Muck City (3 page)

In a farming town of 17,467 people, there were more than a dozen gangs that preyed on young men and saturated the downtown streets with cocaine. In 2003, Belle Glade had the second-highest violent crime rate in the country. Shootings remained near-weekly occurrences. AIDS had left its indelible scar and lingering stigma. If you stayed long enough, there came a time when you felt as if everyone you spoke with had been touched by some sort of tragic episode—so that even along Main Street, with its fast-food restaurants and sleek Bank of America branch, and within the quiet, middle-class neighborhoods, Belle Glade carried the aura of a trauma zone.

Yet somehow from this crush of poverty and tragedy came one of the country’s greatest concentrations of raw football talent. After Jessie Hester
went to the Los Angeles Raiders, thirty players from Glades Central reached the NFL, while more found their way into Canada and other professional leagues (Pahokee’s numbers were even greater). For a school of only 1,037 students, it was a staggering rate of success, considering that only eight out of every ten thousand high school football players (or .08 percent) are ever drafted into the NFL.

In recent years, Glades Central has sent an average of eight players to NCAA Division I programs. It is said that in any given year, one hundred former Raiders are playing football somewhere in North America. Glades Central also boasts six state titles and twenty-five district championships.

With such numbers, one might think,
It’s a town obsessed with football
, and tick down the other places that come to mind: Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Odessa, Texas, or perhaps even Long Beach, California, where Polytechnic High School alone has sent more than fifty players to the NFL since 1927. Or it could be one of a hundred other places in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Michigan that inform Hollywood’s treatment of the Friday-night game—the story of bighearted kids winning it all behind a coach’s tough love in a town where football is like religion.

But this is not that story.

In Belle Glade, where the risk of joblessness, prison, or early death followed each boy like a toxic cloud, high school football was more than religion, it was like salvation itself—the raft by which to flee a ship that kept drifting back in time. Football offered an education, a chance at life. As for the town, the relationship with the game went beyond fandom. It was something deeper, more psychological, like a weekly remembrance of lost, unblemished youth. Glades Central had to be one of the only high schools in America where its students were largely absent from football games. Watching from the bleachers were the uncles, fathers, and old gridiron kings whose own escape had eluded them. For a town with trouble on its mind, the Friday-night lights were the closest things to a catharsis, or at least a fleeting escape.

“Down here,” one player said, “there’s so much trouble that winning is the only thing to look forward to. It’s the only thing we’re good at. For that moment, all our problems go away.”

Belle Glade was like no other football town in America. There was no Hollywood treatment of the Muck City game. What follows instead is the messy and chaotic pursuit of a title-seeking team, a story about home, loyalty, and the pressure to win in a town whose identity lay rooted in a game. It is a tale of great escapes, a story of survival.

T
he city of Belle Glade was born in the watery wake of Manifest Destiny, a settlement hacked and forged from America’s last wild frontier. Like most of South Florida today, Belle Glade emerged as the result of one of the most ingenious and cataclysmic feats of modern engineering, the draining of the Florida Everglades.

For thousands of years, summer storms over Florida had caused water to spill naturally over the southern rim of Lake Okeechobee. A vast, shallow sheet of water crept hundreds of miles from the Atlantic shoreline to the Gulf of Mexico, feeding swamp and sawgrass marshes along the way. This “River of Grass” was the sustaining blood of an extraordinary ecosystem and the chief obstacle for an American dream pushing southward.

Beginning in 1906, the first of six canals was dredged from the lake to the Atlantic, draining the Glades into the sea. And once the lake and swamp began to recede, they left behind a nearly magical black soil that has since come to build empires and define a region and its people.

Glades muck is silty, the texture of talcum powder or finely ground espresso, and streaks the skin like powdered ink. When you walk in a field, it explodes in fine clouds beneath your shoes and seeps into your socks and under toenails. In the motels in Belle Glade that cater to migrants and construction workers, it’s not uncommon to find the shower walls stained with black handprints. Drive your car down a canefield road and the black dust will appear in every crevice of the vehicle for months, no matter how many washings.

The muck is also flammable, its organic matter so rich that fields have been known to catch fire underground and smolder for years. These properties also make it some of the most fertile soil in America.

The first settlers in the Glades arrived before the First World War and found the much-promised black gold under a watery bog. The rest remained covered under an armor of impenetrable sawgrass that stretched beyond the imagination. When the water receded enough to plant, the boggy muck swallowed tractor tires and the sawgrass tangled plows. Snakes and flying insects covered the land and helped purge all but the strong and determined.

As war drove the demand for food, the region became a major producer of string beans and potatoes, which thrived in the muck. By 1928 the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee produced more string beans than anywhere else in the country. Since beans were a labor-intensive crop requiring many hands, thousands of black migrants from the South and the West Indies flooded into the Glades, where they could earn as much as twenty dollars a day in the fields.

Belle Glade began to boom, and much of the town that emerged during the 1920s was as wild and untamed as the swamps pressing in around it. This “Catfish Row” atmosphere of juke joints, bonfire dances, and lonely men far from home provided the backdrop for Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
.

“Saturday afternoon when the work tickets were turned into cash everybody began to buy coon-dick and get drunk,” Hurston wrote. “By
dusk dark Belle Glade was full of loud-talking, staggering men. Plenty of women had gotten their knots charged too.”

On the morning of Sunday, September 18, 1928, a storm blew in. The newspaper from the day before, fetched from nearby West Palm Beach, reported that a hurricane had hit Puerto Rico, killing hundreds, and was now headed for southern Florida. But radio reports picked up Sunday morning said the storm would miss the lake region, leaving residents confused and apprehensive. There was reason to fear: Two years earlier, during the Great Miami Hurricane, a section of the mostly muck dikes that formed a half circle around the lake had crumbled above the nearby town of Moore Haven, drowning 150 people.

As the wind and rain began whipping hard, Belle Glade’s mayor, Walter Greer, ventured out into the weather to inspect the dikes. Greer returned soaking wet and said the water was indeed high, but he didn’t believe it would breach. People chose to stay.

“The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed,” Hurston wrote of the encroaching storm. “The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn’t worry.”

What was later determined to be a Category Four hurricane hit shortly thereafter, bringing winds of over 150 miles per hour. It came in from the Gulf side, then swung across and pounded the lake.

“The wind, like a thousand devils, howled its hollow roar,” Glades historian Lawrence E. Will wrote in
Okeechobee Hurricane
, a riveting firsthand account of the storm.

As the eye of the hurricane moved over the town, people quickly regrouped to search for those lost in the wind and rain. Amid the confusion, the dikes began to burst, releasing a wave of water thirty-five miles long that wiped clean the settlements in its path.

When the surge hit Belle Glade, the water rose at a rate of an inch per minute, cresting at eleven feet in areas nearest the shore. The town quickly disappeared beneath the moving tide, and entire houses were swept down
the canal with people clinging to rooftops and from windowsills. Looking out, Will spotted a kitten, a rabbit, and a water moccasin all huddled on the same piece of floating garbage, paralyzed with fear. On two branches of the same tree, a man and a wildcat clung for life, eyeing each other with caution.

When the storm finally calmed, settlers in boats rescued dozens from treetops and floating debris, but most perished under the flood. Search parties were dispatched along the lakeshore to look for the dead or the few survivors who had drifted and become lost in the swamp. Small boats, remembered Will, “brought in the corpses half a dozen at a time, each secured with a turn of rope around its neck, like a ghastly bunch of grapes. Arrived at the bridge, a crew of negroes, their cotton gloves soaked in disinfectant, hauled the bodies out and laid them in rows.”

An estimated 2,500 people perished in the flood. Later estimates ventured as high as six thousand dead. What is known is that three-quarters of those killed were black sharecroppers and fieldworkers who’d been as surprised and unprepared for the storm as the whites who’d employed them. Because of their migrant status, and because so many were known to friends and employers only by first names or nicknames, it will never be known exactly how many died that day.

The frenzied weeks following the hurricane read like a chapter pulled from ancient days of plague and fever, rather than twentieth-century America. In the first days after the storm the muck was still too saturated for burials, so corpses were stacked like cordwood along the banks. Trucks then carried them to West Palm Beach and elsewhere along the coast, “trailing slime all the way,” as Will wrote. Whites that could be identified were buried in cemeteries, but the number of black victims soon overwhelmed officials, and few were given proper burial. Fearing the spread of disease, workers soon began piling bodies in ditches, black and white skin now undistinguishable due to decay, covering them in fuel oil, and setting them ablaze. Search crews combing through the swamps would find decaying corpses and simply cover them with lime and move on. For decades afterward, farmers breaking ground in the Glades would uncover
skeletons of those left behind or never discovered at all, their bones having been swallowed by the sawgrass.

Today there are few traces remaining of those who perished in the storm. The trucks that carried the dead to West Palm Beach first stopped at Woodlawn Cemetery, where sixty-nine bodies were laid in a common hole, sixty-one of them white. A short distance away, in what was then the black paupers’ cemetery, the bodies of nearly seven hundred unidentified blacks were dumped into a mass grave.

Hurston recounted this macabre ordeal, in which white lawmen pressed blacks into unloading the trucks by gunpoint. Don’t toss any whites into the holes by mistake, they said. Bury the blacks in the rough with lime, instead of pine-box caskets.

“Look at they hair when you cain’t tell no other way,” they instructed. “And don’t lemme ketch none uh yall dumpin’ white folks, and don’t be wastin’ no boxes on colored. They’s too hard tuh git holt of right now.”

A marble plaque memorialized the sixty-nine buried at Woodlawn Cemetery. But it took seventy-four years for the mass grave containing 674 black victims to receive any recognition. It wasn’t until 2002, after a dogged campaign by community activists, that the city of West Palm Beach purchased the land and finally marked the grave site.

The entire city of Belle Glade was in ruins, most of its inhabitants dead or missing. Only one hotel still stood. Taking even the lowest estimates of those killed, the hurricane of 1928 ranks as the second most deadly natural disaster in American history, next to the 1900 storm that struck Galveston, Texas, and killed six thousand. It’s also been called by black scholars the single most deadly natural disaster to strike African Americans, even worse than Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

•   •   •

THE STAGGERING DAMAGE
and loss of life from the 1926 and ’28 storms incited an uproar across the country, exacerbated in part by
near-biblical flooding along the Mississippi River in 1927 that left more than a million people homeless. The floods had overwhelmed man-made dikes and levees and debunked any notion that modern engineering could bridle nature in her full fury. But in the decade that followed, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set out to prove that indeed it could be done, at least in the Everglades. The response was not only to tame the giant beast, but to chain it forever behind a ring of prison walls.

Built during the height of the Depression, the Herbert Hoover Dike, named after the president who commissioned the project, stands more than thirty feet above sea level and nearly wraps the entire lake. Whereas the old dike was mostly muck, the new structure was given a core of stone and covered in grass, trees, and bamboo to control erosion, and hurricane gates to maintain balance when severe storms struck. And while the dike has never failed, it also concealed much of the lake completely from view. It left the towns along its shores butted against a giant mound of grass that appeared more like a covered landfill than the nation’s seventh-largest lake. Today, any unsuspecting traveler passing through Belle Glade or Pahokee could come and go without ever knowing it existed.