by Bryan Mealer
“The news of my life came today,” Marvin wrote in his journal in August 2008. “I could not believe I got my visa. It was my dream and God came though for me. I still can’t believe it’s real. I will never forget where I’m coming from.”
His father, a construction worker, had finally sorted out paperwork and sent for Marvin and his sister. Growing up, their image of America had been shaped by the two channels that came through on their television. It was of slick cars and beachfront estates, an image soon shattered when they arrived at their tiny apartment on Southwest Eighth Street, where black mold spotted the walls and nightfall was to be feared.
After the discouraging soccer season, Marvin tried his luck at football. He’d avoided football players since arriving at Glades Central, finding them to be pompous and disruptive in class, showboats. But as always, the Raiders were desperate for a kicker, and Sam King, the special-teams coach, saw promise in Marvin’s leg. It had taken most of the preseason to get his approach right, and he still had a bad habit of lifting his head and throwing off his stance. But here in Texas against the Yellowjackets, that was hardly the problem. Both times Marvin was called out to kick, the whole line fell to pieces before he even had the chance to miss.
Luckily for the Raiders, the Yellowjackets could never fully capitalize on the special teams’ mistakes, thanks to another powerful showing by the defense. Linebackers Boobie, Jaja, and Don’Kevious Johnson worked with sudden quickness, wrapping up the Denison running backs the second they reached the open air. They held Denison to 152 total yards and forced three late fumbles, with Boobie running one back for a fifty-six-yard score. Jaja would notch eighteen tackles on the afternoon, plus two sacks on quarterback Jordan Watson.
By the fourth quarter, the Raiders led by a score of 56–17. The game was so lopsided that for kicks, Hester allowed Benjamin to join the defense, the six-foot-six receiver prowling the Raider secondary like a lion lunging for buffalo. It was a slaughter.
The next morning as the team waited for the plane home, Benjamin—clearly proud of his performance—spotted a group of girls in the terminal and announced, “I saved three touchdowns. I’m a athlete, baby!”
Kelvin’s mother, Christine, had a proclivity for athletes. The one true love of her life was James Otis Benjamin, considered to be one of the greatest running backs ever to pump feet over the muck. He’d been a blockbusting god at Lake Shore High on the eve of integration, going 2,300 yards for twenty-two touchdowns his last two seasons, then to Florida A&M. But during his first year of college, Chris announced she was pregnant. After Kelvin’s sister Tangela was born, Otis hung up his cleats and started driving trucks for U.S. Sugar, yet for years the memory of his electrifying power still drew college recruiters hoping to pull him out of retirement.
Otis had a second career as hero in the eyes of his daughter. Tangela’s memory is occupied with fog-filled mornings when her dad would rustle her awake for predawn workouts on the dikes. Even then, Otis maintained an athlete’s frame. They’d ride bikes to Okeechobee’s great wall, where Otis would pound up and down the hill in shorts and striped tube socks before regimens of jump rope and sit-ups on a flat board, his pint-sized trainer giggling as she counted off, ONE-TWO-THREE.
Even after Otis slipped into drugs years later, some say because of overwhelming sorrow for what could have been, he remained present. Living on the streets, his life in shambles, he’d still slip past the house at night to give his daughter a kiss through the window screen.
At thirty-six years old, he suffered a stroke in North Carolina, where he’d gone to piece his life back together. Hearing the news, Chris drove up and found him in a coma, his brain already gone, then held his hand while doctors switched off the machine. “He was the greatest man I ever had,” she would always say of him. “He loved me.”
After Otis’s death, Chris began dating a professional golfer who’d drive over from the coast every few months, a man who showered her with money for bills and gifts for her children. When she became pregnant again, she was certain it was the golfer’s child, until nurses in the hospital handed her the baby boy with skin the color of cinnamon.
To Chris, that meant one thing: that the real father was Tony Barnett, the lanky Jamaican who owned the restaurant on Fifth Street. “Tony Dread” was a man she’d sneaked around with against her best intentions, a man she claimed to hate but couldn’t resist. Tony had seen her growing belly in the subsequent months and had the audacity to claim it for his own, even predicting a boy “pretty like you, but tall and red like me.” When Tony visited Chris in the hospital and saw that Kelvin was a mirror image of himself, he could only beam with pride. “I told you he was mine,” he said.
As much as she hated being associated with Tony, with his Rasta locks that hung down to his backside, he was a good father to Kelvin. He’d pick him up on weekends and parade him on his shoulders through downtown, bragging to the shopkeepers about his son. He paid bills, covered day care, and even took Tan and the others for days at a time—his “little piglets,” he called them.
But when Kelvin was three, Tony was arrested on marijuana charges and eventually deported back to the island, forever barred from entering the States. In the months that followed, Kelvin would cry for his father, asking Chris, “When’s Daddy coming back?”
I’ll let you know, Chris would say.
Tony would call every so often, but the promises of his returning slowly began to deteriorate over the watery gulf that separated them.
Chris raised her three children on her own while working a variety of jobs, which included at a day-care center and fast-food restaurants. Every so often she’d get help from a local electrician whom she’d also started dating.
Growing up, Kelvin was a big kid. His mother described him as physically awkward, a boy who was more comfortable playing video games than running for touchdowns. Nonetheless, during summers he’d still join his friends spray painting the yearly gridiron onto the asphalt for daily pickup games. He even followed them into little league, considered to be the entry level for every future Raider, but soon quit when coaches made him run in the heat. With football, his heart just wasn’t in it.
“Other kids always talked about their favorite players, but I never had any,” he said. “I didn’t even like football. My mind was always elsewhere.”
By junior high, Kelvin was already pushing six feet tall. And while football coaches were unable to utilize KB’s size and strength, others enjoyed its advantages. Older boys befriended him and roped him into their schemes. When Kelvin was fourteen, he was arrested for theft after he and others went on a spree of terrorizing younger kids and stealing their iPods. His mother begged for leniency from the judge, who sentenced Kelvin to a year and a half at the Okeechobee Juvenile Offender Corrections Center, located sixty miles from Belle Glade in the swamps on the lake’s north end.
The company Vision Quest ran the program, which Kelvin described as “summer camp, except you can’t go home.” Inmates took long, meandering walks through woods and learned to handle the extreme heats of an Indian sweat lodge.
“We did rituals and chants in those sweatboxes,” he said. “A man then dumped water on the rocks. But I’d be cheatin. I’d be over there breathin by the hole in the tent.”
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 do
n’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.