Courteney Ross turned off her car engine and took a deep breath. She stepped out of her old minivan on this blustery night in late March, pulling out a box of 46 red glasses and 46 candles that she wanted to set down at the corner where her boyfriend, George Floyd, had begged a police officer to stop suffocating him.
It was the night after opening arguments in the murder trial against Derek Chauvin, the officer who had dug his knee into Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. Ross’s therapist had instructed her to avoid watching the proceedings, to try to carry on as normally as possible. But what was normal in this city on edge? Every move she made felt like it threatened her inner peace — or even the justice system.
“I’ve never felt more isolated,” said Ross, 45. “Everyone’s got their own thing going because of Floyd, everyone’s on this journey, and I still don’t know what to do or what to feel.”
She began to tremble as she approached the now-infamous corner of 38th and Chicago, the location of the Cup Foods neighborhood market. The last time she had tried participating in activities there, Ross said, someone had suggested she take her opinions back to her own community. This movement wasn’t about her: a White woman who had grown up on the other side of town.
As the world tried to make sense of Floyd’s death, Ross was trying to make sense of her place in it. They had been together for three years, but she was neither bound to Floyd by law or by blood. To make it through, Ross had begun to treat Floyd’s death as a private pain that did not intersect with the struggle it represented. She worried that her mourning could seem shortsighted, selfish, even out of place.
