Muck City (18 page)

F
or 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 coincidence, 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.

“Her hands were so rough and callused,” Theresa remembered. “At night they’d crack.”

Hard as life was for Bernice as a single mother, Theresa still carried fond memories of her childhood in Pahokee. But it certainly wasn’t how she’d envisioned her own children growing up. At least Jonteria and her sister Jawantae knew their fathers, she thought. Theresa had no memories of Jessie, not even a photograph.

While John was at home, Theresa had given up her dispatch job to be with the kids. Now that he was gone, she had to scramble to keep a roof over their heads. Soon she was working two part-time jobs, one at the Boys and Girls Club from six until eight in the morning, then at a day-care from eight until four in the afternoon. She did this for six years, rushing out to get her daughters from school, then bringing them back to work. They spent so much time in the car that Theresa used the miles for reading. Anything Jonteria had in her school bag, her mother would make her read aloud.

All these years, Theresa told the girls their father was just “away.” It wasn’t until Jonteria was in seventh grade that she sat them down at the city park in Pahokee and told them what had really happened.

Not long after, Jonteria started talking about wanting to be a nurse. Not in the same way kids dream of becoming astronauts and race-car drivers, but really asking specific questions.

“I just saw my mom struggling and I knew that doctors and nurses made good money,” Jonteria said. “It just became that thing I focused on and nothing else.”

Right out of the gate, her confidence cut a path. We see her at age thirteen, short, beaming behind large, buggy glasses, the pride of a kid having won an award. The prize for the local newspaper’s character contest was getting to read a PSA on the airwaves of WSWN Sugar 900.

“She is certainly outgoing enough, articulate and uses great sentence structure by which I was impressed,” the station manager, Harvey Poole, told a reporter who captured the moment. “Fear factor is not a part of her makeup.”

“It comes naturally,” the eighth-grader replied. “I am happy I can speak and smile at the same time.”

The story described Jonteria’s eagerness to help tutor her fellow students and assist teachers. But it made no mention of the social downsides of ambition, the jealousy that brains and confidence can incite, or the daily serving of abuse she had received every day since getting to junior high.

Popular girls lacerated her with name-calling, pelted her with wads of paper in the hallways, and made fun of her glasses. Most painful were the girls in her same gifted-student program who teased her to fit in themselves, leaving her no shelter. The problem became so bad that Theresa had to routinely visit the school and demand better protection. Finally one day Jonteria, fed up, smashed one of the girls in the face with a water bottle.

High school offered asylum. In order to curb dropout rates, Florida law requires incoming freshmen to declare a major area of study and slots them into appropriate career academies. Glades Central, historically one of the worst-performing schools in Palm Beach County, had recently opened academies in engineering and criminal justice, but its toughest was medical science, which required a solid understanding of algebra and a 3.0 GPA all four years. Jonteria threw herself into it.

The academy gave students Licensed Practical Nurse Certification by the time of graduation. Part of the requirement was an internship at the local hospital, Lakeside Medical Center, where it didn’t take long for Jonteria to trade up on her dream. She would be a doctor—not one chained to her pager twenty-four/seven, but an anesthesiologist. “You still make good money,” she reasoned, “but you also get to go home.”

Her goal before leaving high school was to be valedictorian, a title that would sparkle on any college application and guarantee free money. To bolster her chances at the top scholastic honor, she dual-enrolled at the
nearby community college, taking courses like statistics and anatomy in the evenings after school. “I felt it was something I had to do,” she said. “Or else someone else was gonna jump over me.”

•   •   •

AND TO PROVE
she wasn’t just brains, Jonteria set out to become popular. She began running to get into shape, circling her neighborhood in the morning near the sugar-mill smokestack that defined the city’s skyline. That summer before her sophomore year, Jonteria tried out for the Dazzling Diamond Dancers, the saucy drill team that performed alongside the Marching Maroon Machine Band. She made the cuts. She got contact lenses. Before long, she was grinding her hips in a pair of skimpy shorts across the halftime field.

But the Dazzling Diamond Dancers weren’t enough. Jonteria wanted more—she wanted to be a cheerleader. The next summer, after spending all day on her feet at the grocery store, she stayed up four hours each night practicing toe touches and herkies and learning how to throw her tiny voice when reciting from a list of chants.

“Let’s get phy-si-cal, get down, get dirty, get mean. WHAT?! Let’s get phy-si-cal, gon’ stomp right over your team.”

She was one of seventeen Raider cheerleaders her junior year, holding her own among girls who’d never lifted a finger to be popular and beautiful. And it was
fun
, like living two separate lives.

But Jonteria was competitive by nature, maybe when the other girls were not. She was just wired to go above the minimum. Perhaps it was because she’d choreographed some cheers that won the Raiders a cheerleading award, or because she never talked back and took instruction. Whatever the reason, just before the start of senior year, head coach Connie Vereen made Jonteria the captain. And with that honor came a fresh set of enemies.

“Even though I had the better skills, I didn’t think she would pick me,”
Jonteria said. “These girls had been there since they were freshmen and I made captain my second year. Some of them were jealous, and not very friendly about it.”

As captain, her directions were ignored. Girls sniped and yelled at her, turned their noses, and refused to get in set. Jonteria didn’t want a fight. She bit her lip and carried on.

Suddenly, being at the top wasn’t so much fun.

•   •   •

EVEN BEFORE JONTERIA
became a dancer, she started dating a football player. Theresa hadn’t let her date until she was fifteen, at which point Jonteria brought home Vincent Harper. He was a junior and two years older, played offensive line for the Raiders, and was built for the position, at six foot one and 250 pounds; Jonteria barely came up to his chest.

They met in algebra class. For a big guy, Vincent had a booming voice and he liked to joke. “Who is this guy who’s so loud?” Jonteria blurted out in annoyance one day. She was just a freshman, but did not tolerate fools. Vincent just looked at her and got louder. One day on the band field, he asked her out.

When Jonteria brought Vincent to meet Theresa, she also made him bring his mother. The four of them sat in Theresa’s living room.

“I told him my expectations and requirements, and his mom did the same,” Theresa said. The first rule Theresa laid down was
NO SEX
.

“I want her to live her high school years without being tied down,” she told Vincent. “I want you all to go back to the old-fashioned tradition of dating. You don’t have to go out just to have sex. There are other things you can do to enjoy each other.”