Testimony of the Righteous
In honor of Larcenia Floyd, mother of George Floyd:
A tribute to the resilience of poor working-class women.
Act One – a play
I knew George Floyd’s mother even though I never met her face-to-face. I never shared a meal with her, nor did we gossip about our neighbors while waiting for the arrival of our monthly welfare check or being careful not to miss the Metro because we had houses to clean. I stood standing at the bus stop surrounded by the silence of Latino women going to some of the worst jobs in the city, we never said hello and never had time to say goodbye. No formal introduction would ever happen, but at the same time we were tribal sisters with ancient identical tattoos.
We wore the tattoos of poverty, Spirit, hard work, generational resilience, laughter, single parents, burritos, gospel music, flying bullets, black-eyed peas and cornbread, prayers, dreams deferred, and a sacred hope when there was nothing to hope for coupled with periodic despair. We kept our heads above water, but mostly we existed underwater with small pockets of air slowly keeping us alive. I knew George’s mother, but I never met her face-to-face.
She and I were the statistical conclusions of governmental research. We were the charted cycles of the marginalized studied in college classrooms across America while members of our families generationally rotated through the American prison system. We were Roosevelt’s New Deal now failed by deficient school systems, food deserts without food justice, racist red lining; we were brutalized by traumatized police systems, chronic medical disparities, and culturally insensitive gentrification of communities historically not seen as worthy.
Educated people studied us in sanitized United Way board meetings while preparing for their next funding cycle. We were Section 8 mothers: we had to be Mom and Dad at the same time as part of too many families with fathers touched by incarceration who were not allowed to live in government housing. We survived in a system for broken families that never intended our families to become financially grounded, mentally thriving, and sustained enough to envision a positive future.
We were expected, alone, to heal the sick as well as tame the wild. We were experts at surviving and morphing into distorted and contorted versions of ourselves, bound to Section 8 account numbers, housing inspectors, caseworkers, and slum landlords. We tried over and over to make things better as we tumbled through welfare systems and poverty programs that could not nourish us as mothers who were fragmented and broken by the constant shock of not having. I never knew George’s mother, but I will tell you one thing: I knew her pain. I knew her deep disappointments. I knew her feelings of abandonment.
We were American women rooted in African ways that would not, could not ever be remembered. We were grounded by the tribal energy of the diaspora in places where race and class hypocrisies danced well together, where poverty had always been a generational problem, hand-in-hand with the mass killings of Black men. The violence of poverty had never been far from the violence of the Black body with Black people dying by the hands of the prison system, by the hands of White murderers, and by the hands of people who looked just like them. The Black body individually and throughout history has always needed intensive care and healing.
Waiting patiently with patriotic foolishness, we were women of color trapped in a romanticized matrix of dreamlike American visions that were never meant for melanated women who surrender to life in marginalized ways. We were mothers waiting for the next funeral, the next open grave, the next balloon released into blue skies.
We were colonized and constantly surrounded by the stress and the fear of whiteness. Each day we bore witness to systemic manipulation of poor whites rooted in Eurocentric brutality based on distorted stories of indentured servitude and racialized traumas used to divide, control, and conquer.
We noticed the deadly residues of white supremacy shown through the bold and dangerous acting out of young white people based in their family system’s traumatic nightmares. I never met George’s mother, but I do know that we hungered for reparations and a home, waited for those forty acres of work well done with mule at hand and a place of safety we could call our own.
With intention, we carry the ancestral heartbeats and the resistance of those who came before us, always resisting and fighting to reclaim the humanity of a people. Even when shot in the back with cuffed hands, we resist. We resist and die while jogging on a sunny day. We resist by suicide, heart attacks, and nervous breakdowns. We resist by selling cigarettes on corners until we stop breathing.
We are magical women resisting, hiding under the sun, birthing new people, disappearing, murdered while sleeping or simply coming from a store eating Skittles. We are often accused of resisting while being suffocated with knees on the neck, quietly whispering, “I can’t breathe,” quietly whispering, “You are killing me,” while echoing the sacred childlike words of, “Mama…Mama….” I know George Floyd’s mother even though I never met her face-to-face.
