George Floyd, “‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’, The Magna Carta, and the Commons
by Vijaya Nagarajan

George Floyd, a 46-year old Black man, was murdered by the white policeman, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis two weeks ago with his knees on George Floyd’s neck for less than nine minutes.He was accused of using a $20 counterfeit bill at a corner store. Even if the accusation was real, a black man does not deserve to die without the wheels of justice and the law to defend his own innocence. Ostensibly, this is the explicit rule of law, since the Magna Carta in the year 1215, the basis of our honorable Constitution.

The white policeman was inured to the pain he was inflicting on a Black Body. He was showing off the work of a senior, trained policeman. The three other policemen supported him in different ways. Kindled by this wrongful action, enormous protests arose spontaneously all over the United States, and all over the world. These protests argue that it was a lynching, a barbarism. When you see it, it makes you gag on your throat, nausea rising from your stomach. It brings up the broader questions of how and why does this kind of action happen. How does a white policeman think he has the right to do this kind of action and get away with it? Why would a white policeman do this action without feeling as if he was a killer, a murderer? What does it feel like to be a black man, facing this kind of assault on a daily basis? How does one as a non-black person get an insider’s glimpse of this horrific reality?

Jeswyn Ward’s exquisite novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner, 2017), winner of the National Book Award and a NYT bestseller, gives us some clues. Set in rural Mississippi, the two main characters, the thirteen-year old grandson, Jojo, who lives with his grandfather, and Jojo’s mother, Leonie, are portrayed with an incredible, pulsing literary sensibility. Leonie has had both Jojo and his baby sister with a young white man, a high school sweetheart and she has resisted the emotional calling to being a mother.  The book circles around and through past imprisonment, the possibility of future imprisonment, and the growing up in the heart of these twin terrors.

This week, I read it for the second time and this time, too, I could not put it down, even though I knew what was going to happen. Ward has the extraordinary ability to increase your empathy for the characters, for what they were struggling with inside themselves. The unspooling of stories, those that happened in the past and that are doled out like morsels of pepper, heighten the reader’s desire to know what happens next, and serve as the vehicle to propel the story forehead. The dying of black men in prison and the perennial scars in the hearts of black men who had served in prison reveal the ways in which the intelligence of black folk is shaped in a biracial world. It begins with Jojo’s powerful, sweet, intimate voice: “I like to think I know what death is. I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight. When Pop tell me he need my help and I see that black knife slid into the belt of his pants, I follow Pop out of the house, try to keep my back straight, my shoulders even as a hangar; that’s how Pop walks….Today’s my birthday.” (1)

Weaving in and out of different voices, Ward makes the reader, who may not be born and raised in a black culture, feel what is nearly impossible to feel–––the inside, growing awareness of a thirteen-year old boy’s strange, vulnerable being set in the white world, like a sparkling piece of amber. His intense desire to survive and protect those he loves, his growing compassion for the impossible, ungovernable complexities of life, his deciding what to bend his head to and what to not bend his head to––drive the plot.

For any human being, feeling safe and secure in your home, on your street, at your local, grocery store, at your school, all seem like a basic human right. In fact, that is why the 13th century Magna Carta, one of the foundations of our constitution, was so revolutionary in its own time and still is. That a human being, accused of a crime, had the right to due process under the law. That meant that the law could not accuse, judge and execute someone without a trial, a jury, or a judge.

The Magna Carta’s Law #39 says: No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land.

The Magna Carta, 1215, from the Archives of Great Britain

Defunding the police has become a rallying cry across the country. Minneapolis has, in fact, decided to defund the police and other cities are considering this action as well. What seemed impossible and, in fact, utopian, to achieve a few weeks ago–––a publicly led critical evaluation of the brutality of police power against black bodies–––is now happening. It is truly a miracle of a sort.

Defunding the police, and, instead, funding the essential needs of human beings: public health, mental health, education, equality, and food security––to begin with––seems a basic tenor of a society ostensibly based on equity, justice and the law.

Defunding the large, multi-national corporations, not giving them the right to monopolize economic power, to not let them usurp the civic power of citizens, is critically necessary in a republic based on equity. In many ways, they are the white policeman on all of our backs, our necks, holding us hostage to their basic need of profit.

The recovering and reasserting of the commons, a broad canopy that includes our commonly owned assets–––air, water, and forests; parks and wildernesses; schools, colleges and universities; community gardens, oceans, ice, animals, wildlife, genes, art, music, stories, folklore, capacities, beliefs, knowledge, safety, public health, mental health, and breath itself–––is also critical to forging a new path to a new kind of society, a society that recognizes it is connected to everything else. No one is above the law. Not a white policeman. Not a white president. Not a big, powerful corporation, whose officers act like modern day noblemen and noblewomen, who do not understand why the serfs are not content. If you are sitting in the 1%, it may not all make sense, of what all the fuss is about, especially if you hide to yourself the advantages built into class, race, education, gender, sexuality, and ability, that you may have unconsciously had access to. Most of us are unconscious of the advantages our lives began with.

The Green New Deal is the crucible of the new society we need to imagine again; we need to know inside ourselves that we are now at a new crossroads; George Floyd’s horrible, unnecessary death is waking us up, to see us as in this together, to see through the burnt cindered death ashes of our current world-view and to imagine again what it is to be a human again living within the bounds of this utterly beautiful, abundant earth–––only if we learn to share more.