Muck City

by Bryan Mealer

  Taking his place was a man they called Shorty Red.

  Al Werneke was built like a triangle, with a broad chest and stumpy legs. As his nickname suggested, he was small. A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Werneke had played basketball and football at Indiana State, then, for the next decade, had coached high school football in small midwestern towns with names like Dugger, Oblong, Flora, and Brazil. When he arrived in Belle Glade in August 1971, he found a school still brimming with racial tension. On his first day of practice, the coach was greeted by another idiosyncrasy of the Glades: many of his players were still in the vegetable fields.

  “This is the first time in my experience all the squad hasn’t been on hand for opening practice,” an exasperated Werneke told the Belle Glade Herald. “They keep telling me, ‘They’re up north—in Georgia—working.’ I am at a loss.”

  For Johnnie Ruth Williams, that summer had marked the first time she didn’t require her children to travel for the harvests. The living conditions in the northern labor camps had become too unsuitable for families, she felt. There was too much drinking and fighting, and on their last trip up north, someone had been shot and killed. That same summer, her father had suffered a stroke while driving a truck and died in a Georgia hospital.

  With his summer now free, Williams devoted the time to conditioning his body with one goal on his mind. Each morning, he and his teammate Dan Brown, a white running back, would lace up in army boots and run the three miles to the lake marina, then sprint up and down the thirty-foot Hoover Dike until their knees could no longer hold them.

  “We ran that dike and ran that dike,” Williams said, “talking about a championship and nothing else.” That summer, he even began sleeping with a football in his bed. “I’ve never wanted anything more,” he added.

  That same kind of resolve was evident once Werneke finally assembled his new team and stood before them. Unlike his predecessor, Werneke hailed from the North and didn’t carry the same racial baggage. “All he saw was this phenomenal group of football players,” said Newman.

  To avoid conflict, Werneke broke the Raiders into four groups: Red Team offense and defense, and Blue Team offense and defense. He also realized what a gifted quarterback he had in Wayne Stanley. Not wanting to choose between him and Newman, Werneke made the decision to start both players. Stanley and Newman would simply alternate halves.

  “Each team was mixed black and white, all based on talent, attitude, and ability,” said Williams. “And with this setup, the black players bought into the system. It was fair.”

  For any coach, it was a dream team.

  “We just didn’t have a weakness,” said Stanley. “We had strength and we had it two and three deep in every spot. For other teams, it was just ugly.”

  The Raiders tore through their regular-season schedule with little resistance, the victories so lopsided that Werneke started ordering his starters to shower and dress at halftime and sit in the bleachers. By midseason the intimidation factor was enough to wilt teams before the whistle even blew.

  “We’d play some of these all-white schools and they’d get this deer-in-the-headlights look when we walked onto the field,” said Mark Maynor, a running back who was white. “The black guys would stand together and do this chant to get us all going. I’m sure it looked and sounded ferocious.”

  As the Raiders rolled from victory to victory, they were propelled by a force that had been largely missing the previous season: the town. The harmony and camaraderie between black and white players was now starkly evident on the field. Stepping back from the lens of race and politics, the only thing visible under the football lights was a group of kids playing a game they both loved. On Friday nights, at least for a few hours, the town understood this and was united.

  “The full thrust of the stands cheered for both black and white,” said Williams. “When you looked into the crowd, you saw it was now all mixed. Maybe they saw the brotherhood on the field. That must have been the reason.”

  In the playoffs, the Raider dream of a rematch against Hollywood Chaminade was realized. Except in this matchup, the Raider defense held the Lions to only five first downs in a 31–0 rout. The next week, Tampa Catholic fell 35–0, catapulting Shorty Red’s Raiders into the state championship.

  The title game was against the Haines City Hornets. Located forty miles south of Orlando, Haines City was predominantly white and just as rabid about its football as any mucksteppers in Belle Glade. The Hornets were known for their powerful defensive line and a wishbone offense that pounded opponents while mercilessly chewing the clock. But the Raiders were also coming into the game with one of the toughest defenses in the state.

  Dan Brown received the opening kickoff, and there before a crowd of ten thousand people, his summer mornings running the Hoover Dike paid off with a ninety-one-yard return for a touchdown. The rest of the game was a defensive battle. The giant Hornet line blitzed the Raider quarterbacks nearly every play and wrangled them in their own distant territory. Newman and Stanley managed only two completions, while the Raider running game gained a mere fifty-two total yards. Likewise, the only two passes thrown by Haines City quarterback Steve Wilkinson were intercepted. With no passing attack, the Hornets resorted to a game of hammer-and-nail. On four different occasions they managed to get inside the Raider ten-yard line, but only accomplished one touchdown and a field goal.

  By the fourth quarter, the Raiders were losing 10–7. With three minutes remaining, the Hornets mustered a final sustained drive and were perched on the Raider seventeen-yard line, ready for the kill. Werneke called a time-out. The game was all but over.

  Playing both receiver and defensive end, Williams had hardly left the field all game. Now he shouted to his line, “Hold your man up,” and to his linebackers, “Plug them holes and leave no space. Aint nothing getting through.”

  Wilkinson snapped the ball. The Hornets’ play call was a lateral option pass, but when Wilkinson turned to flip the ball to his running back, there was no one there. The back somehow misread the play and sprinted ahead, leaving the ball bouncing on the naked grass.

  “I watched it fly out,” Williams said. “And I took it.”

  The instant shot of adrenaline caused Williams to juggle the ball, as if it were a thousand degrees in his hands. But once he had control, he began to run. Reaching the fifty-yard line, he felt his tired body begin to falter. Glancing back, he saw a Hornet defender quickly slicing toward him, gaining ground. I’ll never make it, he thought. I’ll just lie down. It was then that teammate John Banks suddenly appeared between them like an attending angel, following Williams step for step, shouting, “Come on, Pearl. Don’t stop, Pearl. Keep going, keep going.”

  At the twenty-yard line, Banks turned and stuck his helmet in the numbers of the Hornet pursuer and cleared the path. When Williams crossed the end zone for the winning touchdown, he crumpled like a sack of rocks.

  “There was no air in the atmosphere,” he said. “My lungs were burning. I just collapsed and lay there. All I could hear was the crowd going crazy.”

  Raiders win the championship, 13–10.

  One of those voices cheering in the stands was Johnnie Ruth’s, but she was not well. Her cancer had returned just before the playoffs, and both the disease and the aggressive treatment had whittled her down to half. Her cheeks were now sunken, and her body thin from the nausea and vomiting that plagued her days and kept her indoors. But she’d gathered enough strength to make the three-hour drive to Haines City. For she was the one who’d set this whole thing into motion, who’d challenged her children to be fearless and grab hold of dreams no matter what side of the canal.

  As the fans lifted Williams and his teammates onto their shoulders in celebration, he saw his mother walk onto the field. He knew right away that she’d probably never see him play football again.

  “I didn’t break down until I saw her walking to meet me,” Williams said. “She asked, ‘Anthony, why are you crying?’ And I didn’t wan
t to tell her it was because I’d seen her and knew the cancer was winning. ‘I’m just crying, Mom,’ I said. ‘I’m just crying.’ ”

  Afterward, Williams walked to the locker room and wept in the showers, the victory not as sweet as he’d long imagined. Six months later, as he prepared to play in the all-star game, Johnnie Ruth passed away. She was thirty-nine.

  The following season, with Stanley, Williams, Newman, and most of the starters graduated, the Raiders continued to win. The team was led by Byron Walker, a junior quarterback who “couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle” by his own admission. But with a solid team of athletes behind him—and guided by Werneke’s deft coaching—the Raiders won back-to-back championships.

  In Belle Glade, the great experiment had not only prevailed, but given birth to what was known as “the tradition.” It realigned the world that held the tiny town, moved the North Star from its perch above the migrant road to its place between two yellow posts, and gave young boys in the muck a new kind of beacon.

  One of those boys was Jessie Hester.

  When Hester was growing up in the mid-1970s, little had changed from the days of Gatemouth and Poochie. For the most part, Belle Glade remained a place of toil and hard lessons, where children were sent to the fields and little came for free.

  The people who lived there back then like to say it was a simpler time, when kids had to learn how to be tough. And it was for this reason, apart from most others, that so many of them became great athletes.

  The ten-block section of downtown still hummed with migrant families on the move. Calypso poured from the Jamaican clubs, along with the smells of jerk chicken and roasted breadfruit. On weekend mornings after the clubs had emptied, Jessie and his brother Roger would scan the downtown sidewalks, picking up the bills and loose change the drunks had dropped in their merrymaking.

  By the 1970s, little had improved since the days when Marjory Stoneman Douglas was so struck by its misery. The migrant quarter remained a warren of mostly flat-roofed, two-story concrete rooming houses. Built in the 1930s, few of the buildings had ever been renovated or given a fresh coat of paint. They sat bleached and faded under the sun, festooned with fluttering laundry and beset with idle men between harvests.

  By the time Zara and her children rented a one-bedroom on Seventh Street and Avenue E (now MLK Boulevard), the neighborhood held over 40 percent of the town’s population. A consultant hired by the city in the 1970s reported the area housed as many as one thousand people per acre. By contrast, the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, had only 284 people squeezed into the same amount of space.

  Jessie and his siblings slept on bunk beds, stacked atop one another like Lincoln Logs. The walls were made of cardboard and carried every sound. The entire building shared a few common toilets and a shower. In the evenings, Jessie or Roger would have to stand guard at the door while their sister Agnes bathed.

  “There were big spiders in those showers,” Roger remembered. “And walking into the toilet some mornings, you’d find feces smeared everywhere.”

  One block away, their grandparents’ apartment offered a respite from the crowded dinginess. Jessie’s grandmother Eva was the grand matriarch of the family, a big woman who kept her daughter’s children in step. “My mom worked and my grandma raised us,” said Roger. “She did the discipline and didn’t run after you. She made you go and get the switch.”

  Like her daughter, Eva and her husband, Willie, made their living in the fields. But on Sundays, Eva would preach. The revivals held in her tiny apartment were legendary, a crush of sweaty bodies speaking in tongues and dancing, so drunk on the spirit that the building would rattle on its foundation. In addition to the Holy Ghost, Eva was guided by old superstitions that would find their way into her grandson Jessie. The strangest things would set her off, such as sweeping near her feet.

  “Boy, get that broom away from me,” she would shout. “You gonna cause me to go to jail.”

  • • •

  WHEN JESSIE WAS in sixth grade, the family moved into a bigger, two-bedroom house a few blocks away. By then Anthony and Cora had been born. Even as babies, both children behaved oddly, but it wasn’t until much later that they were diagnosed with autism.

  For Anthony, the condition first manifested itself when he was six years old and fell into seizures. Jessie remembers seeing Zara one morning before work, the boy bent and contorted in her arms. When she put him down to walk, all he did was limp and mumble as though something had broken inside him. Zara went hysterical.

  His sister Cora had always been special, exhibiting a brilliance that hid behind her quiet brown eyes and revealed itself in her artwork. Cora’s notebooks read like illustrated soap operas of the street life and family dramas surrounding her. But that brilliance had a dark riptide that would turn the lights out while it dragged her under. When this happened, Jessie and Roger would have to hide sharp objects in the house because Cora liked to cut herself. Some afternoons they’d come home and find her sitting on the floor covered in blood, ramming her forehead into a wall.

  To keep his mind off problems at home, Jessie, like most boys in Belle Glade, turned to sports. On weekends and after school, the neighborhood kids would gather for pickup games of football. For kids whose parents labored in the fields, there was barely enough money to cover food and clothes, much less an actual ball. So, to compensate, the boys filled socks with dirt and tied them off at one end. They used Coke bottles, old shoes, and, when nothing else could be found, a wad of newspaper—whatever could be tucked, thrown, and caught in the land of make-believe.

  The games were played in empty lots and outside the bars and rooming houses. The boys wore no pads and tackled on streets covered in gravel and shattered glass, leaving knees and elbows chewed and bloody. Cars ran over them, but most often it was the other way around.

  “Some of the hardest hits I’ve ever seen in football were from parked cars,” Hester said.

  The street games instilled an essential fearlessness that formed the bedrock to their becoming good football players. And for Hester, they laid the foundation that in later years would make him a great receiver. Aside from speed, courage was the one true requirement for the position, an understanding that your head could be taken off at any moment—yet still you ran for the ball.

  “Everything else can be taught,” he said. “You can teach a guy to run a route. But you cannot teach a guy to run out and catch a ball in traffic. It’s got to be something he already possesses. And most of us got that early on as kids.”

  Summer days were spent diving off the Torry Island bridge into the canal infested with alligators. Ray McDonald, one of Hester’s childhood friends, remembered watching Jessie and Roger drag old mattresses in front of a two-story boardinghouse, then jump off the roof.

  “They’d hit those mattresses and flip,” said McDonald. “I’m not talking about a single flip, but spinning and twisting in midair. Greg Louganis kind of stuff.”

  Zara started bringing her kids into the fields when Jessie was ten. The older kids would work weekends and holidays picking corn, celery, and leafy stuff like cabbage and lettuce. In the orange groves north of Pahokee, Jessie would earn five dollars for every bucket he filled, sometimes tumbling from tree limbs whenever a snake dropped from the branches. Summers were spent piled into various relatives’ cars to work the fields in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

  Early on, Jessie was vigilant about saving money because he knew if his mother ran out, as she often did, she would need help keeping the lights on. She would also need help buying school supplies and clothes. Jessie’s wardobe was nothing high fashion, just sensibly stylish: white Converse sneakers and blue jeans heavily starched, with a razor crease down the middle.

  “And whatever you did, always color-coordinate,” he said.

  But the snappy clothes couldn’t cover the blisters that opened in class, or the scars that zigzagged down his arms. All scars told a story, and the thick, fleshy ridge tha
t ran down Jessie’s hand, thumb to wrist, reminded him of the life that must never be.

  He’d acquired the scar one morning when he was twelve. His family was working a field of romaine, with Jessie cutting the leaves from their roots and laying them down for Roger to box behind him. Taking his eyes off his work, he missed and dug the blade into his hand. The wound was jagged and deep and needed stitches. But it was too close to Christmas and his mother was broke. Instead of asking to leave, he took off his shirt and dipped it into the icy water from the coolers, wrapped his hand, then kept cutting.

  As the knife handle pressed into the wound, he’d had a revelation: This won’t be me. It was the first time he’d ever seen himself as separate from the rows that bound his mother and the town, from the poverty that squeezed them so tightly atop one another it had driven the whole place crazy.

  By then, Wayne Stanley was quarterback at Iowa State and would later sign with the Browns. Anthony Williams was playing at Middle Tennessee State and would go to the Buffalo Bills in the fourteenth round. Newman was a Florida Gator. This was basic knowledge to every young boy in town. If you played for the Raiders, you could go to college, even beyond. As Jessie moved down the row, blood soaking through the wrap, he decided there was a better way to help his mother. But at twelve years old, he was no intimidating presence. Jessie was puny, like a pretzel with a mouthful of teeth.

  He wouldn’t realize how skinny he actually was until a few months later, when he’d wake up on the floor of his sixth-grade classroom, dizzy and confused, with a huddle of faces staring over him, murmuring, “Jessie, what’s wrong wit you? Someone call the ambulance!” The doctor would take one look at his drawn belly and ribs grinning out of his chest and use that word malnourish. Oh Lord, was Zara embarrassed! “People gonna think I’m too busy to feed my child,” she said.