Muck City (15 page)

During recreation time, many of the boys at Okeechobee would organize pickup games of football. Benjamin had nothing else to do, so he often ended up playing. Even with half his heart in the game, his unmatched size usually guaranteed his team would win. Slowly, the realization began to sink in. “This is something I can be good at,” he thought. On Friday nights, a crowd of boys would gather around the radio and listen to Raider games broadcast live on the AM gospel station WSWN (whose motto was “Only sunshine reaches more homes than Sugar 900”). It was Glades Central’s 2006 championship season, when receivers Deonte Thompson and Travis Benjamin were slicing up secondaries to the rumble of the hometown faithful.

“Damn, bro,”
the kids would shout to Kelvin. “You from Belle Glade, right? That could be
you
.”

Kelvin agreed. “It was then I decided to get serious and play football,” he said. “I wanted to be part of that.”

Kelvin needed more male influence in his life, so it was decided that he’d live with Frank and Tan when he was released. Boobie was also living there, having moved from Georgia.

Frank Williams became the father Kelvin never had. He was a big-shouldered bear of a man who drove trucks for his dad’s sod business. When he was growing up, everyone had called him Boobie, just like his son. And like Otis Benjamin, Frank had been a standout running back with a scholarship to Florida A&M. That is, until doctors discovered an abnormal heartbeat. Loyola Marymount basketball star Hank Gathers had just died of complications from the same problem. After one look at Frank’s medical records, FAMU revoked its offer and no other college would look at him. Forced to retire in his early twenties, Frank came home and took a job with U.S. Sugar.

But home life had not delivered the kind of excitement he craved, or
the money. In 1994, one of Frank’s neighbors was dealing cocaine. Some guys from the coast approached Frank looking to buy a pound, so Frank agreed to broker the deal. In less than an hour of easy work, he pocketed $9,000.

“The most I’d ever had in the bank was five hundred,” he said. “And I gave most of it to my mama to help with expenses. So the sight of that much money was exhilarating.”

A month later the same deal came around. Before long, Frank was running lots of deals—so many that he didn’t realize some of his contacts had been busted in a federal sting. When he was on his way to work one morning, a whole posse of sheriff’s deputies surrounded his car. They carried a sealed indictment. Frank’s dad put up the family house for bond. In the end, Frank ended up pleading. Just twenty-two years old, he was sentenced to serve forty-eight months in federal prison.

But that was years ago. Frank was grown up now. And he certainly didn’t look like any hardened criminal. These days he worked a forty-hour week on the muck, and at night, he was a husband and father to a houseful of football players. One of them, of course, was Boobie, whose brickhouse physique and quick feet made people remember the old Boobie of 1987. Another was David Bailey, Tan’s son from a previous relationship, who was a Raider defensive back. With two small boys of their own also playing football, Frank and Tan ran the house like a minicamp, which was the perfect setting for Kelvin once he cycled back into the world and took hold of the game.

Their little house on Northeast First Street was part sports bar and locker room, with football blaring year-round on the flat-screen television, thanks to the NFL Network. Each night, a stampede of boys smelling like sweat and wet grass invaded the tiny kitchen to empty the pots that Tan left on the stove.

“KB has always looked at us as his parent figures,” Frank said. “He knows his sister’s gonna make him do what he’s gotta do. He craves that structure.”

•   •   •

OF THE FIFTY-FOUR
players on the Raiders’ roster, Hester estimated that only about six had fathers living at home. Most players had little contact with their biological fathers and received little to no financial help. Many had never laid eyes on the men at all. The only exception seemed to be the Haitian players, whose parents remained together yet would still separate for extended periods of time to return home or follow harvests.

The absence of fathers was a subject little talked about on the team, but one that defined each boy and stitched his wings against the battering winds. Belle Glade was a town of children rootless from their lineage and scattered wild.

In the case of Davonte Allen, it was his grandfather Julius who stepped in to assume the role, laying in the boy a foundation of stone. Davonte had practically grown up in Julius and Nora’s home in South Bay, the little community four miles south of Belle Glade. And his childhood was lived between the six rows of pews in the tiny Church of God Tabernacle (True Holiness), where both grandparents delivered the good word three times a week.

Davonte’s mother, Delia, was twenty-three when she became pregnant with him. She was fresh off a two-year degree at Lincoln College of Technology in West Palm Beach and dating a handsome Jamaican named Ruel Allen. Working two jobs, Ruel did his share to provide money for diapers and bills when the baby arrived. But he also enjoyed his nightlife and friends, and Delia knew he wasn’t the marrying kind. So, when Davonte was three months old, she left Ruel.

“Sometimes we sidetrack before we realize, ‘This is not how I was raised,’ ” she said.

Working two jobs herself while caring for an infant, Delia soon realized the way she was raised was also better for her son. Julius and Nora ran a rigid household, well oiled with daily routine. Delia’s younger brother was still in high school, so the family structure was very much intact. When
Davonte turned three, he moved into a small bedroom at his grandparents’ home, where his mother would visit almost daily. “I wanted him to be in a normal environment, around a family that loved one another,” she said.

Outside of his congregation, Julius drove a truck for a delivery company. He was a slender man with a thin face and a cast-iron voice who saw the world in stark black and white. He was the kind of man who only bought his cars in cash, explaining why with an answer more resembling a personal creed:

“I learned how to suffer, and I wait.”

He’d waited until he was twenty-six to marry Nora, even though they’d been steady sweethearts since high school. “It’s just the age I’d always decided,” Julius said. “Ever since I was a child.”

The pastor ruled his home with a firm, quick hand. But with Davonte it was rarely needed. The boy took to discipline early. One of the only times Julius remembered having to spank him was when he was five, after being told repeatedly not to run under the racks in a department store.

“I rapped him about five times on the butt,” Julius said. “After that, when we’d go to any kind of store, he would shove his hands down and say, ‘Granddad, keep your hands in your pockets.’ He did that for years. He knew not to touch things.”

Under Julius’s roof, the mornings began with prayer and scripture. Nora would lead the children in a daily devotional, and before stepping out into the void, together they would recite the Twenty-Third Psalm. After school, homework had to be finished promptly, and if there was none, children were expected to read quietly at the kitchen table until supper was ready. Television and video games were closely monitored. Once, when Julius discovered Davonte playing Grand Theft Auto—walking in as Davonte’s avatar robbed an old lady and knocked her to the pavement—he ripped the disc from the machine and cracked it in half. And of course there were cars to wash and the lawn to mow.

“If you don’t do the yard and you need twenty dollars, I’m sorry,” he’d say. “Life is not easy. It’s hard, and nothing is free.”

Julius’s father was a Jamaican immigrant named Uriah Gordon who’d arrived in Belle Glade in the 1940s to work for U.S. Sugar. But the conditions were so oppressive in the camps that he soon quit. With only $1.65 in his pocket, he caught a bus to Hartford, Connecticut, and found work as a union painter. Uriah still lived in Hartford, and during summers, Julius and Nora would take Davonte to visit, even driving one year into New York City. There was the annual summer camp in Charlotte and another in Tennessee. One year his aunt took him to the Bahamas. And when Davonte returned home, it was to Glades Day School, where summer travel was nothing extraordinary, unlike the situation across town.

“Davonte’s been to places most other kids have never been,” said his mother. “And I thank God that he doesn’t have an attitude that makes him think he’s better. He knows that everyone is the same.”

His family was also encouraged by his strong faith, which they saw as a bedrock against the prevailing winds. This close relationship with God was often evident on his Facebook page, which he used for daily affirmations in a world designed to drag him down:

“They say what goes up must come down but God please don’t let me fall …!”

“Only one man is perfect & thats GOD and some people fail to realize that … real testimony by D. Allen you gotta like it! Haha!”

“Letter 2 Jesus … Please bless me 2 see you more clearly love u more dearly and follow u more nearly … amen … sincerely, D. Allen #6.”

Ruel Allen still remained in Davonte’s life. Delia would often take her son to see him at the Silver Spoon, the Jamaican restaurant he owned in Lake Park. They spoke each week by phone, and Ruel was good about putting money into Davonte’s account whenever Delia asked. He also showed up for football games. That distant relationship was more than most boys on the Raiders had with their own dads, and it was something for which Davonte felt fortunate. But there was little question in his mind over who his
father
was—the man whose shadow had never left his side.

“Davonte sees me as a role model,” said Julius. “I’m happy that I
could be there to teach him the values of life. He listens to me because he sees that I practice what I preach. It takes a man to raise a boy into being a man.”

•   •   •

HESTER’S OWN FATHER
had disappeared before Jessie was born, and this abandonment had shaped his own values about loyalty to family and raising boys into men.

His oldest son, Jessie junior, was ten by the time Hester left the game. And although the family moved numerous times in the preceding years, with Hester frequently on the road, there were no gaps in Jessie’s memory when it came to his father being around. “Growing up, he was always my best friend,” Jessie said. “I wanted to be just like him. I idolized him.”

Among Jessie’s fondest memories were the frequent trips to Red Lobster, where his father kept a standing comedy routine. To those who knew him well, Jet was a spot-on mimic. Inside a quiet booth of the restaurant, Hester’s walls would come down as he twisted his face into an assortment of characters for his son: Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the Three Bears, and a crazed old neighborhood curmudgeon named Mister Ed.

“My parents thought I liked going to Red Lobster for the food,” Jessie said, “but it was really to hear those stories. My dad’s super quiet, but if you get to see the side that I saw, he’s very funny.”

Jessie had recently graduated from the University of South Florida, where he’d played his father’s position and become a star on his own merit. But his chances at playing professionally had been dashed after a foot injury his senior season. He was now living in Tampa and considering a career in coaching.

Hester’s two youngest boys remained at home. Jarron was a freshman at Glades Central and Jymetre was eight. There was rarely a moment when Hester did not have at least one of them by his side.

After school, Jarron would usually sit in the truck and wait for practice to end, fighting boredom with homework or video games. (“I’m just not into football,” he once said. “Nobody seems to understand that.”) Jymetre, however, was a born player and student of the game. He could recite the Raider route tree like it was Mother Goose, much to the pleasure of Jet’s assistants. Later in the season, even when the Raiders played on the road, Jymetre would shadow his father along the sideline at most every game. With his hair done in perfect cornrows and always clutching a football like a teddy bear, he would gaze at the procession of violence, profanity, and blood with a look of wonderment. Come Saturday mornings, he would shine as quarterback, receiver, and running back on his own little league team in Wellington.

“The boy just cries whenever he loses,” his father once said with a glow of pride on his face. “He takes it real, real hard.”

Throughout Hester’s own days as a young player, watching friends wave to their fathers sitting in the bleachers, he’d always had to settle for his grandfather, Willie, whom he loved.

Growing up, he knew his real father’s name was Lorenzo. He also knew he’d been a decent player for the Lake Shore Bobcats, and that he no longer lived in Belle Glade. For most of Jessie’s childhood, Lorenzo was just a myth that would take blurry form whenever strangers stopped him with the occasional
“Don’t you look like yo daddy!”
or whipped him into confusion with
“Aint we cousins?”

But after Jessie’s senior season, after the All-American selection and publicized commitment to Coach Bowden and the Seminoles, Lorenzo suddenly appeared like some rare species out of the wild.

He stopped by the house one afternoon, but Jessie chose to speak with him out in the yard, rather than invite him inside. After all, the man was a stranger.

“I’ve been hearing about what you’ve become,” Lorenzo said.

The first thing Jessie noticed about his father was how polite and well dressed he was, how fit and healthy. A man with a fine life somewhere
else—Washington, D.C., he said. It was as if Lorenzo had been watching all that time from behind some invisible curtain, through the dark nights with Cora’s fits and Anthony’s seizures, the pangs of hunger and thousands of hours under the sun, just waiting for the right time to spring.

“I wanted to see him,” Hester said, “to see what I came from. But there was no emotion, no thoughts in my head. At that point, there was nothing that man could do for me.”