— 3 min read
In June 2020 a young man was lost overboard in Charleston Harbor, his body later to be recovered on the Breach inlet sandbar. Elijah Weatherspoon was an 18 year old black Puerto Rican student and athlete who had resided in the area for several years. His mother claimed that her son went sailing from Mt Pleasant at night with seven white teenagers, that they had not reported him missing for hours after returning, and suggested foul play in his tragic death.
I was angry. Like many of my peers, I absorbed the narrative of an epidemic of racist violence against blacks. Attending the Academic Magnet high school in North Charleston, I was a member of an anti racist political club. We demonstrated at the NCPD headquarters after the shooting of Walter Scott. We attended school board meetings to make demands for policy changes intended to increase the diversity of Charleston’s high performing charter schools. Other members regularly volunteered at a local after school program. I showed up once, but didn’t return as I had a hard time connecting with the children I had nothing in common with.
I was sure that Elijah had been the victim of white supremacy somehow, some way. It was reported that the Mt Pleasant PD did not have an active investigation. I did what I knew was right. After donating to the family’s fundraiser for funeral expenses, I shared links on my Instagram with the caption “a black boy was murdered in Charleston Harbor. Mt Pleasant PD refuses to investigate. DNR, the agency responsible for wildlife poaching, has been given this case. White supremacy in action.”
These kids on the boat, whoever was the captain, were responsible. All the white kids got back and the black boy didn’t. A simple equation. What happened, I wondered? Was he pushed overboard in a watery lynching? Were they all swimming, and left him behind? I wanted to know what happened, but the question of mal intent was already closed in my mind. There was true evil among the white faces on that boat. There was some spiritual reenactment of the white-on-black violence endemic to that harbor. Charleston served as a major port in the trans Atlantic slave trade, with Gadsden’s Wharf on the Ashley river serving as the disembarkation point for up to 40% of all people taken to America as chattel.
I was proud for doing my part to exorcise the still haunting ghosts of white supremacy. I received many shares of the post, and inquiries of how to help right this injustice. But friends of those accused had also seen my broadside against their associate. The first message I opened simply called me a very sick, evil person. Another young man questioned my assumption that the death was a racially motivated murder. He knew the parties and was sure it was an accident, with all the boaters intoxicated when the man overboard happened. The conversation went on for a while with myself ceding ground that it may not have been intentional, but I did hold firm that allowing teenagers to go on a drunken sail was a clear manifestation of Toxic White culture.
I am a sailor, and I do not wish to drown. I felt such shock at the story initially. I imagined the betrayal to be left behind, left for dead, in the dark, deep water. What it would feel to swim, trying to preserve strength, hoping for rescue as the tide accelerated, feeling energy seep out of my body, increasingly bobbing under the surface, swallowing seawater, fighting for life with dwindling hope. It’s not fair. Someone must pay for such pain.
A part of me knew that the boy defending his classmates from the accusation of murder had a point. I still believed in the principle of innocent until proven guilty despite the best efforts of my later education to denigrate due process . He shared a detail not reported in the media, that one of the other sailors had been in the water when she got the anchor chain tangled around her leg. The 40 pound mass of iron shot down as a gravity sled, constricting the line and crushing her foot. A panicked return to the shore with a gruesome injury, having to make a horrible choice between searching for the missing and saving the hurt sounded like a plausible narrative.
After much internal turmoil I recognized my attempt to gain social capital from a horrible tragedy. I realized I had committed a serious sin and asked God for forgiveness. This led down a road of examining the other times I had used the zeitgeist of intersectional oppression for my own gain. I saw how the media and institutions I trusted stoked the flame of racial conflict in their quest for righteous indignation in the same way I had. It changed my whole worldview of how Identity interacts with tragedy and human struggle- maybe our pain is in fact the same instead of stratified by race or the growing list of orientations. Maybe in fact we all bleed red and each death is tragic in a way that unites humanity.
In short, the drowning of Elijah Weatherspoon rocked my reality of death, race, culture, and God. I still feel that I am in stormy waters, trying to hold on since my previous reference point was completely destroyed. I pray that the handsome young man who suffered a tragic end knows peace. Lord be good to us, for the sea is so wide and our ship is so small.