More Teju Cole: “Death in the Browser Tab”

I know this is my second straight post on Teju Cole. I’m working on a project that’s got me re-reading his 2016 collection Known and Strange Things, and over the past few weeks I’ve been reminded not only what a great writer he is, but how essential is his analysis of the events of the past decade.

This week, if you haven’t read it, or if you haven’t read it since it came out, Derek Chauvin’s trial for the killing of George Floyd provides a reason to revisit “Death in the Browser Tab,” Cole’s 2015 essay about watching video of the police shooting of Walter Scott.

If you don’t remember, that was the shooting in North Charleston, South Carolina, in which Scott, unarmed, ran away from police officer Michael Slager. Slager waited several seconds, let Scott get some distance away, then fired. Then fired again. And again.

In the essay, Cole visits the scene of the shooting and then meets with a literature professor from the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Because of the victim’s name, their conversation turns to the writer Sir Walter Scott. The professor tells Cole to read Scott’s 1827 story “The Two Drovers,” in which, after a dispute, a character walks miles to his house to retrieve a knife and then miles back to exact revenge on the cattle herder who has insulted him.

It’s the time involved, Cole says, that makes the act remarkable. “This was the core of the story, Jarells suggested to me: the stretch of time over which Robin intended his crime, those two hours of premeditation,” Cole writes. He continues:

When there is premeditation, over hours or over a few seconds, the final moment is accompanied by the weight of the moments preceding it, moments necessary to establish that quantum of moral disregard out of which one person kills another. The video from North Charleston seemed to enact this disregard, this voiding of empathy, in seconds that felt like hours, seconds in which the shooter could have stopped and reconsidered, just as the drover Robin could also have stopped and reconsidered, but didn’t.

Over hours or over a few seconds. The figure eight minutes, forty-six seconds was burned into our national mind over the summer; it was reportedly the time that Derek Chauvin spent kneeling on the handcuffed and subdued George Floyd’s neck. During the trial, that number has grown: apparently it was actually nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds.

Of course, of course I’m reading what the “other side” saying — about Floyd’s drug use, about the things he did wrong in his responses to the police. I’m angry in advance to see those things highlighted as Chauvin’s defense team presents its case in the coming days. But there’s no escaping the moral disregard of those nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds, the time Chauvin could have stopped and reconsidered. But he didn’t.