The Curious Case of the Dam-a-Rama
by MALIK WASHINGTON
baaba, things, change, 2023
going from major to minor pieties,
always on the go. The click of heels
the tap of a drum awaking the dead.
-Yusef Komunyakaa [1]
“It’s something about them relays.”
Well before the glass that separated us broke under the force of continuance, we all felt the voice we had come to be familiar with. It was not unusual to hear the walking elders of the city speak of their glory days running between the walls. But for the man who had spent most of his life watching the coming and going of relay travelers at the stadium gates, it was a way of life that far preceded him.
“They were the anchors on their respective teams. Saw each other grab the baton and come from behind to win. Then there they were, next to one another at the stand waiting to accept their gold watches. I guess they thought they might have something more in common, and they were right.” He grins back at the portrait of his grandparents cupped in his hands, the two of them in their youth, locked at their shoulders down to their palms, still bursting with care and affection vividly from behind the worn black and white film. One of the gold timepieces on their wrists, now on his.
“They used to tell the grandkids all the time, ‘they don’t call it a track meet for nothing,’” he chuckles. “If you were fortunate, you’d come out with a little more than some hardware.”
The groundskeeper had scaled the very top of the upper tier. Behind him was a blue city skyline dressed with shimmering office towers and hospital towers, obscuring the few remnants of his childhood—an old railroad trestle, a museum courtyard, the bend in the riverbank. In front of him remained familiar. Gazing over the crimson trail that encircled a lush grassy plane, he recalled going to the races as a kid with the whole family, anxiously awaiting his chance to finally compete in the relays. His father would sometimes slip him and his siblings through the gates late at night, practicing and preparing under the darkness, a fact he finds humorous now, as if he were born to watch over these grounds.
“My father pushed us hard. He was that dad. Believe me, there was lots of blood, sweat, and tears.”
The reverb throughout the city following the announcement was damning and swift, yet evoked these types of warm and enduring reflections. Cracks that formed along the grandstand walls of Dama Field had long given away it’s age - a symbol of great pride and prestige to many - but failed to signal the extent of over two centuries of instability beneath the historic structure. Years of dollars and repairs believed to correct the problems at its foundation had mostly served a neoclassical facade. Effective immediately, there were to be no more sporting events between its hallowed walls. No more commencements. And soon thereafter, no more echo of a thousand shouts and chants cast upon the edges.
Of most consequence to many was the fate of the annual Dam-a-Rama Relay Carnival. The carnival had been held since the stadium’s opening, and grown from an afternoon of relay races between students to a celebration stretching across the city, centered on the occasion of the longest running track and field meet in the new world. From its onset, the relays were an integrated contest - a notable contrast in a segregated city and its host, the Institution, that had only recently begun admitting a trickle of Black students. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the relays took on a special meaning.
What the groundskeeper remembers most about his first time at the Dam-a-Rama is the spirit of the entire weekend, a feeling he feels until this day but can’t quite capture with words.
“Everything happens before the moment you even realize where you’re at, right there on that circle. That’s the energy.” The excitement rising evidently in a body that had slowed with time.
“We used to fight to put our name on that track and once you stepped on that cinder? I had guys on my team, they couldn’t look up. That took courage, you know? There were so many eyes steadied on us. Just everywhere. In places you couldn’t see.”
Those late night training sessions were characterized not only by his father’s drive, but of his meticulous attention to detail when drilling, directing the movement of their limbs with millimeter precision, instructing them to drive their legs into the ground with force.
Drill. Run. Drill. Run.
And then they would do it again.
“There was a rhythm to it. Always a rhythm.” His arms swing almost compulsively. He drops his hands back to his side and shakes his head at the thought of how long it has been in him.
“He said it was memory.All that work? Won’t matter otherwise. The body must recall what it already knows.”
Our anxious awaiting had taken place beyond the grandstand walls, party to the sounds that could not be contained, imagining the spectacle trained on the living at the so-called Negro Olympics.
Without a singlet over our chests, we stood, held at the gates, in our nudest form. Our nameplates and team colors scribbled on our foreheads in ink. Surrounded by diligent markers and tools made to evaluate our performance in the smallest increments, the richness of how we lived and practiced remained illegible to onlookers who dared look us in our face. The truth of our origin story, the distances we had recorded, proved too much for the capacities of these scientific methods and threatened to rupture the myths of the enlightened at its cranial seams.
In our running, we passed through as youngsters and elders, shoemakers and carpenters, farmers and porters, homemakers and soldiers who fought at Germantown. We could not unhear the calls—to go further, to go elsewhere, to end up anywhere but there. So it was a peculiar sleight of musicianship that the echo of these pleas could find rhythm with the thousands who willingly packed the bowl of the stadium like peppercorns, spilling out into the streets, dotting the lines of city blocks in intractable measure. We were parts of the same song.
The athlete at peak performance was of as much interest to the study of the body as the moribund, the corpse, or the cadaver. Unknowing of the ways vast waters organized beneath the bodily surface, how it pumped through cellular fibers making torque of fluid, how it perspired from the pores and fumed from the exhaust of breath, how it replenished itself where it was lost, how it moved us, all in its eventual return to the open seas - often unseen, but never apart. Those claiming dominion over the land knew to seek this ocean of information, and found their vessel in us.
“The Negro’s short calf muscles and long heel bones provide the leverage which allow him to excel disproportionately in the sprints.”
There were some who believed our victorious sprints might show ourselves as equal to our evaluators. And those whose mobility meant something else, who knew that achieving equity with man who placed themself at the center of the world and its knowledge was neither a possible or desirable outcome. For in the eyes of this science, we had either devolved from God’s perfection, or not yet evolved to it.
These were the explanations for where we found ourselves. Here, at ground zero, we’d all been enlisted in the most arduous proving grounds.[2]
The longstanding spring date for the Dam-a-Rama drew nearer with no apparent plans for continuing. Though the report identified structural weaknesses at Dama Field, it failed to explain exactly what or why. It was easy to assume it was much too old, much too close to the river bed, subject to a shifting water table that it sat atop. But for others, this lack of explanation signaled a disregard for the relay traditions and the community most invested in them. Some longtime attendees accused the Institution of sabotaging the carnival.
As calls grew louder to keep the Dam-a-Rama alive, the Institution hurried to announce plans for its return. The relays would be held at a temporary site, while the Institution began construction on a newer, bigger stadium encroaching on the neighboring blocks, buoyed by the latest record donation from the billionaire trustee alumnus and shipping heir. Some wondered if this had been the plan all along. It would only be the latest affront on the possibility of a town and gown relationship, which mostly involved the gown twirling about its own ball, ever-expanding its floor for dancing.
Amid rising anger over the proposed plans, some simply questioned how the Dam-a-Rama could ever really be itself without its namesake. While others hitched their hopes to the Institution’s promises— a much grander relay event, with state-of-the-art technologies, increased space for Black-owned vendors, and a fund to sponsor name, image, and likeness deals for winning athletes. The Institution even offered to exhibit to the history of Black relay athletes in the neighboring museum, and the establishment of a sports sciences program for local youth.
The groundskeeper, for his part, seemed much less unmoored.
“It’s sad, for sure. But I been around long enough to know what’s under that brick and it just can’t hold.”
Dama Field, meanwhile, stood hollowed. When the southeasterly wind that seasonally whipped through the city entered the reed of the stadium colonnade, it shot from its arched openings in the pitch of a bassoon, the volume of a thousand vuvuzelas, the improvisation of folktales retold. It was the type of haunt that stoked campus lore and late night expeditions to back it up.
The grounds had always been a magnet for night owls and activities better done under darkness, but with a waning pulse, it lured the necrophilic. Inching closer to cadaver than coliseum, Dama Field was subject to the type of marauding that financed its construction. Its memory was increasingly interpreted through the dissection of its skeletal, muscular, and visceral remains. The elastic surfaces of its insides ripped away. The sections of steel beams somehow broken off. The filleting of its brick skin, a rare native maroon whose sun-dried face was now evident from behind the sprawling ivy that once suffocated it— that too, swifted away for curious inquiry, scholarly study, cultural cache, or simply the highest price.
On this particular occasion, the noises emanated so loudly that officials were sent to inspect. As they approached, the trickle of rain that covered most of the daylight had grown to a downpour. The torrent made a marsh of the side of the field nearest to the river, and through the haze of splattered rain drops, they saw what looked like a small mountain of soil. But before they could shine a flashlight in that direction, a wall of concrete gave way, chasing them from the grounds.
The incident seemed to only validate the initial report concerning Dama Field and officials moved faster to condemn the structure and begin construction elsewhere— wrapping its exterior in yellow tape and fencing that kept as many out as it kept in.
In its most common form, a sprint relay involves teams of runners placed equidistantly at four points along a circle. Participants run in a single lane around the track in a counter clockwise direction. As each runner starts, the pitter patter of their feet evolves into quickening rhythms. Their hands and knees swing in a syncopated march. For a short distance, runners nearly touch one another at synchronized speed, from one’s front to the other’s back, connecting only to exchange the baton between hands. Each sprinter must give and receive the baton cleanly.
The top sprinters are frequently a part of the best relay teams. In a sport known for individual medal, the relay reminds that those who run the furthest and fastest always have another with whom they train and exchange.
On the day the Dam-a-Rama was to take place, the sonic atmosphere was gentle across the city, except for the clanging of final preparations at its temporary site. Institution officials seemed elated to ensure the Dam-a-Rama would go on uninterrupted and to have raised the stakes of the games with substantial investments. The trustee donor gave interviews to local media, gushing about all of the ways the new stadium would benefit the city and its residents. The fact that land near the proposed site was under his ownership, and stood to substantially increase in value, was hushed under the celebratory tone.
As the start time approached, the stands remained empty with few lined up to enter the gates. Athletes were scratched from their events en masse. Race official could be seen fidgeting with their flags and pens. A subtle breeze and the chirping of birds could be heard giving way to a deep howl gripping the entire city.
Across town, a crowd had formed along the street between Dama Field and the museum that faced it. With a louder, more forceful gust, gates were blown open and the windows of the museum shattered. Thousands of African wayfarers were seen, wearing the colors of their respective teams scattered about the port cities from Boston to Savannah, Kingston to Port of Spain, Luanda to Dakar. The group splintered, with some entering the museum and others moving through the stadium. By the time the procession ended, each building had been filled to capacity like lead shot, shooting out into a trajectory between the two.
Those inside the museum delicately retrieved our skulls—once robbed of our graves, dissected, and experimented —from behind glass encasements and cardboard boxes.Those between the grandstand walls hastened their pace. With some skipping along the crimson circle, the others tapped their feet on the lips of their shovels, driving their legs into the ground carefully and with precision as not to disturb the rest of our remains.[3]
Wrapped in black cloth, they delicately passed our crania from hand-to-hand in line from the museum back to the field where we had been buried—the ground beneath Dama Field. With whatever markings they could find, they re-membered our bodies, uniting our skulls back with our ribs. Dancing intensified in a growing circle around us, and we danced with them, until we all made it back to where we were or where we wanted to be. Some found their way to other burial grounds scattered across the city to do the same— the living and the dead trading steps.
The gun that had traditionally marked the starting of the games was tossed somewhere to be unseen. We had already begun.
The groundskeeper chuckled as his chin drifted towards his chest and wavered from side to side, his smirk directed at the ground.
He rose his head to speak towards the stands.
“This whole time we been chasing ourselves.”
A roar of shouts, a tapping of the drums, a singing of the horn.
Could the relay be unbroken?
Notes
[1] An excerpt from Yusef Komunyakaa's "The African Burial Ground."
[2] In addition to America’s founding, we may think of Philadelphia as a center of medical anthropology and American polygenism where a number of its leading theorist trained and practiced, specifically at the University of Pennsylvania. I consider this race science and its relationship to church and state through the lens of Terence Keel’s Divine Variations, among others. In the early 20th century, the popularity of track and field and its accelerated record progression, namely among Black athletes in the sprints, became an open air laboratory where these ideas were further hypothesized. In turn, W. Montague Cobb used the example of the Penn Relays in Race and Runners to challenge prevailing scientific myths regarding biological race and the Black athlete. In a more exhaustive assessment of existing research at the time, Cobb referred to the American Negro as physical anthropology’s “most arduous proving ground” perhaps a tongue-in-cheek reference to the discipline’s dependence on Black cadavers and subjects for study, and its dubious conclusions on race.
[3] The practice of robbing graves of Black and poor individuals to study and train students on their bodies was widespread among America’s elite schools of medicine and anthropology. These studies were often used to further race science, as well as make significant medical advancements that raised the profiles of their respective schools. See more for brief overviews of the history of grave robbing in Philadelphia (here), the burial ground beneath present day Franklin Field where the Penn Relays are hosted, and the holding and display of remains across the street at the Penn Museum (here), and Finding Ceremony, the effort to form a descendant community to steward a proper re-burial (here).
Malik Washington is a writer, educator, and artist based in Philadelphia working across and against form. Some of their work and contributions can be found at malikwashington.com.