When the Water Gave Him Back: A Letter to White America
OPINION: From Emmitt Till to Nolan Wells, Tasia Fortune, Trey Reed and Kohen Wiley, the pattern of Black death needs to be a wake-up call to lawmakers in Mississippi.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
You do not know what it is to bury a child and be told to grieve more quietly.
You do not know what it is to ask a simple question, what happened to my son, and watch an entire system organize itself against you instead of for you. That is where Christine Wonsley has been standing since the Fourth of July. Not looking for sympathy. Looking for the truth. And the system’s answer, over and over, has been to make her prove she deserves it.
This is not new. This is the oldest story in this country, just wearing a new date.
In 1955, a mother in Mississippi opened her son’s casket so the world could not look away from what was done to him. Mamie Till did not get sympathy either. She got a trial for her grief. The world decided her pain was too loud, too political, too inconvenient, and it turned its attention to finding reasons to doubt her instead of reasons to help her. Seventy years later, in that same state, another mother is asking the same question into the same silence, and the system is reaching for the same old tools. Doubt her. Distract her. Come after whatever she has left so there is less of her left to keep asking. They went after Christine Wonsley’s nursing license the week she was picking out a burial suit. That is not a coincidence. That is a pattern with seventy years of practice behind it.
And Mississippi does not get to hide behind time on this one.
This is the state with more recorded lynchings than any other in the country, hundreds of Black bodies put on public display as warning. That is not history behind glass; it is a pattern still breathing today. Less than two weeks ago, Tasia Fortune, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of four, was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned house in Jackson, and her family said immediately, she did not do this to herself.
Not even a year before her, Demartravion “Trey” Reed, a twenty-one-year-old student, was found hanging from a tree on his own college campus at Delta State University, and questions about his body were dismissed before they were fully asked. Two names, two trees, the same state, and the distance between them measured in months, not decades. In between, one-year-old Kohen Wiley was shot dead by police in a Walmart parking lot over the suspicion of stolen diapers, and the first autopsy did not match what actually happened to that child—a baby. And now Nolan Wells, eighteen years old, goes missing over a holiday weekend and comes back two days later with a cause of death the state still cannot name.
How many names does it take before somebody in power in that state has to answer for a pattern instead of a headline?
This is not a request anymore. This is a demand. The Department of Justice needs to be in Mississippi, pulling the thread on every one of these deaths, because a state does not accumulate these many names and these many unanswered questions and get to call each one isolated. Somebody in that coroner’s office, that sheriff’s department, that governor’s mansion knows more than undetermined. They have just never had to say it out loud, because the system has never made them.
Say it plainly with me. If you had his phone, why were you calling his mother to ask if she had heard from him? If you were his friend, why does the story keep changing? If there is nothing to hide, why did it take lawyers, threats and spoliation letters before anyone started telling the truth? A mother is asking why an independent review could not even settle something as basic as what happened to her son’s throat, and every time she asks it out loud, somebody calls it harassment instead of what it actually is, which is love that refuses to stop working.
And somewhere in all of it, you will always find an Uncle Ruckus with a microphone, more interested in being first than being right. We know him well. We have always known him. He does not need more attention here than that.
The real story is the system behind him. The one that moves in months when the question is what happened to our children and moves in days when the question is how to discredit the mother asking. Truth is slow when it is owed to us and fast when it is owed by us. You already know why the machine runs in that direction. You have always known.
Christine Wonsley does not want your sympathy. She wants the truth about her son, in a state that has owed us the truth for longer than any of us have been alive.
Investigate the state. Investigate the people who let this happen again and again and call it isolated every time. Give her son’s name the weight it deserves.
Jonathan Conyers is the author of the acclaimed memoir I Wasn’t Supposed to Be Here. He is also a respiratory therapist, writer, and producer, as well as the owner and investor of several successful business ventures. Through his storytelling and work, Conyers continues to amplify underrepresented voices and create impact across industries.