Perhaps not an actual drowning, but still

While I was in Colorado my phone rang. It was someone at the lake out behind my house, reporting that it looked like a kid had drowned. He had, or at least he was dead. My initial response wasn't the best. I said I was out of town and was no longer on the Board, to call the new Chair. I might have first expressed some kind of basic human empathy first. Oh well.

But I had recently been the Chair so I inevitably got pulled into the first couple of days of a mix of appropriate action and hand-wringing. What was clear at the time was that the kid had snuck into the lake, having come up with a group of friends from Chatham County and had lied to the staff and said they were such and such who lived on street X. From a story in the paper the next day I saw that he was a Black kid, a recent high school grad, a football and lacrosse player. In his picture in the paper he was with a white girl. The lacrosse and the girlfriend told me most of the story. He was running with a bunch of white kids but, because he was black, he wasn't a confident swimmer.

Today I had coffee with a friend who lives next to the park who gave me more detail. It seems that the kid and his friends were on drugs and he had a heart attack, so he might in fact not have drowned. But my friend watched the video of the event and said that it was clear from the outset that he didn't want to go into the water. He paused at the edge of the lake for a long time and his girlfriend talked him into it. 

So yes, he died of blackness and the fact that he didn't -- like all white kids -- learn how to swim not too long after he learned how to walk. That's the issue here. And he wanted to hang with his friends and not admit that he didn't know how.