Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (16 page)

If Billingsley could do nothing right, Winchell could do nothing wrong. Three plays later he threw his fourth touchdown
pass of the night, tying a Permian record for most touchdown
passes in a game.

The game ended with Permian beating El Paso Austin 49-0.
El Paso Austin had been a helpless opponent but even so, the
performance of Winchell had been wonderful. He had had the
best game of his life-seven for nine passing for 194 yards and
four touchdowns. His performance proved how high he could
soar when he could unleash himself from the constant selfdoubt that had entrapped him after the death of Billy.

Billingsley's starting debut had been just the opposite; it was
hardly the kind of game that would make him a legend alongside Charlie, or anyone else for that matter. And now there was something else to contend with, something that to Don's way of
thinking was disappointing but somehow inevitable.

It began at halftime when Gaines said he was going to let
an untested junior named Chris Comer play the entire second
half at fullback. It was Comet's first game ever on the Permian
varsity, and it was only because of the injury to Boobie that he
was there at all-otherwise he would have been back on the
junior varsity. He had talent, but the coaches were wary of him.
The previous school year he had been ineligible for spring
practice because of academic problems, which put him way
down in the doghouse. The coaches questioned his work habits
and desire, and they were hardly inspired by his backgroundfrom the Southside, living not with his parents but with his
grandmother.

But these concerns began to lessen when Comer took the hall
early in the third quarter at the 50, lingered behind the line
for a split second until a tiny alleyway developed, turned the
corner, broke past two defenders with an acceleration of speed,
and dashed down the sideline for a touchdown. The run had
been so stunning that it was hard to know what to make of it.
Had it been a fluke? Or, in the aftermath of Boobie's knee
problems, had he just become the new star running back of
Permian High School?

When he did it again, this time on a twenty-seven-yard touchdown where lie just bullied his way past several tacklers, the
answer became obvious.

Belew, who had spent most of the game in the press box relaying offensive signals to Gaines over the headset, moved
down to the sidelines in the waning moments of the game,
clearly beside himself. He started to gush about Comer, and
then lie eyed Boobie, who had had knee surgery the day before. He obviously did not want to hurt Boobie's feelings by
raving in front of him about someone else. He moved until
Boobie was out of earshot. Then he opened up like an excited
child. "Did you see that?" said Belew of Comer's performance,
116 yards and two touchdowns. "Comer's a motherfucker!"

With the injury to Boobie, Billingsley had thought he might
get the ball more often. But if Comer continued to run as he
had tonight, Billingsley could pretty much forget about that.
The ball would go to Comer on the pitches and the sweeps and
he would lead the noble but anonymous charge trying to take
out the defensive ends and the linebackers. Comer would get
all the touchdowns, all the attention, all the glory, and Billingsley would get the aches and pains of being a blocking back.

That sure as hell wasn't why he had given up so much to
come to Permian, to have a black kid come in and steal away his
chance at glory. It was something his father had never had to
contend with. There wasn't one black around when Charlie
played. Back then they all went to high school on the Southside,
had their own stadium, and as long as they stayed put there was
no problem. But things were different now.

Don knew they had talent. It was just the way some of them
kind of swaggered around that bothered him, how some of
them seemed to do whatever they wanted in practice and the
coaches let them get away with it. It seemed obvious to him that
the Permian system was prejudiced against him-it had rules
for blacks and then rules for everybody else. "In practice, the
niggers, they do what they want to do, and they still start Friday
night," he said. "There are different rules for black and white
at Permian."

So the injury to Boobie hadn't made a damn bit of difference.
As he later looked back on it, it seemed that the minute one
black player got hurt there was another to take over.

"I didn't get to carry the ball" was how lion Billingsley sized
it up. "They moved up another nigger to carry the ball."

I

NIGGER.

The word poured out in Odessa as easily as the torrents of
rain that ran down the streets after an occasional storm, as com;
mon a part of the vernacular as "ol' boy" or "bless his 'ittl' biddy
heart" or "awl bidness" or "1 sure did enjoy vision' with you" or
"God clang."

Dumb of nigger. Cocky nigger. New jersey nigger. Smartaleck nigger. Talk nigger. Blaine it on the niggers. Afraid of
the niggers. Nigger lady. Let the nigger girl do it. Nigger ball.
Run, you nigger.

Like household cleanser, the term had a dozen different uses
in Odessa. People said it in casual conversation. They also said
it publicly, as just another descriptive adjective. Some people
looked tall, some looked short, and some looked nigger.

An elderly nian making a complaint to the city council one
day in September said lie had given documents to a city employee to copy for presentation to the council. He didn't remember the name of the person. But he did recall what she
looked like. "The nigger lady," he said at the podium. That's
who he had given the papers to. The Nigger Lady.

Certain members of the council raised their eyebrows. Some
looked to the side a little as if embarrassed. But that was the
extent of- the protest. The man continued prattling on, and he was treated with the utmost respect. After all, he was a
taxpayer.

People who used the word didn't seem troubled by it. They
didn't whisper it, or look chagrined after they said it. In their
minds it didn't imply anything, didn't indicate they were racist,
didn't necessarily mean that they disliked blacks at all. Instead,
as several in Odessa explained it, there were actually two races
of blacks. There were the hardworking ones who were easy to
get along with and didn't try to cut corners and melded in quite
nicely. They deserved the title black. They deserved the respect
of fellow whites.

And then there were the loud ones, the lazy ones, the ones
who stole or lived off welfare or spent their whole lives trying
to get by without a lick of work, who every time they were challenged to do something claimed they were the helpless victims
of white racism. They didn't deserve to be called black, because
they weren't.

To the Reverend J. W. Hanson, a black minister who was the
pastor of the Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist Church on the
Southside, the easiest way for blacks to get along with whites in
Odessa was by being nonthreatening and obediently towing the
line. "If you're the type of leader that as the establishment says
can `handle your folk,' you'll be all right," said Hanson. "As
long as you don't rock the boat, then they think you're a pretty
good of fella."

There were some whites in town who found the use of the
word nigger offensive, but they were so far removed from the
mainstream that no one took them very seriously. With her
background as an active Democrat, a Unitarian, an ex-hippie,
and a Dukakis supporter, it sometimes seemed surprising that
Lanita Akins wasn't forced to walk around town with a shaved
head and wearing a pair of striped pajamas like the French collaborators of World War 11. The only thing that made her at all
typical of Odessa was her passionate devotion to Permian football. "It's the one thing I do that they think is normal."

She loved her hometown, because of what it represented and despite what it represented. She loved the friendliness of it and
the small-town feel of it, the way she knew everyone out at the
country club or at the store, the way the gossip made an easy
circle. She relished the physical rawness of it, the feeling of the
wind across her face and the gorgeous lightning storms during
the summer when the sky, as she described it, just seemed to
open up and dance. She knew the place was as immutable to
the changes of time as an iceberg, but there was something reassuring about that. People stood up for one another. They
cared about one another. They held old-fashioned values.

But she also knew that Odessa's values were old-fashioned as
well when it came to race, still rooted in the days when the line
between white and black was bluntly defined by the American
version of the Berlin Wall-the railroad tracks that inevitably
ran through the heart of town.

Back in the forties and fifties and sixties, the areas of occupation had been clearly understood. "There was the ordinance
on the city books making it illegal for any "white person and
any Negro to have sexual intercourse with each other within
the corporate limits of the city." (The term Negro was carefully
defined to "include a mulatto, or colored person or any other
person of mixed blood having one-eighth or more Negro
blood.") There was the public policy of the city planning and
zoning commission, which warned that the city's "Negro" population should never be given any opportunity to "invade the
white residential areas."

There were the familiar redline laws that made it impossible
for blacks to obtain mortgages or home improvement loans.
There were deed restrictions preventing whites from selling
their houses to blacks. There was a policy at the county medical
center consigning all black patients to the basement, which
meant that women giving birth were sometimes put next to patients with infectious diseases. There was the basic system of
apartheid in which blacks had their own library, their own
clubs, their own schools, their own stadium, their own football
team, their own carefully delineated areas where they could walk freely and other places where they walked only at their
own risk. They were the same laws, the same policies that applied to blacks all over Texas and all over the South.

Some of these laws and policies had given way over time, but
the change was slow and excruciating. No black family lived
above the tracks until 1968, and it took two painful years of
searching to find someone willing to sell the first black family a
home. School desegregation, imposed by a federal court over
bitter protests, did not take place until 1982.

As a result of that ruling, blacks could move about more
freely now in Odessa. They could go to schools in the rich part
of town. They could live pretty much where they wanted-assuming they could afford it, which most of them could not.
They were still concentrated below the railroad tracks, below
where the whites lived. Symbolically and physically, the tracks
were still a barrier and still defined an attitude.

"The most amazing thing to me is the shock on people's faces
that I'm offended by the word nigger," said Lanita Akins. "They
are truly shocked that not only am I shocked, but I have friends
who are black."