The Washington Post Magazine - USA (2022-05-15)

THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 11

home around 3,” Jackson told him.
Jackson trusted Floyd; she had loaned
him the car several times before. Floyd had
no other plans, so he called his friend
Maurice Hall around 10 a.m. to see if he
wanted to hang out. Many of Floyd’s
friends warned him about Hall, 42, who
had been sleeping in hotels and his vehicle,
dealing drugs while trying to avoid arrest
warrants. Floyd had tried for years to move
on from using, but Hall provided some
kinship during this empty part of his life.
The two men would smoke pot or ingest
pills, which Floyd would chase down with
Tylenol to dilute the impact.
Hall told Floyd that he felt he had
exhausted his options. Outstanding war-
rants had driven him underground, and he
didn’t want to turn himself in to police. He
was a father now, with freckled, curly-
haired children, and he couldn’t stomach
the idea of being locked up far away from
them. Floyd could empathize with Hall’s
predicament: He felt guilty being so far
away from his young daughter, Gianna.
This was not the life either had envisioned
when they left Houston’s Third Ward for
Minneapolis, seeking sobriety and a new
chance at life.

F

or the two men, and so many of their
friends, Minnesota was the “state of
opportunity.” They had left Houston for the
chance to pull themselves out of a vicious
cycle of unemployment, incarceration and
addiction. Growing up, Perry, as family
called Floyd, had outsize aspirations — to
become a Supreme Court justice, a pro
athlete or a rap star. He wanted to do
something to make a lasting impact. “Sis,”
13-year-old Floyd said to his sister Zsa Zsa.
“I don’t want to rule the world; I don’t want
to run the world. I just want to touch the
world.”
But he was young, poor and Black in
America — a recipe for irrelevance in a
society that tended to push boys like him
onto its margins. As he came of age in
Houston’s Third Ward, his dreams were
diminished and derailed both by his own
mistakes and the systemic forces that
proved especially unforgiving for people of
color: a crumbling public schools system
that pitched athletics as a way out but left
him unprepared for college, leading to his
return to the economically deprived and
over-policed neighborhood without a de-
gree. Selling drugs was one of the most
accessible ways to make ends meet, a
decision that led to jail time, making it even
harder to find a stable job. Those seeking an
escape from impoverished conditions often

by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

In 2017, Sylvia Jackson met George Floyd at the Salvation Army,

where they both worked as security guards. In the early

morning of May 26, 2020, she woke up wondering where Floyd

was with her car. She heard a knock on the door; it was

another one of their friends, his eyes red with tears. “The

police killed Floyd,” he told her. “There’s a video.” In the

aftermath of Floyd’s murder, Jackson moved out of her home

because she said there were too many memories.