by Bryan Mealer
That generational divide was a constant source of vitriol for old-timers such as Preston Vickers, a former Raider linebacker and U.S. Marine who often volunteered at practice. That week, as the team ran through two-minute drills in preparation for American Heritage, Vickers observed a group of second-string players goofing on the sideline and launched into a tirade.
“You guys don’t take it seriously,” he shouted at them. “Yall don’t realize where you playin. This here is bigger than you all. This here is tradition. What yall need is discipline, ’stead of all this horseplayin and cussing. That’s when accountability will set in—”
He was suddenly interrupted when the boys, ignoring him, broke into freestyle rapping.
“See there! Aint got nothin to do with football. You boys aint focused, man. You all spoiled. Everything been handed to you, even the tradition itself.”
He told of the 1998 state championship game against the Madison County Cowboys, when the Raiders were playing like dirt. The quarterback, Jerry Campbell, had thrown two interceptions that had both led to Cowboy touchdowns. Come halftime, with the Raiders losing 14–7, Vickers happened to be in one of the bathroom stalls when some teammates shoved Campbell against a wall and threatened to beat him if he blew the game.
“Rest is history,” said Vickers. “Second half that boy threw for three touchdowns and over two hundred yards. He knew those boys was for real. Those boys came to work. They knew, they knew, what they had to do.”
He then looked out at the current crop, rapping, sitting on helmets, loafing at the water cooler while the rest of the team practiced.
“These cats, they nothing but babies. The wake-up call has to come from a player, not a coach. What this team is missing is a leader.”
However, among the die-hard fans in the community, some of the same criticism was being lobbed at Hester’s coaching staff. Fans already took issue with the fact that several assistant coaches had never played football for the Raiders—or played at all, for that matter. Around town, people were also starting to complain about the staff’s behavior and how they represented the team. Some hated the way Jet wore his hat backward like a teenager, hated Coach Q’s flashiness, how he “dressed like a pimp,” and how at practice “Jet’s boys” appeared just as disorganized and disengaged as the players themselves.
The criticism had stepped up the previous week after it was discovered that Coach Q had landed himself in trouble with the administration. While in Dallas, Coach Q and another assistant had left the hotel after the team was in bed to go visit a local club. Afterward, Glades Central principal Anthony Anderson suspended them from participating in the home opener.
Although some of Hester’s assistants may have lacked hands-on experience when it came to teaching Xs and Os, their presence and reach on the team were undeniable. There wasn’t a kid on the Raiders who didn’t love Coach Q, or hesitated for a second to take the piss out of Sherm or Coach JD. A bond existed beyond the game. Aside from Vickers’s occasional rants, Jet and his coaches did not rule with fear.
• • •
BEFORE THE HOMETOWN crowd against the Stallions, the Raiders remained a rudderless ship. Tackles were missed. Receivers refused to block and improvised routes, running ten yards instead of five, hopelessly tangling the offense. Standing on the sidelines with his son Jymetre, Hester identified the problem, and it wasn’t his coaching staff.
“You got all these people telling these kids what to do, how great they are, how the coaches don’t know nothin,” Hester said, gesturing to the crowd, which had started to groan. “Well, now they’re seeing what happens.”
Benjamin did manage a beautiful, one-handed catch for thirty yards to move the team into scoring position, but the momentum was quickly squashed as the Raiders lost it on downs.
The offensive line had yet to improve. Even if they’d held, it was no use. Play after play, Mario would dash out of the pocket, “running from ghosts,” as Hester would say, and immediately get hammered to the ground. In the second quarter, after driving to the Stallion ten, Mario was sacked in the backfield for a loss of twenty-five yards. Third down and thirty, sacked again. Fourth down and thirty, Hester threw up his hands and went for it. Mario was sacked again.
An interception by the Raider secondary moved Glades Central once again into scoring position, but a wild snap sent Mario chasing the ball across midfield, only to be buried under a pile of enemy jerseys. The whistle blew for halftime, leaving him crumpled on the grass.
As the team trotted off the field toward the locker room, their path took them underneath the home bleachers, where a group of local men rained curses down like stones.
“Hey Jet, yall messin up our team, man!”
“Mario, you sorry piece of shit!”
“Hey Mario, you suck, bro!”
“Hey Jet, take yo’ ass back to West Palm!”
Frantic and demoralized, the squad gathered beneath an oak tree outside the locker room and Hester tried to calm them. He felt out of his body. A migraine twisted his brow, forcing him to squint in the dark. Perhaps he’d been wrong about this team after all.
“There’s something about this bunch that’s killing me. Flat-out killing me,” he said, then exhaled in resignation. “But I’ll be here till you kill me.”
The Raiders returned to the field with renewed vigor, which was quickly crushed when KB was hit on a reverse and flipped upside down, landing on his back and writhing in pain. The doctor would later diagnose a deep-thigh contusion. He limped toward the bench to the hushed silence of the crowd.
Mario rallied them back with a thirty-yard pass to receiver Robert Burgess in the end zone, only to have the Stallions answer with a ninety-yard return for a touchdown to make the score 10–7 in their favor. With seven minutes remaining, Mario punched through the line for another score, giving the Raiders a slim lead. On their next possession, on fourth and short, the Raiders looked likely to lose the ball when KB hobbled back under the lights.
It was a welcome show of initiative by the Raider captain. Benjamin had asked Hester to return, he’d even called the play. He caught a short slant between two defenders, then leaped toward the first-down marker with his long arms outstretched. The effort was just enough to set up another score by Page to give the Raiders a ten-point lead.
The Stallions quickly answered with a touchdown and two-point conversion to make the score 20–18, but their rally was too late. Once again, the Raiders managed to survive.
Despite the win, reaction to the team’s lackluster home performance was immediate. Hester’s phone rang all weekend with fans calling to complain about everything from the fat quarterback to the jelly-wristed O-line. He did not answer, nor did he bother wading through the flak on Internet message boards, as he was certain his players were doing. At Monday practice, he reminded everyone that anger and insults were part of playing in the Glades, that it was nothing new. Players who shut down from a little criticism could not become better, could not lead their team. And the Raiders’ problem, he knew, was that a true leader had yet to emerge.
“Every one of yall is like that lonely ant, spinning around trying to find the others to lead him back to the mound,” he said.
• • •
THE PERSON HESTER was waiting for was Mario, but the quarterback was too lost in his head. He’d gone home after the game in a funk. He could not find his rhythm. Was not playing like he knew he could. First of all, he was too manic. He was playing quarterback like a linebacker: full-on beast mode with the brakes ripped off. He was jittery, easily spooked, and just plain nervous. It was no wonder the fans were circling like buzzards over the cane rows. He had to learn to calm down, to internalize the criticism and use it as fuel. That was the stuff that legends were made of. But living it was another thing. Living it was hard.
Lying on his bed that night, he could still hear the town rising up against him.
“Pay them no mind,” his girlfriend said, rubbing his neck.
He’d be
en dating Les’Unique Hessing since last summer. She was a Raider cheerleader, older than her years, with long legs and a diamond tattoo on her stomach. After games, she would sit with Mario in front of the television and rub Tiger Balm into the muscles of his arms and back, which had seized up like a dry engine.
Around his boys, Mario was quick to dismiss the seriousness of their relationship, saying, “I don’t trust no females. Everybody fuckin everybody in Belle Glade.” But the truth was that he’d let Hessing inside where few people had been. It was Hessing whom Mario had once called in the middle of the night, half asleep and distraught, saying his parents had just visited him in a dream. Someone had said, Who’s knocking at the door? And when Mario opened it, there stood Mary and James as vivid as yesterday.
He’d even taken his girlfriend to visit their graves on Mary’s birthday, leading her to the mausoleum at Foreverglades Cemetery, where his parents lay buried side by side in the walls. Afterward, he’d paid her no mind as he sat there talking to their photos, telling them about his day.
Mario shared everything with her, even the secret he now harbored—one that threatened to destroy his whole pursuit.
The secret was that Mario was playing with a torn ligament in his throwing shoulder, the kind of injury that ended seasons for good. The injury had happened during the summer seven-on-seven in Tallahassee while he and Benjamin were connecting for touchdowns to the great thrill of the crowd.
An out-of-town doctor had taken the X-ray, then given him pills for the pain that now raced through his arm every time he passed, every time he went down in a smothering heap. He told no one, so horrified of being benched and watching it all slip away. For he was meant to play quarterback and lead the Raiders, and there was no turning back now.
Other fears crept in with the pain. He was scared that by pursuing his conviction, he was also gambling a potential college career as middle linebacker, a position for which he’d been recruited as a junior. The weight of his decision grew heavier each afternoon he walked into the shop class to dress for practice. Colleges had once again begun their seasonal courting. In a basket by the door sat dozens of faxes from football programs far and wide, a fresh stack arriving each week before game day.
“Dear Kelvin,” a letter from University of Alabama’s head coach Nick Saban read. “People will be talking about someone’s great performance tomorrow … make them talk about you!”
“Dear Jaime,” the coach from Western Kentucky wrote. “The WKU football coaching staff wishes you good luck as you lead your team to victory …”
At the bottom were the inspiring words from Jim Rohn, the rags-to-riches motivational speaker cum locker-room swami: Leadership is the challenge to be something more than average.
The stacks of correspondence were mostly addressed to KB, Jaime, Jaja, and Boobie. But picking through the basket, there were no good words for the quarterback. He would have to make them notice, broken body and all.
For the rest of the students at Glades Central, college could be an elusive if not fantastical quest. But it was one Jonteria Williams had been on for so long, it was hard for her to remember an afternoon or weekend with an open, unscheduled hour.
She is entering the seventh year of her journey when we see her cheering on the sidelines of the Raider home opener, a journey that began the year her mother explained that her father was in prison and not coming home. It was then that Jonteria declared, rather unceremoniously, the end of her childhood.
That same year Jonteria told Theresa, her mother, that she wanted to become a doctor, and together they’d embarked on this mission. Every step beyond that point was calculated with the one goal of getting a scholarship into medical school. The pom-poms, the college boyfriend, and her bedroom at home, solid pink and bedazzled with Hello Kitty, remained her few sanctuaries of normal teenage life. But even cheerleading looked favorable on a college application. After all, she was the captain.
Theresa watched her daughter from the third row of the bleachers, where she sat with other moms. Her presence was constant, for her daughter’s life was her own. In fact, even during years when she worked two jobs, Theresa had not missed a single practice, game, banquet, or award ceremony since her journey with Jonteria had begun. If her daughter could make such a commitment, then so could she. It was the least she could do after what had happened with John, the man who’d set both their paths in motion.
It was 1990. Theresa was at the car wash, drying her burgundy Pontiac, when John Williams appeared out of nowhere like Billy D. He wore a muscle shirt and kept his hair permed in loose Jheri curls. The aqua convertible with the top down had to be his.
“You need some help with that?” he said. “I’ll help you.”
Before Theresa could refuse, he’d grabbed the chamois from her hand and was wiping down the car, smiling like he’d just found his best friend.
“I was like, oh no,” she remembered.
Theresa had just ended a long-term relationship and was not looking to get involved. She’d dated a man named Jerome for over four years, and together they’d had a daughter, Jawantae, who was then two years old. Jerome was a good guy, she said, but he’d always floundered when she brought up marriage and making a life together, just the three of them. So finally she broke it off.
The very last thing Theresa was looking to do now was hook up with some guy she met at a car wash. Who does that?
“But he wouldn’t give up,” she said. “He pursued me.”
Theresa mentioned something about working at FHP, not thinking John would figure out that it stood for Florida Highway Patrol. She was a dispatcher there, and two days later when she answered one of the lines, it was John.
“You didn’t think I’d find you here, huh?” he said, laughing.
He started calling her every day. Sometimes twice.
“Finally,” she said, “I broke.”
She wasn’t attracted to John at all, not at first. But after they’d dated awhile, she eased into him. He was steady and owned a business. He wasn’t spooked by kids, and even seemed to enjoy spending time with Jawantae. Plus, he had that way of making her feel like the last woman alive.
The two were married three years later. By that time, Theresa also had Jonteria. The four of them made a nice life together. John bought them a three-bedroom house in the Lake Breeze Mobile Home Park outside Pahokee, just across the street from Theresa’s mother. John and his father owned a fleet of trucks they used to haul corn, so as long as it rained and shined in Georgia, business was good. John would leave the first of every June and be home by the Fourth of July picnic at Pioneer Park. The rest of the year, they worked the corn and pepper seasons in the Glades.
Then, one day in July 1999, her husband never came home. Theresa called his phone, then started getting worried. She called his brother. Have you heard from John? But he had not. The next day she got a collect call from Georgia. It was him.
“I’m up here in jail,” he told her.
“Jail? What happened?”
“Flip and some other guy robbed a jewelry store and they say I was the getaway driver.”
“Were you?”
“No, no.”
“Should I come up there?”
“No, I’ll be home soon.” But he never came back.
“He had no reason to be with those guys robbing a jewelry store,” Theresa said. “He had a successful business. No reason. It totally surprised everybody.”
A judge sentenced John to ten years. Meanwhile, back in Belle Glade, Theresa was alone with two kids, a car payment, and a mortgage. And every day she woke up with the weight of those obligations she brimmed with resentment.
“I never even went to see him, I was so mad,” she said. “He called at first, then I realized I was getting these humongous telephone bills. I told him to stop calling and just write. He was remorseful. But it was too late. My mind was made up.”
That next year, Theresa filed for divorce.
It was a case of cruel c
oincidence, for nearly the same thing had happened to Theresa’s mother, Bernice. At age thirteen, with her parents’ reluctant approval, Bernice had boarded a Blue Bird bus in Selma with a boy named Jessie and set off for an adventure into the north country. Jessie was older, a family friend, and he’d heard there was good money in the apple orchards of upstate New York, right outside of Albany. Theresa’s older sister, Ethel, also went, and once the season was over, the three of them fell in with the gypsy caravans and eased their way down to Georgia for corn.
By age sixteen, Jessie had given Bernice two babies. One morning in Albany, with Bernice pregnant with their third child, Jessie left for work and never came home. No phone call. No letter. The man simply vanished. Alone with three children, Bernice came to Pahokee, where the beans and corn brought better pay. For a year they stayed with a woman named Eva Hill, known affectionately as Big Mama. Her home was a way station for the rootless, its many rooms filled with families of migrants seeking their footing.
“Big Mama’s house was huge,” Theresa remembered, “with lots of babies crawling around, and she’d take care of them all. By the time my mom came home from the fields, she’d have us bathed, fed, and ready for bed.”
Bernice worked the cornfields on the slow-moving backs of mule trains, which were like miniature packinghouses on wheels. She then took a job cooking for the Jamaicans who cut the cane. After moving into their own place, Theresa remembered, her mother would wake at three o’clock each morning to fry chicken for their lunches, then leave for work by four. All day she’d prepare giant vats of rice and beans, stewed oxtails, or mustard greens, then roll them into the steaming cane rows on trucks to serve the men. Once the cane harvest was over, Bernice would go back to packing corn and peppers.