by Bryan Mealer
Reporters arrived from as far as Sweden to write the AIDS story, and while in town they also found the sex, crime, and tales of drug dealers directing traffic along Avenue E. The new label “AIDS Capital of the World” was all Belle Glade needed to continue its journey to the bottom.
Most damning about MacLeod and Whiteside’s presentation was the misconception that mosquitoes could possibly transmit the virus. That fear turned Belle Glade into a leper colony overnight. Businesses began closing and moving away. A major retail store withdrew plans for an opening, along with a developer ready to build a large subdivision. Belle Glade residents shopping in Miami and Fort Lauderdale were stunned when merchants sprayed their checks with Lysol. Teams canceled games scheduled for Belle Glade, and after an away match, cheerleaders returned upset when other girls refused to shake hands or share refreshments. Visitors were seen driving though town wearing surgical masks. And guests at the Belle Glade Motor Inn began calling ahead seeking guarantees they wouldn’t catch the virus and die.
“What’s the first sign of AIDS?” the joke went.
“Belle Glade: 5 miles.”
But behind the jokes and sensational stories, the disaster was indeed real. AIDS ravaged Belle Glade, particularly downtown, where sex and drugs were readily available. Entire families disappeared. Houses went empty. The Miami Herald reported that one girl had lost both her parents twenty-four hours apart. Even today, the city carries a staggering number of cases (434 living with HIV/AIDS in 2010), and most everyone you met had a friend or a relative who’d died of the disease in the past decade.
If the stigma and fallout of AIDS weren’t bad enough for the Glades economy, Big Sugar dealt an even greater blow. In the early 1990s, the region’s sugar companies found themselves mired in lawsuits filed by H-2 cane cutters, who claimed they were being cheated on wages. For the growers, the lawsuits ran up millions in legal fees and caused a public-relations fiasco for an industry already reviled as one of the “evil empires” alongside Big Tobacco and Big Oil. With the recent advent of mechanical harvesters that could now travel atop the soft muck, growers decided to end the worker program altogether.
“From a public-relations standpoint,” said Barbara Miedema, spokesperson for the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, “there was no way you could put a pretty face on importing people to do a job that people of America wouldn’t do, who are black as coal, work in black muck in shin guards in the heat, swinging a machete. I don’t care what you do. It just doesn’t look great.”
In 1993, H-2 workers harvested the last sugarcane in Florida, and when these men left, so did their money. Businesses along Avenue A and Main Street slowly began to vanish. The rapidly expanding coastal suburbs such as Wellington—now just a half-hour drive east along state route 80—began pulling away many of the remaining white and middle-class black families, lured by shopping centers, gated communities, and better schools. The city’s tax revenue plummeted. By 2006 the county had taken over most public services in Belle Glade, including the city’s fire and police departments.
Many now feel that Big Sugar’s only lasting legacy in the Glades is the chronic joblessness and underemployment that soon gripped the region. Much of the old land that once made Muck City the winter vegetable capital of the world and employed tens of thousands now sits under cane, which is harvested by machines. Perpetuating this system, critics say, is the archaic U.S. sugar program that continues to prop up growers despite the collateral damage done to the local economy.
United States sugar policy, which is wrapped inside every farm bill passed by Congress, guarantees American sugar growers 85 percent of the domestic market, which in turn drives up prices for consumers and businesses. As of May 2011, Americans paid thirty-six cents a pound for sugar—about 50 percent higher than the world market price. The high price of sugar has proven hurtful to small businesses that depend on it to function. In 2000, the Government Accountability Office reported the sugar program had cost refiners, manufacturers, and consumers about $2 billion per year. More recently, economists put that figure at around $4 billion. Because of this, food and beverage conglomerates largely did away with sugar years ago in favor of cheaper corn-based sweeteners.
Today, most of the top jobs in the Glades-area sugar mills are held by Cubans, whites, or those with advanced education or connections, while local blacks are left with mostly low-paying jobs such as janitors and truck drivers. U.S. Sugar’s citrus division near Clewiston even came under recent criticism for importing more than four hundred Mexican workers to pick oranges at $9.20 per hour.
Greg Schell, the labor lawyer who challenged them, was told the younger generation of local African Americans were unwilling to work as hard.
“We’ve encouraged the sugar industry to supplant all the vegetable land to grow sugar, a crop we don’t even need to produce domestically. But it’s profitable for a few people, and these guys can’t lose money the way the sugar program is set up,” said Schell, the managing attorney at the Florida Legal Services’ Migrant Farmworker Justice Project, based in Lake Worth.
What few jobs remain in agriculture are now divided among local African Americans, Haitians, and a relatively recent influx of Latinos, who now make up over one-third of Belle Glade’s and Pahokee’s citizens. (In Belle Glade alone, Hispanics were solely responsible for a 17 percent jump in population over the last decade.) These migrants plant sugarcane from August through December, but mostly they pick corn. Belle Glade produces nearly one-third of the sweet corn grown in America, which is harvested each spring and early fall. But come late fall and winter, when sugar is being harvested as far as the eye can see, very few locals are involved.
“People simply cannot make a decent living, and our sugar program is central to that,” said Schell. “It creates this distorted model that encourages production of this crop which is run by companies who choose to segregate all the good jobs by race, leaving very little, if anything, for the African Americans and Haitians. So what you’ve got is just chronically poor people. And it’s hard to see how that pattern changes.”
The nature of migrant work had historically made for an ever-shifting employment rate. With the jobless rate consistenly high (city officials estimated it was around 40 percent), crime flourished.
Already a nuisance in Belle Glade, crime began spiking in the mid-1990s to levels unprecedented for a small rural town. In 2003, Belle Glade made the FBI’s list of top-three most violent cities in the country, its crime rate fueled by nearly a dozen gangs that saturated the downtown streets with drugs. In Palm Beach County, the sale of marijuana or cocaine within a thousand feet of a church or school carried a higher felony rap than the sale of it elsewhere. And in downtown Belle Glade, a church seemed to rise up every three blocks.
These days, according to Schell, most criminal defendants in drug cases are urged by their public defenders to plead guilty, rather than run the risk if scheduling a trial on the coast and not getting witnesses. “So they walk out with time served,” said Schell, “but now they have a criminal conviction.” In 2010 the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office estimated that over half of all young men in Belle Glade between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five had felony convictions that barred them from getting well-paying jobs. These days, even the Burger King on Main Street requires a background check for management positions.
For the many kids who avoided trouble, finding a career path in the Glades was daunting. Aside from seasonal labor, the only remaining jobs were with the sheriff’s department and two prisons that shimmered in the outlying cane like dark omens. “In the Glades, either you pick it or you guard it,” said Schell.
Which is why, more so than anywhere else in America, the game of football carried such profound importance that it held near-magical properties. It seemed as though the worse things became, the more athletes the Glades produced. The 1994 and ’95 Raider teams yielded nine NFL players, including Fred Taylor of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Reidel Anthony of the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers, both first-round draft selections. In 2001, Glades Central had seven former players in the NFL—more than any other high school in the nation.
Eight players from the Raiders’ 2001 team went on to play at Division I universities and two later advanced to the NFL, including New York Jets wide receiver Santonio Holmes. As a Pittsburgh Steeler, Holmes was MVP of Super Bowl XLIII for his stunning last-second grab in the corner of the end zone to give the Steelers the victory. Standing on the opposite sideline that night was Arizona’s Anquan Boldin, his old rival from Pahokee.
“The special thing about Glades Central is that kids love to play,” said Willie Bueno, who coached the Raiders in the 2000 championship. “It’s important to them. They’re born to compete and they give great effort. For a coach, the carrot you give at Glades Central is you do good and you’ll get out of here and go to school. You go to some of these other schools on the coast, and that’s just not the motivator. A lot of times their daddy can pay for school.”
The only memorial to these men and their tradition is a wall at Glades Central’s Effie C. Grear Field containing a list of title seasons and the former players who have gone pro. Although the list is outdated, its positioning makes it the first thing you see as you enter the field.
Looking at the wall, one would be wrong to assume it is a celebration. Rather, it could be read as a statement of expectation, a warning to all who enter with the title head coach.
The season began on a sweltering August morning with dark, low-hanging clouds that seemed to snag along the cane tops in the distance. At one end of the practice field, head coach Jessie Hester leaned against his gray Ram pickup and surveyed the land. He was dressed in standard attire: a matching T-shirt and shorts, and a cap turned backward on his head. A gold nameplate with the word JET hung around his neck. Every few minutes, he’d tip a bag of sunflower seeds into his mouth and reveal the scars of his trade. Apart from the dark rows of turf burn along his arms, both pinky fingers had been permanently deformed, the result of being broken and dislocated dozens of times by incoming passes. Hester would work the seeds with his teeth, then crane his neck to spit. Each time, he’d glance up at the gathering of fresh recruits and appear to wince.
For the Glades Central Raiders, the 2010 season was kicking off with all the familiar signs. The sugarcane was high and green and shimmered in the breeze like a whispering sea. The summer air was like breathing through cotton. And Glades Central, still the poorest high school in the state of Florida, had one of the best-ranked football teams in America. It was this last part that filled Hester’s stomach with dread.
The national ranking in USA Today, published that morning, came despite what had happened the previous season, when Hester’s team, once again ranked among the country’s most elite, had dropped the state championship game.
The loss had been a colossal disappointment, especially since the season had been so glorious, so near perfect. As in so many seasons past, the Raiders had won their division undefeated, then coasted through the playoffs. In late November, after a blowout win against Tampa Robinson, they’d sealed a date with Cocoa High School in the state 2A title game, which was held in the Orlando Citrus Bowl.
The Cocoa Tigers were the reigning champs and had everything under the hood: a pounding running game that took victories by attrition, a fleet of DI receivers, and a swarming defense that held opponents to double-digit yardage.
They’d ended the regular season with a stunning come-from-behind victory against Jacksonville’s Bolles School in a clash of defending champions. Bolles had won ten state titles, nine of them under Charles “Corky” Rogers, who was the winningest coach in Florida high school history. Rogers and the Bulldogs were riding a forty-two-game winning streak. They’d not lost a game at home in four years, until Cocoa rallied from a two-touchdown deficit to beat them 44–37 in overtime.
Still, the Raiders entered the game the favorites, mainly due to their star-studded roster full of skill players. Nearly all of Belle Glade had turned out, eager to launch a new dynasty in the Glades. Fox Sports Florida had broadcast the game live. And there before seven thousand in attendance and all the Sunshine State, the mighty Raiders, those uncatchable, seen-on-Sunday Raiders, had gone and laid a giant egg.
The Raider offense tacked up thirteen easy points before the half, then spectacularly fell apart in the third quarter, dismantled by a team whose greatest strength was its unflashy discipline and attention to the little things. The Tigers won the game by a score of 27–13, mainly by seizing on interceptions and a litany of mindless penalties. It was like watching eleven ants take apart a Porsche in under half an hour.
After Cocoa’s quarterback took a knee to end it, Hester had to run halfway onto the field shouting, “Lose with dignity!” because his players were flinging their helmets to the ground while others crumpled to the turf and sobbed. The ride home to Belle Glade seemed to last days.
• • •
HESTER’S HIRING TWO years earlier had caused enormous excitement. Jessie the Jet, the most celebrated player in Raider history, had returned to his embattled hometown to give something back. But Belle Glade was different from most small towns, in that Hester was not actually the first former legend to return. That was Willie Snead, whose abrupt departure had left an opening for Hester in the first place. Snead, the former wide receiver for the New York Jets, had also been compelled to give something back, which he did in 2006, bringing Glades Central its sixth state title and golden rings as fat as walnuts for his team.
That season, Snead had been blessed with one of the best Raider teams in years, with two NFL-bound receivers on his wings in Deonte Thompson and Travis Benjamin (no relation to Kelvin). But the Raiders still dropped three games, including the one that arguably mattered most, the annual matchup against rival Pahokee.
Snead’s coaching and motives came into question. People started talking, the way they do. Maybe Snead was just career-obsessed, looking to leverage a bigger job on the back of his famous alma mater. It didn’t take long before Snead was plain “anti-community” and the town was boycotting his home games. Even after he won the championship, Snead was a pariah.
The Raiders lost again to Pahokee the following season before being eliminated in the semifinals by three points. A month later, Snead seemed to confirm everyone’s wisdom by accepting a high-paying job at a private school in Michigan, where he won another title. His coaches parlayed their stints in Belle Glade for assistant jobs at LSU and the University of Miami.
“The opportunity I got to come back to my alma mater and give to the community, and then to face the ridicule that you face, it was really disturbing,” Snead told the Palm Beach Post upon his resignation. “It really bothered me and I think it bothered the other coaches too.”
Once Snead was gone, fans and players petitioned the school to offer the job to Hester. By that time, Jet was in his twelfth year of retirement, two years longer than he’d even played, living quietly between Belle Glade and his home in Wellington, a suburb of West Palm Beach. During his career, as his hometown had started its slow decline, he’d invested in devalued real estate, buying and refurbishing apartment blocks in and around the quarter. He’d also built a house for Zara in a new development on Belle Glade’s south side, then bought a small meat market and Laundromat for her to manage.
He was spending his days engrossed in the puttering routine of family life: getting kids ready for school, sending Lena off to her job at the sheriff’s department, then driving thirty miles to his properties to paint, lay carpet, and wait for plumbers.
His connection with his alma mater had remained solid. During the years in the league, Hester had paid for football cleats and jerseys, and bought the Raiders’ mascot costume. For his old track team, he’d covered the cost of shoes and plane tickets for out-of-state meets. Once he’d retired, his face was a familiar one at Raider home games, especially during years when his eldest son, Jessie junior, played wide receiver.
To th
e fans, there had been no need to question allegiances. Jessie had kept his roots deep. Even if his wife did make him live in Wellington, Jet’s home was in Belle Glade. He was a muckstepper to the bone.
During those years, whenever one coach would fall out of favor, the school and fans would lobby Hester to take the job. But he always declined. The game had already kept him away from his family for a decade; he’d even missed Jessie’s birth while playing in Los Angeles. But after the latest petition and subsequent offer, Hester was driving downtown, near his old apartment, when he saw something that made him reconsider.
The sight was nothing extraordinary: two men in sagging jeans standing on the corner of Southwest Sixth Street and Avenue A. The corner was a known drug market, and if Hester had to guess, they were most likely dealers or lookouts. But as he drove past, he recognized them as old teammates of his son Jessie. The men had not only been Raiders, but they’d also sat in his kitchen and eaten his groceries. Now here they were on the corner, just two more jitterbugs caught in the swirl.
All day, the question nagged at him: Could I have helped those guys?
Hester accepted the job and the meager $3,600 salary, the annual pay for a head football coach in Palm Beach County. He announced to friends and family, “I’m not here to win championships, I’m here to win kids,” and was quickly put to the test.
The first thing he realized was that half his team were affiliated with gangs. Some were actual members, but most had simply been intimidated into vowing allegiance. The gangs and cliques pitted neighborhood against neighborhood, town against town: trailer park versus South Bay; Pahokee versus Belle Glade. The rivalries had also infected the harmony of his team.
No wonder they’re losing games, he thought. Most of these kids hate each other. Linemen would flat-out refuse to block for a running back, fights would break out during practice, and kids were beaten while walking home.
