What kept me sane was a small city just north of College Station called Bryan, Texas, which was very segregated, with an all-Black side of town. That’s where I did most of my volunteer work, mentoring young people. I didn’t even know the city existed until I took part in a community service project there for a class. You could feel the divide between Bryan and College Station, and Bryan helped me stay afloat. So did being at school with Martellus. We each had our own lives on campus, but we were together most of the time. We worked out together, studied together, lived together. That makes for a special bond because we’ve seen each other grow, all the way from babies through adolescence and into adulthood: truly from boys to men. Looking back, I feel so fortunate that we went to the same school. I had Martellus and Martellus had me. That’s how we got through, but his presence was more like a cushion to catch me when I fell than a force field to protect me from the reality of racism in College Station.
On campus, sometimes people treated me like a hero, a god, because football is king in Texas. But other times, with the pads off, I was anything but. Once I was near my dorm late at night, and a big drunk group of students started shouting, “Hey, nigger! Go back to Africa, nigger!” I wasn’t mad so much as disappointed. I remember thinking, Really? This is 2003. We’re all in the middle of Texas and we all know this place sucks. Why make it worse?
I was half god, half property. But whichever half they were dealing with, I was never fully human. Is my being nerdy of interest? Do they celebrate things that have happened in the life of my community? You come to find out, painfully, that the answer is less “No” than “Why should we care?” College is supposed to be about intellectual and social growth, but when you play football, they don’t want you to grow. At the time, I was studying religion on my own. I’ve always been and will always be a Christian. But I was exploring Islam. I was reading the Quran, as it mattered to me to figure out what religion I thought was right for me. I knew that a massive percentage of African people who came to this country in chains were Muslim, before conversion. I knew I was a Christian because my ancestors were beaten to believe in Christ. I wanted to explore and discuss this: Did I really have these convictions with which I was raised, or were they just the legacy of slavery? These kinds of discussions made my coaches uncomfortable. Especially after the attacks of 9/11, people on campus weren’t too thrilled with me, trying to engage people in the ideas I was reading in the Quran. I never became a Muslim. I just wanted to have those discussions. But that was too much.
Independent of football, life wasn’t easy. Pele became pregnant with our first daughter, Peyton. Telling my dad was one of the hardest moments of my life. My father had left his football scholarship, remember, when my birth mother was pregnant, and now it looked like I was following that path. My football career could have ended then and there. I asked my dad, “What should I do? Should I leave school, get a job, and start working to support my daughter?” I didn’t want to do that, and Pele didn’t want me to do that either, yet my dad’s word meant so much to me. He could have pushed me either way. But he insisted that I stay in school and try, somehow, to make parenting work with Pele. I was twenty and Pele was nineteen when Peyton was born. It was tough, commuting two hours back to Houston to see my love and my daughter, while we figured out how to be parents, and still maintaining the ten-hour day of the student-athlete.
It all came to a head when Peyton turned two on a game day. I wanted to leave after the fourth quarter and motor right to Houston for her little birthday party. The coaches told me that this was against the rules, that it was not professional. I clashed with the coaches because they didn’t see me as a man; they didn’t see what I was trying to do, in terms of being a good father to my child.
No one was going to come between my daughter and me. No way. I was suspended for a game, and it was the shittiest-feeling punishment in the world. If you get punished for partying or fighting or being a fool, I get it. But getting punished for trying to be a father to your child? It was a perfect example of how the coaches didn’t try to understand what it was like to be a young, Black man who was also a father, wanting
