An African priest meets George Floyd at a Pirates game
The story begins like a parable:
An African priest comes to Pittsburgh for graduate studies at Duquesne University. He visits the ballpark at the headwaters of the Ohio River to see the American game of baseball. There he meets and befriends a 17-year-old basketball player in Pittsburgh on a visit from Houston.
The two of them hit it off, so well that the priest visits the young man’s family in Texas. They eat barbecue, and the 40-something priest even shows the Texan teen a thing or two about soccer. Over the years, they exchange postcards and the occasional Christmas card.
That meeting was in 1991. Twenty-nine years later, the Ghanian-born priest is Roman Catholic Bishop Frank Nubuasah, 71, of Gaborone, Botswana. And the young Texan has become more famous, for the saddest of reasons, because that teen was George Floyd.
I read Bishop Nubuasah’s tribute to Floyd, in the form of a letter written directly to him in “God’s kingdom,” on the Vatican News page last month. I was struck by the fullness of their unlikely international friendship and the restrained anger in the bishop’s memorial to his friend.
I also wondered what had brought Floyd to Pittsburgh, but that I haven’t been able to answer. After 29 years, the bishop could not recall why Floyd had come here, and those who would remember best — Floyd and his mother, Larcenia Jones Floyd — are dead. But after an exchange of several emails with the bishop, I got a few more details of the bond that began in Three Rivers Stadium, in a summer when Barry Bonds still played for the Pirates and the team was playoff-bound.
“I do remember vividly our first meeting,” Bishop Nubuasah wrote in his epistle to Floyd. “You came wearing blue jeans, T-shirt, a cap on, holding a huge paper cup filled with Coke in one hand and a bag of popcorn in the other. We were seated; you then joined us . ... We got to chatting and became friends.”
The 6-foot-4 Floyd would already have been co-captain of the Yates High School basketball team by then, a power forward. He also played tight end for the football team that would play for the 1992 Texas championship.
“How can I forget you, George?” the bishop wrote. “Your distinctive features are a large nose and thick lips, very African traits. I know, you always reminded me that you are not African but African American. Both backgrounds were important to you and you did not want to lose any. You were standing solidly with both feet in two traditions.
“Between those two feet of yours was a lot of water called the Atlantic Ocean. You never got to cross it!”
Duquesne University records show the Rev. Nubuasah was a graduate student from the fall of 1990 through his graduation in May 1992, when he took away a master of arts degree in formative spirituality. He wrote that he and two fellow missionaries in the Society of the Divine Word left their home on Lytton Avenue in Oakland to travel through the South to visit the many parishes where their congregation’s priests were working.
They stayed at a parish house in Houston for a couple of days, and there the Rev. Nubuasah saw Floyd and met his baby boy, Quincy. When the priest persuaded Floyd to take him to a soccer game — “real football, the gentle game” — “you were bored to the bone.”
He’d wanted Floyd to visit him in Botswana, to have his “very infectious smile” open wide before wildlife in its natural habitat and to “enjoy our coveted delicacy of pounded meat, But that trip never came to be.
The younger man had a troubled life after the two friends parted. Floyd served four years in prison for an aggravated robbery in 2007. But after serving his time, he moved to the Minneapolis area in 2014 and found work as a truck driver and bouncer, losing that security job in the COVID-19 shutdowns. In that city, he was killed, handcuffed in the street in the early evening of May 25, his neck under the knee of a policeman who coldly kept it there for about eight minutes.
The killing has been protested around the world.
“My heart is heavy as I sit in my prayer corner to write you this missive knowing well that others will read it but you will not,” the bishop wrote. “The revolution that your sacrificial death inspired and the new movement and alliances against racism, classism and discrimination are growing.”
But the bishop also reminds us in his epistle that there must be room in the human heart to allow for redemption, to offer forgiveness. That’s the Big Ask that Bishop Nubuasah has for his old friend at the end of his letter.
“I am angry because I am human and never thought humans can stoop so low. A huge welcome awaits you in the Father’s house and I hope Coke and popcorn will be there, too.
“You have one more task to perform. It is to prepare to welcome the notorious four who killed you into heaven when their time does come, and show ’em round the jolly place we call heaven.
“I will miss you, George. You can now breathe eternally the breath of love.”