This Nolan Wells decision has my heart broken. In my mind, he has died twice. Nolan was like many young, gifted, and Black kids who believed a promising future was ahead of them. He had already picked out names for the children he hoped to have. He was a wide receiver with dreams he imagined could be reality. And now he’s a ‘no true bill.’ A legal footnote. A decision my parents would have recognized instantly as the same story, different century.
I cannot help but think about the many times my parents would stop whatever they were doing and go off on a monologue about the latest atrocity hurled in the faces of Black people at the time and why we must continue to fight for equality. White privilege and the protection of it is and was insidious, they would caution. And even though I didn’t always understand everything said to me at the time, I did as told and learned with each experience. How to speak up for myself, for others, for those that couldn’t find the words, for those afraid to use their words — no matter the city, state, country, or continent.
And now, I sit here at this big age and this news has me in tears. His ‘friends’ say he chose to stay. A Black boy, alone on an uninhabited island, with his phone in someone else’s hands and his messages missing — chose to stay. That is the soft life explanation they’re offering us. A choice that only exists after the fact, constructed to explain why the only Black face in the boat didn’t come home.
I am livid.
I rail against any Black person today in search of a ‘soft life’. A ‘soft life’ for Black people simply does not exist. Not in the way it does for a white person. To have a soft life as a Black person, you must remove yourself fully from the issues affecting the entire Black community. You must excise yourself from the atrocities of systems meant to place us in peril forever as opposed to raise us up. You must look the other way as people who resemble you are deemed to be less-than or unworthy. By these definitions alone, I could never have a soft life. After living all around the world and meeting people from all walks of life, all types of Black and brown people, I know it to be true — there is no ‘soft life’ anywhere for Black people who love Black people.
And I love us for real.
So, yes. Today?
My heart is broken. I am in tears. I want to scream. I want to shout. I want to punch somebody.
The D.A. said there was ‘not a scintilla of evidence.’ Not a scintilla. For a boy who didn’t come home.
Black people have been here and heard this all before.
I am GenX, and our generation was told that we would have A, B, and C if we did certain things. They called our picketing, our marching, our pain, ‘public clamor.’ They called our accusations and questions ‘private malice.’ They told us, again, that we are the problem — not the system that lets a boy die and calls it drowning, that lets his friends go home and calls it cooperation.
And for just a sliver of a moment, a small window of time in American history, maybe we did have it. Maybe we were actually closing in on the American dream our forefathers spoke about. But just as quickly as we could even catch a whiff of it, it was taken away and replaced…
with this.
I have now lived more than half of my life. There is more road behind me than in front of me, and I will feel like a failure if the state of the world is not better when I leave this earth. And the young ones are watching. They’re seeing that a Black boy can be surrounded by white friends in photographs and still be the only one who doesn’t come back. They’re learning what my parents taught me: that the system will find a way to say you weren’t really one of us.
I am tired.
But as my grandmother always used to say: if you are Black, you will always be tired of something. So, I have learned to live with the unease of an unshakeable fatigue. But what I do not want to have to do is apologize to younger generations for not leaving them more than what I have. I pray every day to at least leave them that.
So no, I cannot ‘soft life’ my way out of this. Not when Nolan’s mother posted on her birthday that the only thing she wanted was to hug him again. Not when the grand jury said his death was ‘consistent with drowning’ and left it there. The soft life is for people who can afford to look away. For the unmelanated. I have never had that luxury, and I never want it.
I will sit with this feeling, ponder it, let it wash over me. Then I will regroup, as I do, and wake yet again to fight another day.
As I do. As we do.
But right now, in this moment?
I feel defeated.
Rest in power, Nolan Wells.
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