evidence: Thanks to Darnella Frazier, the courageous 17-year-old who captured Officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee into the neck of the handcuffed George Floyd Jr. for nearly nine minutes, the world watched a 46-year-old Black man beg for his life. Twenty-six million people took to the streets across the country and around the world, risking their health and safety to face down riot police, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the Covid-19 pandemic to demand justice for Floyd and an end to state-sanctioned racial violence. [...] I never questioned this narrative before I had to reconstruct my father’s life. Turns out Lottie was 17, not 13, when she gave birth. The birth certificate, filed five months after Donald’s birth, listed Allien and Rafe as parents, contradicting what I found in the 1940 census. For many Black families facing economic hardship, intrafamily adoptions were not unusual—a legacy of Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved people tried to reconstitute families after generations of forced separation. [...] Adapted from After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America, edited by Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams (Haymarket Books).