About a decade ago, I lived in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood, a few blocks away from Emancipation Park. It’s the oldest park in Houston, and the oldest in Texas; during the Jim Crow era, as the Third Ward changed shape, it was the only park open to black city residents. There’ve been renovations to it in recent years—including the addition of a rec center with classrooms, a basketball court, and a cultural center—but it’s one of the few spots in the area that’s retained its autonomy in the midst of Houston’s steadily advancing gentrification. On weekends, I’d bike down Elgin Street, hooking a right toward the park, before the shotgun houses and gas stations phase into town houses and skyscrapers; then I’d eat whatever sandwich I’d packed in my bag on one of the curbs at the park’s edge. It usually wasn’t very busy, but sometimes it was. It was mostly local folks, and mostly black and brown, but sometimes not. People congregated by the pool, or on the baseball field. Families played music and ate sitting on their cars just beside the fields of grass.
Last week, a few hundred people gathered in the park to hold a vigil for George Floyd, the black man who was killed, in Minneapolis, on May 25th, when a police officer knelt on his neck—as he lay pinned face down, in handcuffs—for nearly nine minutes. Floyd grew up in the Third Ward. His family moved to Houston from North Carolina when he was a child, and lived in Cuney Homes, a housing project not too far from the park. Floyd came of age in the neighborhood; one of his teachers from elementary school, whom David Remnick spoke to over the weekend, saved an essay that Floyd wrote in the second grade about how he wanted to become a Supreme Court justice. He attended Jack Yates High School, where he played basketball and football—one year, he helped his team make it to the state championship, although they lost—before receiving a scholarship to play basketball in Florida. He returned to Texas to enroll at Texas A. & M–Kingsville, a few hours outside the city, where he also played. But, before the end of his sophomore year, Floyd made his way back to Houston.
At some point, back in the city, he fell in with the local rap scene. This would’ve been the early nineties, as Houston’s oozing, lurching, chopped-and-screwed sound was expanding and distorting, molding the city’s residents and reshaping our sense of Houston’s cultural imprint. There’s even a cameo from Floyd, under the name Big Floyd, on a DJ Screw mixtape, “Sittin’ on Top of the World”; growing up, I heard the freestyles at least a handful of times floating from speakers in Alief, at parties or in the barbershop, or just out in the world, which was an achievement that any number of the city’s burgeoning rap stars would’ve dreamed of. Floyd didn’t ultimately seek out a music career, but in this quiet way he made himself inextricable from the neighborhood; he inhabited several realities simultaneously, in the way that the benefit of the doubt, when you’re given it, can allow you to do. Ideally, Floyd would’ve been given the privilege, like so many in this country, of continuing that way.
In Houston, this past Friday, as protests swelled around the country, the police set up a cordon around the city, and occasionally a handful of squad cars blared down one road or another. By the time I arrived downtown, late in the afternoon, protesters had formed a wall between themselves and policemen on horseback. Helicopters flew above us, a handful of cops peered from the corners of nearby buildings, and a contingent of skateboarders who frequent the area circled both groups. The horses were a familiar sight: at a Houston protest for incarcerated undocumented children last year, seemingly a lifetime ago, police rode the animals, flanking protesters as we made our way through the city.
But the air felt palpably charged this time around: you could reach out and grab the anger. Nearly every protester wore a mask, or a scarf, or a sort of home-fashioned facial covering, which made an already balmy evening a little less tolerable—a reminder that our hands had been forced in the middle of a pandemic. Organizers maneuvered the crowd from one block to another, imploring people to allow cars to make their way through. The rap that blasted from car speakers mingled with the tinkling melody of an ice-cream truck, which drew a respectable line. Most of the protesters looked to be in their twenties and thirties. I passed a black couple walking their dogs alongside the protest’s route, just across the street, who nodded; an older white couple holding signs; a gaggle of Latinx teens distributing water bottles. A handful of medical staff leaned against a building, smoking and raising their fists. Other passersby stood for a moment, watching the crowd progress along its path, before they returned to their own.
But the relative calm I witnessed was a product of my position and timing: later, I’d find out that an upswell I’d seen from the other end of the street was a young woman being trampled by a horse. Later in the evening, an hour or so after I’d made it out of downtown, the police department shut roadways in and out of the area, gridlocking the folks who hadn’t yet left. Friday night, windows at the Bravery Chef Hall food court were smashed and items inside were looted, but the damage downtown was minimal. Still, more than a hundred protesters were arrested on Friday night, and a similar number on Saturday night. Another march downtown, toward City Hall, is planned for Tuesday afternoon.
Naturally, the public conversation has begun to drift toward the question of what this moment means, and where we will go from here, and what this solidarity pledged en masse will tangibly yield. Over the weekend, friends of mine living abroad—veterans of their own protests—sent screenshots of tips for navigating riots. Other figures and entities, some of whom have profited off the amplification of diverse voices, remained silent. Some have taken pains to note the infiltration of the protests by “outside agitators,” while others have argued that the damage done to cities and businesses is a natural by-product of grief and exasperation. As ever, many things can be true simultaneously. But, at the end of the day, a man is dead. He was suffocated in the street, with a knee on his neck, under the guise of the law, and now he is gone.
Not very long ago, a well-meaning white acquaintance asked me how it felt to incessantly think about living, in the United States, in the shadow of total police impunity. I answered, after blinking at him, by saying that I didn’t incessantly think about it. Nor did I not incessantly think about it. It’s just the same way that you (and you know who you are) don’t think about putting one foot in front of the other. We have to go about our lives; at the same time, there is this thing right here, which is to say everywhere in this country, that might end it at any time. We still play in the park, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still snack in our living rooms, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still read in our cars, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still blast our favorite music, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still pull into the grocery-store parking lot, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still babysit, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still ring in the New Year, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still drive home from dinner with our partners, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still go out and about only to find ourselves misidentified, owing to an administrative error in an office somewhere, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still go for walks in the neighborhood, and we might be shot and killed for that. We still take naps at home, and we might be shot and killed for that. We can be killed for any of these things—or anything else, really—with total impunity for the killers.
Maybe someone will record it. Maybe we’ll become a hashtag, our existence flattened into the virtual universe of typed sentiments, joining a list that’s only multiplied in the course of my adult life. Maybe not. Who knows. But it’s enough to make us upset. Surely you can understand.
