Free Muck City by Bryan Mealer Page B

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’dalways 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 rise 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 thetown’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