PEARLAND, Texas – A string of headlights flashing past the median couldn't dull the calm Jennifer Plummer felt draping crimson ribbon over a crepe myrtle tree Tuesday morning. Something about the repetitive motions — making sure the ribbon lay flat on the trunk, that the knot was tied loose enough to not wrinkle the bow — gave her moments of clarity along Cullen Boulevard, one of the major thoroughfares in the Houston suburb of Pearland.
It gave her time to reflect on her 13-year-old son and the difficult conversations they've had in the two weeks since a police officer killed George Floyd 1,200 miles away. Plummer, like other black moms, worries about how the world views her son and how those perceptions could put him in danger.
"You don't want to tell him people think he's a criminal walking down the street," Plummer said. "That's a hard thing to tell someone."
Plummer was among more than 30 mothers, fathers and kids who fanned out along Cullen on Tuesday to drape crimson and gold ribbons across trees and fences. They traced the same route George Floyd's family used Tuesday afternoon to travel to his grave site, carved in a plot next to his mother's.
As Floyd's procession headed toward the grave site with a long line of cars, his family saw thousands of supporters on one side of Cullen. On the other were dozens of crape myrtle trees adorned by heartbroken mothers.
The idea to honor Floyd and his family's pain through physical markers came from a group of mothers in Pearland. For Davida Chatman, one of the main organizers, listening to Floyd use his dying breaths to call out for his deceased mother felt like an ice pick to the heart.
"I don't know any mom in Pearland or any other area who wouldn't stop what they were doing and help," Chatman said. "We wanted to do whatever we could to welcome him to his final resting place."
Groups began arriving at a strip mall parking lot at 5 a.m., bringing snacks, water bottles, trash bags and bug spray. They pre-cut strands of ribbon to make them easier to hang. When 20-year-old Kate Yordy tried to run across Cullen to retrieve more ribbon, Ginger Pearson yelled at her to wait.
"Don't you dare go until after that last car," said Pearson, who has several grown children and a grandchild.
Yordy and her 18-year-old brother, J.C., already had ant bites all over their shins and ankles after stepping in ant hills that blended in with mulch on another median. So did Natile Farris, a 40-year-old who wore a matching zebra print face mask, bandanna and a homemade T-shirt that read "You do not have to be black to be outraged — you just have to be human."
Farris, like Plummer, has had to have difficult conversations about how to behave around police with her three children, especially her 15-year-old son. She's reluctant to let him get a driver's license, fearing traffic stops that could go horribly wrong. Every time she lets him out of her sight to play with friends, pangs of fear hit her in the stomach.
"He's just a kid who wants to go running around the neighborhood, but the whole time I'm on pins and needles," she said as she tied gold ribbon around the base of a tree. "We're not a threat because of our skin color. We all want one thing, that's to be treated as human. That's all."
