Friday Night Lights

The game ended with Permian beating El Paso Austin 49-0. El Paso Austin had been a helpless opponent but even so, the performance of Winchell had been wonderful. He had had the best game of his life—seven for nine passing for 194 yards and four touchdowns. His performance proved how high he could soar when he could unleash himself from the constant self-doubt that had entrapped him after the death of Billy.

  Billingsley’s starting debut had been just the opposite; it was hardly the kind of game that would make him a legend alongside Charlie, or anyone else for that matter. And now there was something else to contend with, something that to Don’s way of thinking was disappointing but somehow inevitable.

  It began at halftime when Gaines said he was going to let an untested junior named Chris Comer play the entire second half at fullback. It was Comer’s first game ever on the Permian varsity, and it was only because of the injury to Boobie that he was there at all—otherwise he would have been back on the junior varsity. He had talent, but the coaches were wary of him. The previous school year he had been ineligible for spring practice because of academic problems, which put him way down in the doghouse. The coaches questioned his work habits and desire, and they were hardly inspired by his background—from the Southside, living not with his parents but with his grandmother.

  But these concerns began to lessen when Comer took the ball early in the third quarter at the 50, lingered behind the line for a split second until a tiny alleyway developed, turned the corner, broke past two defenders with an acceleration of speed, and dashed down the sideline for a touchdown. The run had been so stunning that it was hard to know what to make of it. Had it been a fluke? Or, in the aftermath of Boobie’s knee problems, had he just become the new star running back of Permian High School?

  When he did it again, this time on a twenty-seven-yard touchdown where he just bullied his way past several tacklers, the answer became obvious.

  Belew, who had spent most of the game in the press box relaying offensive signals to Gaines over the headset, moved down to the sidelines in the waning moments of the game, clearly beside himself. He started to gush about Comer, and then he eyed Boobie, who had had knee surgery the day before. He obviously did not want to hurt Boobie’s feelings by raving in front of him about someone else. He moved until Boobie was out of earshot. Then he opened up like an excited child. “Did you see that?” said Belew of Comer’s performance, 116 yards and two touchdowns. “Comer’s a motherfucker!”

  With the injury to Boobie, Billingsley had thought he might get the ball more often. But if Comer continued to run as he had tonight, Billingsley could pretty much forget about that. The ball would go to Comer on the pitches and the sweeps and he would lead the noble but anonymous charge trying to take out the defensive ends and the linebackers. Comer would get all the touchdowns, all the attention, all the glory, and Billingsley would get the aches and pains of being a blocking back.

  That sure as hell wasn’t why he had given up so much to come to Permian, to have a black kid come in and steal away his chance at glory. It was something his father had never had to contend with. There wasn’t one black around when Charlie played. Back then they all went to high school on the Southside, had their own stadium, and as long as they stayed put there was no problem. But things were different now.

  Don knew they had talent. It was just the way some of them kind of swaggered around that bothered him, how some of them seemed to do whatever they wanted in practice and the coaches let them get away with it. It seemed obvious to him that the Permian system was prejudiced against him—it had rules for blacks and then rules for everybody else. “In practice, the niggers, they do what they want to do, and they still start Friday night,” he said. “There are different rules for black and white at Permian.”

  So the injury to Boobie hadn’t made a damn bit of difference. As he later looked back on it, it seemed that the minute one black player got hurt there was another to take over.

  “I didn’t get to carry the ball” was how Don Billingsley sized it up. “They moved up another nigger to carry the ball.”

  (5)

  BLACK AND WHITE

  I

  Nigger.

  The word poured out in Odessa as easily as the torrents of rain that ran down the streets after an occasional storm, as common a part of the vernacular as “ol’ boy” or “bless his ’ittl’ biddy heart” or “awl bidness” or “I sure did enjoy visitin’ with you” or “God dang.”

  Dumb ol’ nigger. Cocky nigger. New Jersey nigger. Smartaleck nigger. Talk nigger. Blame it on the niggers. Afraid of the niggers. Nigger lady. Let the nigger girl do it. Nigger ball. Run, you nigger.

  Like household cleanser, the term had a dozen different uses in Odessa. People said it in casual conversation. They also said it publicly, as just another descriptive adjective. Some people looked tall, some looked short, and some looked nigger.

  An elderly man making a complaint to the city council one day in September said he had given documents to a city employee to copy for presentation to the council. He didn’t remember the name of the person. But he did recall what she looked like. “The nigger lady,” he said at the podium. That’s who he had given the papers to. The Nigger Lady.

  Certain members of the council raised their eyebrows. Some looked to the side a little as if embarrassed. But that was the extent of the protest. The man continued prattling on, and he was treated with the utmost respect. After all, he was a taxpayer.

  People who used the word didn’t seem troubled by it. They didn’t whisper it, or look chagrined after they said it. In their minds it didn’t imply anything, didn’t indicate they were racist, didn’t necessarily mean that they disliked blacks at all. Instead, as several in Odessa explained it, there were actually two races of blacks. There were the hardworking ones who were easy to get along with and didn’t try to cut corners and melded in quite nicely. They deserved the title black. They deserved the respect of fellow whites.

  And then there were the loud ones, the lazy ones, the ones who stole or lived off welfare or spent their whole lives trying to get by without a lick of work, who every time they were challenged to do something claimed they were the helpless victims of white racism. They didn’t deserve to be called black, because they weren’t.

  To the Reverend J. W. Hanson, a black minister who was the pastor of the Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist Church on the Southside, the easiest way for blacks to get along with whites in Odessa was by being non-threatening and obediently towing the line. “If you’re the type of leader that as the establishment says can ‘handle your folk,’ you’ll be all right,” said Hanson. “As long as you don’t rock the boat, then they think you’re a pretty good ol’ fella.”

  There were some whites in town who found the use of the word nigger offensive, but they were so far removed from the mainstream that no one took them very seriously. With her background as an active Democrat, a Unitarian, an ex-hippie, and a Dukakis supporter, it sometimes seemed surprising that Lanita Akins wasn’t forced to walk around town with a shaved head and wearing a pair of striped pajamas like the French collaborators of World War II. The only thing that made her at all typical of Odessa was her passionate devotion to Permian football. “It’s the one thing I do that they think is normal.”

  She loved her hometown, because of what it represented and despite what it represented. She loved the friendliness of it and the small-town feel of it, the way she knew everyone out at the country club or at the store, the way the gossip made an easy circle. She relished the physical rawness of it, the feeling of the wind across her face and the gorgeous lightning storms during the summer when the sky, as she described it, just seemed to open up and dance. She knew the place was as immutable to the changes of time as an iceberg, but there was something reassuring about that. People stood up for one another. They cared about one another. They held old-fashioned values.

  But she also knew that Odessa’s values were old-fashioned as well when it came to race, still rooted in th
e days when the line between white and black was bluntly defined by the American version of the Berlin Wall—the railroad tracks that inevitably ran through the heart of town.

  Back in the forties and fifties and sixties, the areas of occupation had been clearly understood. There was the ordinance on the city books making it illegal for any “white person and any Negro to have sexual intercourse with each other within the corporate limits of the city.” (The term Negro was carefully defined to “include a mulatto, or colored person or any other person of mixed blood having one-eighth or more Negro blood.”) There was the public policy of the city planning and zoning commission, which warned that the city’s “Negro” population should never be given any opportunity to “invade the white residential areas.”

  There were the familiar redline laws that made it impossible for blacks to obtain mortgages or home improvement loans. There were deed restrictions preventing whites from selling their houses to blacks. There was a policy at the county medical center consigning all black patients to the basement, which meant that women giving birth were sometimes put next to patients with infectious diseases. There was the basic system of apartheid in which blacks had their own library, their own clubs, their own schools, their own stadium, their own football team, their own carefully delineated areas where they could walk freely and other places where they walked only at their own risk. They were the same laws, the same policies that applied to blacks all over Texas and all over the South.

  Some of these laws and policies had given way over time, but the change was slow and excruciating. No black family lived above the tracks until 1968, and it took two painful years of searching to find someone willing to sell the first black family a home. School desegregation, imposed by a federal court over bitter protests, did not take place until 1982.

  As a result of that ruling, blacks could move about more freely now in Odessa. They could go to schools in the rich part of town. They could live pretty much where they wanted—assuming they could afford it, which most of them could not. They were still concentrated below the railroad tracks, below where the whites lived. Symbolically and physically, the tracks were still a barrier and still defined an attitude.

  “The most amazing thing to me is the shock on people’s faces that I’m offended by the word nigger,” said Lanita Akins. “They are truly shocked that not only am I shocked, but I have friends who are black.”

  Out where she worked as a secretary for a petrochemical plant, many of the blue-collar workers used the word all the time. She didn’t know how to get them to stop so she hit them back where it hurt, saying “Goddamn Jesus Christ!” with the same bitter snap in the voice. It bothered them, and they frankly didn’t know how a decent person could say a thing such as that, show such utter disrespect for the Lord. But nigger?

  What was wrong with the use of that word? Wasn’t that what they were? Wasn’t that what they always had been? Let a judge shove school desegregation down their throats. Let the federal government have all the free hand-out programs it wanted. It wasn’t going to change the way they felt.

  Look at how they lived down there on the Southside, in those shitty little shacks where the only thing that was missing was pig slop. Look at how you turned on the national news and saw another bunch of ’em being arrested for raping an innocent white girl in Central Park or running a crack house or blowing each other up in some gang dispute because one of them was wearing his hat tilted to the left instead of the right. What the hell was racist about calling ’em niggers when they acted like that? It was just the truth.

  Dwaine Cox, who owned a restaurant downtown, had been raised in Odessa. He had graduated from Permian in 1962 back in the days when it was an all-white school. That was the way he figured it would be for his son, Michael, until the federal government stuck its fat nose in and started telling everybody what to do whether they liked it or not.

  Dwaine was proud of his son, who had started at defensive tackle for Permian in 1987 when the team, the biggest bunch of overachievers ever, had gone all the way to the state semifinals. Michael was tough as nails, pushing his way past offensive linemen who sometimes weighed ninety more pounds than he did. Michael was equally fearless off the field too, getting into frequent fights and once showing up for practice in a shirt covered with blood after an altercation with some kids over at Odessa High. Dwaine wasn’t so proud of that. He wasn’t sure what the hell motivated Michael to get in trouble all the time, but he suspected that the federal government’s desegregation plan had something to do with it. And he, like many others in Odessa, resented the federal government’s coming in and telling good, hardworking people how they should live and who their children should go to school with.

  Dwaine pegged the start of his son’s problems to 1982, when the junior high school he went to got desegregated as a result of the fight that had taken place in the courts. “He would not even go to the bathroom in junior high. He wouldn’t even go to the bathroom, because he was afraid of the niggers and the Mexicans. I think he just decided that he wasn’t going to put up with that crap,” said Dwaine Cox.

  “You take these kids out of their schools and put them with blacks from the Southside and Mexicans. . . . They dragged the whole school down. They didn’t want to be here anymore than we wanted ’em. It just dragged the whole school down. You don’t take kids like that, the way they’ve been raised, and put ’em with Michael, the way he was raised, he’d never been around ’em. I don’t see how it could have gotten anything but worse.

  “I live over here because I want my kids to go to school near here and I live here because I want to live with people like me and I don’t want kids bused in from the black side of town living in a seven-thousand-dollar home. The majority of people over there, they don’t better themselves, they’re busy with their food stamps.

  “My God, Mexico’s nothin’ but a big goddamn pigpen,” said Dwaine Cox. “Hell, look at Africa. They’ve been here a lot longer than North America and they could be civilized and they’re the same way they were three or four hundred years ago.”

  Some also blamed desegregation for irrevocably changing the character of Permian football.

  Daniel Justis, a dentist in Odessa, had been an All-State running back at Permian on the 1970 team that went to the state finals. He knew all about Mojo pride. He knew all about Mojo tradition. Justis had traveled with the team for a couple of years in the early eighties. To him, enormous changes had taken place since his own playing days. He believed discipline had broken down. He believed the coaches allowed certain players to get away with murder. He believed the very essence of Mojo had changed, and he pinpointed the cause of its destruction.

  “I blame it on the niggers’ coming to Permian,” said Justis. “People say you can’t win without the blacks, but we did.”

  The black population of Odessa was quite small—about 5 percent. Since the majority of blacks still lived below the tracks, it was easy for white adults to go about their daily lives, particularly if they lived on the northeast side of town, and never see a single one, not in the mall anchored by Penney’s and Sears, not in the supermarket, not in the video store on a Saturday night. The lack of contact created distrust and fear, and only further reinforced the images whites heard about and read about and had been in the town’s psyche since the early days when blacks were run out. They found further justification for these feelings as a result of the activities of several blacks who had gained public positions.

  Willie Hammond, Jr., had become the first black city councilman in the history of Odessa in 1972 and later the first black county commissioner in the history of the county. Those who knew him, like Lanita Akins, thought he was a brilliant politician who had provided blacks in Odessa with their first real public voice.

  Few then could fathom his arrest and subsequent conviction on arson conspiracy and perjury charges in connection with the burning of a building that had been the tentative site for a new civic center. According to testimony, after the
bond issue for the civic center failed, Hammond was in on a scheme to torch the building in order to collect insurance money. Hammond claimed he was innocent, the victim of a political setup. His first trial ended in a hung jury, but in the second one a jury convicted him.

  Akins, who was extremely active in local Democratic politics, would never forget the night she had sat in the Zodiac Club on the Southside with Hammond and his lawyer after it became clear that Hammond’s political career in the city was finished. She remembered how horrible she felt, not only for Hammond but for the blacks who had supported him, who had seen him as something of a savior in a city that was dominated at every level by whites. What struck her most was their attitude of fatalism, as if this was how it always turned out, whatever the initial promise or potential.

  “They thought they had one chance in this world and it was Willie, and when he lost they felt terrible about that. And they accepted it. They just accepted that they’d lost somebody else.”

  Laurence Hurd, a Church of Christ minister, came to Odessa and galvanized the Southside minority community into demanding a desegregated school system. In 1980, twenty-six years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, and ten years after a federal suit had been filed against the school district, Odessa’s schools weren’t remotely close to being integrated. Nor, until Hurd came to town, had any significant public pressure to desegregate the schools been placed on the school board and administration by the minority community.

  The very presence of Hurd, the way he spoke with such passion, the way he could zero in on the hypocrisy of whites not with anger but with a biting cynicism, made him a wonderful figure on the Southside—their Martin Luther King, their Jesse Jackson. How could those who had been there forget the night at the school auditorium on the Southside when he had stared those whites dead in the eye and exposed them for using the cloak of Christianity, and the issue of busing, to justify that it was all right in Odessa to have two school systems, one for whites and one for blacks and Mexicans? How eloquent he had been that night, how sweet the rhythm of his words as he went to the very edge of emotional outrage but never crossed over into it, never lost control.