The Boy I Saw as a Problem

I looked at a photograph of a dead eighteen-year-old and thought about the discourse. So did Ben Crump.

My son is away from home today. He’s with friends. Most of them, maybe all of them, are white. I haven’t thought about that once, and I wouldn’t be thinking about it now if men in Mississippi weren’t being paid to make me.

Ask Ben Crump what I should feel. Ask Al Sharpton. There’s an answer waiting, and it comes with a press conference attached. My son is in danger, and the danger has a color, and the color is the one his friends happen to be.

The truth is, I don’t believe it. What worries me about my son is that he’s young, and young men do foolish things in water and in cars and around fire, and some of them don’t come home. That’s my fear when I have one, not the ethnic arithmetic of a boat. But before I say a word about Crump, I have to tell you what happened to me when I saw the picture.

It wasn’t outrage. It wasn’t grief either, and I’d like credit for the first, and I won’t take credit for the second. One black kid, arm slung around his white friends, everybody grinning on a boat on the Fourth of July. And I thought: Oh, THIS is going to be a problem.

I didn’t think about that young man. I didn’t think about his mother. Those four boys had been friends for years, and the photograph is evidence that not one of them ever counted anybody’s melanin, and I looked straight at it and read a narrative. If I follow it all the way down, I have to admit what else was in there. I was looking at a column I’d end up writing. Ben Crump saw an asset. I saw a liability. Neither of us saw an eighteen-year-old.

So let me tell you about the eighteen-year-old. On the third of July, Nolan Xavier Wells stood in his mother’s kitchen and cooked her baked salmon. Christine Wonsley had worked a long day. Her son, a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, a quiet leader who wanted to be an example to his little brother, noticed she was tired and made her dinner. The next afternoon, he took a boat to Horn Island, ten miles out, no water, no shelter, no signal. He was last seen around three. He told somebody he’d catch a ride back later. Monday morning, a park ranger found him face down at the northwest tip of the island.

Christine Wonsley wasn’t afraid on the third of July. She had a boy in her kitchen making her dinner because he’d noticed she was worn out, and there isn’t a mother or a father reading this who wouldn’t trade a year of life for that to be the last ordinary Thursday they ever got. She was as certain as I am today. More certain, because her son was in the room.

I am writing on the fifteenth of July. As of this hour, the toxicology report has not come back, and the state’s examiner has not released a cause of death. Nobody on earth knows how that boy died. Everything Ben Crump has already said, and everything I am about to say, is being said into that gap, and the difference between us is what each of us is thinking the gap is for.

I’m not carrying water for Jackson County. Two days after a ranger pulled Nolan out of the Gulf, before toxicology, Sheriff John Ledbetter announced that no foul play was suspected, and he gave no reason. That is a verdict rendered by a man who hadn’t done the work that produces verdicts. It’s the same offense I’m about to charge against Crump, committed first by the one man in Mississippi paid to know better. Then the county went quiet in the places that mattered. Asked by CNN whether investigators had even interviewed all four boys from that boat, Ledbetter said nothing. A man who answers the easy questions and skips the hard ones isn’t being careful. He’s being handled.

So Crump didn’t create the doubt in Ocean Springs; he distributes it, and Ledbetter manufactures it. Two days after the body came out of the water, with no cause of death established, Crump went on television and said, “This is the state where Emmett Till was lynched.”

Understand the inversion. In 1955, everyone knew what happened to that boy. The facts sat on the table, and Mississippi looked at them and lied, and Mamie Till-Mobley opened the casket because she had the truth and couldn’t get a verdict. In Ocean Springs, nobody knows yet. Into that gap, a lawyer inserted a verdict and went looking for evidence to fit it, which is what the men who acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam did, running backward. She opened a casket to show the country a fact. Colin Kaepernick, a man who never met this family, paid to have Nolan’s body opened a second time in Washington before the state of Mississippi had finished with the first, and he didn’t go looking for facts.

If the toxicology says an eighteen-year-old went into the Gulf on a hot afternoon and drowned, Crump will have spent Emmett Till on it. He will have spent it, the way a man draws down an account he didn’t open. That name is the one piece of currency in American life that can’t be counterfeited, and it gets debased the same way any currency does, by being spent on things it wasn’t worth.

That same weekend in Chicago, five people were killed, and twenty-three were hospitalized. Here’s the part I’m not supposed to say: that was the quietest Independence Day weekend Chicago has had in seven years. The mayor called it progress, and he wasn’t lying. Even so, at 1:25 that Sunday morning, a seventeen-year-old girl standing on West Maypole Avenue was shot once in the chest and taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition. Nine minutes later, six more people were shot on the same block, and one of them was eighteen years old, the same age as the boy on the boat.

I’ve now told you everything I know about them, which amounts to an age and a street corner. I don’t know a single name, and actually I went looking. What exists is a police blotter, and a blotter doesn’t record that somebody cooked his mother salmon on the third of July.

Kaepernick funded a second autopsy on a body he’d never seen. Byron Allen gave $100,000 to a fund that had already exceeded its goal several times over. Tyler Perry took the funeral, and Al Sharpton agreed to officiate it. Nobody paid for anything on Maypole Avenue.

Those kids were made in the image of God on the same terms as Nolan Wells and my son, and every one of them was worth the blood of Christ, and that valuation doesn’t fluctuate. But a market doesn’t price by worth. It is priced by demand. And the girl at Stroger is an asset nobody can move, because there’s no county to sue, no defendant, no photograph a producer can read in ninety seconds. Sharpton will tell you he marches in Chicago and nobody sends cameras, and he’s right. But marching is free. Money tells you what a thing is worth to the man spending it, and every dollar in this story went to the case with a defendant in it.

Watch the checks. The checks aren’t fighting for black life. They’re fighting for the kind of black death that sells.

Which brings me to August, when the cameras will be gone. Sharpton will have preached at the funeral and flown home. Tyler Perry will have paid for the casket. Spike Lee stood in the back of a press conference in Harlem and then went back to work, and Kaepernick filed his report. And a woman in Ocean Springs will be sitting at the kitchen table where her son made her salmon, with a toxicology report in front of her, and if that report says he drowned, she will not be able to believe it. She’ll have been taught for six weeks that the truth is the thing they hide from you. So the truth will arrive, and she’ll have been trained to refuse it. Three-quarters of a million dollars and no peace.

That’s the shakedown. It was never the money. Grievance gangsters took the only thing that could have helped that woman, which is the possibility that the answer might be bearable.

“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). The sheriff stated first. Crump stated second. Neither man examined anything.

There’s a third party. Christ was the only Man in history with a real grievance, and He didn’t reach for it. “When He was reviled, He did not revile in return; when He suffered, He did not threaten, but continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). There is a Judge. There will be a full accounting of what happened on that island, whether or not Jackson County ever produces one, and that isn’t a consolation prize handed to a mother when the earthly verdict disappoints. It’s the only ground a person can stand on when the answer isn’t the one she wanted. Every man at that podium is promising her that this world will settle the account, and this world won’t, and they’ll be gone by August.

So, wait for the report. Accept it when it comes, whatever it says, and understand that this will cost some of you something. Pray for Christine and Elmore Wonsley by name, tonight, out loud, where your children can hear you. Teach them that the truth is their friend even when the truth is terrible, because a man who needs the story to come out a certain way has already stopped looking for it. And refuse to buy certainty. Refuse to be the person who needs it to have been a murder.

I don’t know what happened to Nolan Wells. Neither do you. Neither does the sheriff, nor does his lawyer, and only one of us is being asked to live in a kitchen with the answer.

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