A Letter From a Minneapolis Mom

My teenager and I were a block from the intersection where Renee Good was shot in the face, an hour before it happened.

This is a Minneapolis story, about children who barely remember the choking smoke of the George Floyd uprising fires, and the mom who closed all the windows and said we were going to have as much screen time as we wanted as a treat! So sit tight, because I’m going to pull the hose out front and fill some trash cans with water—why? It’s just a thing mommies do sometimes. (When there are embers in the sky and someone made rings of wheelie trash cans and filled them with gasoline and threw in a match so they’d fuse to the asphalt and block fire trucks.) Yes, of course we can make popcorn!

And it’s the story of sitting at a stoplight, and listening to the radio, and hearing that Melissa Hortman’s memorial rally, quickly repurposed from the scheduled No King’s rally, has been canceled because maybe the gunman, who is still at large, is going to spray the crowd with A.K. fire. And being at that stoplight, and turning to another teen, who barely remembers the fires and popcorn, and saying: “No, we’re going.”

This is the story of trying to be a good and moral mom in the city of Minneapolis over the last decade, just like Renee Good and Melissa Hortman were, and how you do it full of uncertainty, in between loads of laundry and grocery runs and kids rolling their eyes at you and generally thinking you’re reckless or a coward, between the Mother’s Day cards that tell you you’re the greatest mom ever. As my hero Jon Kabat Zinn terms life, it’s “full catastrophe living”—though now being lived with the streets seething with unhinged, murderous goons.

Oh, and I should mention: The helicopters are back. Constant since they shot Renee Good in the face. They shake the walls. Some throw down Batman-style spotlight beams and look like they’re resting on a cone. Some you never quite find, especially when it’s cloudy. The other night, I was walking the rescue pup and looked toward my house: Three helicopters, and Venus.

I have two teenagers. They were just 14 and toward the end of 11 when George Floyd was murdered. Now my son is off in college and my daughter is 17, and perfect in the way all 17-year-olds are—a little bit baby, a little bit all grown up, an ultimate frisbee captain, a gardener, a person who asks you: “Did you ever hear of someone named David Bowie?” And then you don’t know what to do with your face.

All teenagers are like this. They just showed up to the party, and they can see what they can see, but they don’t know what they don’t know—like all of us, except we’ve been at the party longer, so we can say things like: “First they shot Abraham Lincoln, then MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm, Harvey Milk—or wait, was Malcolm before RFK?” But by the time we’ve nattered on, they’re teenagers, they’re bored talking to mom at the party and have gone to see who else is there.

From school, while Renee Good’s body was cooling after being shot by the murderer Jonathan Ross, my perfect teenager texted me: One of her friends’ dad was in the crowd on Portland when Renee Good was shot in the face by the murderer Jonathan Ross; that dad was pepper-sprayed; the kids were going to the vigil that night.

Um … they’re shooting cute girls in the face right now, so maybe not?

During the George Floyd uprising—we’re all supposed to say “uprising,” though honestly some of it was an uprising and some of it was crime during the cover of the uprising—I felt like nothing good happened after dark; it was when the brawlers and mischief-makers came out, when fires started, when phones stopped working.

I walked to meet her at the bus stop. Do you think going would be safe?

They’re Nazis. How is this different from the beginning of everything in Germany with Nazis?

OK, granted. But I don’t think a lot of people would say: “I’d like my 17-year-old to go to a place where Nazis can get her?”

She told me that we were obligated to use our whiteness as a shield for our Black and brown neighbors. I told her that we seem to be living in an upswing of brute misogyny—shooting Melissa Hortman, shooting Renee Good; being a cute girl might be an invitation to getting shot in the face right now? “Know when to hold them,” I said. “Know when to fold them. Know when to walk away, and know when to run. That’s wisdom.”

You always say that.

At that very minute, across town, at the high school that the other half of her frisbee team comes from, murderous ICE thugs were attacking children.

We didn’t know that then.

We knew it quickly enough, though, as the videos starting flying from kid-phone to kid-phone, through Instagram stories and Snapchat messages. These people do not care if you are a kid, noted a friend of hers. They will kill you.

I told her we’d go to the Saturday march, the big important one, and we sat side by side on the couch Wednesday night and the Instagram videos and stills of the Wednesday night vigil flooded in, and I became the coward who prevented her from going to the most important vigil of all time. 

Which might be true! I don’t know. Sometimes you make a call and it’s the wrong one. Welcome to parenting.

Every day since my cowardice ruined her chance at the best vigil ever, my girl has been out in it. 

Thursday night she marched in the cold rain (that seemed pretty safe; I honestly think no one makes trouble in January rain in Minnesota because even if you wanted to, five minutes in you can’t feel your fingers or toes). On Friday, she raided the piano bench for slide whistles and tin flutes to go bother ICE agents at the Hilton downtown (that one seemed pretty fun, like a big New Orleans street party, and she even made the background of one of the official Star Tribune videos, and cleared out before the city sent in Minneapolis police to arrest everyone who wouldn’t clear out). On Saturday, we went to the big Powderhorn Park rally together; and it was jam-packed, bitterly cold, and I was deeply touched by some of the spontaneous art people made to commemorate Renee Good’s bravery and life.

I was particularly touched by one sign, whose creator obviously spent hours drawing Good’s face—really thinking about her, the sparkle in her eye, the mischievous tilt of her chin.

I was also deeply touched to see several of Tobi’s high school friends up in a tree over the frozen crowd. This is what being a teenager means in Minneapolis right now; they’re all at rallies. Her little voice piping: “ICE out, fuck ICE; ICE out, fuck ICE!” sounded so funny to me. All those conversations a decade ago: You can say that word, but you have to be mindful of how the people around you are going to hear it. As our Mayor Jacob Frey learned anew.

Today my dear daughter went to another ICE training—that’s four anti-ICE events in four days.

Today an ICE caravan trailed by watchers honking their horns blazed by my house. The ICE goons blew right past the stop sign by the elementary school—that’s the third time that has happened since last Wednesday.

My teenager brings back nuggets of information from each new event, like: The people leading the training think this is going to go on for another month or two. 

Am I worried? Kind of very!

What am I going to do about it? Keep grinding through?

Oh, I also have a working theory of why Minnesota has been the Center of the World for a while now.

My unified theory goes like this. Minneapolis was founded by abolitionists, and the call of justice runs deep here. (I can walk you over to one of America’s first integrated cemeteries. Hubert Humphrey and Paul Wellstone are buried there.) But it was an internally inconsistent sense of justice because among abolitionists’ most meaningful acts was to outlaw the Dakota from the territory. Black good, brown bad?

Anyway. I grew up in New York City—fourth-generation descendant of mainly Jews who fled the Russian pogroms—and identified as a Beastie Boy American most of all, so I got to this party pretty late. But when I got here, Minnesota was, in fact, a powder keg of injustice. We had so many cover stories about thumper cops when I worked at City Pages, the city’s eruption over George Floyd’s murder was one of those moments when no one should have been surprised, but everyone was.

Did I mention that the burned-out husk of the Third Precinct is a couple of good frisbee tosses away from my kid’s high school, which has the All Nations program for Indigenous kids from all tribes, serving our neighbors at America’s largest urban reservation, Little Earth? And that the American Indian Movement was born in our neighborhood, where George Floyd was killed and the Third Precinct stands charred, wrapped in barbed wire? 

I saw that the New York Post and CNN are posting stories about how Renee Good, before she was murdered by the ICE thug Jonathan Ross, had a son, Emerson—named for the American philosopher of moral conviction—who attended a school with a curriculum mentioning George Floyd, as if it was some kind of inculpatory evidence against her. Giant swaths of our neighborhood are still flattened; not mentioning George Floyd here would be like not mentioning Central Park in New York City—absurd, it’s our geography.

Back to the unified theory: George Floyd’s murder made Minnesotans seek—and vote for—justice. That brought a left-leaning legislature to power, which gave us Melissa Hortman and all the runway to pass our “Minnesota miracle” of enshrined abortion rights, family leave, and free school lunch. That miracle brought Tim Walz into the national spotlight, and put him on the presidential ticket. It also brought less miraculous moments: the masked man impersonating a policeman who killed Hortman, which brought the rage and violence of Donald Trump, and the gun to the face of the mom in the car with the dog in the back.

Do you think about the fact that both Hortman and Good died like moms, with the family dog just right there, close enough to touch? I do. I particularly do when my own dogs howl at the ICE goons and the honking watchers tear down the road. What is being a nice, pretty white mom who believes in a just future for all children? Is it the most dangerous thing the right wing can imagine? I think the recent body count might point to: Yes. 

But I can’t think about it too much. I have to take the dogs for a walk, then do a grocery run for a family trapped in their apartment like Anne Frank in her attic, and then my perfect child is taking a friend to an ICE training. Am I worried for her?

Of course. I’m worried for us all.

But moms worry, and then we act. One of my greatest frustrations with American conceptions of parenting is that it’s all about potty training or scraping yogurt off the floor. And while it is that, it’s also one of the most morally complex and fascinating ongoing interactions with the world anyone can ever undertake, and I guess I’d like to ask you to see the current war on Minneapolis differently. It started with two Minnesota moms, Becca and Renee Good, no doubt still reeling from the assassination of Minnesota mom Melissa Hortman. Most everyone you see in the streets right now is or came from a Minnesota mom, just like them. If Trump and Vance and Elon (and all the rest?) are the ultimate bad daddies, maybe the best way to look at the battle for Minneapolis is to call it the equal and opposite insurgence of actual Good—and a whole lot of trying-to-be-good mommies.