The Country I Cannot Outrun

I was standing in the customs line at Haneda when the news reached me. That is the truth of it, and there is no more honest way to begin. I had come to Tokyo on business with the United States Department of War, which is what our Department of Defense has been called since the President signed the order restoring the older name last year, and I had come at the far end of a Fourth of July weekend that was already, before I had boarded the plane, a weekend of small partings. I had told my oldest son to keep an eye on the company while I was gone, and I had put my youngest on a plane to Florida so he could fish with his friends for a few days before he starts high school in Connecticut. I had signed off on two boys with one signature each and turned toward the Pacific. I had thought, God help me, that I was leaving the country behind for a week. What I learned in that customs line, and what any Black man of a certain age already knows, is that the country does not permit that arrangement. There are parts of the United States that reach for you no matter how many time zones you have put between yourself and your kitchen table. I was oceans from home, and the country was already asking me to pay attention.

I am writing these sentences from a small Airbnb apartment somewhere in Tokyo, at a table that is not mine, in a room with photographs on the walls of people I do not know but whom I respect, because they have opened their home to me. That is a small kindness. It is on my mind this week.

The news that reached me was about a boy named Nolan Xavier Wells. He was eighteen. He was from Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He had graduated from Ocean Springs High School the previous spring, where he had been a multi-sport athlete, and he had signed on to play football, at wide receiver, for Southwest Mississippi Community College. On the afternoon of the Fourth of July, he had left a private dock with a group of friends, headed to Horn Island for the holiday, which is a barrier island about ten miles off the Gulf coast and is by all accounts a beautiful place to spend a summer day. He did not come home. His mother, Christine Wonsley, called the Jackson County Sheriff's Office around midnight to report that her son had not returned. On the morning of Monday, July 6, a United States Park Service ranger found a body in the water just off the northwestern tip of Horn Island, and the Jackson County coroner, Bruce Lynd, later confirmed through dental records that the body was Nolan. The cause and manner of death have not been released. Investigators told ABC News that they suspect drowning and that they do not, at this time, see evidence of foul play. The family, unwilling to wait weeks for the state's answers, has retained the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who has publicly described what he calls an altercation on the boat, characterized as Nolan and someone else yelling at one another, and who has arranged for the boy's body to be flown to Washington, D.C. for an independent autopsy. The Reverend Al Sharpton has joined the family at the microphone. That is the map, as much of it as anyone can honestly draw at this hour.

I have written about Black children being killed before. I have sat at this table, in this chair, with some version of this paragraph in front of me more times than a father should have to, and I am not going to pretend, for the sake of narrative freshness, that the ground is new. It is not. What is different about the Wells case, and what I have been turning over on the long flight and in the long queue, is not the crime, because we do not yet know if there was one. What is different is the country's silence.

The calendar itself is arguing with us, and it has been arguing for a very long time. Frederick Douglass, standing in Rochester on the fifth of July, 1852, delivered a speech in which he asked what to the American slave was the Fourth of July, and he answered his own question in the plainest words a man could find. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, he told the country in that hall. It is a day that reveals to me, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which I am the constant victim. Nearly four million people in the United States were not free on the Fourth of July in 1852, and Douglass insisted, out loud, that the country's fireworks were premature so long as that arithmetic held. That speech is a hundred and seventy-four years old. Nolan Xavier Wells left an Ocean Springs dock on the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country's declaration of its own liberty, and he did not come home. His mother made her phone call to the sheriff on a night the country was still setting off fireworks. The calendar is arguing with us in a voice that is not new. That the voice is not new is part of the offense.

Let me put the thing plainly, because plainness is what the story requires. If three Black boys had left an Ocean Springs dock on the Fourth of July with one white boy, and if that white boy had come home in a body bag while the three Black boys came home whole, the President of the United States would very likely have given a speech by now. The Attorney General would already be standing at a lectern. Cable networks would be running the eighteen-year-old's yearbook photograph on a chyron every hour, on the hour, for a week. The white boy's high school football coach would be on the morning shows. There would be a task force. There would be a hashtag with the boy's name in the President's own hand. That is not a hypothetical. That is the country we live in, and any American who has watched a summer news cycle since the invention of cable television knows it. The Wells case has not commanded that response. NPR has covered it. ABC News has covered it. NBC affiliates on the Gulf Coast have covered it. Rolling Stone has covered it. Ebony has covered it. Hot 97 has covered it. The Mississippi Free Press has covered it, and CNN, and Newsweek, and Forbes. The press, in the modest and specific sense, is not ignoring Nolan Xavier Wells. But the presidency is, and the cable networks are not treating this as the week's American story, and the difference between what happens to a country when a Black boy does not come home and what happens to a country when a white boy does not come home is not a paranoid observation. It is a description. I am not asking anyone to invent an outrage they do not feel. I am asking anyone reading this to notice which outrages the country prefers, and to notice which ones it does not.

I want to be careful here, because I owe the Wells family the discipline of not overclaiming what happened on that boat. I do not know what killed Nolan. Neither, at this hour, does the state of Mississippi, and neither does Ben Crump. But that is not, tonight, the question that keeps me at the desk. My concern in this piece is not what happened to Nolan Wells. My concern is what the country has failed to do about the fact that something happened. A child is dead. A mother is calling for answers. That combination of facts, in a country that still remembered how to be a country, would be enough. It would not require a diagnosis. It would not require a task force. It would not require the intervention of Ben Crump. It would only require the ordinary human recognition that a dead child is somebody's child, and that when a child does not come home, the country is supposed to help the family carry the weight of it. That recognition is being withheld from the Wells family, and the withholding is not accidental. It is the country deciding, in real time, which sons it will grieve for and which sons it will not. The question of what killed Nolan is a question we will get to when we get to it. The question I want to sit with, this week, from Tokyo, is the one the country is not asking on Nolan's behalf. How does a country hear the name of an eighteen-year-old who did not come home from a Fourth of July boat trip, and not, for a moment, stop what it is doing and stand next to his mother?

I am writing this as a father. That is not a rhetorical device. I have a fourteen-year-old boy in Florida this week, at a dock with his friends, and I honestly do not know if he has been on a boat yet by the time you read this, and I would like to tell you that I am not thinking about that as I write these sentences, and I would be lying if I did. That is the weight of the country I cannot outrun. I put my son on a plane the same week Christine Wonsley put in a call at midnight, and the difference between our two nights, and the difference between what I am owed as a father and what she is owed as a mother, is not supposed to be a function of what our sons look like. It is, however. Anyone who denies it is not talking about the same country I am talking about.

There is a temptation, in a piece like this, to talk about the family as though they were a symbol. They are not a symbol. Christine Wonsley is a mother. Nolan Xavier Wells was her son. He was eighteen years old, six foot one, a hundred and eighty-five pounds. His college teammates have called him a leader. His high school has called him beloved. The country he lived in owes his mother the truth about what happened on that boat, and it owes her that truth on her schedule, not on the schedule of a state office that will get to the autopsy in a few weeks, and not on the schedule of a national press corps that has not yet decided this story is the story of the summer. That is the country's failure, and if we love this country, and I do, we name its failures out loud so it can hear us.

I will land at home in a few days. I will pick up my youngest at the airport when his fishing trip is over. I will walk into my office and shake my oldest son's hand and thank him for holding the line while I was gone. I will sit down at the kitchen table where I write these pieces. And I will remember, because I owe the Wells family this and I owe my own sons this, that the presidency of the United States can find its voice for the American boys it wishes to speak for and can lose its voice for the American boys it does not. That is not a fact of nature. It is a choice, made every summer, in every administration, by men who could choose otherwise. Nolan Xavier Wells was an American boy. He deserved the speech we are still waiting for. So does his mother.