A Letter to Christine and Elmore Wonsley

By Earl O'Garro

Dear Christine, dear Elmore,

I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times, and I want you to know that first, because I do not want you to believe that the words I am about to hand you arrived quickly or arrived without the specific labor of a man who has been trying, in the private corners of his mornings, to put them in a shape he could sign his own name to. They did not arrive quickly. They did not arrive easily. I have been working at them since the September afternoon the grand jury in Jackson County, Mississippi, declined to bring indictments in your son's death, and the question I have been asking in those mornings is whether I had any right to write to you at all. I am going to decide, this October morning, that I do, and I am going to decide it on the specific ground that I am a father of Black sons too, and that if I do not use the small share of a public voice I have been given in this country to say what I am about to say to you, I will have no honest answer for my own sons when they are old enough to read it.

I want to tell you where I am writing from, because the where is part of the letter. I started this letter last night, at the kitchen table in Connecticut where I write most of what you read from me. I am finishing it this morning, on my phone, from the waiting room of an urgent care clinic in the same town where my family lives and where my younger son plays football, where I brought him at first light for a workup on the injuries that have been accumulating in his body over the weeks past. He plays running back. He is the sort of boy a town like ours is proud of and a father like me cannot look at for too long without remembering what the country has, over the years, chosen to do with young men who look like him on fields that look like the one he will go back to on Friday night. He is going to be fine, I am told. The thing I will not stop thinking, as the hour of my sitting here extends, is that you were told something similar once, on a July afternoon, about a boy who had gone out on a boat.

I wrote about Nolan in the second week of July, from a borrowed apartment in Tokyo where I had gone on business the morning after the country's two hundred and fiftieth birthday, and I made you a promise in that piece without naming it as a promise. The promise was that I would keep writing. I am writing again now because the country has done, in the roughly ninety days since, what I predicted the country would do, which is to arrange for your son's death to become, in the plain reading of the official record, a death the country does not have to account for. The grand jury that convened in Pascagoula under Judge Fountain and heard, by the state's own accounting, forty-three witnesses and considered the output of one hundred and thirty-two subpoenas, returned a no-bill on the twenty-second of September. The state's chief medical examiner and the pathologist your family retained, Dr. Roger Mitchell, both ruled the cause and manner of Nolan's death undetermined. Both pathologists noted, and the grand jury acknowledged, the bruising on the back of Nolan's head. Both pathologists declined to classify that bruising as a fatal injury. The grand jury then wrote, in the plainest sentence it had the courage to write, that the condition and position and location of your son's body were, and I am quoting the record, consistent with drowning, which they called a diagnosis of exclusion. That is the language of a state apparatus that would like to be done with the matter. I want you to know that I read that language, when it was published, with the same mixture of grief and anger I expect you read it with, and that the plainest English I can offer you in response is that a diagnosis of exclusion is not a finding. It is a decision not to find.

I want to tell you what I think of the handling, and I want to tell you plainly, because I think a letter from a father to a father owes the father receiving it the plainness that was withheld from him by the men paid to render the verdict.

The handling of your son's death is, on the specific record, what the handling of a young Black man's unexplained death has looked like in the American South for the better part of a century. The investigation was long enough to appear thorough. The grand jury was large enough to appear deliberative. The paper that was produced was detailed enough to appear considered. The language that was chosen was cautious enough to appear fair. And the result, when all of that performance was finished, was a result that required the country to look at nothing, correct nothing, and prosecute no one. The bruising on the back of your son's head was named and then declared not fatal. The absence of a drowning finding was named and then absorbed into a presumption of drowning by exclusion. The gap between what Nolan's friends did or did not do on that boat and what the record would say about what they did or did not do was closed by a document that chose, carefully, not to require anyone to answer for the gap. That is a result the country knows how to produce. The county knew how to produce it. The county has produced it before, for other families, with the same procedural grammar, and the county will produce it again if we do not force a different grammar on the counties that are tempted to use the old one.

I am not writing to you with a theory about what happened on that boat. I do not have one and I would not advance one if I did, because the one obligation a man of my trade still owes the record is that he does not fill, with his own guess, the specific space the state left open by its deliberate decisions. I am writing to you about the deliberate decisions. The deliberate decisions are not a mystery. The decision to use a diagnosis of exclusion in a case where the direct evidence is incomplete is a decision. The decision to call bruising on the back of a young man's head non-fatal without naming its cause is a decision. The decision to send home a grand jury with the paper you now hold in your hands, instead of a paper that would have obligated the state to continue looking, is a decision. The decisions have authors. The authors have names. I am not going to recite the names on this page, because this is a letter to parents and not a piece of advocacy, but I want you to know that I have those names, and that I will keep them, and that I will use them in the writing I do over the months to come, and that if other parents in other counties in other summers are to be spared the specific procedural absorption your family was subjected to this September, those names are going to have to be said, out loud, in the ordinary rooms where the country decides who it still considers its children.

I want to say a word about Nolan now, because I do not want this letter to be a letter about the handling only. Nolan was eighteen years old. He was six foot one and a hundred and eighty-five pounds. He was a wide receiver who had signed on to play at Southwest Mississippi Community College, which means he was, this September, at the age the country has decided it will treat as the age at which a young Black man ceases to be a child and begins to be a potential threat, and which means also that the week before his death he was at an age at which he was somebody's child in a way the country should have recognized without instruction. He was your son. He was a brother. He was a friend. He was a wide receiver. He was, by every account I have read of him in the press that has covered his case, the kind of young man his community spoke well of because the community had been given reason to speak well of him. The country did not take any of that into account when it decided which grief would be broadcast and which grief would be processed. The country took it into account that he was a young Black man in Mississippi on a boat on the fifth of July, and the country processed him accordingly, and the country is now, through its grand jury document, asking you to accept the processing. I want to say to you very plainly that you are not obligated to accept the processing. The procedural closure of the state is not the moral closure of the matter. The country wrote the paper. You do not have to sign your name to it.

I want to say what I have come to say now, which is the part Baldwin would call the warning that is also the love. The warning is this. The country's story about your son, the official story, the story written in the margins of the grand jury's no-bill, is the story the country has always written about young Black men whose deaths it would prefer to be able to shelve. That story is not the story of your son. It is the country's story about itself, dressed in the specific language of a specific procedural outcome. The country will try, over the months and the years, to persuade you to adopt its story as your own. It will do this through the smallness of the subsequent news coverage, through the absence of follow-up from the specific institutions that owed Nolan an answer, through the ordinary way the American calendar fills with new names and new griefs and makes the old ones feel, if you are not vigilant, somehow quieter than they were on the night they happened. Do not let it. Do not let your son be absorbed into the country's quiet. Keep saying his name. Keep saying what you know about him. Keep refusing the specific closure the state is trying to hand you, because the state's closure is a convenience to the state and no comfort to a mother or a father, and the country has not earned, by any of its conduct in the ninety days of this investigation, the right to hand convenience to a county at the expense of comfort to a family.

The love is this. You are not alone. There are more families in this country, Black and otherwise, who have been handed the specific document you have been handed and who have been asked to make peace with the specific absence of answers you have been asked to make peace with, than the country's cable networks or morning papers will ever assemble in one room for you to see. Those families are a community you were born into on the morning Nolan did not come home from that boat, and that community will keep you if you reach for it. Reach for it. Christine, Elmore, I will not offer you consolation I do not have the standing to offer. I was raised in a church. I will not pretend, in a letter like this one, that I still live inside it. The specific account of a God who gathers his children home before their time is not an account I keep, and I am not going to borrow it from a tradition I have left in order to hand it to you now, because to do that in a letter of this kind would be a specific form of theft. What I can tell you, from the place I actually stand, is that the country, in some ordinary human corner of itself it has not yet learned to admit, holds the memory of every child it has failed, and that the memory accumulates, and that the memory, if the people who carry it refuse to let it be processed into the country's quiet, becomes, in the long slow way these things become anything at all, the specific pressure that one day forces the counties that wrote your son's story to write a different kind of story for the next son. I do not know the timeline. No father does. What I know is that a letter like this one, written to parents like you by a father like me, is one small entry in that long accumulation, and that there are others, and that you will not know most of them, and that they are being written, this October morning, in kitchens like mine all across the country.

I want to close, as I have been closing these pieces, with what I owe my own children, because I write all of these letters, including this one, for them. My oldest son will be eighteen in January. He is six foot one, a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and he played shooting guard. I want you to notice, because I noticed when I set his measurements down next to your son's, that there is the same height, ten pounds, and a basketball instead of a football between my older boy and yours. The country does not know the difference. The country has never known the difference. And my younger boy, the one for whom I have been sitting in this waiting room all morning, is the other half of the ledger. He is a running back, which means his assignment on Fridays is to run through other people's sons on his way to a line men who are not thinking about him drew on a field. He will go back out there this Friday night, because that is what Friday night is for in a town like ours, and because he has his own mind about what he is willing to risk and does not consult me about it any longer. One or both of my boys will one day be out on a boat, somewhere, with a group of friends, on an American weekend. I will one day get a phone call. I hope the call is one I can answer. I know that there is a world in which the call is the one you got in the small hours of the fifth of July. If that world ever becomes my world, I would want a letter like this one, from a father like me, to arrive at my own kitchen table, and I would want its writer to be as honest with me as I am trying, this morning, to be with you. That is why I am writing. That is the only authority I have claimed in doing it.

Christine. Elmore. Nolan Xavier Wells was your son. He is still your son. The country does not have the final word on who he was, and it does not have the final word on what happened to him, and it does not have the final word on what the two of you are owed. The country has written its paper. The paper is not the record. The record is still being written. I will keep writing my small share of it.

With love, and with the specific respect of one father for the two of you,

Earl O'Garro