wear his hood up if he wants, or not — no one cares.

Time seems to slow down here, at least a little while.

Life feels easy, content.

Nice.

“I remember looking around,” Fahnbulleh says, “and I got this sensation of — I am really going to miss this.”

At the kitchen table, he joked with his coach’s grandfather, glanced again at his friends on the back porch. Marveled at the way proximity had opened all of them up, creating space for joy. Making everything feel lighter.

A kind of weightlessness.

“I knew that wasn’t going to last for long,” he says, “so I just sat there and looked at everyone and smiled. I wished it could last forever, but it can’t, so —”

A year later, that night in North Carolina feels even more ephemeral.

More out of reach than he might have imagined. He knows he can’t recreate it, or somehow will it back into existence. Can’t easily return or reclaim that fleeting sense of peace.

Especially now.

Which leaves him on another kind of bridge.

A feeling of being caught between two sides. At one end, a night, just over a year ago, when everything felt possible, when he and his friends could simply be themselves, unweighted. At the other: some point past this present reality of pandemic and protest, when those moments might come readily again.

Some of it feels unbridgeable at the moment; daunting, given the weight of history.

How to overturn a system of oppression that has endured for 400 years? How to move past slogans and symbolism, past hashtags and retweets, to something that approaches a true reckoning?

Big questions, and the bridge feels long.

So, for now, Joe Fahnbulleh is here, in the middle of the span.

All of them are, in various ways. Out on the streets of Minneapolis, protesting and photographing. Delivering food. Promising their moms they’ll stay safe. Promising Lovas the same thing. Showing up at the Hopkins track most afternoons, putting in the reps. Staying fit.

Trying to balance both. 

Trying to get closer to a place where peace equals justice. Where you can walk into a Target and no one follows you. Where a simple traffic stop doesn’t feel like a possible death sentence.

Where no one calls the police on Black men out running.

Where Juice WRLD is always playing in an upstairs bedroom, and no one minds.

Where there are no more consecrated intersections.

Where you can throw dice on the back porch with your friends on a warm summer evening, and your laughter just echoes and echoes, long into the night.

# # #