When a Black child dies without answers, grief has nowhere to go

The mystery surrounding Nolan Wells’ death has become more than an investigation. For Black parents watching from afar, it evokes an inherited anxiety about their children’s safety, particularly when tragedy strikes in places where history has taught them to be wary.

Wells, 18, disappeared during a July 4 boating trip to Horn Island off the Mississippi coast and was found dead two days later. Officials initially suspected drowning and reported no evidence of foul play, while both the state autopsy and the family’s independent autopsy have been inconclusive or withheld pending a grand jury investigation. The family, their attorney Ben Crump and the Congressional Black Caucus are pressing for federal review, but the manner of death remains officially undetermined.

An engineered melancholia

Psychoanalysis distinguishes between mourning, in which the lost object can be gradually relinquished, and melancholia, in which loss cannot be metabolized and becomes lodged in the psyche. An undetermined death is a kind of engineered melancholia. Without a narrative of how and why, the grieving mind cannot complete its work. Into that vacuum flow the most terrifying possibilities, which for Black Americans are not paranoid fantasies but memories.

The case’s grip on the collective Black psyche cannot be separated from geography. A Black teenager vanishing in a majority-white space in Mississippi activates what could be called a cultural unconscious structured by Emmett Till, whose body was pulled from a Mississippi river in 1955. Trauma theorists argue that unmourned historical violence is passed down not as memory but as affect, dread and behavioral injunction. When the news broke, many Black parents did not experience it as new information. They experienced it as confirmation, the return of something never fully repressed because it was never fully safe to forget.

Searching for trusted institutions

The skepticism toward the official investigation functions as a transference onto institutions that have historically been unreliable containers for Black grief. When sheriffs, coroners and prosecutors have failed to serve that function, anxiety remains uncontained and circulates as suspicion, activism and sometimes conspiracy thinking. The demand for federal review is, psychologically, a search for a container that can be trusted.

For Black parents, cases like this reinforce racialized hypervigilance: Never let your child be the only one, never let them separate from the group, never assume white spaces are safe. Wells’ stepfather’s comment that he taught his son “never to separate from friends he arrived with” reveals the protective script, and the parent’s torment when it fails anyway.

I write this not only as a scholar of the psyche, but as a Black mother and grandmother. When the news broke, I responded with my body first, that tightening in the chest every Black parent knows. I raised my children on the same scripts Wells’ parents gave him. I said those words so often they became a kind of prayer, and now I watch my children say them to my grandchildren. I feel the love in those words and their weight, because no child should need a survival liturgy just to go on a boat trip with friends.

A mother’s plea

Whatever the investigation concludes, this much is already true: A mother in Mississippi is grieving without answers, and millions of us grieve alongside her because we know how easily it could have been our child, our grandchild. This is my attempt to give that grief a language. But before it was language, it was a feeling in my chest. It still is.

This op-ed appeared first in Word in Black. It has been edited for length. For the original, visit https://wordinblack.com/2026/08/when-a-black-child-dies-without-answers-grief-has-nowhere-to-go/.

The Rev. Sheila Poynter Johnson is a New York State-licensed psychoanalyst, ordained minister and Chair and President of Harlem Family Services.