Chapter 1The Projects

Foreword

The institutions I have written about most of my life hand you a uniform on the first day and take it back on the last. The jersey belongs to the team. The number belongs to the league. The name across the shoulders is licensed, trademarked, sold in the concourse in three sizes, and reclaimed the moment you are cut or traded or done. This is not a metaphor. It is the actual arrangement, printed in the actual contracts, and it is the arrangement I have spent a career describing: the athlete as a body the institution dresses, brands, sells, and eventually gives back to itself.

Florence Griffith Joyner made her own. Working from sketchbooks she had been filling since she was a girl in the Watts projects, the daughter of a seamstress cut a suit that covered one leg and left the other bare, sewed the early versions with her own hands, and wore it onto the biggest stage the sport had, and dared the officials to tell her to take it off. They did not have a rule for her. That is the sentence that pulled me across a country and a decade and a sport I had barely covered. They did not have a rule for her.

I expected, when I started, to be writing about a controversy. That is the shape the culture has pressed her life into — the fastest woman who ever lived, and the asterisk that trails her like a second shadow — and I read for it honestly. I read the record of the era, the accusations and the denials, the physiology and the innuendo, the arguments that had not resolved in thirty-eight years and do not resolve here. And somewhere in the reading the controversy stopped being the center. What moved to the center was the sketchbook.

Because everything the world argued about — the transformed body, the six-inch nails, the hair streaming behind her like an illustration of speed, the one-legged suit — was a single intelligence expressing itself in the only two mediums a girl from Jordan Downs was ever handed: her own body, and whatever surface would hold a drawing. She was designing herself before anyone thought to watch, and she never stopped. The speed was the part the stopwatch could measure. The design was the part it could not. They were the same gift, and I did not understand until I had spent three years inside her life that you cannot tell the story of one without telling the story of the other.

And then there is what she left in the book that no argument has ever managed to touch. Ten-point-four-nine. Twenty-one-point-three-four. Numbers set in a single summer in 1988 that have outlasted every woman who has chased them and every suspicion fastened to them, that have stood longer than any sprint records in the event's history. I came to distrust the tidy verdicts on both sides of her — the sainthood and the indictment both — because each is trying to do quickly what those numbers refuse to do at all, which is to close the case. She does not close. That, in the end, is the only honest reason to give a life this many pages.

This book is my attempt to follow one woman from a housing project the country had decided to forget to the record books it has not been able to overwrite, and to insist, the whole way, that the runner and the designer were never two people. I came to her a writer of leagues and franchises, fluent in the machinery that owns athletes and dresses them and numbers them for sale. I leave her having watched someone refuse every part of that arrangement and win anyway. That is what the rare ones do to you. They make you look again at everyone who never got the chance.

— Roland Mercer, Boston

Chapter 1 · The Projects

Part I: Watts

The Jordan Downs housing project in Watts, Los Angeles, was a grid of low-slung stucco buildings the color of nicotine stains, arranged in rows that suggested neither design nor accident but the simple efficiency of warehousing. First opened in 1944 to house defense workers during the Second World War, and converted to public housing in the following decade, by the mid-1960s it had become what most public housing projects in American cities had become: a repository for people the economy had discarded, maintained just enough to prevent collapse but never enough to suggest that anyone in authority considered the residents fully human. The walls cracked. The plumbing failed. The paint peeled in long, jaundiced strips. The courtyards between buildings were patches of dirt and cracked concrete where children played and men stood and nothing grew except the persistent, bitter knowledge that you were where you were because the country had decided you belonged there.

Watts itself occupied the southeastern edge of Los Angeles, a flat, sun-blasted expanse of grid streets and small houses and vacant lots that sat in the shadow of the larger city like a bruise the body refuses to acknowledge. It was overwhelmingly Black. It had been so since the Great Migration brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to California's defense plants during and after the war, and it had remained so as redlining, restrictive covenants, and the everyday machinery of American segregation ensured that the people who moved in could not move out. The Watts Riots of August 1965, six days of fire and fury that left thirty-four dead and nearly a thousand buildings damaged or destroyed, had announced to the world that the neighborhood existed. The world had noted the announcement and then, with the efficiency that characterized American attention to Black suffering, forgotten.

Jordan Downs itself was a specific geography within the larger geography of Watts. First opened in May 1944 as wartime workers' housing and converted to public housing under the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles in the 1950s, it occupied a rectangle of land bounded by 97th Street to the north and 103rd Street to the south, with Alameda Street on the east and Grape Street on the west. The project consisted of exactly seven hundred units arranged in two-story structures that faced interior courtyards, a design intended to encourage community cohesion that instead created enclosed spaces of shared poverty, where everyone could see everyone else's difficulty and privacy was largely a theoretical concept. By the time Florence's mother arrived with her children in the mid-1960s, the project housed roughly three thousand people, the majority of them Black, in a density that translated into approximately four residents per unit on average but that in larger families like the Griffiths', eleven children plus a mother, meant a compression of bodies into space that required the household to function with military precision simply to get everyone fed, dressed, and out the door each morning.

The Watts of Florence's childhood was also a neighborhood of specific institutions that formed the social infrastructure of the community's daily life. The 103rd Street Corridor, known locally simply as Charcoal Alley after the fires of 1965, was the commercial strip that had been rebuilt after the riots, slowly and incompletely, into a collection of small businesses, beauty salons, barber shops, and the kind of neighborhood commerce that serves communities the larger economy has written off. The Will Rogers Memorial Park at 103rd Street and Central Avenue — renamed Ted Watkins Memorial Park decades later — provided one of the few green spaces where children could play organized sports. The David Starr Jordan High School on East 103rd Street anchored the neighborhood educationally. The Nickerson Gardens housing project, about a mile south and the largest of Watts's three major public housing developments, was the other pole of the neighborhood's residential geography, a reminder that Jordan Downs was one node in a larger landscape of concentrated poverty.

The Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation ran one of the few organized youth sports programs available to children in Watts. Robinson himself, the former welterweight and middleweight champion who had grown up poor in Detroit and who understood what poverty did to the bodies and minds of children, had established the foundation in 1969, four years after the riots, as a direct response to the community's need for organized activity and adult mentorship. He donated funds, recruited volunteers, and created a youth athletics program that gave children from Jordan Downs and the surrounding streets a structure for their physical energy and a set of achievable goals in a neighborhood where the larger goals available to American children — college, professional career, financial security — seemed so remote as to be fictional. Florence Griffith began running in the foundation's program as a young girl, competing in sprints at its sports days.

Delorez Florence Griffith was born on December 21, 1959, in Los Angeles, the seventh of eleven children. Her mother, also named Florence, worked as a seamstress. Her father, Robert Griffith, was an electronics technician. The family was large in the way that poor Black families in mid-century America were often large, not from carelessness but from the economics of survival, where more children meant more potential earners and more hands to share the labor of getting through each day. The Griffiths lived first in Littlerock, a small Mojave Desert community in the Antelope Valley, before moving to Watts when Florence, Dee Dee, as the family called her, was still a young child.

The six Griffith children who preceded Dee Dee — the future Florence Griffith Joyner, seventh in the sequence — were Bobby, Weldon, Vivian, Kathleen, Robert, and Elizabeth, and four more siblings arrived after her, bringing the household to eleven children in all. The names changed but the structure was constant: older children helped manage younger ones, the household's authority flowing through a chain of sibling responsibility that descended from their mother, who was absolute, through the older siblings to each child in turn. Dee Dee, the seventh, occupied the position of the middle child in the most literal sense: old enough to have older siblings who remembered life before the projects, young enough to have younger siblings who knew nothing else. She was not the baby who commanded special attention and not the oldest who commanded special responsibility. She had, in the peculiar arithmetic of large families, room to develop her own identity away from the gravitational pull of either extreme.

The desert was the first landscape she knew. She later described it with a vividness that suggested the Mojave had imprinted itself on her sensory imagination before Watts had the chance to overlay it: the vast emptiness, the quality of light that bleached everything to its essential form, the jackrabbits that exploded from the scrub in sudden, startling bursts of speed. The family kept a pet rabbit. This was not an ordinary detail, in a household of eleven children where money was perpetually short, the maintenance of a pet suggested something about the family's relationship to beauty and softness, their insistence on preserving some small space for delight amid the practical demands of survival. Florence loved the rabbit. She loved its quickness, its alert stillness that could become motion without visible transition. It is tempting but not unreasonable to see in this childhood observation an early vocabulary for what her own body would later become.

Florence's parents divorced when she was four years old, while the family was still in the desert, and it was after the marriage ended that her mother brought the children to Jordan Downs. The father's departure was not unusual, the rate at which Black fathers left or were driven from poor households in the 1960s was a statistical fact that reflected not moral failure but the systematic destruction of Black male economic viability by an economy that offered them the worst jobs, the lowest pay, and the first layoffs. But statistics do not raise children. Florence Griffith, the mother, arrived in Watts alone with eleven children, dependent on welfare, managing a household whose daily logistics, the feeding, the clothing, the homework, the discipline, the medical emergencies, the emotional crises, the relentless grind of keeping that many young people alive and functional, would have challenged a fully staffed institution.

She managed, because she was a woman of immense organizational force and because she had no alternative. Years later, she would describe her philosophy with a metaphor that distilled a lifetime of survival into a single image: "We had nothing. But I explained to the children that life was like a baby. A baby comes into the world without anything. Then it starts crawling, then it stands up. Then it takes its first step and starts walking. When we moved into the project I told them, 'Start walking.'" The children were raised in the Watts projects — Jordan Downs — where the rent was subsidized and the conditions were what they were. Florence the mother established rules. She held weekly family meetings she called "powwows," at which the mother and her children would reflect on the events of the week and use stories from the Bible as examples for how they could improve themselves. The children had chores. The children had curfews. The children had expectations placed upon them that were enforced with the quiet, unyielding authority of a woman who understood that discipline was not cruelty but a substitute for the resources she did not have. If she could not give her children money, she could give them structure. If she could not give them the neighborhoods and schools that white children had, she could give them the knowledge that they were expected to be exceptional anyway.

Part II: Dee Dee

The girl they called Dee Dee was different from the beginning, and the difference was visible. She was not only active, all children are active. She was kinetic in a way that suggested her body contained more energy than it could reasonably hold, that stillness was a state she could achieve only through conscious effort and could not maintain for long. She ran everywhere. Not walked. Ran. To school, from school, across the courtyard, up the stairs, through the apartment, a constant, darting, velocity-driven presence that her siblings learned to navigate around the way one navigates around weather.

She was also, from a very young age, interested in appearance in a way that went beyond vanity into something more like art. She painted her fingernails. She braided her hair in elaborate configurations. She assembled outfits from whatever was available, hand-me-downs, thrift store finds, pieces that should not have matched but that she combined with a visual confidence that suggested she was already thinking about aesthetics as a medium of self-expression. In the projects, where sameness was imposed from without, the same buildings, the same apartments, the same concrete, the same institutional indifference, Dee Dee's insistence on visual distinction was a form of rebellion so fundamental that it did not need to name itself as such. She simply refused to look like everyone else. She refused to accept that poverty meant invisibility.

Her mother noticed and did not discourage it. Florence Griffith, the mother, was herself a woman who cared about presentation, who insisted that her children go to church clean and pressed, who maintained standards of appearance that cost effort rather than money and that communicated to the world that the Griffith family, however poor, had not surrendered to the grinding aesthetic of poverty. The mother understood, perhaps intuitively, that her seventh child's obsession with how things looked was not frivolity. It was identity under construction.

The running was harder to channel. In the projects, a child who ran constantly was a child at risk, at risk of crossing into territories controlled by people who did not welcome crossings, at risk of encountering the violence that was as much a feature of Watts as the stucco walls and the empty lots, at risk of being in the wrong place when the wrong thing happened. Florence the mother recognized that her daughter's physical energy needed a structure, and the structure she found was organized sport.

There was a youth program at the Sugar Ray Robinson Youth Foundation, established by the former boxing champion in the Watts community. Robinson, whose own journey from poverty to fame and back gave him a particular understanding of what young people in Watts needed, had created a space where children could train, compete, and direct their energies toward something that had rules, goals, and rewards. Florence, the daughter, began running in organized competition at the age of seven, and once the foundation's track program was established, she became one of its regulars.

She won. She won immediately and she won consistently and she won by margins that made the other parents look at her and then look at her mother and ask the question that would be asked, in various forms, for the next thirty years: where does that come from?

Where it came from was a body that was, even in childhood, extraordinarily designed for speed. She was long-limbed relative to her torso. Her muscles were fast-twitch dominant in a ratio that would later be identified as extreme even among elite sprinters. Her stride was naturally long and naturally efficient, she covered ground with a minimum of vertical oscillation, directing almost all of her energy forward rather than upward, which is the biomechanical signature of every great sprinter who has ever lived. But biomechanics are retrospective explanations. At seven, eight, nine years old, what people saw was simply a girl who was faster than everyone else and who seemed to experience speed itself as a form of pleasure.

By the time she was fifteen, she had won the annual Jesse Owens National Youth Games two years running. The Jesse Owens Games were the premier youth track competition in the country, drawing the best young athletes from every state. Florence did not only compete. She dominated. Her times at fifteen were faster than the times many grown women were running at local meets around the country. The talent was so obvious, so visually arresting, this long-legged girl from the Watts projects who ran with a fluidity that made it look easy, that made it look like she was not trying, that made it look like she could go faster if she wanted to but had decided, for the moment, that this was enough, that the only question was not whether she had a future in track and field but how far that future could go.

Part III: The Nails

The nails appeared early. They were not an affectation added later, in the years of fame, as a piece of personal branding. They were there from the beginning, long, painted, elaborate, maintained with a care that was itself a kind of discipline. In a household where money was scarce, the time and attention Florence devoted to her nails represented a real allocation of resources, not financial but temporal and emotional. The nails were a statement. They said: I am here. I am not what you expect. I will not conform to the visual template that poverty and Blackness and femaleness in America have prepared for me.

The nails became, decades later, the subject of fascination and mockery and aesthetic analysis. They were not a costume put on for cameras. They were Florence Griffith Joyner's first art form. Before she was a world-record holder, before she was an Olympic champion, before she was the fastest woman who ever lived, she was a girl in the Watts projects who painted her fingernails and refused to cut them and ran faster than anyone while they flashed in the sun.

Her mother also noticed something else about her daughter: Florence could draw. The girl had a genuine visual gift, a facility with line and color and composition that went beyond the casual artistic abilities of most children. She drew constantly, on any available surface, with whatever was at hand. She drew clothes. She designed outfits in her mind and committed them to paper with a specificity that included fabric textures, color combinations, and the way a garment would move on a body in motion. This was not a child drawing pretty pictures. This was a future designer working in the only medium available to her.

The combination, the speed, the nails, the visual imagination, the refusal to be ordinary, was already, by her early teens, the complete Florence Griffith. The world would not recognize the totality of the package for another fifteen years. But it was there, fully formed in its essentials, in a girl running barefoot across the cracked concrete of Jordan Downs, her long nails catching the California light, her legs eating the ground with a stride that seemed to exist outside the normal relationship between effort and motion.

She was, already, fast. She was, already, beautiful. She was, already, unwilling to be one thing when she could be several. And she was, already, from a place that America had decided to forget, which meant that everything she would eventually become would carry the weight of proof, proof that Watts could produce not just rage and despair but grace and speed and art and a woman who would, for one luminous summer in 1988, become the most famous athlete on earth.

The weight of Watts was also the weight of expectation of a specific and perverse kind. The America that had decided to forget Watts expected nothing from it except its own silence. The America that paid attention to Watts expected its children to confirm the pathologies that the culture had attributed to poverty: crime, despair, failure, the self-perpetuating catastrophe of the underclass. Florence Griffith Joyner, by becoming what she became, violated both expectations simultaneously. She was not silent, and she was not catastrophic. She was extraordinary, which is the one thing that neither the forgetting America nor the watching America had prepared a vocabulary for.

The Jesse Owens National Youth Games victories, at fourteen and fifteen, were the first concrete signal that the expectations were wrong. The Jesse Owens Games, named for the athlete who had proven American Black excellence on the most public stage in sport by winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under the gaze of Adolf Hitler, were held annually and drew the best young track athletes from across the country. The fact that a girl from the Watts projects was dominating the sprint events at this competition was noticed in the track and field community. It was not yet noticed by anyone else. The world beyond track and field did not pay attention to youth athletics in the same way it paid attention to professional sports, and the audiences that would eventually witness Florence's greatness in Seoul were, in 1974 and 1975, entirely unaware that the future fastest woman on earth was running in national youth competitions in Watts, her long nails catching the California light.

But that summer was still far away. First, there was high school, and the question of whether raw talent and long nails and a housing project address could translate into something that the world beyond Watts would recognize and reward.

Part IV: Family

The Griffith household operated on principles that were common in large, poor, Black families of the era and that deserve description rather than sentimentality. There was love. "We didn't know how poor we were," Florence told Newsweek years later. "We were rich as a family." There was also crowding, noise, competition for resources, and the particular stress that poverty places on familial bonds, the knowledge that every illness, every unexpected expense, every broken appliance represented not an inconvenience but a potential catastrophe. Florence the mother held it together. The older children helped raise the younger ones. Responsibility was distributed early and without negotiation. You did your part because the family needed you to do your part, and the family's need superseded your preferences.

The physical dimensions of the household were extraordinary. The Jordan Downs units that housed families of Florence's size, eleven children and a mother, were apartments never designed for a household of that scale. The mathematics of this arrangement — a dozen people in a handful of rooms — required a discipline of space management that the family approached with the same organizational intelligence Florence the mother brought to everything else. The older children shared beds. The younger children slept in configurations that rotated by age and necessity. Privacy, in the American middle-class sense of the word, did not exist. Quiet barely existed. The household was a shared physical experience in which the boundaries between individuals were minimal and the collective management of limited resources was continuous and inescapable.

This was the environment in which Florence the daughter developed her interior life. Interiority in a household of twelve required either the complete surrender of privacy, which produced people who defined themselves through community, or a fierce internal self-sufficiency that found ways to be alone inside crowded rooms. Florence was the second type. Her sketchbooks were private. Her nails, elaborately painted in her corner of a shared bedroom, were her own. The internal world she maintained alongside the external chaos of the household was a form of independence that her circumstances made necessary and her temperament made absolute. She learned, in the projects, to need nothing from the external environment except the raw material, space, light, whatever surface was available, to express herself. Everything else came from within.

Florence, Dee Dee, was neither the oldest nor the youngest, which placed her in the middle of the sibling hierarchy, noticed enough to be loved but not so central as to be smothered. She had space to develop her own identity, and she used that space with the determination of someone who understood, even as a child, that identity was something you built rather than something you were given. Her siblings knew her as the fast one, the artistic one, the one with the nails, the one who would spend an hour arranging her hair before leaving the apartment. They also knew her as the competitive one, the child who could not lose at anything, who turned every game into a contest, who approached even household chores with an intensity that suggested she was racing against a clock only she could hear.

The competition was not aggressive. It was joyful. Florence competed the way she ran, with pleasure, with commitment, with a visible delight in the exercise of her own capabilities. She did not need to beat her siblings to feel good about herself. She needed to beat herself, to do the thing better than she had done it before, to find the limit and then move past it. This orientation toward self-improvement rather than dominance over others would define her entire athletic career and would be, perhaps, the quality that most distinguished her from the paranoid, embattled psychology of many elite athletes.

Her mother's influence was paramount. Florence Griffith the elder was a woman who believed in God, in discipline, in education, and in the proposition that her children's circumstances did not define their potential. She did not articulate this belief in the language of self-help or motivational speaking. She articulated it in the language of daily life: you will do your homework, you will go to church, you will be respectful, you will keep yourself clean, you will not use your address as an excuse. The message was not that poverty did not matter. The message was that poverty was a condition, not an identity, and that the appropriate response to a condition was to work to change it rather than to accept it as permanent.

This maternal philosophy would echo through Florence Griffith Joyner's entire public life. The woman who showed up at the 1988 Olympics in a one-legged bodysuit with six-inch nails painted in red, white, and blue was expressing, in the most visible possible way, the lesson her mother had taught her in the Watts projects: you are not your circumstances. You are what you make of yourself. And what you make of yourself should be so vivid, so extraordinary, so impossible to ignore, that the world has no choice but to look.

The world was not yet looking. It was 1975. Florence Griffith was fifteen years old. She was the fastest girl in her neighborhood, possibly the fastest girl in her city, possibly the fastest girl in the country for her age. She had long nails and a sketchbook full of clothing designs and a mother who would not let her quit. She lived in a housing project that most Americans could not find on a map and would not visit if they could.

She was about to go to high school, where a coach would see her run and understand that what he was looking at was not only talent but something rarer, the kind of physical gift that appears once in a generation, that cannot be coached into existence, that can only be recognized and then, with enormous care, developed into what it was always meant to become.