Muck City (44 page)

After his first semester, Way quit the team and dropped out of school. His coaches were left disappointed and sour. “He wasn’t patient enough to wait his turn,” said JaJuan. “That’s the thing with these kids [from Belle Glade], they’re entitled.”

Way was now back in Belle Glade, living at home and weighing his options. After leaving Marshall, he received a full scholarship from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach. But he was holding out for a DI program, perhaps FAU or better. The boy who Coach Hester once pulled from the brink was aware how vulnerable he now seemed. Out of high school, without a job, and down on your luck—the casualty rate was high. “I’m keeping a positive attitude,” he said. “Something will come up. I mean, it’s got to.”

•   •   •

FOR JONTERIA WILLIAMS
, the final semester of high school began with her first broken heart. After months of anticipation, Vincent finally came home for Christmas break. Jonteria had built their whole reunion up in her mind, what she would wear, what they would do together, the goose bumps she would feel watching him laugh, being kissed.

But it was wrong from the beginning. From their first encounter, Vincent didn’t really talk, didn’t laugh, didn’t look into her eyes and feel the same flutter. He was like a shell, a walking hologram. Jonteria knew: Vincent had fallen out of love.

“It just wasn’t the same, that joy,” she said. “It wasn’t that happy, cheery feeling that it always used to be. I was so happy to see him and he was like,
hmmph
.” She stuck her lips out like the Grinch. “After a while, I was like,
okay
. I guess over seven months, we just grew apart.”

She sat cross-legged on the living-room sofa, which faced the table of trophies, plaques, and medals. Jonteria knew how to talk about those things. Her ambition was second nature. But this crushed feeling, it could not be compartmentalized and explained the same way.

“You don’t know what’s gonna happen in the future, so you don’t get so upset about it,” she said, struggling for words. “Whatever happens, happens, right? You learn, I guess …”

Sitting in the next room, Theresa couldn’t stand hearing it. She walked into the living room and raised her hand, signaling for her daughter to stop.

“We’re leaving this subject off-limits,” she said. “Because there’s too many things that she needs to focus on now. So when she wants to talk about it, she’ll talk about it. If a person keeps dragging it out, especially when you’re having your happy moments and moving on with your life, next thing you know you’re down, you’re depressed.”

She then turned to her daughter.

“That’s the reason I try to keep you busy,” she said. “I try to keep you busy so your mind is not focused there. I understand. I’ve been there. I was young and I’ve had my heart broken—not to say that’s what happened to you. Whatever happens, happens. You have no control over that.

“So I wish you the best of luck. I’m not gonna pry into it. I’m not gonna dig. Whenever you want to talk to me, I’m here.
I’m here
. My dream is just for you to be happy. That’s my dream. And when things come about in your life that you have to deal with, you’ll know how. But you know what? Right now you’re doing a pretty good job.”

•   •   •

THREE DAYS LATER
, Jonteria “committed” to Florida State. In his effort to bridge academics and athletics, Principal Anderson insisted the scholars share the stage at Signing Day with the football team. They also appeared on the program before the players, ensuring that the reporters and photographers on hand to capture KB’s big moment counted
eight
scholars “goin DI,” as opposed to only
three
mighty Raiders—one of the smallest Signing Days for Glades Central football in years. That afternoon, Jonteria’s cousin Donalle announced he was headed to the Gators. Walkeria committed to FAU and Jessica Benette, the school valedictorian, was “continuing her education at the University of South Florida.”

For Jonteria, the announcement helped to override the pain of her breakup, dispatching it under the moving wheels of her college dreams. She was going to Florida State, for now, and having made the decision, she could focus on the million little steps leading to its door. On top of her coursework at Glades Central, Jonteria had also crammed three additional college classes into her schedule in order to ease her load the following year. The cheerleaders were now in the throes of basketball season. As class salutatorian, Jonteria was painstakingly working on a speech for the graduation ceremony. And of course she still clocked twenty hours each week at Winn-Dixie to earn extra money.

Money
.

When Jonteria put her head down each night, one day closer to college, all she could think about was how to pay for it. She’d started hearing back from the scholarships for which she’d applied, and the news was not encouraging. The Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation had recently sent a kind rejection letter informing Jonteria she would not be receiving their $20,000 award. The other foundations still kept their decisions locked away, depriving her of the ability to plan. The uncertainty of it all was maddening. She
lived in constant dread that in the final hour she would not have enough. Student loans would not cover the full expense of Florida State, which was about $19,300 per year.

The veneer of confidence revealed a crack. “Sometimes I just get very tired,” she said one afternoon, exhaling. “I just want to know what’s happening. It’s not like this for the football players. At least they know that everything is paid for.”

A few weeks later, so consumed by doubt and the unknown, Jonteria abandoned Florida State and committed to FAU and its cheaper price tag. “If the scholarships don’t work out,” she said, “at least I know I’ll be better covered.”

Then one day in early May, Jonteria got home from school and noticed the mailbox bulging open. Inside was a giant manila envelope, its girth emanating importance. Seeing the return address made Jonteria’s stomach do somersaults. She couldn’t even wait to go in the house. She sat in the front seat of her car and carefully slid open the package.

“Congratulations,” the letter read. “You are a Bill Gates Millennium Scholar.”

Jonteria had to read the sentence again before it sank in.
She had won
.

The plan she’d hatched back as a bug-eyed seventh-grader had just hitched a ride on a rocket ship. Her undergraduate and medical school would be completely covered. All the bullying and alienation she’d endured, all of the sacrifice and hours on her feet—Bill Gates was telling her that it was worth every minute, to stand up and take a bow. Jonteria was too excited to even cry. All she could do was sit there and smile.
She had won
.

Over the next two weeks, the good news kept on coming. In addition to the Gates award, Jonteria received a Florida Bright Futures scholarship, awarded by the state, for an additional $9,000. The Walmart/Sam Walton Community Scholarship gave her an additional $3,000, while the Lions Club came in with another $4,000—all of which ensured she would not
have to work her first semester and could focus on studying. Despite the Gates award, Jonteria chose to stay at FAU. She liked its nursing and medical schools, and more important, it was closer to home.

But FAU was just the backup plan. After one year, Jonteria would have enough credits to finish her bachelor’s degree. At which point, armed with the confidence, and now the means, she would try to reclaim the dream she’d abandoned those many months before: she would apply to the University of Miami and pray her luck still held.

On graduation night, Jonteria took the stage inside the Glades Central gymnasium and delivered the salutatorian speech to the Class of 2011. She began by speaking on the fear that so often stymied the ambition and momentum one needed to clear the green wall of the Glades.

“Fear is an emotion that we learn over time,” she told the 219 graduates. “We avoid things that the world views as bad or unacceptable in society. Fear is something that we create within ourselves. We are the only ones who are able to destroy that fear.”

Her courage to take the long and running start, to go headlong into traffic and dare to be great, had not come on her own. She looked into the audience and found her mother’s gaze.

“She is my heart, my soul, my love, my supporter, my number-one fan, my teacher, my counselor, and my everything,” Jonteria said. “Without her, I would not have made it this far.”

The room filled with applause and the crowd turned to find Theresa. Her eyes remained steady on her daughter, tears running down her face.

•   •   •

FOR JESSIE HESTER
, there was no repeat of a storybook ending.

After hearing he was being fired over grades, Hester had thanked Anderson and James for the opportunity and walked out of the room, knowing there was another reason. His team’s grades were no worse than those of kids who played baseball or basketball. James, the athletic director,
was in fact the boys’ basketball coach. Academics had only disguised a larger motive, he felt. The only reason he could think was that Anderson, James, and assistant AD Roosevelt “Tadpole” Blackmon must have conspired together to remove him.

“Their minds were already made up,” he said, “and I felt like the loss in Orlando just gave them more ammunition. I wasn’t going to stay where I wasn’t wanted.”

Several months later, Anderson did admit that academics wasn’t the main reason he’d fired Hester. The reason, he said, was that administrators had long been frustrated with the coach and his staff. For one thing, they felt Hester and his assistants could have done a better job “marketing” their second-tier players to college recruiters. Anderson said he noticed decent players, guys who weren’t deemed superstars, being allowed to languish and not grow, then being passed over after graduation.

“You just can’t exploit these kids for the Friday-night lights. You have to make sure they all go to the next level,” he said. “Take Mario, for instance. You’ve got him to this level. But what have you done for him to make sure they still have eyes on him at the position he’s being recruited for? Player development wasn’t there. When you have twelve coaches walking up and down the sideline, why aren’t some of them doing this? As the principal, academically and otherwise, my job is to get as many of the students out of here.”

When pressed further about the decision, Anderson said he’d also grown tired of the behavior and conduct of Hester’s assistants. He mentioned the trip to Texas, when both Coach Q and Coach Fat had been disciplined for leaving the hotel and going clubbing the night before the game. Both were suspended for a week. He failed to mention that Blackmon had also joined the coaches, but was not punished.

Anderson said that he and his teachers had been so consumed with trying to raise the school grade, football was one of his last concerns. He’d relied largely on Blackmon to supervise the team. In that role, he said, Tadpole would routinely come to him with a litany of minor infractions:
coaches goofing on the sidelines, wearing their caps backward, playing with their phones, cursing too much.

But through another administrator, Anderson caught word of something more ugly, malignant: during the previous season, one of Jet’s coaches had been sleeping with a female student. His alleged misconduct had since become gossip. Some parents approached administrators with the story. Students were also talking.

From what Blackmon was hearing in the community and relaying back to Anderson, Hester had covered it up. So one day around midseason, Anderson said, he pulled Hester aside with the information, but the coach denied knowing anything. (Hester said the conversation never took place.) The administration then launched an investigation, which stalled when students refused to reveal the girl’s name.

When the season ended, Anderson decided to solve the problem by cutting off the head. “There was just too much coming in,” he said. “I decided to cut ties. I cleaned house.”

For his part, Hester said he didn’t learn about the allegations until nearly two months after he was fired. It was one of the things he and Anderson had argued about in the auditorium after Signing Day. He said no one in the administration had ever mentioned the incident. If they had, the assistant coach would have been dismissed immediately (in Hester’s defense, other assistants had been fired for much less). In fact, Anderson and James didn’t even raise the subject the day they fired Jet. The only thing mentioned in the five-minute meeting was academics.

“I guarantee you if that was a real reason, they would have said it then,” Hester said. “They heard about this stuff after the fact, then used it to give themselves legitimacy.”

But chronology was sadly beside the point. The fact remained that Hester was gone from Glades Central—cut loose by an unforeseen irony. After three years of buffering his team against outside forces, from the streets, from bad men and their corrosive advice, and from the misery that
always sought company—the family was destroyed by its trusted inner circle.

In late January, Glades Central hired Blackmon to succeed Hester as head coach of the Raiders. Tadpole was a muckstepper with NFL credentials, but had returned home the humble servant to work in the schools. The fact that Blackmon was never a first-round draft pick made him seem safe in the eyes of many fans and administrators. Tadpole had the true interests of every player in mind, said Anderson. He was someone “who understood the struggle of getting to that next level, not being a superstar.”

Tadpole, it seemed, had become the anti-Jet.

As Glades Central shed its baggage, other schools clamored to pick it up. In the days after being fired, Hester fielded several job offers. Wishing to stay nearby, Jet took the head coaching job at Suncoast High, the magnet school in Riviera Beach that Glades Central had pummeled 39–0 the previous year. Going with him were coaches Sherm, Q, and many of the gang.

•   •   •

UNDER BLACKMON AND
his new staff—which included Coach Fat, Sam King, and former Raider and Tampa Bay Buccaneer Reidel Anthony—Glades Central began the 2011 season once again ranked among the best teams in the nation. They lived up to the hype during the home opener, defeating 5A powerhouse Dwyer High in a thriller that was broadcast live on ESPN. The new squad was led by Boobie, Jaime, Jaja, Crevon LeBlanc, Baker, and Likely. And for the first time in decades, the Raiders also had a white quarterback—Tanner Redish, who transferred from Glades Day after leading the Gators to back-to-back state championships. After spending most of his career handing footballs off to Kelvin Taylor, Redish was hoping that a season with the GC flyboys would increase his chances of recruitment.