A mother should never have to sing “Happy Birthday” to a dead child.But I watched Nolan Wells’ mother do exactly that. Her son should have been beside her, turning 19, making a wish for a dream to come true. Instead, she had to send those words somewhere he could no longer answer them. I felt a lump rise in my throat as I watched her. It was grief, but it was also fear — the kind that makes one mother look at another and think, please, God, I pray I never have to be this strong.Nolan was 18 when he went to Horn Island, Mississippi, with friends on July 4. He did not return with them. His body was found two days later in the water off the island. His family is still seeking answers about what happened to him, and authorities have said the investigation remains ongoing.I am not accusing Nolan’s friends of causing his death. I was not on that island, and I will not turn unanswered questions into guilt. Nolan’s family deserves facts, not speculation. But the public discourse surrounding Nolan’s death has made me think about which boys America instinctively allows to be innocent, frightened, confused or simply young.My son is 12. He has Black, white, Asian and Hispanic friends. I want that for him; I want his world to be bigger than race and ethnicity. I never imagined becoming a mother who mentally studies the racial makeup of the children standing beside her son, but I am raising a Black boy in a country where his Blackness can change the meaning of the exact same behavior.If he is standing with a group of Black boys, I worry that someone will see a threat instead of seeing children. If he is walking alone, I think about Trayvon Martin.Trayvon was 17 years old, returning from a convenience store in the neighborhood where he was staying when George Zimmerman reported him as suspicious and followed him. Trayvon was unarmed. He was a teenager trying to get home, yet his presence was treated as something worthy of suspicion.So if my son is not safe surrounded by Black boys, and he is not safe walking alone, where exactly is he safe?That question became even harder for me after Nolan, because now I find myself wondering what happens when my son is the only Black boy among white friends. Not because I believe white children are dangerous. Because I worry about what happens when something goes wrong.Supporters gather around a cross during a candelight vigil at a memorial to Trayvon Martin outside The Retreat at Twin Lakes community where Trayvon was shot and killed by George Michael Zimmerman on March 25, 2012, in Sanford, Florida.Mario Tama via Getty ImagesFriendship is easy when everyone is laughing. I want to know what friendship means after the bad decision, the argument, the accident, the police lights or the frightened phone call home. When stories conflict, who gets to be believed? Who gets described as scared, and who gets described as aggressive? Who gets to be a child who made a mistake, and who becomes the scapegoat for everything that went wrong?I was raised in a time when the community helped raise children. Neighbors knew your name. Your classmates’ parents knew your parents. There was an understanding that protecting children was a collective responsibility. There was a sense that the children in front of us belonged, in some small way, to all of us.Now it often feels like what we say in Jamaican Patwa: Every man fi himself.And that terrifies me. Because when something goes wrong in a group of children and each family immediately circles the wagons around their own child, what happens to the child who is easiest to blame? Will community still matter? Will friendship? Will fairness? If protecting yours requires sacrificing mine, what happens to all that talk about how much our children love one another?That is why Black mothers are not OK.We are constantly trying to solve an equation with no correct answer. Send our sons out with Black friends, and pray nobody sees a group of Black boys and decides they are dangerous. Let him walk alone, and suddenly I am thinking about hoodies, hands out of pockets, how he should behave when he walks into a store and whether he has crossed from the block where everybody knows his name onto one where nobody does.I think about actress and author Tabitha Brown describing how she and her husband began having uncomfortable conversations about racism with their Black son when he was only 8 years old. They wanted to give him enough information that he would not be caught off guard by a world that might respond differently to him because of his brown skin.That is the part people who are not raising Black boys may never fully understand. Childhood comes with instructions we wish we did not have to give.Be yourself, but be aware of how people may perceive you. Explore the world, but pay attention to where you are. Trust your friends, but understand what might happen if something goes wrong. Be a child, while knowing everyone may not give you the luxury of being seen as one.And there is evidence that these differences begin long before our sons become adults. Federal civil rights data have repeatedly shown that Black boys are disciplined in American schools at rates far beyond their share of enrollment. School can become one of the first places children learn whose behavior is seen as childishness and whose is seen as dangerous.Those assumptions do not disappear when the school bell rings. They follow our sons into stores, neighborhoods, cars, parties, beaches, boats and unfamiliar towns. They shape who is watched, who is questioned, who is believed and who receives the benefit of the doubt.Nolan’s story has awakened something larger in me. I want my son to have Black friends and white friends. I want him to walk down the street alone. I want him to go to parties, take trips, make dumb teenage decisions, call me when he needs help and grow into a man without his mother mentally calculating the danger of every room he enters.Recently, I was talking with a colleague who has three Black sons whose ages are 22, 25 and 38, and I realized I am only now being initiated into a club Black parents have belonged to for generations. The worries that change shape as our sons grow do not disappear when they become men. They are passed down, an inheritance none of us asked for. Long before me, Black mothers and fathers were teaching their sons how to move through a world that might see danger before it saw their humanity. Our ancestors carried this burden. Our grandparents carried it. Our parents carried it. And now, despite everything they endured and everything we have supposedly learned since, I find myself carrying it too.Part of raising a Black son is receiving survival lessons from the generations who raised theirs before you. The details change — the neighborhood, the hoodie, the car, the store, the group of friends — but the prayer underneath them has remained painfully familiar: Please, let my child come home.But keeping Black children safe cannot be a private burden carried only inside Black homes. It belongs to the communities our children live in and the institutions they encounter. Parents, teachers, neighbors, coaches, police officers, store owners, prosecutors, journalists and strangers all play a role in determining what kind of world our children are allowed to move through.Nolan’s father, Elmore Wonsley, said he taught his son something simple: “If you go with five, you come back with five.”That should be bigger than one father’s rule. It should be how we understand community. If we go together, we come back together. We do not leave one child behind when things get complicated. And we shouldn’t have to wait until a grieving mother is standing before cameras asking what happened to decide that somebody else’s child is worth protecting.Black mothers are tired of trying to solve an impossible equation. Is he safer with Black friends? Is he safer walking alone? Is he safer surrounded by white friends? Where exactly are we supposed to put our sons?Nolan Wells should have celebrated his 19th birthday beside his mother. His family deserves the truth about why he did not. And Black mothers deserve to stop sending our sons into the world wondering which version of them has the best chance of returning to us.Natalie Williams is a published author, a mother to a Black son, Senior Director of Education & Exhibits at Miami Children’s Museum, and a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute (NBCDI).Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.