by Bryan Mealer
“Mary gave her life to Mario,” Mary’s sister Gail would say. “The boy has purpose. He is here for a reason.”
For Mario, that reason was to play football, something he’d discovered to fill the gaping emptiness inside. And now in his senior year, it was to deliver his father’s dream: having a son win a championship as a Raider, a wish his three older brothers were unable to deliver.
The linebacker had been the last person to leave the field after the Raiders lost the title game the previous year. Sitting alone in the end zone, tears streaking his face, he’d looked up at Hester and told him, “We’ll be back. I’ll bring us here.”
Hester sensed a leader in his midst. When the quarterback position came open, he chose Mario, not caring that physically he was hardly quarterback material.
Like Gail, the coach had seen something undeniable.
“The will drives him,” he said.
But for Mario, leading the Raiders and fulfilling his father’s desire would take both an emotional and physical toll. And the spotlights that so often found young men in the Glades and bestowed them with opportunity and fame would prove elusive for the unlikely quarterback.
• • •
IF DAVONTE ALLEN had a nickname, it would be “Clean.”
For him, Belle Glade symbolized the great valley of the shadow of death that he steeled himself against each morning in prayer. But his feet had never walked its menacing streets, something that Deacon Julius Hamilton would credit as one of his greatest achievements in life.
Davonte was raised in his grandparents’ tiny church overlooking the canal, where regal men still donned bowler hats in the Everglades summer. Growing up, he’d followed a rigid course of schoolwork, Bible study, athletics, and weekend chores. Crossing these lines guaranteed swift rebuke, “for the wrath of God shall fall upon the disobedient child,” Julius liked to warn.
In a region where many children never traveled as far as the coast, Davonte’s grandparents had shown him the country and introduced him to a bigger world. They’d enrolled him at Glades Day School, a private, mostly white institution on the opposite end of town that opened in the 1960s, before integration, and boasted six state football titles of its own.
After two years as a standout receiver for the Glades Day Gators, Davonte transferred into Glades Central already a champion. The diamond-studded ring from that winning season now sat on a shelf in his room next to his old Bible, a display that provided both daily nourishment and inspiration. For Davonte, the move to a lesser school was the only way to prove himself on a bigger stage, where the rewards of a righteous servant—college and a career in the NFL—lie waiting under those prime-time lights. But to reach them, he would first have to escape the long, imposing shadow of Kelvin Benjamin.
• • •
FOR THE 96 PERCENT of Glades Central students who did not wear the maroon and gold on Friday nights, there were no weekly faxes by way of the Crimson Tide or Hurricanes. There were no photo spreads in the Palm Beach Post, no middle-aged men in performance wear sending texts laced with promise; no eleventh-hour home visits by the head coach to seal the deal, and certainly no expenses-paid tours of universities across the nation, replete with restaurant dinners, hotel rooms, and eager coed escorts.
For the other 96 percent left in the shadow of football—and especially teenage girls, who accounted for 31 percent of all pregnancies in the Glades—getting a college scholarship was a hard-fought slog up a mountain, one whose peak was reached by only the most focused and diligent students. Luck could carry you only some of the way. For students like Jonteria Williams, it also helped to be fearless and never forget how to smile.
The smile was the first thing to radiate from her tiny, muscular frame, like a single pinhole pouring light through the darkness, her message to the world that said, I have chosen to shine, thank you.
The smile was front and center—on the sidelines of Effie C. Grear Field as she led the Raider cheerleaders through their chants; through the coursework of senior year and two college courses she attended each week to get ahead; through the corridors of the local hospital where she did her internship; through debutante practice, meetings of the Twenty Pearls sorority, National Honors Society, and the planning committee for the prom. And the impulse to smile kept her eyes open another twenty hours each week at Winn-Dixie, where she stood over a cash register to help her mother pay the bills.
“Her smile is the smile,” said Theresa Williams. “Everyone always asks, ‘Is that your little girl in Winn-Dixie? She smiles all the time.’ ”
When Jonteria was eleven years old, Theresa sat her two daughters down and explained that their father was not coming home. John Williams, the competent, hardworking provider, had been arrested in Georgia and was serving a ten-year sentence. The man was gone in an instant. The girls were on their own.
That same year, watching her mother work two jobs to fill the gap, Jonteria announced she would become a doctor. Right away, mother and daughter formed an alliance in pursuit of this goal, because if Theresa knew anything, it was this: for a girl to make it out of the Glades and into medical school—poor, black, with a single parent and nary a connection—she would need a long and running start.
• • •
TO UNDERSTAND WHERE our characters and story begin, to feel the isolation of the far-flung Glades, first you must drive.
You begin in Palm Beach along Worth Avenue, “the Rodeo Drive of Florida,” where a parakeet caws from a coconut palm outside the Hermès store and a woman in tea-saucer shades keeps a limousine waiting. After three quick turns, you enter Southern Boulevard and keep your wheels pointed west, past Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and the shopping malls of Wellington, until the land unfurls into a green carpet of sawgrass and sugarcane, and heat waves dance along the bend of the earth. The plunge into wilderness is so sudden it brings to mind what you know about that road: how gators can cross at night and send a car careening into the canal, how the cane fires in autumn can jump the blacktop, and how, every spring, swarms of mating flies crossing the plain explode against the windshield like fat, yellow rain.
Forty minutes after leaving one of the wealthiest enclaves in America, you enter one of the poorest. The welcome sign that greets visitors to Belle Glade reads, HER SOIL IS HER FORTUNE, but any profits produced by the black, loamy muck have long eluded most of those still living there. The region was once known as the “Winter Vegetable Capital of the World.” But many of those fields and the jobs they produced were engulfed long ago by Big Sugar and the machines that now turned its fortunes. In 2009, the per-capita income in Belle Glade was just $14,018. Official unemployment stood at 25 percent, although city officials estimated it was closer to 40. The crumbling, sun-blasted apartment blocks in the migrant ghetto more resembled the outskirts of Kampala or Nairobi than any rural American town. It was a place so removed from modern society that some families had resorted to catching rainwater to survive.
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 sc
hool 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.
The 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.”
