THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
I always knew there would be a play about George Floyd when he died. Then the Capitol Attack on January 6th happened, and I knew what that play would be. The two events were of a piece, inextricably linked because both were logical conclusions of a history of terror. America's romance with the 'happy negro' singing wistfully for a freedom he is not meant to ever actually pursue by legal or other means, deems it heresy when those singers stop singing and start marching. Meanwhile Trump's infamous escalator ride signaled the advent of the end of the great American experiment and the rise (or perhaps reemergence) of American Fascism. It's like a bad relationship, and we are in its throes.
There'd been scores documented police deaths - documented - of Black and Brown people before George Floyd was murdered. He was part of a long and harrowing tradition of dead. The slave patrols were the beginning. Humans hunting other humans for the crime of rejecting the yoke in order to live as fully human. The founders of a nation born of the premise that all men were created equal found a way to exclude some of us and in fact, a whole war was waged on the principle that some people were simply more equal than others and had the right to own others, and they would be damned if they would be stripped of that right. Slave patrols gave way to the poll tax, Jim Crow, and the Klan, and now white Christian Nationalism and the Proud Boys.
Then came Trump's win in 2016. Everyone cried. Everyone I knew cried. How could this have happened? We'd just had a Black president, for God's sake! And now? Dude actually stood on a dais and said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, and it turns out maybe he can. Nearly half a million dead from Covid alone and all the country can talk about is Sleepy Old Joe - he's three years older than Trump. Three. All those kids stolen at the border? The Arab ban? The wall? Colin Kaepernick took a knee, and they wanted his head for it. They wanted Hillary's for calling them deplorable. They are. But you aren't supposed to call them that. The country was seemingly taking a turn but didn't want to hear there was anything amiss.
American history is a history of terror. Silence and terror. Of human beings living on their knees, consumed by that terror and visiting that terror on Others. I had done my share of running: from ugly words from trucks when I found myself in the wrong neighborhoods while canvassing or just going home; mothers suddenly grabbing their children's hands or locking their doors as I passed. I was at home alone one afternoon - I was in grad school at the time. I heard a woman screaming somewhere. It sounded like she was in a car, but I couldn't tell. It was terrifying. I called the police; told them I was concerned someone was being hurt. They arrived sometime later. I opened the door and these two big beefy guys with their night sticks out were standing there. I remember the look both of them gave me. They were smirking, wanted to know if I lived in the house. For how long. Did I have ID. It was a minutes' long grilling that felt like forever. I had no idea what was happening to this woman and why we were focusing on whether I legit belonged in that house. I had to smile to push down my fear, ire and hurt so that we could get to why I'd called.
This was in Providence, Rhode Island in the early '90s. My knowledge of the cops, having grown up in Denver, was that this was par for the course. Denver cops were notoriously unfriendly to Black people back then. They would hang out at Village Inn or Winchell's Donuts and just as soon beat you as look at you. But this had a different sting to it. Here I am in grad school at Brown University trying to get help for someone and all they care about is whether or not I belong in the house. This was a year or so before the Rodney King beatings in Los Angeles. I remember how quiet the streets were in Providence. Everyone terrified something would pop off and staying inside while the West Coast blew up. I felt devastated, hopeless, dehumanized, and not at all surprised. It was cops, after all. It happened again with Abner Louima in '97. It just kept happening.
Growing up, cops to me weren't the good guys. I can ask them directions, but I put on my politest smile and gird my loins for the animosity every time. I tense every time they're behind me. I worry for my brother who is six feet tall and a walking target. Usually, it's fine. But then comes the cop who stops me and my then-boyfriend in his car at night for no reason, and the guy is just *looking* at me. I tell my then boyfriend (who is white and from the former Czech Republic) it's because the guy thinks I'm a prostitute. He doesn't believe me. But I just *feel* it. I just *know*. Then there's my cousin's ex, a cop (Black), who excitedly pulls out his silver nine millimeter to show off like a new toy while we're sitting on my aunt's stoop in Brooklyn. There's the retired cop watching over us extras on the street in San Francisco while we're on an open film set. He can't stop scanning the crowd, his head and eyes pivoting back and forth like a stuck bobble-head. He's explaining that he sees the worst in people every day and there is something near dead in him as he says it. I feel like I understand him a little, but I don't feel a whole lot better for it.
So when I watch the stills of Derek Chauvin looking straight at the camera while he's crushing the life out of George Floyd with that dead-eyed "so what" stare, all of that floods back and becomes the impetus for BLUE. The contempt, the will to impose control, the implied and casual violence, the almost gleeful imposition of fear. All I can think is "there but for the grace of God..." and that doesn't make me feel better either. And when I'm watching that mob storm the Capital, I already know some of them are cops. I can't explain it. I just recognize the fear in my gut. It just fits.
I don't know how to see cops as good guys. I have been taught by my skin not to. One year my activist Methodist church showed that 60 Minutes special on American racism: white cops blasting black protestors with hoses, setting dogs on them. I was so angry I cried because the Black folk laughed. A woman who must have been in her 70s by then said simply, you have to laugh to keep from crying. I was only fifteen and had already learned the dueling realities battling within me as a Black girl in America. Expected to pledge allegiance to a flag that didn't represent me, my silence and consent were demanded. So, yes, I'd caught glimpses of that terror - nothing compared to what George Floyd faced, but glimpses. Then George Floyd died crying for his mother and I needed to look it in the eye, really try to understand it - not for noble reasons but simply to keep it from killing me.
George Floyd's death carried a special weight. Because he was a logical conclusion of all that ugliness. All that hatred personified. Not that Trump was the cause. He is merely a symptom. Of the rot beneath; the lie behind the truths held to be self-evident. The line from Trump to Charlottesville to tiki torches is littered with bodies and flowers into the Tree of Life Synagogue, that grocers in upstate New York and Pulse Nightclub. Whether draped in the black robes of jurisprudence or white hoods, it's all the same. The State subjugates certain bodies by force, turning an equally bloodthirsty eye on organized labor and dissent of any kind. We have half an electorate that will gladly toss aside fundamental democratic principles if it means someone Other is a little less free. The Right's love affair of late with autocracy isn't so much anathema to the country's democratic roots as it is baked in.
In BLUE, two old friends, both working in the police force, one White and one Black, find themselves on opposite sides when the latter, Sully, a 29-year veteran, is involved in the death of a black motorist during a traffic stop. That the black female investigator is married to the white male cop's former partner makes later revelations that much more personal and, I hope, more complicated and charged. It's basically two people stuck in a room, hashing out lifetimes of rage and betrayal.
BLUE lives in that uncomfortable space as a conversation between two old friends, who have very different experiences of the America both have pledged to defend, and are products of a system of power that invites abuse. Sully is a true believer, a man who feels at the same time that his power is waning and decides to do something about it. Parker is true to the uniform, perhaps to the point of blindness she is so taken aback by the type of warfare her husband's ex-partner has committed himself to. One wonders how well either really knew the other that each could be so surprised and dug in. Parker's belief in rightness and fairness blinds her to the capacity for that rightness and fairness to become warped by living with people at their worst. Sully, meanwhile, has always nursed a kind of existential dread, a fear regarding his own insignificance that drives him toward violence.
When Trump first rode down that escalator, we talked about people like Sully whose disaffection with America had them feeling left behind which drove them into his arms. Lower middle class and struggling, less well educated. The argument never really stuck for me. Because there was Trump not only beating that drum himself. He absolved them, which is something I am not willing to do. As far as I can tell, they like their hate. They love it, in fact. They hide behind the convenient excuse their way of life, their culture is being stolen. It isn't that they don't know any better. It is that they do not care. We call them racist and they do not care. We call them fascists and they do not care. If it screws somebody else, they're for it. There has always been a strain of selfishness to American exceptionalism, and they and JD Vance are simply playing it to the hilt. Trump gets away with the things they wish they could. But he also gets to say what they really feel. And it has nothing to do with want or 'murica.
In abusive relationships, things only get more dangerous the closer the abused is to leaving. We are in the throes of a such a relationship, one where violence is not only anticipated, it is prescribed. And like any abusive relationship, it ends one way or another. George Floyd's death encapsulated a kind of cultural psychosis. January 6th that psychosis emerged full blown and ugly. I said, watching that terrible day unfold, “America, you in danger, girl.”
We are not yet out of the woods. Our bags are packed, but we aren't even in the driveway.
June Carryl is the writer and co-star of BLUE which runs at The Seven Dials Playhouse from March 5th to 30th www.sevendialsplayhouse.co.uk/shows/blue
