by Lisa Fenn
“I don’t have anything,” Dartanyon moaned. “This bag of food is all I got.”
The gunman patted down Dartanyon’s pockets before ripping the sack out of his hands. Dartanyon took a breath of air, braced for it to be his last, and waited for the sound of the trigger to blow him away. Disoriented, he lay on the pavement, unable to see that the two thugs had slipped back into the shadows.
Arthur was waiting with a half-finished beer in his hands when Dartanyon finally staggered through the back door, hand spread across his face. “What took you so—,” Arthur started in on him, only he didn’t need to finish the question to know the answer. As blood splattered across the floor Arthur realized his boy had been jumped. He bolted out the door toward Shrimp Boat like a vigilante, yelling “Who just beat up my son? I’m gonna kill you!” No one owned up, and Arthur quickly ceded the search, winded after a few houses.
Arthur taped up the gash on his son’s forehead and held a bag of ice on his lip. After Dartanyon fell asleep, Arthur knelt beside him and traced around the wounds with his finger. “Dar, nobody’s gonna beat you up like that ever again,” he quietly promised.
The next night, Arthur led Dartanyon into the backyard. “I’m gonna teach you how to fight so you can defend yourself,” Arthur said. “No more walking like a target, like you don’t have a good sense about you.” Arthur had studied tae kwon do at the Cleveland Academy of Self-Defense in his early twenties. “My best friend and I were evenly matched, and it would take fifteen minutes or more for one of us to win,” Arthur remembered. “So we said, ‘Let’s try this with our eyes closed. It’ll be over faster.’” The twosome agreed on a set of rules, wrapped bandanas around their eyes, and branded it the “blind technique.”
Arthur thought this would be a perfect training method for someone with low vision. He raised Dartanyon’s fists to the ready position and pressed their wrists together. Arthur slowly slid his arms up and down, side to side, guiding Dartanyon’s movement. “Keep contact and follow motion,” Arthur explained. He wanted Dartanyon to anticipate his opponents’ movement and hone his reflexes. “Feel how the person moves by how their hand is going and then you go the opposite way,” he instructed. Dartanyon’s unusually long arms flailed wildly as he worked to land his punches.
Dartanyon wasn’t keen on fighting at first. The assault had shaken him deeply, and the bandages across his face reminded him of all there was to fear. He stayed in the house every day for a week, until Arthur returned home late at night and summoned him to the backyard to spar. Arthur may not have known how to check Dartanyon’s homework or read him books before bed, but he could teach him how to withstand the streets.
“Anyone who tells you they’ve never been beat up is a liar,” Arthur told his swollen and scared son. “You can’t learn to fight until you’ve been beat up. Getting jumped is what gives you heart, cuz you say ‘That ain’t gonna happen to me again.’”
With Arthur’s guidance, Dartanyon’s competitive spirit began to emerge, and a fighter was born under the yellow moon. He learned to feel his way through a duel, developing trustworthy instincts. He settled into a sense of timing and soon outmaneuvered his old man with ease. Arthur was elated by his son’s quick progress. Little did he know that his “blind technique” was a real thing, and because of it, Dartanyon would one day see the world.
“After Dartanyon got a little confidence under his belt, his whole demeanor changed,” Arthur remembered. “He walked with a swagger. I knew he would never be jumped like that again.”
Two years passed before anyone tried.
Dartanyon, then fifteen years old, was walking home from school in broad daylight when another teen came into his focus, mumbling and gesturing like he wanted to fight.
“Run it,” the thug ordered. Dartanyon knew what that meant: empty your pockets, hand over your money, your phone, all that you have. Dartanyon refused. The attacker pulled a six-inch knife and plunged it toward Dartanyon. Dartanyon lurched backward, causing the attacker to miss his abdomen but slash his forearm instead. The attacker pulled back, preparing to take another stab; as he did, Dartanyon landed a punishing right hook to the jaw, leveling the thug and sending the knife into the grass. Dartanyon straddled him and worked him over like a punching bag.
He left his victim writhing on the ground, only then noticing how deep his own flesh wound ran. The blood flowed steadily. He hurried home to wrap it in towels, applying hours of pressure until the bleeding ceased. He needed stitches, but he knew that even if he could find his father, Arthur would be too drunk or high to drive him to the hospital.
Things had turned from bad to worse when the new second-floor tenants moved in the previous year. They were crack dealers, and Arthur became their most faithful customer. When employed, Arthur went straight upstairs after work in search of his next hit. When he was between jobs—the polite way of saying he had been fired again—he would be out with his cronies as soon as the previous night’s hangover wore off. Some weeks Dartanyon saw his father’s dope boys more than his father. When Arthur was paid up, his runners watched out for Dartanyon, floating him a few bucks for food. When Arthur fell behind on his tab, Dartanyon fielded the angry calls from dealers or woke up to find that his video game console had been confiscated as collateral. The real trouble came in the car, though, where Arthur often drove under the influence as Dartanyon rode resigned beside him. “He’d be weaving back and forth, but I wasn’t really afraid,” Dartanyon remembered. “I couldn’t imagine death being any worse than what I was living.”
Dartanyon begged his father to stop drinking, even pouring salt in his beer. Arthur chastised him for meddling, raving a bunch of nonsense over and over as he always did when drunk or high. “Remember, my job is to make you into a better man than me,” Arthur slurred. Dartanyon didn’t think that sounded like a mighty aspiration, yet he clung to even this most vague attempt at parenting, choosing high roads when he saw them. When his father passed out in the chair, Dartanyon covered him with a blanket. When he came to, Dartanyon forced a few scraps of food into him before heading to school. Arthur was the only parent Dartanyon had left; he refused to lose his father too.
The only time Dartanyon could count on Arthur being sober was on Sunday mornings, when Uncle Famous picked them up in the Tried Stone Church bus. “Hello there, I’m Famous,” Uncle Famous would introduce himself, pleased with his unique moniker.
“What are you famous for?” people would ask.
“Nothing yet, but God’s got plans for me!” he would answer with a twinkle in his eye.
Regardless of what condition Arthur was in, he ironed his tailored two-piece black suit on Wednesday for church on Sunday, and made sure Dartanyon did the same. Drugs and alcohol may have stripped away Arthur’s dignity, but they did not cloud his respect for the Lord.
“Just trust in God for everything, and He’ll handle it,” Arthur preached to his son as they boarded the ramshackle white bus.
“God hasn’t been handling things for a long time, so we gotta figure something else out,” Dartanyon shot back. Arthur scowled. Dartanyon snapped back to minding his manners like a good choirboy should. And Uncle Famous praised the Lord all the way down godforsaken Kinsman.
DARTANYON’S DAYS DID not get any easier, but he did grow stronger, in body and in mind. Once he immersed himself in sports, his teammates became his family, and Leroy, his brother.
“Come on, Beefcake!” Dartanyon barked as he stood over Leroy on the weight bench, my camera rolling. “You can do this, man!”
I returned to Cleveland in early March 2009 to begin shooting with Leroy and Dartanyon. I filmed Dartanyon holding his book up to his face and peering closely into his computer monitor. I got Leroy angling through doorways and whipping around corners. After classes, I captured Dartanyon carrying Leroy up the fifteen stairs to Lincoln-West’s weight room—a converted hallway lined with dinged-up lockers, out-of-date weights, exposed electrical wires, and a water-damaged ceiling that looked ready
to cave at any moment. A small, petunia-pink portable radio blared Lil Wayne and Shop Boyz. This was their Swole Factory.
On the cinder-block wall in front of Leroy’s bench hung a simple piece of white paper that read, “If you want something you never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.” For Leroy, that leap was trust. Could he have a friendship steeped in respect as opposed to charity? Could he know wholeness despite disfigurement?
Leroy wrapped his hands around the bench-press bar, which was loaded with 330 pounds, and looked up at Dartanyon. In a sense, Leroy had been powerlifting himself around since the accident, building massive upper body strength by scuttling around on his arms. He wore cut-off T-shirts even in the dead of winter because so few shirtsleeves fit around his fifteen-inch biceps. To leverage his massive shoulder girth across a nine-and-a-half-inch weight bench and balance the equivalent of a piano over his chest—while predominantly using his core strength for balance—seemed superhuman to me.
“Come on, man, you got this,” Dartanyon urged. Leroy lowered the bar, pressed it up, and with that, marked his new personal best.
“Dude! I can’t believe I did that!” Leroy roared, shaking in excitement as Dartanyon batted him with high fives. In his unguarded elation, Leroy even hugged me for the first time.
As they celebrated their way out of the weight room, what continued to strike me as just as extraordinary as Leroy’s herculean strength was still the understated act that bookended the lift itself—the one that carried him up and down the gymnasium stairs.
“What do you think it was that drew you together as friends?” I asked Leroy and Dartanyon.
“The first time we met, I didn’t know that Dartanyon was legally blind,” Leroy said.
“And I didn’t know Leroy was crippled,” Dartanyon countered. “It was a blind date.”
“But Leroy, why is Dartanyon the one you want carrying you?” I pressed. “Why are you so comfortable with him?”
“He’s easier to get through doorways than my wheelchair,” Leroy answered. “He doesn’t get as many flat tires either.”
Beneath the jokes and jabs, I suspected they were at least subconsciously drawn together by their disabilities, as well as by race, by poverty, by transience. When Leroy joined the wrestling team, no one expected that Dartanyon would look out for the new kid, especially not one who was so obviously physically challenged, when he himself had his own physical challenges. Dartanyon entered school each day carrying just about every hardship a child can bear. And then he went out of his way to carry one more. Dartanyon’s life had been a demonstration of strength for the sake of his own survival; now on display was his resolve to help someone else thrive.
“They both had handicaps that weren’t their faults,” Dartanyon’s father would later tell me. “Dar didn’t ask to be brought here with them weird eyes, with a daddy who only cared about getting high. Leroy didn’t mean to fall up under the train and get his legs cut off. But they just went balls to the walls and did stuff didn’t nobody think they were going to do.”
Leroy and Dartanyon were inseparable, joined together at more than the hip. Throughout Lincoln’s halls, wherever I found one of them, I almost always found the other—and they were frequently in song. Dartanyon would hum a few bars, Leroy would improvise a harmony, and before long they were grooving and singing like no one was watching—although such was rarely the case. Classmates inevitably gathered around them to dance and laugh along, drawn like magnets into Leroy and Dartanyon’s playful charm. Faculty told me that their friendship had a ripple effect throughout the Lincoln-West student body, smoothing rough edges and tilling barren ground.
“You see a level of hopelessness here in kids who by the time they are fifteen or sixteen years old have already given up,” Coach Hons explained. “They’ve seen people in their lives who put in time and energy, but because of how our economy is structured and how our society is structured, they are still in poverty. As much as there is opportunity in America, there is also a limit, and you see the psychological effects of that limit in our students.”
The image of Dartanyon carrying Leroy suggested that perhaps there were alternatives—choices to combat hopelessness with compassion. These two boys eliminated the right for excuses with their bravery to play on. To those who were taught real men don’t need help, Dartanyon and Leroy proved it was possible to be both tender and tough. Perhaps above all, they showed that giving lightens us.
“Leroy and Dartanyon give their peers a visual reminder that we’re in this together,” Coach Taylor said. “I’m on your back, you’re on my back—whatever it takes, we can get to the finish line. Whatever it takes, we can succeed.”
Following Leroy’s record lift, I looked on as Dartanyon carried Leroy back down the gymnasium stairs. “Leroy’s the man!” Dartanyon shouted, spinning Leroy in circles as he clung to Dartanyon’s back.
“You have no neck for me to wrap my arms around!” Leroy said, laughing. Dartanyon bounded across the gym, completely unhindered by the bouncing ball of a buddy on his back.
“Wow, I forgot what it felt like to skip!” Leroy said, his eyes widening like moons as his spirit traveled back to this airy slice of lost childhood. Dartanyon shocked life into the numb and fraying corners of Leroy’s soul. He pulled Leroy out of his shell and esteemed his accomplishments rather than pitying his disfigurement. And as a result, the bright smile from Leroy’s youth returned, this time effortlessly. He didn’t have to be Dartanyon’s hero. He could simply be his friend. And therein, Leroy found his “somewhere better” that had always been promised to him.
As I watched them spring across the gym floor, I had a hunch that Leroy didn’t need to know why Dartanyon carried him. All that mattered was that he did.
THROUGHOUT THE SPRING of 2009, I returned to Lincoln-West for two out of every four weeks—at times with my film crew, often without it. In the past, I’d coordinated shoots with minors through their parents, yet here there were no parents to give consent, and Pat Sutton thought everything I suggested sounded just fine. On most days Dartanyon lacked a working phone, and Leroy rarely answered his, so on more than one occasion, I planned to film powerlifting events or field trips, only to find that the boys had given me the wrong date or the school calendar was misprinted. As a result, I did a lot of showing up and sitting around with Leroy and Dartanyon. And surprisingly, the idle time together proved to be transformative in our relationship.
Leroy began greeting me with a “Hey”—a red-carpet welcome compared with our basement beginnings. I gathered he was simply tolerating my filming—likely for Dartanyon, who was enjoying his first media experience. Leroy liked seeing Dartanyon happy, and even more, he liked knowing he had a role in Dartanyon’s happiness. Their friendship was slowly but surely deconstructing Leroy’s self-imposed prison. Painful memories were being displaced by new ones of trust.
I continued filming them together in their classes, wanting to capture the best of their routines. Without fail, they were the featured act in Coach Hons’s street law class.
“Leroy, walk over there and sharpen this pencil for me,” Dartanyon said.
Leroy rolled his eyes. “How do I say ‘sharpen your own pencil’ in braille?” he replied.
The class roared on cue, sparking Leroy and Dartanyon to launch into their own vivacious laugh track. As the room quieted, I noticed something curious about the doodles on Dartanyon’s papers. On the top of each page, he scrawled the phrase “Destined for Greatness” in shaded scrolling letters. His audacious declaration sent a shiver up my spine. While I appreciated his optimism, his environment certainly lacked ideal growing conditions for real-world greatness. Were those three words a defiant or oblivious response to the damning limitations upon his life? Could he not tell how high the deck was stacked against him? Had no one told him that poor, black, and disabled register as three strikes and an automatic out in our society?
After class, I followed Dartanyon to his locker. Inside hun
g another piece of notebook paper, branded with the same phrase. “Why do you write ‘Destined for Greatness’ on your papers?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “My dad was bragging on me to one of his friends at work a few years ago, and the guy said, ‘You wrestle, lift weights, and sing in the choir? You must be destined for greatness.’ So I just started writing it. Not sure why.”
I knew why. Hope is a commodity in hardened places, and Arthur’s friend had served up a generous portion of it to Dartanyon. His words echoed a sentiment Dartanyon had not heard since his mother had passed—that maybe he was worth noticing.
Later that week, during last-period art class, Leroy and Dartanyon worked quietly at a table toward the front of the room. Dartanyon’s girlfriend, Jessica, a pretty Puerto Rican girl with long chestnut hair and suspicious eyes, worked beside them. I sat at an empty table in the back of the room while my crew filmed the boys sketching. Both were gifted artists. Dartanyon drew detailed, shaded landscapes, often embedding the phrases “She’s Watching” or “Destined for Greatness” within his etchings; Leroy gravitated toward demons and angels, monsters and dragons.
“I like that constant struggle of good versus evil and the gray area in between,” he said. “Like with dragons, people today think of them as fire-breathing and dangerous. But if you look at their background, their history in ancient mythology, they tend to be creatures that look menacing but are simply misunderstood.”
