by Bryan Mealer
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.”
• • •
BY HIGH SCHOOL, Jessie had also come to live by an ironclad discipline that he observed with almost neurotic diligence. His resolve was driven by a desire to “become somebody,” but also, surprisingly, by not wanting to embarrass his mother.
He stayed away from alcohol and drugs and boys with chips on their shoulders. It wasn’t the acts themselves he strayed from, but the fear of getting caught. Getting caught meant admitting that someone else had forced his hand, that he was weak and no longer in control. Even worse would be the look of disappointment on his mother’s face. That look would be devastating, he thought, “simply unbearable to take.”
A famous story about Jessie concerns the time in high school when he was riding in a car with friends and one of the boys lit up a joint. As the car filled with smoke, Jessie realized with sudden horror, I’m breathing this stuff, then demanded they pull over and let him out. They were in Pahokee, near the marina, some eight miles from Belle Glade. Jessie got out and walked all the way home.
He also didn’t touch caffeine. “I don’t like that sudden jolt of energy it gives you,” he’d later say. A former college tutor remembered how once he even refused to eat cookies baked for the football team because he hated to feel the sugar “shoot up his jaw.” A teammate explained to her, “You know how careful Jessie is of his ownself.”
• • •
THE RAIDER VARSITY team that Jessie joined in 1978 was nothing like the one he’d grown up watching. In 1974, two years after winning back-to-back championships, Werneke’s Raiders were once again undefeated and playing their arch-nemesis Hollywood Chaminade in the first round of the playoffs.
The Raiders were hit with penalties the entire game, leading many fans to suspect the officials were putting in the fix. In the final seconds of the fourth quarter, after a pass interference call against the Raiders set up a winning Chaminade field goal, the fans rioted. Spectators jumped onto the field and attacked referees, then players got involved. When it was all over, four policemen were hospitalized after being beaten with rocks and football helmets. One officer was dragged unconscious from the field.
The state threatened the death penalty for the entire Glades Central football program, then suspended the team from postseason contention. Several players were arrested. “After a game like last night,” Werneke told a reporter the following morning, “you do a lot of soul-searching. You ask youself, ‘Is it worth it?’ You preach to the kids about sportsmanship and try and set an example, then you see adults go and behave like that.”
The betrayal by the adults in the community was too much for Werneke; he resigned before the next season and took the head coaching job at Titusville High School, where he would win two more titles and become one of the great legends of Florida high school football. Vice-principal and junior varsity coach Willie McDonald, a former Lake Shore Bobcat (and father of Jessie’s friend Ray), took over the Raider team.
McDonald’s first move was to fire every player who’d been involved in the riot. “I’d rather have a team of disciplined athletes than any team at all,” he said. For the next three seasons, the Raiders went 13–17, one year winning only a single game.
In Jessie’s sophomore year, under new coach Ben McCoy, the Raiders finally had the semblance of a championship squad. Led by Hester and running backs Johnny Rowe and Greg Bain, the Raiders put up their first winning season before scandal plagued them again. The state athletics board determined that Rowe, whose father was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, hadn’t lived with his grandmother in Belle Glade longer than a calendar year, which was the required period of residency to play sports. The team was forced to forfeit two games, one of which was a victory over a division rival, which pushed them out of the playoffs.
In Jessie’s junior year, the Raiders advanced to their third state championship game, this time against Milton High School, whose team was bigger, faster, and in much better health. Under the lights of Booster Stadium in Ocala, the Panthers drubbed Glades Central in a 35–6 rout. Hester scored the Raiders’ only touchdown.
By his senior year, Jet had come into his own, well known for his blazing acrobatics and out-of-nowhere catches as both a receiver and a bandit safety. We see him in the pages of the Belle Glade Herald, midflight up the open lane, with a caption that reads, “Speedy Alka-Seltzer didn’t have anything on Glades Central Raider Jessie Hester on Friday night.”
He’d grown up hearing the stories of the fabled ’71 and ’72 teams, championship squads who, despite the racial division and hatred all around them, had bonded as a team and a family and found a way to win. Those stories had inspired Jessie. And now, in his senior year, it was his last chance to experience it himself. With Jessie nominated for All-American, the Raiders advanced to the semifinals, where ironically they came face-to-face with Titusville High, coached by Al Werneke. The game was held in Belle Glade. The Terriers were blessed with a hulking defensive line and Werneke’s unshakable coaching. All night they blitzed Raider quarterback Leonard Camel relentlessly, while shutting down Hester with double coverage.
With seconds left on the clock,
the Raiders found themselves down by five points. There was time for one final play. Having been smothered most of the night, Hester had mainly run decoy for his friend and fellow wideout Ray McDonald. Now, with the game and his Raider legacy in jeopardy, Jet drew up the last play with Camel.
“Leonard,” he told him, “they don’t expect me. So as soon as you get the ball, buy some time. I’m going straight to the post. Just hang it up.”
Camel snapped the ball and scrambled, giving Jet a few precious seconds, then cocked back to throw. But the ball never left his hands. He was hit from behind and went down in a heap as the clock hammered zero. In Hester’s final game as a Raider, he stood alone in the end zone, having never brought home a ring.
• • •
IN JESSIE’S QUEST for a title, Bobby Bowden’s Seminoles seemed the best possible option. After the appearance in the championship game the previous year, the Raiders had begun attracting the attention of college scouts. They’d mainly come to Belle Glade to see Greg Bain, who by then was running over defenses in South Florida like John Henry through the mountain, sometimes scoring half a dozen touchdowns a game. Bain was Big Time, bigger than Wayne Stanley, Anthony Williams, Newman, all of those boys combined. When the scouts had come looking for Bain, they’d also seen Hester. But sadly for Bain, he’d snapped his ankle senior year in a playoff game against Fort Pierce Westwood. That same night, Hester put up five TDs and the scouts didn’t have to waste a trip.
Hester would later describe the recruiting process that followed as “a nightmare.” For a person who’d always moved to the back of the picture, who savored privacy and sought to keep his family’s problems out of public view, the experience was debilitating.
“There would be guys lined up outside Jessie’s house in their cars waiting their turn,” remembered McDonald, who was also being heavily recruited at the time.
The Ohio State recruiter actually slept out front, remembered Roger. They’d already found Jessie hiding at his girlfriend’s, so to avoid them he started staying at his grandmother’s and wearing whatever clothes were there.
Bowden’s relentless pursuit of Hester finally broke him, but he’d been comfortable in that decision. The Seminoles were a serious bowl contender, but most important, after carefully studying campus maps of FSU, the University of Miami, and the University of Florida, he’d determined that FSU was “compacted together” enough to feel the most like Belle Glade.
In his freshman year in Tallahassee, Jessie did all he could to transport the little world of Zara’s tiny two-bedroom. He called home every other day and found rides on weekends back to Belle Glade. Home became the theme of every term paper Jessie would write. “How Much I Miss Home,” by Jessie Hester; “How Much I Miss Home Cooking,” by Jessie Hester; “How Much I Miss My Room at Home,” and so on.
“Looking at him, one saw the product of a lifetime of adoring women,” wrote Caroline Alexander, a former tutor at FSU who later profiled several of her student athletes in the book Battle’s End. “He was extremely good-looking, with the even, clean-cut features of a matinee idol.… His were the playful, unthreatening good looks of a best friend’s older brother.”
In Tallahassee, Hester clocked the fastest forty on the Seminole squad, along with the fastest one hundred. We see him as an eager freshman receiver, shortly after catching his first touchdown in a 17–0 victory over Louisville. In front of fifty thousand fans at Doak Campbell Stadium, with a late-summer mist shimmering off the lights above, Hester shot from the eleven-yard line on a fade route, but was bumped by cornerback Roger Clay just as the ball was thrown. Off balance, he leaped into the end zone, curling his body around Clay’s legs, and came up with the catch.
“I thought I was in a dream,” Hester told the Lakeland Ledger. “Coach Bowden has always told us that once your number is called, you have to drive to the top.”
“When he made that diving catch,” joked Bowden, who was standing nearby, “I became a better coach.”
In his four years at Florida State, Hester caught 107 passes for 2,100 yards, leaving behind electrifying memories, such as running a seventy-seven-yard reverse for a touchdown in a victory against number-one-ranked Miami, and against South Carolina making ten catches for 170 yards. But despite lofty predictions during the early eighties that Bowden’s Seminoles had the bones to be national champions, the team never went farther than the Orange Bowl.
At the end of his senior season, Hester was standing with friends at a fraternity party when somebody pinched his butt. Whipping around, he saw Lena Derouen, whose friend had committed the offense and dashed away, leaving her alone. The two instantly clicked.
Lena was just a freshman, eighteen, beautiful, with light mocha skin that she’d inherited from her Creole father, a career naval officer who’d settled his family in Jacksonville. Lena could be loud and sassy, and her bubbly confidence perfectly offset Jessie’s stoic shyness. Probably more appealing to Hester was that Lena knew nothing of football, or of Jessie the Jet.
“I had no idea who he was,” she said. “He never even talked about football. He was a homebody. Most of the time we’d just stay at his apartment and watch TV.”
It wasn’t until weeks after meeting Lena, during her first trip to Belle Glade, that Jessie even allowed her a glimpse of the athlete he was. Standing in the backyard, dressed in tight jeans, he’d started executing double backflips off the wooden fence, leaving her in stitches. So it was an even bigger surprise a month later when he told her he was going to the NFL.
At the end of his junior season, Hester had first realized he could possibly be draft material, but he didn’t know how high. Running back Greg Allen had always been the superstar on the Seminoles squad, and everyone predicted he would go early in the first round.
On draft day, Jessie called Lena, who was at her parents’ house in Jacksonville, and suggested she might want to come back to Tallahassee in case he got picked. Teams had already started calling: first Buffalo, who said they’d love to have him if he was still available in the second round. Same with Dallas, Chicago, and Denver. Incredibly superstitious, Hester had scheduled no parties; he watched the draft on television at his apartment with roommate and fellow Seminole Cletus Jones. Shortly after Mississippi Valley State wideout Jerry Rice was picked number sixteen by the 49ers, Jessie got a phone call.
“Are you ready to become an L.A. Raider?” the voice asked.
“Am I ever,” he said.
The Raiders had chosen him number twenty-three. Greg Allen went number thirty-five to Cleveland in the second round. The 1984 Super Bowl championship team of Howie Long, Cliff Branch, and Jim Plunkett would soon offer Hester a million-dollar contract, a $605,000 signing bonus, and $400,000 in other bonuses. His life, and the lives of his family, had just been forever altered. After years of careful attention to his ownself and the little things, Jet was finally seeing the reward. He was finally the provider he’d always dreamed of becoming. But if there was any excitement, he did his best to hide it.
“Me and Greg gotta do an interview,” he told Lena once the draft was over.
“It didn’t hit me what had just happened,” she said. “Because when he came back, we didn’t celebrate or anything. We just sat around with Cletus and watched Batman.”
• • •
THE FIRST-ROUND SELECTION of Jessie Hester was more symbolic than anything; colleges had been pouring into Glades Central ever since Jet’s high school days. And four years earlier, Pahokee’s Rickey Jackson, a future Hall of Famer, had been drafted in the third round by the Saints. Like the cane and vegetables that grew in the silty soil, Hester’s selection simply solidified the muck as a football land of plenty.
The following year, New England would draft Hester’s high school teammate Ray McDonald. Before the decade was out, Louis Oliver would go first round to the Dolphins. Jimmy Spencer to the Saints. Rhondy Weston would be drafted by the Cowboys, Willie Snead by the Jets, and John Ford would go to Detroit.
The ri
se of Jessie the Jet seemed to coincide perfectly with the decline of the home he knew and loved. In April 1985, two weeks before Hester declared himself an L.A. Raider, Belle Glade was once again the focus of national embarrassment.
At the first International AIDS Conference, held in Atlanta, tropical disease doctors Mark Whiteside and Carolyn MacLeod presented research about a small agricultural town in the Everglades that was defying what doctors understood about the transmission of the deadly virus.
Until then, it was agreed that AIDS was confined mainly to homosexuals and intravenous drug users. But in Belle Glade, they discovered, it had also infected heterosexual men living predominantly in the town’s migrant ghetto. Whiteside and MacLeod suspected that environmental conditions—the cramped living quarters, leaky pipes, communal bathrooms, drugs, casual sex, prostitutes, and mosquitoes that fed on the population—all contributed to Belle Glade’s staggering rate of infection.
At the time of their presentation, there were thirty-seven confirmed cases—giving Belle Glade an infection rate fifty-one times the national average. The fallout was immediate. The New York Times ran the headline POVERTY-SCARRED TOWN NOW STRICKEN BY AIDS, and a deluge of negative media coverage ensued.
Local papers in South Florida had long reported the conditions in the migrant quarter. In 1979, five years after Palm Beach County produced a record-setting $680 million in vegetables and sugarcane, a survey found that nearly half of the city’s housing was substandard, while 16 percent was “dilapidated and unfit for human habitation.” In 1984 the city accounted for half of the black households in the county without bathrooms. A report by the Miami Herald that same year found that a large number of these substandard buildings were actually owned by Belle Glade city commissioners.
Add the concrete bodegas surrounding these apartments, painted bright colors with elaborate hand-painted signs; the vacant lots filled with garbage and weeds, chickens scratching in the dirt, traces of Spanish, Creole, and French on the breeze, and blackness in every direction, and downtown Belle Glade took on the appearance of another country.
