Muck City (7 page)

“I didn’t break down until I saw her walking to meet me,” Williams said. “She asked,
‘Anthony, why are you crying?’
And I didn’t want to tell her it was because I’d seen her and knew the cancer was winning. ‘I’m just crying, Mom,’ I said. ‘I’m just crying.’ ”

Afterward, Williams walked to the locker room and wept in the showers, the victory not as sweet as he’d long imagined. Six months later, as he prepared to play in the all-star game, Johnnie Ruth passed away. She was thirty-nine.

The following season, with Stanley, Williams, Newman, and most of the starters graduated, the Raiders continued to win. The team was led by Byron Walker, a junior quarterback who “couldn’t hit a bull in the butt
with a bass fiddle” by his own admission. But with a solid team of athletes behind him—and guided by Werneke’s deft coaching—the Raiders won back-to-back championships.

In Belle Glade, the great experiment had not only prevailed, but given birth to what was known as “the tradition.” It realigned the world that held the tiny town, moved the North Star from its perch above the migrant road to its place between two yellow posts, and gave young boys in the muck a new kind of beacon.

One of those boys was Jessie Hester.

W
hen Hester was growing up in the mid-1970s, little had changed from the days of Gatemouth and Poochie. For the most part, Belle Glade remained a place of toil and hard lessons, where children were sent to the fields and little came for free.

The people who lived there back then like to say it was a simpler time, when kids had to learn how to be tough. And it was for this reason, apart from most others, that so many of them became great athletes.

The ten-block section of downtown still hummed with migrant families on the move. Calypso poured from the Jamaican clubs, along with the smells of jerk chicken and roasted breadfruit. On weekend mornings after the clubs had emptied, Jessie and his brother Roger would scan the downtown sidewalks, picking up the bills and loose change the drunks had dropped in their merrymaking.

By the 1970s, little had improved since the days when Marjory Stoneman Douglas was so struck by its misery. The migrant quarter remained a
warren of mostly flat-roofed, two-story concrete rooming houses. Built in the 1930s, few of the buildings had ever been renovated or given a fresh coat of paint. They sat bleached and faded under the sun, festooned with fluttering laundry and beset with idle men between harvests.

By the time Zara and her children rented a one-bedroom on Seventh Street and Avenue E (now MLK Boulevard), the neighborhood held over 40 percent of the town’s population. A consultant hired by the city in the 1970s reported the area housed as many as one thousand people per acre. By contrast, the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, had only 284 people squeezed into the same amount of space.

Jessie and his siblings slept on bunk beds, stacked atop one another like Lincoln Logs. The walls were made of cardboard and carried every sound. The entire building shared a few common toilets and a shower. In the evenings, Jessie or Roger would have to stand guard at the door while their sister Agnes bathed.

“There were big spiders in those showers,” Roger remembered. “And walking into the toilet some mornings, you’d find feces smeared everywhere.”

One block away, their grandparents’ apartment offered a respite from the crowded dinginess. Jessie’s grandmother Eva was the grand matriarch of the family, a big woman who kept her daughter’s children in step. “My mom worked and my grandma raised us,” said Roger. “She did the discipline and didn’t run after you. She made you go and get the switch.”

Like her daughter, Eva and her husband, Willie, made their living in the fields. But on Sundays, Eva would preach. The revivals held in her tiny apartment were legendary, a crush of sweaty bodies speaking in tongues and dancing, so drunk on the spirit that the building would rattle on its foundation. In addition to the Holy Ghost, Eva was guided by old superstitions that would find their way into her grandson Jessie. The strangest things would set her off, such as sweeping near her feet.

“Boy, get that broom away from me,” she would shout. “You gonna cause me to go to jail.”

•   •   •

WHEN JESSIE WAS
in sixth grade, the family moved into a bigger, two-bedroom house a few blocks away. By then Anthony and Cora had been born. Even as babies, both children behaved oddly, but it wasn’t until much later that they were diagnosed with autism.

For Anthony, the condition first manifested itself when he was six years old and fell into seizures. Jessie remembers seeing Zara one morning before work, the boy bent and contorted in her arms. When she put him down to walk, all he did was limp and mumble as though something had broken inside him. Zara went hysterical.

His sister Cora had always been special, exhibiting a brilliance that hid behind her quiet brown eyes and revealed itself in her artwork. Cora’s notebooks read like illustrated soap operas of the street life and family dramas surrounding her. But that brilliance had a dark riptide that would turn the lights out while it dragged her under. When this happened, Jessie and Roger would have to hide sharp objects in the house because Cora liked to cut herself. Some afternoons they’d come home and find her sitting on the floor covered in blood, ramming her forehead into a wall.

To keep his mind off problems at home, Jessie, like most boys in Belle Glade, turned to sports. On weekends and after school, the neighborhood kids would gather for pickup games of football. For kids whose parents labored in the fields, there was barely enough money to cover food and clothes, much less an actual ball. So, to compensate, the boys filled socks with dirt and tied them off at one end. They used Coke bottles, old shoes, and, when nothing else could be found, a wad of newspaper—whatever could be tucked, thrown, and caught in the land of make-believe.

The games were played in empty lots and outside the bars and rooming houses. The boys wore no pads and tackled on streets covered in gravel and shattered glass, leaving knees and elbows chewed and bloody. Cars ran over them, but most often it was the other way around.

“Some of the hardest hits I’ve ever seen in football were from parked cars,” Hester said.

The street games instilled an essential fearlessness that formed the bedrock to their becoming good football players. And for Hester, they laid the foundation that in later years would make him a great receiver. Aside from speed, courage was the one true requirement for the position, an understanding that your head could be taken off at any moment—yet still you ran for the ball.

“Everything else can be taught,” he said. “You can teach a guy to run a route. But you cannot teach a guy to run out and catch a ball in traffic. It’s got to be something he already possesses. And most of us got that early on as kids.”

Summer days were spent diving off the Torry Island bridge into the canal infested with alligators. Ray McDonald, one of Hester’s childhood friends, remembered watching Jessie and Roger drag old mattresses in front of a two-story boardinghouse, then jump off the roof.

“They’d hit those mattresses and flip,” said McDonald. “I’m not talking about a single flip, but spinning and twisting in midair. Greg Louganis kind of stuff.”

Zara started bringing her kids into the fields when Jessie was ten. The older kids would work weekends and holidays picking corn, celery, and leafy stuff like cabbage and lettuce. In the orange groves north of Pahokee, Jessie would earn five dollars for every bucket he filled, sometimes tumbling from tree limbs whenever a snake dropped from the branches. Summers were spent piled into various relatives’ cars to work the fields in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

Early on, Jessie was vigilant about saving money because he knew if his mother ran out, as she often did, she would need help keeping the lights on. She would also need help buying school supplies and clothes. Jessie’s wardobe was nothing high fashion, just sensibly stylish: white Converse sneakers and blue jeans heavily starched, with a razor crease down the middle.

“And whatever you did, always color-coordinate,” he said.

But the snappy clothes couldn’t cover the blisters that opened in class, or the scars that zigzagged down his arms. All scars told a story, and the thick, fleshy ridge that ran down Jessie’s hand, thumb to wrist, reminded him of the life that must never be.

He’d acquired the scar one morning when he was twelve. His family was working a field of romaine, with Jessie cutting the leaves from their roots and laying them down for Roger to box behind him. Taking his eyes off his work, he missed and dug the blade into his hand. The wound was jagged and deep and needed stitches. But it was too close to Christmas and his mother was broke. Instead of asking to leave, he took off his shirt and dipped it into the icy water from the coolers, wrapped his hand, then kept cutting.

As the knife handle pressed into the wound, he’d had a revelation:
This won’t be me
. It was the first time he’d ever seen himself as separate from the rows that bound his mother and the town, from the poverty that squeezed them so tightly atop one another it had driven the whole place crazy.

By then, Wayne Stanley was quarterback at Iowa State and would later sign with the Browns. Anthony Williams was playing at Middle Tennessee State and would go to the Buffalo Bills in the fourteenth round. Newman was a Florida Gator. This was basic knowledge to every young boy in town. If you played for the Raiders, you could go to college, even beyond. As Jessie moved down the row, blood soaking through the wrap, he decided there was a better way to help his mother. But at twelve years old, he was no intimidating presence. Jessie was puny, like a pretzel with a mouthful of teeth.

He wouldn’t realize how skinny he actually was until a few months later, when he’d wake up on the floor of his sixth-grade classroom, dizzy and confused, with a huddle of faces staring over him, murmuring, “Jessie, what’s wrong wit you? Someone call the ambulance!” The doctor would take one look at his drawn belly and ribs grinning out of his chest and
use that word
malnourish
. Oh Lord, was Zara embarrassed! “People gonna think I’m too busy to feed my child,” she said.

They both knew it was because Anthony always ate all the supper. It was Anthony who raided the stove top and left them nothing, licking the pots so clean they could comb their hair by their reflection.

“You waste no time getting home,” Zara would warn them in the mornings, putting down a pot of beans or oxtails before heading to work. “Anthony gonna eat all this.” And he did.

Anthony could
eat
. Even Grandma called him the Human Trash Compactor.

•   •   •

“FOOTBALL?” ZARA SAID
to Jessie when he asked, not even giving it a thought. “Baby, you too scrawny to be playing football. Them boys’ll hurt you up.”

So, like his brother, Jessie joined the middle-school band. He practiced his trumpet long enough at night in his room to convince Zara that he was still dedicated, even long after he’d told the band director, “Don’t look for me here no more,” and made the football team. Since the band always traveled with the team, the plan worked for a while. Until the day in practice when one of his teammates looked out toward the parking lot, frowned, and said, “Jessie, is that your mama comin?”

Zara was blazing a hot streak across the football field with the devil in her eyes. “I thought I told you you can’t be playing no football,” she screamed, then jerked Jessie by the neck and dragged him all the way home. It took his uncles a week to persuade her to let Jessie play.

“The boy’s an athlete,” they told her. “You got yourself a Raider.”

Jessie was so small that he would enter high school weighing barely 150 pounds. But his uncles had been right, he was an athlete—proficient in anything won and lost with speed. Athletics gave him a quiet confidence. He
got to where he could watch people, the way they moved, and immediately know if he was faster.

When he was a freshman at Glades Central, coaches put him on the junior varsity football team to let him grow, then reconsidered one afternoon at the school’s annual field day. Jessie had casually approached the fastest seniors on the Raider track team and doubled down.

“I’ll give you five yards,” he told them.

“You crazy” was the response.

“Okay, I’ll give you ten.”

Then
boom
, he was gone.

By senior year, Jessie was the fastest kid in the Glades. He and McDonald were on the same 4×100 relay team that won the Raiders a state championship. McDonald also remembered the crowds that started gathering at the city pool when Jessie would step on the diving board, executing triple gainers with hardly any effort. Or the afternoons in the school gym playing basketball when Jessie would stand motionless under the rim, then jump up and dunk.

“Jessie didn’t say a lot, but he dominated every sport,” said Louis Oliver, a former safety for the Miami Dolphins who grew up idolizing Hester. “He was just more focused than anyone else. He knew where he wanted to go and how to get there, and he applied himself.”