It felt like Mo Better was on the verge of a blowout. The boys on Brick City’s sideline appeared defeated, slouching and shaking their heads. Mo Better had scored easily on two straight possessions and prevented Brick City from advancing past midfield. On its next chance, though, Brick City’s offense began to chip through the defense. They spread the field, with two receivers on each side, and ran the ball to the right, away from Isaiah. The running back, who wore number 3 and had thin sweat bands on his lower leg, sliced through the defense for 20 yards, and then, on the next play, broke through three tackles for nine more yards. The Mo Better defenders bent over with fatigue and the Brick City offense rushed to the line, keeping up the fast-paced attack, but just as it seemed that the offense was rolling, the referee blew the whistle. The third quarter was over—after just eight total plays. Brick City’s coaches, furious, shouted a flurry of questions at the referee. How did the eight minutes pass so quickly? How could the quarter end when their first offensive possession had barely begun? Why hadn’t the ref, tasked with keeping time on his hand-held clock, updated them? “Ay, ref! We need to know the time on this side of the field!” shouted one coach.
But Brick City trudged on in the fourth quarter. Their running back with the leg bands scored a touchdown, and then, on the kickoff, they recovered the short on-side kick to regain possession.
“Fuck, man!” Andrell shouted. “Damn!”
With the score 13–6, Brick City had the ball at midfield, seven minutes left in the game. Less than half an hour earlier, Oomz had thought the game was over. He didn’t say this out loud at the time, but he would admit it days later. “I thought we had them done,” he would say. “It turned so fast.” Now, his heart began to beat faster and he felt anxiety bubbling in his stomach.
“We just gotta hold ’em,” Esau said to Andrell on the sidelines. “Right here.”
“Isaiah! Oomz! Get me that ball back!” Andrell shouted to the field.
Brick City’s offense continued its roll. Four yards. Six yards. Four yards. Eight yards. Nine yards. The same play, sweep to the right, over and over, and yet the defense couldn’t stop it. When the running back with the leg bands hopped up from the turf, he walked back to the huddle with a swagger, bouncing on the balls of his feet, a bop in his step, the stroll of a confident athlete.
“They tired!” shouted a man on Brick City’s side of the bleachers.
They were less than 20 yards from the end zone. Dripping with sweat, Hart leaned his head back, looked to the sky, and sucked in air with big breaths. Oomz rested his hands on his knees, his chest heaving. Even Isaiah looked winded, slowly dragging his heavy legs to his position on the field between plays.
“Y’all letting it slip away!” Andrell shouted to the boys. “Damn!”
On first down and 10, Brick City ran for a short gain, but a lineman was called for a holding penalty, moving them back 10 yards. It was now first down and 20. Brick City gained four yards on the next play, and then one yard the play after that.
“Fourth down!” the referee announced, and the coaches on Brick City’s sidelines looked at one another in confusion.
“Third down!” a coach yelled. “It should be third down! We had that penalty! It should be third down!”
“It’s fourth down!” the ref again declared.
Bewildered outrage rained down from the Brick City sidelines and bleachers.
“What?!”
“No way!”
“You can’t let this happen!”
“The fuck is this?!”
“Come on, it’s third down!”
The Brick City coaches pleaded with the referee. “It’s fourth down,” the referee stubbornly repeated, and then he blew the whistle for the next play to begin. The Brick City coaches, stunned and speechless, with no option but to accept the injustice, called on the offense to play on. Mo Better’s defense held them short. Esau and Andrell looked at each other with gleeful, grateful smirks. Last week, the breaks had gone against them. Fortune could make all the difference, they knew, and they welcomed it to their side.
Up seven points with less than five minutes left, Mo Better could seal the victory by scoring again or by running out the clock. Isaiah got the ball first and pushed forward for four yards, the time ticking down to four minutes. Esau called a play for Oomz next, and Oomz lined up in the backfield with Isaiah in front of him. Oomz was confident and calm again, his adrenaline rising because he was about to run the ball. He had been eager for this game all week. His father had not hidden his disappointment after last week’s loss. Big Oomz had told him that he and his teammates played soft, played unlike the Mo Better teams before them. “Y’all gotta step it up,” he remembered his father saying. “I’ma go hard,” Oomz replied.
THE GAME AGAINST Brick City had been on his mind all week. He had plenty of time to daydream. His mother had transferred him to the charter school in Fort Greene for his sixth-grade year, and the bus ride took about 45 minutes. He now mostly lived with his maternal grandmother in East New York, and in the mornings, he took the B25 bus by himself to school. His paternal grandmother, Monique, who worked in Downtown Brooklyn, met Oomz outside his school in the afternoons and accompanied him home on the 3 train. If he had practice that day, he’d return to East New York to pack an overnight bag, head to Betsy Head, and then spend the night at Monique’s house in Brownsville.
His father didn’t like this new routine because Oomz was spending less time with him at Monique’s house. His coaches didn’t like this new routine because Oomz was late to practice more often. A few times over the past two weeks, he showed up 30 or more minutes late, still in the clothes he wore to school, and by the time he was dressed in his pads, he’d missed nearly an hour of practice.
“She got him going to school all the way up in Downtown Brooklyn,” Esau said to Ramsey as Oomz strolled into the park the night before the Brick City game.
“Why he ain’t going to school ’round here?” Ramsey said. “She crazy.”
When Oomz’s mother, Tasha, dropped by the park that evening, Esau complained to her that Oomz kept showing up late to practice since switching schools.
“Esau, you pick him up from school then,” she proposed.
“You gotta take him back around here,” he deflected.
“Nah, uh-uh, Brownsville ain’t good.”
“There’s some good schools around here. The one he went to was pretty good.”
“They got too familiar with him, and then it was just whatever.”
Tasha believed that the shift from a Brownsville public school to a Fort Greene charter school would be an educational upgrade. As an added benefit, her son would be spending more time outside Brownsville; she didn’t want him to become one of those young men who rarely left the comfort of his immediate surroundings. Though the new commute and routine brought inconveniences to his life, Oomz supported his mother’s decision. He knew enough to know that he already had plenty going against him. His family didn’t have much money, and he’d heard that many public high schools didn’t properly prepare students for college. He knew that he was smart and that to escape his neighborhood one day, to rise further than anyone in his family before him, he needed to maximize whatever opportunities he encountered. This didn’t mean getting lucky. To Oomz, escaping and advancing meant keeping himself on a certain path, a simple path: to get a good job he had to go to a good college, and to get into a good college he had to go to a good high school, and to get into a good high school he had to go to a good middle school. If his mother believed that this charter school in Fort Greene was the best middle school available, he was all for it. Oomz’s mother had visited the school. It was clean and bright, and the administrators talked a big game. She’d heard good things about charter schools, from other parents and from news articles. She put her son’s name into the lottery, and when he was selected, it felt like an easy decision.
Oomz and his mother had expected a rigorous curriculum, good teachers, and eager stu
dents at this new school. But they were soon disappointed. “My mom thought it was gonna be people who sit in they seat and do they work, but it’s not,” Oomz said. By his second week in class, Oomz had concluded that the school wasn’t for him. The students were disruptive, and the teachers seemed overwhelmed and inexperienced, Oomz observed. Classes started and quickly sputtered into chaos, the teacher sitting impotently behind the desk while students talked and flirted and teased, not even pretending to fill out the day’s worksheet assignment. “They ain’t teach us algebra or nothing,” he said. “Just teaching us division. They ain’t even give us homework!” At his old school, Oomz got along with everybody and felt that his classmates respected both his charisma and his intelligence. At his new school, though, “there’s always kids tryna start stuff,” he said. “People always tryna fight. They just wanna start anything.” Though he sometimes had a quick temper, Oomz wanted to avoid trouble. He talked his way out of having to throw punches, and because he was not releasing his anger, it built with each confrontation. One kid in particular kept poking at him. This was “a slow kid,” Oomz said, who seemed to take offense at Oomz’s efforts to bring order to the classroom: the way Oomz was in his seat before the bell, raised his hand to answer questions, and told other kids to be quiet while the teacher was talking. Oomz didn’t dress or speak like a square, but he acted like one in class, and he believed that this kid thought he was showing off. Why else would this boy talk so much smack to him? He told his father about all this, and his father advised him that “if this kid says something to me or touches me, I’ll hit him,” Oomz said. A few days before the Brick City game, as the classroom descended toward anarchy, Oomz raised his voice and told his classmates, “Yo! Pay attention!” The kid turned to Oomz and growled, “Shut up!” Oomz felt the anger rise from his gut up to his head and he clenched his jaw and fists. He cocked his arm back and swung, but then pulled his hand back inches before it connected with the kid’s face. The kid flinched and cowered, and the other classmates laughed. The kid didn’t say anything to Oomz the rest of the week. Oomz told his father about how he’d scared the boy into silence without having to hit him, and his father was impressed.
BIG OOMZ HADN’T come to any practices so far, but he’d been at every game, quiet and brooding at the front of the bleachers. Now, as Oomz lined up for the play, the bleachers were rattling on both sides, with stomps and banging fists. Naz took the snap and held the ball out for Oomz to grab, and Oomz opened his arms and took the ball into his stomach. But, when he closed his arms, the ball squirted out and bounced onto the turf. A Brick City player dove on the ball and the Brick City side of the bleachers went wild. Two plays later, Brick City ran in for the touchdown and then tied the game at 13 with the point-after conversion.
On the sidelines, Oomz seemed close to tears. He bit his lip and stared at the ground, his hands on his hips. One by one, his coaches approached him.
“Get over it, Oomz,” Andrell said. “Just make it better.”
“Let’s go,” Ramsey said. “Your team needs you. Perform under pressure.”
“Oomz,” Vick said. “Listen to me, baby boy. You need to go out there, lay somebody the fuck out. You lay somebody out, I promise that’ll make you feel better. This is the opportunity right now. Right now, put a block on somebody. You made a mistake. Go out there and make up for it right now. Hold ya head up. You a fighter.”
The sun dipped below the trees on the horizon. A soft blue light engulfed the field. It was cool now, and a breeze flapped jerseys and leaves. Mo Better had the ball back and Oomz was on the field. On fourth down, with a few seconds left in the game, Naz dropped back for a Hail Mary pass attempt from midfield. Oomz, blocking to give Naz more time, leveled a defender and Naz threw the ball deep toward Chaka, but a defensive back intercepted it, then cut across the field, and as the seconds ticked down he had much space in front of him and it looked like he had a chance to score. But just as he was about to break free, Hart caught up and cut him down. The game would be settled in overtime. The Brick City side of the stands cheered loudly, keeping alive the energy they’d built in the game’s final quarter. The Mo Better side was silent, tense—even Mr. Hart. He was standing with his arms crossed, as quiet and brooding as Big Oomz.
TO MR. HART, merely standing up still felt like a feat. He’d been bedridden or on crutches for seven months, and only a few weeks ago did he take his first steps out of the house without help. In those early months after his knee injury, he hoped to eventually return to his job. He had worked as a correctional officer at Rikers Island for 27 years and planned to retire at 30 years, which would mean a bigger pension to put his two kids through college and support his and his wife’s retirement. Hitting 30 years was supposed to be the final step of a long climb from poverty to the middle class, an ascent that stretched back decades and spanned hundreds of miles. Mr. Hart’s parents had grown up poor in Georgia before following the Great Migration trail north to Brooklyn. They settled in Bed-Stuy and built working-class lives. Mr. Hart’s father was a cook at an oyster restaurant and his mother worked in a factory. They ran a strict household, where the punishment for misbehavior was a belt to the backside. They were active and caring parents, but Bed-Stuy was rough in the 1970s and ’80s, and Mr. Hart hung out with troublemakers. As a teenager, he joined his friends on a few stickups. He never got caught; an armed robbery conviction would have prevented him from getting a job as a jail guard, irreversibly altering the trajectory of his life––his son’s too. Just as a child is born into a family’s accumulated wealth, a child is born into a family’s accumulated troubles. But by luck or God or fate, Mr. Hart was not pulled into the criminal justice system.
He worked some odd jobs after high school, then decided to take the civil service test, applying for work as a police officer, a garbage collector, a correctional officer, and a bus driver, which was his first choice. Rikers Island guard was the only offer he got. For a young man with a working-class background and no college education, the job represented upward mobility. After five years, he could make more than his father made; after 10, he could make six figures; after 20, he could retire with a pension that paid half of his salary for the rest of his life; and after 30, he could retire with a pension that nearly equaled his full salary. A generation earlier, he might have found such an opportunity at one of Brooklyn’s booming factories, but most of those factories were closed now. So, he went to Rikers.
The job was more grueling than he had imagined. Every day, he would patrol the cell blocks, absorbing a constant stream of shouted curses, thrown feces, and spit from inmates. He saw an inmate stab a pen into another inmate’s eye. He saw an inmate dump a pot of boiling water onto another inmate’s head. “His head swelled to the size of four basketballs,” Mr. Hart recalled. The environment hardened him. Inmates who disrespected him paid the price. “You would just pop him in the face, write up a small report, and you’d be good,” he said. Over the years, though, that changed. Mayor de Blasio pushed to grant inmates more rights. Around 75 percent of inmates at Rikers hadn’t been convicted of a crime and were simply awaiting trial. De Blasio appointed a new Department of Correction commissioner who aimed to change the culture at the jail—less solitary confinement, less violence against inmates. “These days they’re cracking down, and you could get in a lot of trouble for hitting an inmate,” Mr. Hart said. “And so inmates act out more.” He believed that these reforms were making the job more dangerous, that the bureaucrats making the decisions had no clue what it was like trying to keep order over angry and spiteful men, some of whom were surely planning to shank a guard at the first opportunity. Within a year, city officials reported that the number of stabbings and slashings at the jail increased by around 30 percent, the annual tally of injured guards rose by 104, and attacks on civilian staff tripled, from 17 to 54, even as the inmate population dipped by more than 5 percent.
So, while Mr. Hart had been hoping to get his 30 years, he concluded that he was getting out a
t the right time. He was on terminal leave now, receiving his salary checks for $6,000 a month until his vacation time was exhausted in November, at which point he would begin to receive his pension checks, around 60 percent of his salary. It would be enough to live a happy twilight.
He was still in his 40s, and he felt blessed to be able to retire before his kids were even teenagers. Those first few months after the injury, he’d thought about how unlucky he was to suffer such a debilitating freak accident, but his spirits quickly turned once he discovered the benefits of being a stay-at-home dad. Before, he and his wife, who worked as an accountant, had to juggle the standard responsibilities that emerged in every non-rich household with two working parents. Once Mr. Hart was healed enough to drive, he had all the time to take the kids to school in the morning, clean up the house during the day, pick the kids up in the afternoon, and prepare their meals in the evening. He quickly fell in love with how much time he got to spend with them.
He had worked hard to build this life. His kids went to a good public school and lived in a two-story, three-bed, three-bath, wood-paneled house with three televisions and a backyard in a quiet neighborhood. They had a fish tank in the basement and a basketball hoop out back. Their closets were stuffed with clothes and their walls lined with shoes. This was a long way to come over a generation.
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