Letter From the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Year

On America's 250th birthday, Nolan Wells went into the water off Horn Island, Mississippi. The bitterness at the bottom of the cup.

On the day this country turned two hundred and fifty years old, a boy went into the water.

I want to say his name slowly, because the country will not: Nolan Xavier Wells. Eighteen years old. Ocean Springs, Mississippi. On the afternoon of July 4, 2026, while the nation lit its candles and sang to itself, he boarded a boat with a group of friends and rode out to Horn Island to do what American boys are promised they may do on that day, which is to be young, and free, and unafraid, on the water, in the sun. He was last seen around three in the afternoon. By nightfall his mother was calling the sheriff. On Monday morning a body was found floating off the northwestern tip of the island, and on Tuesday the coroner matched the dental records, and the promise, whatever it had been worth, was withdrawn.

I do not know what happened to Nolan Wells. Neither, as I write this, does anyone who is telling the truth. The autopsy is done but the findings are weeks away. There is a video circulating, said to show a confrontation on the beach that day, which the authorities are examining and have confirmed nothing about. The friends came back without him. The family called Ben Crump, which is a sentence that requires no translation for anyone who has lived here. And I am asking you to notice something about yourself, or about us, which is that you already know why the family called him. You knew before you finished reading the second paragraph. A Black boy, white companions, in the Deep South, Mississippi water. You recognized the story before the story had an ending, and that recognition is the evidence I wish to enter here. Not evidence of what happened on Horn Island, which I do not know, but evidence of what has happened in America, which I know entirely, which we all know entirely, and which the country has spent two hundred and fifty years and considerable treasure arranging not to know.

They pulled Emmett Till out of Mississippi water seventy-one years ago. The state explained itself then, too. The men who did it confessed to a magazine afterward and lived out their lives in the sun. And so when Black Mississippi looked at the Gulf this week and felt something older than suspicion move through it, that was not hysteria and it was not social media and it was not, God help us, racial division. It was memory doing the only work this country has ever permitted it to do, which is to brace the body for the next blow.

Eddie Glaude, who is from Moss Point, in Jackson County, the same county where they brought Nolan out of the water, has just published a book about the birthdays of this republic, and he opens it with a phrase I have not been able to put down since I read it: the bitterness at the bottom of the cup. History put it there, he says. And he tells us where it was put in him: as a child, in that county, hearing a neighbor’s father call him out of his name, learning in one scalding instant that the world had already decided what he was. I ask you to sit with the geography of this. The bitterness Glaude carries was deposited on that very coastline. And on the two hundred and fiftieth Fourth of July, the same coastline reached out and made another deposit, in another mother, in another set of children who will now grow up knowing what Glaude knew, and the country will call this a tragedy, and an isolated incident, and it will be neither. It will be the oldest continuous American tradition, older than the flag, older than the anthem, observed faithfully at every anniversary: the centennial conducted while Reconstruction bled out in the road, the sesquicentennial held while the Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in its tens of thousands, and now this one.

Frederick Douglass stood before America in 1852 and asked his question: what, to the slave, is your Fourth of July? He called the celebration a sham and the boasted liberty an unholy license, and the country has spent every year since proving he chose his words with terrible precision. Because here is the thing I most need to say, the thing that keeps me up: Nolan Wells was not protesting on the Fourth of July. He was not marching, or petitioning, or bearing witness. He was celebrating. He accepted the day’s invitation in perfect good faith. He got on a boat with his friends because he believed, as any eighteen-year-old has the right to believe, that the freedom being feted that afternoon included him, included his body, included his ordinary summer joy. And whatever the water knows that we do not yet, this much is already fixed: the day took him. The invitation was revoked between three in the afternoon and midnight, and his mother learned, as Black mothers have always learned, that the Fourth of July is a door that opens for her child and may close behind him, and that this has been true in every one of the two hundred and fifty years now being celebrated, and that the fireworks are indifferent to it, and that the fireworks have always been indifferent to it.

Now the country will do what it does. It will audit the dead boy. Already the record is being assembled: he played football, he was humble, his coaches loved him, he led by example. All of it true, but yet none of it the point. I wrote once, when the police killed Amir Locke in Minneapolis, a young man with no record, asleep on a couch, holding a gun the state itself had licensed, that his innocence should not have mattered, because the demand that Black people prove their innocence in order to deserve their lives is itself the crime, the original one, the one from which all the others descend. A people should not have to arrive at their own deaths with references. Nolan Wells was here. He was somebody’s son and somebody’s teammate and somebody’s whole heart, and that is enough, and if it is not enough for you, then the deficiency is in you, and in the civilization that formed you, and not in him.

And so we come to the question, the one that waits at the bottom of every one of these stories like the bitterness at the bottom of the cup. What would justice be, for Nolan? The family demands a real investigation, and they must have it, every hour of it, every document of it, conducted as fiercely as it would be conducted for the governor’s son, which is precisely what a Black family in Jackson County, Mississippi has never yet had reason to expect. Perhaps there will be findings. Perhaps there will be charges. Perhaps the water will be ruled an accident and the video a coincidence, and perhaps that will even be true. I hold all of it open. But I will not lie to you, and I will not let the country lie to itself through me: none of it will be justice. Justice is not a verdict, and it is not a settlement, and it is not a press conference on the courthouse steps. Justice requires as its precondition the presence of Black life. Justice was Nolan on the boat coming home Saturday evening, salt-skinned and laughing, sunburned across the shoulders, alive. Justice was foreclosed the moment he was not. Everything that follows now, however necessary, however hard we must fight for it, is only the accounting of a debt that cannot be paid.

This is what I would have the country understand about itself in its two hundred and fiftieth year, and what I suspect it will refuse, as it has refused each time before, because the refusal is the tradition. A nation cannot love its anniversaries and despise its children. It cannot light the sky over the Gulf while a mother walks the dock, and call itself free. But the water keeps its own records. It has kept them since the first ships, and it gave one back this week, on the nation’s birthday, in Mississippi, and it is asking us the only question it has ever asked: how long will you celebrate what you have not yet become?

Nolan Wells should be alive. Let that be the whole of the patriotism I can offer this year. He should be alive on this Fourth of July and the next one and the fiftieth one after that, an old man someday telling his grandchildren about the summer the country turned two hundred and fifty, and how the water was that day, and how the light was. That life was the only justice possible, and it is gone, and the fireworks went on anyway. They always do. That, to the American Negro, is your Fourth of July: the proof, renewed annually, that the country can mourn nothing while congratulating itself, and the stubborn, unkillable insistence, older than the republic and harder than its history, that we are owed the mornings anyway. All of them. Every one.

— Mustafa