A man dies.
/Rest Peacefully, George Perry Floyd, Jr.
October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020
Dear Mr. George Floyd,
We breathe for you.
We inhale the last of your breath that called out to Mother. The breath that they expelled from your buckled body, leaving your daughter fatherless.
We feel the hate that compresses the backs of our bruised necks. It dampens our streets with the tears and blood that spills from our bodies and the bodies of our ancestors. It has been here since the beginning, long before it arrived on slave ships and warships and fishing boats.
We choke on lifetimes of cruelty, while dodging the darts of corrupt systems and wicked empires. They will be judged—if not in this lifetime, then in the next. As promised, power will be pulled from the filthy hands of they who wring the life out of the ones who are most vulnerable.
You will no longer bear witness to the affliction that your People have been made to endure.
Brother, you are free.
So we exhale. We howl ballads of lamentation, and follow with songs of freedom. We release the breath that sustained you for forty-six years, in time to give life to a new generation. We will remember you and the others as we kneel in prayer and in protest.
::
The looting began two nights ago. Unruly opportunists chose to deface the city rather than to shield it from this very violence, their anger inflaming mayhem. A hungry mob is an angry mob. Your lady, Courtney, spoke of your love for people, particularly the ones whom had been thrown away. In your honor, she pled for an end to the havoc that ensued in response to your murder:
You can’t fight fire with fire…
Everything just burns…
People hate.
They’re hating…
and he would not want that...
He would give grace.
To the people who rouse chaos rather than organize: How do these actions protect our people? How does this activate the justice that we long for? We must learn to project our warranted anger upon the actions that steer us toward solution and toward the peace that they try to suffocate. When we watch our people suffer, it is so very difficult to control the seething rage. But there are other ways to demand justice. We can look to our brethren who march the streets together in peaceful protest. They did, so that we could. They will show us how.
On July 1, 1917, two white policemen were killed in East St. Louis, Illinois, in a ruckus caused by marauders attacking homes of blacks in the area. The incident sparked a race riot on July 2, which ended with forty-eight killed, hundreds injured, and thousands of homes burned. The police and state militia did little to prevent the carnage, which mostly targeted African Americans. On July 28, 1917, the NAACP protested with a Silent March of 10,000 black men, women, and children down New York’s Fifth Avenue. The women and children dressed in white and the men in black suits, marched behind a row of drummers carrying banners calling for justice and equal rights. The only sound was the beat of muffled drums. Today, the Silent March is considered New York’s, and most likely America’s, first African American civil rights march. (NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (254.01.00)
My belovèd husband said during one of our reflective, late-night drives around the city:
Anger may be justified, but anger is not the solution.
It only leads to violence when it becomes full-blown.
The violence may soothe the fire,
but that fire is not of God.
April 14, 1960: Demonstrators in front of the F.W. Woolworth store in New York City. The majority of the protestors were ministers, sponsored by church committees in cooperation with the Congress of Racial Equality. The protest began when black students refused to leave after being denied service at Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. (New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. Library of Congress (LC-DIG-ppmsca-08096).
There are still those who remain willfully ignorant while claiming to preach truth. To them, we ask:
How many lives is the wool over your own eyes worth?
On our streets, vexation pulsed through the arms of peaceful protesters as they pushed the words high above their heads:
I don’t have to be black to be outraged.
Stop killing us.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.
[Although often attributed to Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., these words did not come directly from his lips. Rather, the quote above paraphrases a portion of a sermon that he gave on March 8, 1965 at Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, the day after Bloody Sunday, on which the police brutalized civil rights protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they marched toward Montgomery.]
During his preaching, Reverend King uttered these words:
A man dies
when he refuses to stand up for that which is right.
A man dies
when he refuses to stand up for justice.
A man dies
when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.
I rode through downtown on the way to the post office this afternoon, air thickened with some feeling that stooped in the liminal space between outrage and agony and hope. I remind myself that this hope must, at some point, be proclaimed as an active hope lest it grow timid and hide behind anguish. It is a treacherous thing when despair ensnares. When hope takes on material form—in gesture, in communion, in conversation, in prayer, in art—transitioning from noun to verb, it carries out its potential authority.
Massive wooden panels border our streets with the same matter from which thousands of our Black People and their children were lynched centuries ago. And here we are, in a new era, still witnessing modern-day lynchings. These trees were made to produce life-sustaining air for all people, but a large wooden wall that is pocked with knots echoes your call. It reads:
I can’t breathe.
We breathe for you.
Artists stand firm on crates as they paint your name in colorful messages of hope, solidarity, and justice. BLM is sprayed thick across raw boards. These initials trouble me, though, having been reduced to only three letters—they just do not carry the gravity of the message that they intend to proclaim.
Say the words in their entirety, like we say their names. These words hold the weight of history, of life, of death. Every one of them.
The same way OMG does not fully bear the groaning plea for these human lives.
They same way RIP does not adequately describe what we wish for you and for all the others.
Your death rustles momentum as we march in love for our fallen brothers and sisters. Our firm steps trample upon the refuse of hate, violence, injustice, and immorality. We cup the ashes in our hands and loosen some with every exhale, our damp cheekbones hold the dust to our faces. We wear the ashes like delicate voile until they free themselves from our skin, swept by the same wind that billows white flags suspended from a mourning sky.
That horrific scene flickered in my memory as a devastated cityscape moved sluggishly past my peripheral like some dystopian nightmare come to life. Like so many other cities, our downtown is edged with splintering quilts of plywood, concealing the windows that, at one time, welcomed in life and light. (Hold fast, Neighbors. This too shall pass. Darkness shall not prevail.)
We mourn for you.
::
When I arrived at the post office line, there were four people ahead of me, each one toeing a yellow dash to keep us safely distanced during this pandemic. (How much more are we to handle?) The man at the window was a disabled White Marine veteran. He moaned an overwhelming grief, which continued even after the woman stepped away from the window to retrieve his mail. Because his check had been redirected back to the post office, he was unable to pay his rent on time and now feared possible eviction.
The second person in line was a Latino man whose dark brown wavy hair hung down to the bow of his broad back. His black shirt untucked from army fatigue shorts, bare heels hatched with the cracks that told of a grueling trudge, pressing heavily upon black rubber sandals. A familiar road for some of us. Stamped on his left calf was a message that I strained to make out but couldn’t, pushing against a tattoo of an inverted cross.
The third person was a large-framed Black man who was draped in all black. The period of mourning continues. He stood still and strong, shoulders square, with his headphones shielding him from the sounds of a long-lived terror, protecting his stinging ears from any utterance of rage and despair. No sound of a rasping throat, eager to gulp air into the blackened lungs that have been polluted by hate. No sound of gurgling blood. Or of wheezing. Or gasping. No sound of his brother’s wailing for mercy, or the lifeless silence that followed soon after.
The fourth person in the line-up was an elderly Black man who was dressed in an old black suit that drooped over his lean stature. His wooly hair burst from between the straps of his face mask like silvery cotton in bloom. His profile hunched over the counter, shuffling through a stack of papers pulled from his black work bag that was greying with wear. It was a Swiss brand bag with a red cross logo that gripped onto the outer pocket like crosshairs. Or like a symbol of recovery, faith, peace, and refuge.
As I stood in line behind him, he said aggressively,
I’m not in line. I’m just paying bills.
Moving in front of him would have crowded everyone, so I said to him,
I’ll just wait here.
I smiled softly at him, but it was covered by my mask. He didn’t look at me, anyway. He grumbled to himself while fingering through his paperwork. Another four minutes passed and the veteran continued lamenting. These distressing sounds layered one atop another, echoing throughout the lobby. Finally, the line moved up, so I stepped widely around him.
I don’t know why you just stood there when I told you I wasn’t in line! his tight lips snapped.
I was trying to give you more space, Sir.
He continued muttering to himself, displeased with me.
It was out of respect for YOU, SIR, I said sternly. My face and chest tightened.
He paused.
Oh—Oh. Well, thank you, he said, startled.
I didn’t turn back to look at him. I was too exhausted from the frustration—his, everyone else’s, my own. He continued speaking quietly to himself, but loud enough to witness to us the disrespect that he has encountered from too many others, the plight of having been the target of racism for too long, the ones who so readily call the police on him, and how they grow more unrestrained every day. I listened. I found myself faintly nodding as he bemoaned his grievances with a hurried voice; he knew there was not enough time to reveal all of it. And as I considered the people with whom I stood in line, my heart peeled from a blistering pain for each them, and for you, Brother, and for your daughter and your loved ones, and for the sufferers in communities everywhere. There we were, lined up as if waiting for another funeral procession to begin. Your brothers dressed in black, all of us standing in this narrow space, flanked by two walls—one of marble, the other tiled with antique brass mailbox doors, ornate like columbarium vaults that preserve the ashes of these whose lives have been looted during this long-winded war.
I finally arrived at the window, snatched up my package, and darted out. But right before I reached the double doors, a still small voice told me to return to the elder. Hesitatingly, I did. I turned the corner and said quickly, before I could change my mind,
Sir, I’m not sure if you are a believing man, but everything that you are going through, everything that we all are going through…
God is bigger than all of this. We are going to make it through this together.
His ashen hairline and black mask framed his tired eyes. He said in a calming voice,
Actually, I am a believer.
Then we closed our eyes and prayed together for strength and for courage, and for justice to rise up—and quickly. We brought that boiling anger to a simmer that day at the post office—a moment of grace that Courtney said you would have hoped for, Mr. Floyd. Fittingly, the gentleman’s name was Victor.
I lay beside my husband that evening while folding my aching eyes into the pages that offer comfort beyond all understanding. These living words diffused from out of my mouth and into our ears, drowning out the sounds of the city:
If thou seeth the oppression of the poor,
and the violent perverting the judgement and the justice in a province,
Marvel not at the matter:
for he that is higher than the highest regardeth,
and there be higher than they.
– Ecclesiastes 5:8
When I returned home, I opened my package to unloose a pile of star magnolia bones that were sent from a friend in Bloomington, Indiana. They might have held a different kind of beauty on any other day. But on this day, they lay like delicate bones—relics of things expired, once teeming with life and offering us breath. Too many bones. Your bones—no longer weary, George Floyd. In life and in death, your life, these lives, have always mattered.
1942: A sign posted for warning. Jim Crow sign printed by Lonestar Restaurant Association, Dallas, TX. (N.D. Black History Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (024.00.00)
2020: A sign posted for protection. a message to the looters next to a message of fortitude: together we are stronger. Twelves Record Shop, Long Beach, California.
We’ve come a long way, but not far enough.
In your memory, George Floyd, in memory of countless others
In memory of those who led the march from the beginnings
We, the mighty Peace Warriors press on.
We know we’ve got a long way to go.
It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
- James Arthur Baldwin
To the Black Community: In life and in death, your lives matter. The multitudes stand with you.
Holy Black Sister of Christ, 2020. By Isabella Ferch, age 15. A portrait study focusing on Christ’s love for all.
How Long, 2019. Detail showing fragmented scripture that reads: And they cried with voice, saying ‘how long’. Many men died. Was found without fault. (The rest of the piece reads: He has judged who corrupted. Woe is past. Behold, woe is past. Do not weep. Know that our brother has been set free. Those who dwell will marvel.)
Love without power is sentimental and anemic.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.
And justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
- Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
::
Lyrics to songs referenced:
Billy Holiday: Strange Fruit (1939)
Mahalia Jackson: Lord Don’t Move the Mountain (1958)
Bob Marley and the Wailers: Time Will Tell (1960)
Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come (1964)
Abyssinians: Declaration of Rights (1969)
Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On (1971)
Bob Marley and the Wailers: Them Belly Full (But We Hungry) (1974)
Judy Mowatt: Black Woman (1980)
Barrington Levy: Oh Jah, Can’t You See (1982)
Sade: Slave Song (1999)