I still don’t understand what Trayvon Martin was supposed to do. I’ve asked before, and received many confident answers; since the moment George Zimmerman shot him dead, there has been no shortage of loudly stated certainty about his actions and explanations of how it all ought to have gone. Most are presented as self-evident. Many are contradictory. None are satisfying. In part, that’s because we don’t know exactly what Martin did in the very last minute of a life that ought not to have ended. More than that, too many of the prescriptions are not about what Martin was supposed to do, but who he was supposed to be.

Martin left the house where he was a welcome guest to buy candy for a younger child; a little while later, his dead body was spread out on a lawn. One might have expected Zimmerman’s trial, which ended in an acquittal, to be mostly about Zimmerman’s choices—he followed Trayvon when a police dispatcher told him not to, he pulled the trigger—but it was mostly Martin who was on the defense. Legally, Zimmerman’s lawyers relied on the most imprecise moment, for which they had the least proof: when the two men were finally face to face, they said, it was Martin who lashed out. Their argument was about what he shouldn’t have done: fought (or, in a scenario perhaps better fitting the evidence, fought back). It is harder to picture what he should have done instead. When Anderson Cooper asked the woman known as Juror B37 if she thought that Martin played a role in his death or if it “was just something that happened to him,” she said,

Oh, I believe he played a huge role in his death. He could have, he could have—when George confronted him, he could have walked away and gone home. He didn’t have to do whatever he did and come back and be in a fight.

“To do whatever he did”—even in blaming him, she doesn’t really know. And it seems yawningly facile to say that when he was confronted by Zimmerman, a man in the dark with a gun, “he could have walked away.” Is the idea that Zimmerman would have stood there like a statue? Juror B37’s answer seems to be that Trayvon should have done something he might well have tried—something that probably wouldn’t have worked.

Should Martin have just followed the law? He was lawfully walking where he had every right to walk. If being a law-abider means acting according to the logic of Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, then, as Jelani Cobb has pointed out, Martin, stalked and scared, could have invoked it. Then the night might have ended with Zimmerman dead, Martin on trial, and his life, at the very least, blighted. That can’t be the right answer, either.

But that is jumping ahead. How could Martin have prevented the confrontation in the first place? Even Juror B37 recognized that that wasn’t entirely his job. Of Zimmerman, she said, “He should have done what he did except for the things before”—the “things before” being everything that night until he was losing in some kind of tussle and pulled out his gun. When Cooper asked if she thought Martin was the aggressor, she said, “I think the roles changed.” Martin, a teen-ager, should never have had to decide what to do when he saw a strange man (not in a uniform) following him in the dark. But how could he have made the choice that didn’t end with him dead?

When I asked on Twitter, there were two sorts of answers about what Martin should have done at this stage of the night: variations on “run straight home” and “not be black.” Those options are themselves mirror images. The idea that Martin, when he saw a light-skinned man looking at him strangely, should have realized his mistake and cleared out is a way of saying that he ought to have been exquisitely conscious of his blackness, of how he looked. Zimmerman’s lawyers argued that Zimmerman was properly scared; more subtly, they made the case that it was perverse of Martin not to recognize and manage his own scariness. And yet there are complications in instructing a black teen-ager to start running: Martin seems to have alarmed Zimmerman and the police dispatcher both when he moved too quickly and when he was slow. As Charles Blow wrote in the Times, “So what do I tell my boys now? At what precise pace should a black man walk to avoid suspicion?”

Other advice—that he should have deferred to Zimmerman, politely explained who he was, led him to the house where his father’s girlfriend’s son was waiting—assumes that Martin ought to have known that Zimmerman was just a nice man out to protect the neighborhood. Known how? Because we see how it turned out, we might wish that it had gone one of those ways—run, walk, wheedle, smile, just get home alive and grow older. And, for the moment, never mind the fairness of it all. But he is dead, and we should mind.

There is an echo, in what people say Martin should and shouldn’t have done, of what people say to women when bad things happen to them in dark places. Why did you walk that way, why were you out in the rain? Why did you walk in the direction of the man instead of running? Why did you think you had the privilege to go out and get candy for a child? You didn’t; you should have known. It shouldn’t be that way. A woman should be able to walk on a dark street in Florida, or anywhere. That she might not be able to doesn’t make a similar restraint on Martin any more reasonable—one injustice doesn’t vindicate another—and, in a way, only adds to the pain. One of the answers, among the most mortifying, and rightly underlying the rage at the verdict, is that Trayvon Martin wasn’t supposed to act like a man.

He wasn’t quite one, yet. He was a child, who had just turned seventeen. He was learning how to be a man—and he had some reasonable guides in his parents, as we have learned through watching their utter dignity throughout the trial. That night, though, Martin was just guessing.

Photograph by Mark Peterson/Redux.