8.

Wet, Black Bough

You come out of the forest with gold and it turns to ashes.

—Joseph Campbell, in an interview with Bill Moyers

You’re still young, that’s your fault,

There’s so much you have to know.

—Cat Stevens, “Father and Son”

Millions of eyes were on Ervin when that NBC sportscaster asked him about his black heritage. “I didn’t know a thing about what it was like to be part of the black experience,” Ervin would reflect years later. “But now I do. It’s like winning gold and having a bunch of old white people ask you what it’s like to be black. That is my black experience.”

But Ervin also knows that there’s more to it than that. The question touched a raw nerve, because at a deeper, unintended level, the question was really asking, Who is your father and where do you come from? And that made him ashamed. Ashamed, because he didn’t know.

Only a decade later, thanks to the genealogical excavations of Rebecca Jozwiakowski, Ervin’s half-sister on his father’s side, would Anthony learn something about his ancestry. His lineage branched back to two soldiers: the mixed-race American Revolution soldier Shadrach Battles, who fought for the Patriots and survived numerous Revolutionary War battles only to die in penury (See Apendix B), and the Civil War soldier William Slaughter, who as a teenager was killed fighting for the Union cause in the bloody Battle of the Wilderness (See Apendix C).

If Anthony had had a sense of his own lineage back then, he might have felt rooted in something larger than himself. But as it was, he didn’t even know about the man closest to him in that long line: his own father. It would be another decade before his father told him about where he had come from and who he was.

Like his ancestor Shadrach Battles, whose military documents curiously listed him as “yellow” under both eyes and complexion, Jack Ervin was also a light-skinned black living in the South. The prejudice came in all colors: “White guys didn’t want to be bothered because I was black, and black guys didn’t want to be bothered because I looked too white,” he recalls. “But I had my cousins. We’d go fishing and hunting.” Like both Shadrach Battles and William Slaughter, Jack Ervin also saw combat, but on foreign soil: Vietnam. Though there was military history in his immediate family—both his cousin and uncle were Marines—Jack had never given serious thought to enlisting before the opportunity presented itself. And that opportunity came before a judge, during a hearing.

Some backstory: at the time Jack was living in Delaware, Ohio, where he was, as he put it, “hell-bent for trouble.” He worked in the food court at an all-girls dorm, a position that despite the modest $1.30-an-hour pay came with obvious perks, especially since Jack was an equal-opportunity charmer with little regard for strictures against interracial dating. Not everyone was as relaxed about it. One day Jack and his cousin were out with two girls getting burgers and sodas at a Big Boy carhop when two white guys pulled up next to them and rolled down their windows. “Well goddamn, look at that!” the driver said. “Two niggers with two white girls. Ain’t that something?” What followed was like a scene from The Outsiders. Jack’s cousin jumped out of the car, dragged the driver out, and started whaling on him. Jack went over to the passenger door to keep an eye on the other fellow. Once his cousin had knocked the driver to the ground, Jack grabbed the other guy. “Go on,” he told him. “Go help your friend up.” Then Jack and his cousin went back into their car to finish their burgers. The two white boys left them alone after that, but before driving off they smashed out some lights in the parking lot. When police arrived, the restaurant owner claimed that Jack and his cousin had participated in the vandalism, and so the two of them were hauled off to jail for the night.

The judge had little sympathy during the next day’s hearing. He said he had a mind to lock them up and throw the key away. But he told them that if they worked something out with the Marine recruiter in the back of the courtroom, he’d dismiss the case. The main thing was that they get the hell out of town.

His cousin wanted no part of the military, preferring jail instead. But Jack knew that if he didn’t make a change, there’d be only jail in his future. It hadn’t been his first fight and he was in with a rough crowd. So Jack made his way to the recruiter, who told him that within two days he could be in California, where it was 75 degrees and sunny. “In Ohio the snow was ass deep,” he recalls. “I thought, California? Sounds damn good to me. Where do I sign?” The recruiter listed him as Caucasian in the Race/Ethnicity slot even though Jack had told him he was African American. He only noticed the discrepancy after he was assigned to his duty station. When he pointed out he was black, the officer replied, “Trust me, you don’t want to be black for this.”

Jack enjoyed the camaraderie of boot camp and was glad to be in San Diego. But darkness lay ahead: thirteen months in Vietnam. He doesn’t talk about that time, and the silence is telling. “I asked myself, Why am I carrying this baggage? and so I’ve let it go,” he says, adding that he has to “relive it enough every Friday” when he attends weekly meetings with other veterans. But for Anthony, his unwillingness to share details from Vietnam only demonstrates that he has yet to escape its clutches. Sherry’s childhood is Jack’s Vietnam: both of them black holes in their past—or at least guarded chests—in which memory must remain locked away. And because Anthony has seen, in both his parents and himself, how bottling away the past only extends and prolongs suffering, he now chooses, for better or worse, to dig up his skeletons and expose them to the disinfectant light of day.

Upon Jack’s return from Southeast Asia, he married. But as much as he cared for his first wife, he found himself unable to deal with the family structure. “I didn’t know it then,” he says, “but my PTSD wouldn’t allow me to be a normal person. I had anger issues and was screwing up all around. Depression, anxiety . . . I couldn’t talk to anybody.” He saw no relief from his dysfunction, so he apologized and left her.

The trauma followed him into his next marriage with Sherry. Though it never fully released its grip on him, upon moving to South Carolina he began attending Friday meetings at the VA where he could broach the subject with other Vietnam vets. Despite his reticence to speak about the experience outside of these meetings, talking has helped relieve some of the war’s stranglehold on him. Now Jack Ervin gives the impression of a man at peace with himself, someone who’s emerged from the wringer into a more Socratic place of contemplation. After a lifetime of being pigeonholed, his philosophy is that what others think of him is none of his business: “I can’t be defined by what you think. If I did that, I’d be lost. I’d be just another idiot out there.”

But in 2000 his son Anthony had not yet learned that piece of wisdom. With no clear sense of his own identity, Anthony did define himself by what others thought. And the media had defined him—their story line demanded it—as African American. Yet, Anthony had never asked about his father’s past and had only once met his father’s parents on a visit to West Virginia. As he was only four at the time, he doesn’t even remember his grandparents. Only three memories of the trip remain with him—three that were nonetheless vivid enough to paint his conception of his father’s childhood in wonder and fear.

The river is big and slow. You don’t go close to it. You don’t go close because big snakes live inside. Snakes that swim as fast as Jackie. Big dangerous swimming snakes. Pops says they’re called water moccasins. You don’t go close to the river.

* * *

At night the fireflies come out for playing. They’re not really made out of fire but they have lights inside and they switch on and off when they fly. Fireflies don’t live in my home. I run after them when they turn their lights on. Pops catches some of them in a glass jar and I keep them like pets. But when I wake up in the morning they don’t glow anymore and they don’t move anymore.

* * *

Pops takes us to his school. It’s not like my school. It’s dirty and scary and nobody goes now. Pops says it’s been closed for a long, long time. The windows are broken and pieces of glass are on the floor. I go in one room and a big black bird is standing on the floor on pieces of stuff. When it sees me it starts to hop up and down and flaps one wing and makes a noise like, Caw, caw. I run back to Pops and grab his hand. He says it’s a crow and it has a broken wing. I don’t like to see it. It looks scared and a little angry. The crow keeps trying to fly but one wing doesn’t move and it drags on the ground. It looks at me and says, Caw, caw, caw. I tell Pops I don’t like it and pull his hand. But Pops just looks at it. Like he’s forgot I’m here. I don’t like it, I tell him again, and finally Pops nods. “Me neither,” he says. And even after we leave I can still see it staring at us, scared and mad.

Fireflies, lurking water snakes, and an injured crow cawing in a derelict segregation-era school. These were the images that came to mind when Anthony tried to make sense of his father’s past and his own. His mother’s history was a blank, and his father’s was of a world he barely knew and in which he never felt he belonged. Even now that he’s learned something about his ancestry, he still doesn’t feel he belongs: “Whatever my forebears may have been, I am no warrior. If anything, any warrior spirit of my bloodline has been watered down. And part of me wishes I still had it.”

Anthony never enlisted or went to war like his father or William Slaughter or Shadrach Battles. But he did compete in the Olympics, and dissimilar as sports and combat may be, there are areas of intersection and overlap. For the ancient Greeks, contests were undertaken in the midst of war: the funeral games of charioteering, wrestling, and the like that take place in the penultimate book of the Iliad are as much about invigorating warriors for upcoming battles as commemorating victims of earlier ones. Stephen Crane believed he was able to write convincing battle scenes in The Red Badge of Courage despite not having seen combat because he “got [his] sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.” Football is the obvious choice, with its lexicon of offense, defense, blitzes, bombs, formations, and ground games, not to mention more colorful recent additions like Legion of Boom, which sounds like an elite special-operations force (or an incompetent explosives disposal unit). And then there’s football’s crunching bodies on the field and generals on the sidelines and red-blooded flag-wavers in the stands and homefront loyalists in the armchairs, and let’s not forget the cigar-chomping suits in the background running the whole damn show. On October 7, 2001, when President George W. Bush launched air strikes against Afghanistan a half hour before the Sunday kickoff of the Eagles vs. Cardinals game, the 65,000 at the Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia erupted in cheers at the announcement. And why wouldn’t they? They were already primed, jacked for battle. When the Air Force holds a flyover before every Super Bowl, it’s just setting the stage.

Overlap is less apparent in the so-called individual sports like swimming, but it’s there. The ideals of a soldier are also those of the athlete: team unity and brotherhood and commitment and sacrifice and perseverance through pain. Instead of boot camp, athletes have training camps; instead of contesting in war, they contest in games. Both sports and military push the boundaries of permissible conduct further on each end of the spectrum, allowing on one end for outpourings of antagonism and aggression and on the other for unprecedented male bonding and intimacy. Both are bound up with national pride and anthems and flags and victory parades. And although nothing compares to the casualties of war—whether civilians, soldiers, or veterans—both athletes and soldiers are swiftly forgotten once their time is up and eyes turn to new heroes.

There’s also the odd sense of meaning and purpose that both competition and war instill in us.²⁵ Some argue sports can generate, or at least approximate, this same sense of heightened significance, without leaving death, disfigurement, and horror in its wake, although this notion has its counterpart among critics who see sports as grooming for war. The linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky once described how as a high school student he questioned why he should care if his school’s football team won since he didn’t know anyone on it and a victory effectively meant nothing to him. He went on to characterize sports as a “way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements . . . [and] training in irrational jingoism.” But even accepting the irrationality of the sports fan’s enthusiasm, even finding some theater of the absurd in any athletic spectacle, there’s also something to be said, especially in our era of selfies and noncommittal sneering from the sidelines, for letting oneself unself-consciously and earnestly throw one’s support behind another person or team. You could even call it, allowing for some hyperbole, a spiritual exercise in selfless devotion. And hell, it’s possible that rooting for your country in the World Cup isn’t prepping you to cheerlead the Third Reich.

When Anthony won gold, he stood alongside Gary Hall Jr. on the top podium and bowed his head as a medal was draped over his neck. Two giant American flags were raised to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He’d done his nation proud. And because of his father’s lineage, Ervin’s victory carried even more significance, making him a symbol for the changing face of swimming. He grinned on the podium and waved an American stick flag, which someone had just handed him. It was as close to a war hero as you can get in the realm of sports. It’s also a comparison Anthony rejects: “I’m definitely no equivalent of a war hero, despite what others may have said I did for my country by winning.”

Hero or not, victory’s luster was short-lived. The reality soon set in that his gold medal was no carte blanche. He was denied entry to the illustrious Sports Illustrated party even with his medal on hand like a credential, though his teammates got in. The drinking age in Australia was eighteen, so he spent most of his time hanging out at bars and nightclubs with a couple of other young Team USAers, Erik Vendt and Klete Keller. Though the swimming portion of the Olympics had ended, the team still imposed a (very liberal) curfew of four a.m.

One night Ervin came back fifteen minutes late. He was given a warning. A few nights later he arrived late again.

Shit, I’m like fifteen minutes over curfew again. Everett is sitting at his desk in the American House, where we check in. “You’re late,” he says.

“Sorry, it’s only a few minutes. You don’t have to report that to Denny.”

“I have to,” he says, avoiding my eyes.

He has to? Everett has been buddy-buddy with me all meet and now he’s acting all hard-ass. “Come on, don’t do that. The train from downtown was late. All you have to do is let it go.”

“No, I’ve got to.” He still won’t look me in the eye.

But he doesn’t have to do this. He has a choice.

The next day the national team director Dennis Pursley calls me into his room. He tells me he’s kicking me out of the Olympic Village and I have to hand over my athlete credentials and I’m banned from participating in the closing ceremony. I can’t believe it. I try to reason with him and tell him how the train was late and how I have nowhere to go, but he won’t budge. He stares at me unblinkingly. Then everything starts buzzing on me and I start yelling. I’m so so angry. I storm out and start shouting about him to the others in the town house—swimmers, administrators, coaches, anyone around. “Can you all believe this, can you believe what he’s doing to me?!” And then Denny comes out of his room and we get into a yelling match and I start attacking his character and he says that if I want to appeal his authority I can take it up with the US Olympic Committee judiciary, but that if I do he’ll prosecute me to the full extent of his powers when we return to the US.

I call my parents who are now back in the States and I tell them that he’s throwing me out just because I was a few minutes late and he’s an asshole and nobody likes him and he’s going to lose his job, and I’m shouting into the phone so that everyone can hear me, so that he can hear me, so that he can realize what he’s doing to me. Why, why is he doing this to me, throwing me out, casting me out, an authority once again punishing me, ruining what’s supposed to be the best moment of my life?

Though Anthony had been stripped of his credentials, he found a way to sleep in the Olympic Village for a few more nights thanks to two of his World Sprint Team 2000 teammates: Bart Kizierowski put Anthony up in the Polish House, where there was no curfew or doormen; and Gordan Kožulj, who’d already moved out of the Village with his Croatian squad, gave Anthony his athlete credentials. “Back then Tony was talented at getting in trouble,” Bart recalls. “I remember being proud that there we were at the Olympics, with such high security, and we were able to sneak Tony in and out of places without anybody knowing.” Fortunately for him, Ervin never ran into either Dennis Pursley or Everett Uchiyama, the man who had reported him, probably because he stayed out all night and slept during the day.

Ervin soon moved to a beach hostel, where some swimmers would join him a few days later. He checked into an empty room with three bunk beds and a stained sink. The hostel had been full during the Olympics but began emptying as the Games winded down.

By closing ceremony the hostel was practically deserted. In the next few days the rest of Sydney would follow suit as the nations withdrew their teams. He thought of catching the train back and attending the ceremony with Kožulj’s credential, but feared getting caught, knowing all the coaches and managers would be there as well.

Instead he posted up at the bar and watched the closing ceremony on TV.

“It’s going off,” the bartender says. “You just know they’re all on the piss. Hell of a party to be at.”

“No doubt,” I say. “Hell of a party.”

I finish my beer and step outside. A crescent moon hangs over the breaking water, a sliver of violence.

I lie down on the plastic frame of a lounge beach chair. The stars don’t give a glittering fuck. It’s like I’m back in that treehouse, alone under the night sky. Except this time I didn’t run away. I was thrown out. I rattled the cages and the warden tossed me into solitary confinement.

I stand up and walk to the water. The ocean is loud, belligerent. It seethes. I light up a cigarette.

I guess I’m right where I deserve to be. They want me to be the first black Olympian. Well, here I am, fulfilling all expectations, giving them what they want. Anointed black and then treated accordingly!

Maybe not, but the swimming world wants me to be this figurehead for black people and I don’t even know what I am. I’m all mixed up. And even now, here I am, a spectator but not a spectator, an athlete but not an athlete. A supposed champion who can’t even get into a Sports Illustrated party, who’s exiled from his team, who’s drinking alone at a dingy hostel bar during the closing ceremony. And my medal lying in a heap of dirty laundry. There’s the golden truth. There’s the glory of it all.

Listen to me, making excuses, blaming others. I couldn’t even answer one simple question about my Tourette’s. And I know nothing about who I am or where I come from. So I just dodge the question. I have the ultimate opportunity to say something meaningful in front of the world and instead I just run.

I’m a coward.

I head back inside. It reeks of stale beer and cigarettes. On the television Paul Hogan is buffed out as Crocodile Dundee, perched on a float of a giant black safari hat and giving a thumbs-up to the cheering Olympic stadium.

My mouth tastes of ashes. I push my glass toward the bartender. “One more bitter.”

In the days after the ceremony, Sydney felt like a ghost town. The nations had withdrawn their teams. The fanfare had ended. The media had moved on to new spectacles. The residents slowly emerged from their shelters and limped through the forsaken landscape like apocalypse survivors, burnt out from the past weeks’ invasion of tourist hordes. The only sign of the juggernaut that tore across their city was the litter that blew through the desolate streets like tumbleweed. Flyers and ticket stubs lay torn and strewn about the pavement, plastic bags somersaulted on the breeze. And soon all that vanished too as the convalescent city staggered back to its feet.

The Games were over.

 

_________________

25.   I experienced this during a brief stint reporting on the 2006 Lebanon War. The distant rumble, the power outages, the rooftop view of a thunder-and-lightning storm that was actually air strikes—these all helped impart the feeling that I’d been transported to some other land where daily life was stripped of its superficiality, and solidarity replaced disinterest among strangers. It was disturbingly seductive and intoxicating. Return to text