Hello friends,
Earlier this month I was in Minneapolis, and regrettably, the city of my birth reeked of shit. A passenger disembarking in front of me noticed, too. “It smells like arse,” he said to his companion, drawing out the word in a faux British accent as we walked up the jetway toward the terminal.
It was a windy mid-November day—so gusty my flight departed late from Denver and arrived in a city with sickly yellow skies. The odor was the stench of manure on fields to the south of Minneapolis. This phenomenon returns to the air each fall when farmers spray liquid manure on fields before the first freeze. Over the winter, the fallow fields soak up the nutrients.
The smell doesn't represent some terrible omen, don't worry. I'm not about to recount something awful that happened in Minneapolis. Sometimes the air just smells like arse. Eventually, you acclimate.
I was in Minneapolis for my final public book event of the year. It wasn't my best-attended event this year, but it certainly wasn't the worst, either, and it is a relief to be home for a while. The event was made all the better by getting to visit a really cool bookshop, Magers & Quinn, and by meeting a new author friend, Emily Strasser, who wrote Half-Life of a Secret, an incredible book delving into her family's connection to the nuclear research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
The morning after the event, I stuffed myself with corncakes and set out on foot. I had six hours before getting back on a plane and I wanted to visit George Floyd Square, the ad hoc monument established in 2020 in the days following Floyd's fatal encounter with police. The air had cleared overnight, leaving an odorless, brisk morning with skies so bright I donned sunglasses for the three-mile walk. It was cold enough for a hat but not so chilly that gloves were necessary. Stiff winds the prior day had scrubbed the trees of all leaves. The city felt fallow and empty, as though winterization was already well on its way. I saw few other people on foot or on bicycles.
As I walked, I considered my safety. In His Name Is George Floyd, the book co-authored by my former Miami Herald colleague Robert Samuels, he and Toluse Olorunnipa wrote of hearing gunshots at the memorial while attending events marking the first anniversary of Floyd's death. "This type of activity was not unheard of at George Floyd Square—gunshots were a fact of life in the neighborhood," they wrote. "But to have it happen this early, on this particular day, invited all kinds of concern: Was it a person having a bad day in a country where mass shootings are a daily occurrence? Was it a white supremacist looking to make a statement? Was it a domestic dispute or a neighborhood beef?"
No one in this country is immune to gun violence, but my risk seemed low at midday on a bright, quiet Friday in November. It's also true that I walk with a certain amount of privilege—height, demeanor, race—that sometimes makes my path through this world undeservedly easier. People often ask me for directions but I seldom get hassled or catcalled.
The square is at the intersection of East 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, which became a site of protest, commemoration and other gatherings after Floyd's death. Two years later, the city officially renamed the intersection George Perry Floyd Square. It continues to be a place of contemplation and expression in Minneapolis.
Murals, ephemera and other objects clutter the intersection—it's unruly in that it’s decentralized and anyone can contribute to the memorial. The part I would describe as the central "monument" includes three raised fists along East 38th Street. The central fist, made of metal, sits about 10 feet high in a makeshift traffic circle imposed upon the intersection. The traffic lights at the intersection have been deactivated. The other two fists, made of plywood painted brown, sit one block to the East and one to the West. Spray-painted signs, as well as city-installed sign posts, warn drivers that one of the intersections is now a four-way stop.
Technically, there's a difference between monuments and memorials. Memorials honor the dead, and that is exactly what George Perry Floyd Square does. But the site also serves as a monument, albeit a temporary one created spontaneously, in defiance of the official, public processes most American cities use to erect such structures. Monuments are “a statement of power and presence in public,” according to Monument Lab, the Philadelphia organization helping cities reconsider how they maintain public memory. Using that definition, the intersection of an otherwise unremarkable lower-middle-class part of a Midwestern city represents more than a memorial to a Black man murdered by police. It stands as a statement of presence marking the beginning of a movement that galvanized the nation and the world. It also represents the possibility of a shift in power, which is what was so exhilarating about the 2020 protests. (Or what was so terrifying to those with a zero-sum game worldview.)
And yes, the monument also represents the complexities of a movement that sputtered after the urgency and isolation of the early days of the pandemic faded, as backlash brewed in Minneapolis and so many other American places. "I’ve learned not to expect much from America; it has a deep capacity for change but a shallow desire for it," the New York Times columnist Charles Blow wrote last year, on the second anniversary of Floyd's murder. By then, many of the monuments and murals erected following Floyd's death—especially those painted on city streets—had begun to fade. Their erasure in some cities (sometimes deliberate) felt a little too symbolic, he wrote, "reflecting the reality that many lacked the true, sustained commitment to Black lives."
Three years later, what stood out to me at the square was how the makeshift monument forces people to interact with what happened in 2020. If you're on foot, you can't help but interact with the space. There’s a lot to look at. (I was disappointed it was such a quiet day and no one was at the square to talk to.) If you're riding the bus, you must walk to a different stop down the street. And if you're in a car, you have to stop where you never stopped before and you have to make your way around a traffic circle that didn't exist before. By reclaiming the intersection as their own, activists disrupted the existing patterns of a city. Disruption is a necessary step in changing the conditions that allow some people to walk unbothered through a city while others cannot.
Officialdom does not know what to do here at this square. Eventually, the city will reconfigure the intersection into a true monument, but it won't announce those plans until 2026 and it won't begin building anything until then, either. "I'm heartbroken," City Council President Andrea Jenkins said last month after the city's Office of Public Service announced plans.
I understand the frustration at the slow pace, but rebuilding always takes longer than a teardown. I suspect there's some fear that because monuments represent public memory, recollections might change, fade, or lose urgency as time passes. After all, we are always rewriting and reinterpreting our experiences and our history within the context of the present. And what if people forget? Already at George Floyd Square, I could see how the story of what happened had become more than just the story of one man's murder at the hands of police, how it represented so much more to those who have visited.
Yet there are facts associated with that intersection that won't be forgotten, beginning with what a teenager caught on video with her phone. Facts were established in a courtroom as well, which resulted in the conviction of Floyd's killers. Those facts were memorialized in book form, in the hundreds of interviews Robert and Toluse conducted to weave a story of the lives and forces and multiple points of view that collided on May 25, 2020.
Minneapolis is not alone in its indecision, I’ve learned as I delve more into this space of monument-making, unmaking and remaking. Some cities, including Portland, have warehoused unwanted monuments, freezing them in time behind locked doors, but not replacing them. Some in the South have melted them down. Some cities, like Denver, have put toppled monuments in museums that offer context. Other cities are doing all the public engagement things they're supposed to do—the public meetings, the comment periods, the post-it notes on whiteboards—plus the lessons they've learned post-2020 about telling inclusive stories of a community. And yes, although there are states where schools can't teach the full spectrum of historical events, I'm hopeful that we're moving toward a future where multiple perspectives and versions of history will get the monumental treatment.
It might stink for a while, but manure takes time to do its work in fallow fields. The winds will shift. Something new will grow, seemingly out of nowhere, all at once.
Yours,
Erika
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