Eric Garner
Forty-three-year-old Eric Garner was known as a peacemaker in his community. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, Esaw Snipes, and the couple had six children. Garner worked for some time as a horticulturist for the New York Department of Parks and Recreation, but had to quit due to his asthma. The poem contemplates the ecology of his work: what it means that his hands most likely placed plants in the earth that continue to create the air we breathe.
On July 17, 2014, Garner was approached by police for allegedly selling single cigarettes from packs without tax stamps. After a verbal exchange, one of the officers placed Garner in an illegal chokehold, killing him. His dying words "I can't breathe" became a national rallying cry against police brutality and racism in America.
Us
As in many poems that Gay has written, the audience is made present in "A Small Needful Fact." In the last lines of the poem, Gay writes that the plants that Garner likely placed in the earth make it "easier / for us to breathe" (Lines 14-15). The use of the present tense and the first-person plural suggests how Garner's life continues to be connected to the collective. Because the chokehold that killed him exists in the context of institutional racism, the "us" who make up society are also implicated in his death.
