Adarryl Hunter, a longtime friend of George Floyd, who was killed in May 2020, signed copies of “Floyd’s Baller” for attendees of the reading at Coffee Shop NE on Saturday, May 23. (Vince Brown)
About 40 people packed into the back room of The Coffee Shop NE on Saturday, May 23 to hear about the creation of “Floyd’s Baller,” a new book from Duluth author Heather N. Wilde and Adarryl Hunter, a longtime friend of George Floyd.
Wilde, a former middle and high school English instructor and the book’s publisher, and Hunter collaborated for two-and-a-half years to bring to completion a work of young adult fiction that chronicles the ongoing complexities of growing up Black in the United States.
Courtney Ross, who was Floyd’s partner at the time of his death, provided opening comments. Hunter then read an excerpt that introduces readers to the book’s narrator: “Now, I haunted my best friend as he tried to figure out life without me and what to do with all of the noise going on around him, coming from people who’d never even known me. The truth? I was scared too. I was never a good spectator—I was here to play the game. Turns out, now I’m the ghost watching it unfold. I didn’t ask to die. I begged for my life. My name is George Perry Floyd Jr. and I am Adarryl’s ghost.”
It was not an easy choice to create a work involving a public figure as prominent as Floyd, according to Hunter and Wilde. Hunter told the group that as a “low-key kind of person” and “confidante” of Floyd’s, he had no desire to be part of the “spectacle” in the early days after Floyd’s murder.
Wilde, talking about her initial feelings before the program, said she was slow to come around to the idea. She said that she “walked away from it” at first.
While the two of them were working on a different project of Hunter’s, they came back around to the idea of making a story that involved Floyd, but with Hunter as its focal point. The two decided that there was an opportunity to communicate important lessons to young people. “We both are interested in helping the future by helping the young adult students… in our communities,” Hunter said.
Addressing the “white elephant in the room,” Wilde admitted that she is keenly aware of how her involvement might look to some. “Adarryl is a Black man from the South and I’m a white woman from the Midwest… my biggest mountain (was) to feel like I was worthy of writing this,” she said.
Ultimately, they agreed that there was “value” in their “different backgrounds” for their young readers. “One of my mantras,” said Hunter, “is we live in a black and white world, but it’s the grey that matters,” adding that they accomplish this when putting ink to paper.
For Hunter, the new book is about “intimate friendship, growing, coming of age, dealing with life’s adversity that everybody deals with.”
“There’s some things that are very fundamental … we want to belong, we want to have friends,” he said.
Presenting his friend as he really was, not like the “stuff on TV,” was important to Hunter. Floyd “was the type of type of person that you wanted with you if you were going to get some bad news or (there was) something you were really worried about,” he said. “He could always bring a smile to your face, even in the tough circumstances.”
Memorial Day, May 25th, was the sixth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder.
Copies of “Floyd’s Baller” can be purchased through hezziemae.com. Discounted pricing is available for schools.