His Name Is George Floyd by Robert Samuels & Toluse Olorunnipa

Author:Robert Samuels & Toluse Olorunnipa [Samuels, Robert & Olorunnipa, Toluse]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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George Floyd had always believed that God was watching over him.

Back in Texas, after his mother died in 2018, Floyd was on one of the spontaneous road trips he liked to take with his friend Tiffany Cofield. They had picked up Cofield’s sixty-seven-year-old uncle and headed east on I-10 toward Orange, Texas.

It was already dark when the trio left on what was supposed to be a two-hour drive to see a friend near the Louisiana border in a place Floyd referred to as “Fruit City.”

As they passed cow pastures and timber farms, Floyd turned up the volume on DJ Screw’s 1998 mixtape Tre World, in which he had featured as a host. He was nodding to the crawling beat when the car started to sputter. He looked down to see the gas light beaming a bright orange and the needle settling confidently below the letter E.

“We ran out of gas, man,” he said matter-of-factly as the car slowed to a stop. They were in a rural stretch of east Texas, the kind of place where freeways slice through farmland and forest, with several miles of bleakness between each exit. It was pitch black.

Cofield was incredulous.

“How are you driving and you don’t check the damn gas?” she said, trying to contain her disbelief.

Floyd looked across the car, unbothered.

“Stiff, it’s going to be okay, shug,” he said, speaking just above a whisper, as if trying not to upset the eerie quiet of this forsaken stretch of highway. “God’s got us.”

“Don’t you bring God into this!” Cofield interjected.

“Stiff, I’m telling you, God got us,” he said. “For real, just calm down. Just calm down, I’m going to go ahead and push the car a little bit up the way and then—”

Cofield cut him off again: “You can’t push this motherfucker by yourself!”

She looked back at her uncle, who had bad knees and a frail frame, and grew even more incensed as she realized what was about to happen.

Floyd, still betraying no sign of stress, got out of the car while the elderly man took his place behind the wheel to help steer.

“Shug, don’t worry,” Floyd said as he and Cofield got behind the car and prepared to push. “God’s got us.”

Just then, a loud truck pulled over in front of them.

The door creaked open, and out came “the most redneck-looking White guy I have ever seen in my life,” Cofield later recalled. Her mind flashed to images of James Byrd’s body being dragged behind a rusty Ford truck not far away, near Jasper, Texas, twenty years earlier. Three white supremacists were convicted of murdering the forty-nine-year-old Black victim and dumping his body in front of an African American church.

“Hi, how are y’all doing?” the man said in a deep drawl.

He was barefoot and looked far too excited for the hour and circumstances.

“Oh my God, please don’t let this be my end,” Cofield thought to herself.

Floyd walked over with an outstretched hand and told the man what had happened.

“Well, you’re in luck

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