The Guardian Willie Powell built a park to save children from guns and Violence. In the process, he saved himself. TONY BARTELIVIE The Guardian About Post and Courier Selects Post and Courier Selects are specially chosen stories with enduring themes and drama that are edited and updated to be read on e-readers. Cover photo by Alan Hawes/Post and Courier Willie Powell makes a jump shot during high school. Chapter 1 Willie Powell remembers when the smoke cleared in his life, when the butterflies appeared in a yellow cloud that afternoon years ago and filled the park, his park, and he finally knew his mission was a righteous one. He points at the tall stand of willow oaks from which the butterflies emerged, beyond the basketball court he built with his sweat and anger. He stares through the ghosts of the children he has coached and lost, past the hand-me-down bleachers with the hand-painted sign of an angry deer buck, its nostrils flared and shooting smoke, and his voice rises, like a preacher's, like ashes from a pyre, like that cloud of butterflies, and in a half-shout, he says: "I would die for this park!" *** Which spark is first, the one that hits tinder? Maybe it's that night 40 years ago when Willie and his buddies break into the gym. That's what they do lots of nights — sneak into Berkeley Training School, the segregated middle school in their neighborhood, scaling a wall first, then squeezing through a window and finally tumbling into the darkened gym, their voices echoing and mixing with the bambam-bam of basketballs bouncing on the dusty wood floor. They're trying to steal a few games of ball, that's all. And maybe smack one of the bats flittering down from the rafters. They play for hours, sometimes until midnight, or until the police arrive and force a fast-break back out the window. But something flickers through young Willie this one night. As usual, he and eight or nine other boys are playing basketball, and as usual, a lookout suddenly yells "Police!" This time, he thinks, I'm staying. He shouts, "Don't run! Don't run!" He and his friends stand pat as the police walk into the gym. A few days later, Willie is in the principal's office, explaining himself, playing offense. "We don't have anything to do," he says. "Why not open the gym?" Then he goes before the school board. "We're not trying to hurt anyone or anything," he says. "We don't have any place to play." And what do you know, they agree to open the gym more often after school. "That was the start of a brand new day in my life," Willie says years later. "I learned that you can stand up to authority, especially when you're fighting for what's right." Chapter 2 That was a spark. But there were lots of flints back then, especially for a young black teenager. And more than enough kindling. This is the late 1960s, after all. A new South is being forged, public schools are the furnaces, and Willie is feeling the heat, enrolling in Berkeley High School a year after integration, the year Martin Luther King Jr. is gunned down. One day at basketball practice, not long after King's death, a group of white kids notices that he's feeling down. "What's wrong?" one boy says. "You sad because your Daddy got killed?" Basketball becomes his insulation. And, he can play some ball. He isn't the tallest on the court, but he's strong and fast. He copies Earl "the Pearl" Monroe's shake- and-bake move to the hoop. He studies Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's sky-hook. He makes varsity as a freshman. Then he's one of the first five running onto the court, the first black player at the school to start, out there in gymnasiums packed with white and black people, standing room only, everyone whistling and clapping, though he doesn't really hear their cheers. His focus is on the game. That's when everything gets quiet inside, when the problems vanish. No snakes to chase from the outhouse, no hauling water from the neighborhood well because you don't have indoor plumbing, no wondering about a father who isn't around. No, he isn't poor when he has the ball, not when he's scoring 28 points in the first half, feeling as if God has taken over his body. Not when the James Brown song starts playing and the cheerleaders chant "No matter how hard you try, you can't stop Willie now! Say it loud!" Not when the newspaper says, "Willie Powell was the hero for the Berkeley Stags ...." Not when he scores the game-winning basket at Walterboro with 44 seconds left and angry fans spill onto the court and police escort him from the gym for his own protection. He nears the mountaintop his senior year. His team is stocked with talented athletes. There's Marvin Gray, who used to sneak into the gym with him during middle school and puts on a show at forward. There's Clarence Williams, the brick wall at guard. Williams is even better at football, good enough for the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and then the NFL. When Berkeley High plays Stall High, Willie and his teammates score 100 points, the most in the school's history. Willie fields calls from college recruiters. Willie is voted Most Popular, Best Athlete, Best Dressed, looking lean and sharp in his senior yearbook with his bow tie. "No matter how hard you try, you can't stop Willie now! Say it loud!" Willie Powell is a shooting star. Chapter 3 What happens when sparks fly but nothing catches? Willie turns down the college scholarship offer. He tells people he has a hernia, but it's just a fake pass. He's comfortable here in this neighborhood of dirt roads and wooden shacks. He's comfortable hanging around with his friends, drinking and smoking a little reefer. He's in love. He's scared that he won't make it academically, scared to leave. He has no one— no father, no teacher, no preacher — who stands up for him, tells him that drugs and booze are false paths to glory, that he's good enough to go to college, that a college diploma is worth much more than one from Berkeley High. So, strangely enough, he begins to become this man he needs so much, though this alchemy will take time. In his 20s, he fields a basketball team for children in the neighborhood. He calls his team "the Bucks," a play on Berkeley High School's mascot, the stag, and his own nickname, Buck, bestowed by an uncle who thought he was as wild as a buck. He tells kids like big Sam Gillins Jr. to stay away from drugs, to set goals, to practice every minute you can. Sam and the others can't imagine a world without Willie "Buck" Powell. He's everywhere, it seems, always trying to get a game going, get the kids together for practice. How far will he go for these kids? One afternoon, Willie organizes a scrimmage with another team. But when his Bucks show up at the Berkeley Training School gym, a different team walks in, an adult team sponsored by Home Telephone. They say they were promised the court. Willie says he was promised the court, and then asks, will you let us play? Home Telephone says no. Words are exchanged, then punches, and then Willie is on the floor wrestling with the guy who called him a potato head and worse. Sam and the rest of the Bucks empty the bleachers and join the fray. Two days later, police arrest Willie on a trespassing charge and haul him to jail. A protest is planned. Sam's parents don't want him to go, but he slips out of the house anyway. Outside the jail, a hundred people carry signs, saying "Free Willie Powell. We shall overcome!" The jailers let him out that day. People like Sam, now a marketing analyst with Berkeley Electric Co-Op, never forget this. "Willie was willing to sacri?ce for us, to go to jail for us," he says, "'ust to play basketball." Chapter 4 Statistically speaking, the 1990s should be a good time to be Willie Powell. The economy is hot — the best labor market in 30 years, and a record number of black people are getting degrees and starting businesses. Willie is in Columbia now, doing maintenance for the state mental hospital, scraping by, making enough at least to remodel his mother's house and get rid of that old spider-filled outhouse. He still plays some basketball, still returns to Moncks Corner to coach new incarnations of the Bucks, still drinks too much. Then, at work, he breathes fumes from a stain remover. His body isn't the same after that. His lungs feel as if they're on fire. He's dizzy. He gets depressed. He can't work. He drinks to numb the pain. He's burning out. So are lots of black men he knows. Like his friend Clarence Williams, the big center on his old high school basketball team, the one who made it to the NFL. After five seasons with the San Diego Chargers, Williams ends up in Columbia selling used cars, smoking crack, looking for a prostitute one night in a lousy neighborhood. A 22-year-old drug dealer pumps bullets into Williams' chest, and three children lose their father. Sure the economy is booming, but something is missing in the hearts of many black men, Willie included. He's arrested twice on DUI charges. "I was mentally sick, alcohol-impaired, drug-impaired, and with all that bound together, I almost gave into it." Then one day, his sister phones. She says, we want to build a park. *** Yes, a park might be the spark these kids need. Willie thinks back to the summer of 1972, when a powerful state lawmaker named Rembert C. Dennis sponsored a camp at the old gym. Willie still has the ledger, yellowing and smudged, with the names of the 223 children who attended. He remembers how he blew a whistle in his neighborhood in the morning and 50 boys and girls suddenly appeared and followed him to the gym, how the children played ping pong and basketball, practiced archery and did plays. And even though these children had a wonderful summer, that was it; town leaders never held this camp again. Maybe, Willie thinks, he can recreate that magical summer in the form of a new park. Richard Roper, a longtime store owner, worries about the children, too. Roper has 4.2 acres of scrub and corn in the middle of the neighborhood off a narrow dead-end road called Wall Street. Sure, he says, a park is what the children need — as long as Willie or someone else chips in for the property taxes. The park now has a name, Roper Wall Street Park, and Willie gets to work. He clears the land and digs ditches to improve the drainage. It's miserable work, and one hot afternoon, covered in muck and sweat, he works himself into a rage. Why isn't anyone helping me! No one cares! Suddenly, he hears a voice that isn't his. "If you bear doing this work, I will stand you up strong." He looks around. Nobody there. He hears the words again. "If you bear doing this work, I will stand you up strong." And now he has the same fire he had when he was playing basketball, but instead of scoring points, he's scoring favors. He sees someone driving a big yellow excavator and chases him down on his 10-speed bicycle, asking if he'll do some grading work for free. He sees a dump truck, and asks the driver if he'll get some dirt. He scores metal slides from the Naval Weapons Station. He thinks about the park all the time. He knows he's getting on people's nerves with all his talk of what needs to be done. Willie starts on the foundation for a cement basketball court, and that's when the butterflies come. It's early evening, when the sun's glare is weaker and the colors from the trees and sky seem brighter. Willie has been digging since sunup and is drenched in sweat. His hands are blistered. The wind is still. The butterflies float in from the trees near the back of the park. They're yellow - he's never seen so many. They pour in, millions of them, like a storm of yellow confetti. He feels a feeling of peace roll over the park, and then just as suddenly as they come, they leave. "After that, I felt there was something more powerful than me at work here." Chapter 5 Now the children have a smooth, cement court painted blue and maroon with yellow lines. They have bleachers, donated by a nearby town. Now they have a place to play and learn. On the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, Willie organizes a rally. During spring, he has Easter egg hunts. As usual, he coaches the Bucks, and in 1998, the team travels to downtown Charleston for the Midnight Basketball Championship and wins it all. But Willie sees the wildfire of violence coursing through the neighborhood, and even as the park takes shape, flames consume his kids. There's Angelo Lampkin, who moves to Alvin after playing with the Bucks. One afternoon, stray bullets from a nearby gun battle tear into his head and stomach, and as he's lying there bleeding, he cries, "It's burning. It's burning." Angelo survives, but another Buck gets stabbed outside a club and dies. Another is shot to death in his car. Three more teens are charged in the killing of a construction worker. Yes, Willie can feel these flames drawing closer. One afternoon the Bucks hold a car wash at a McDonald's in Moncks Corner to raise money for uniforms. A car drives by. A kid pulls out a gun and shoots. A bullet whizzes by Willie and slices through the T-shirt of a 14-year-old next to him, just missing the teen's torso. Willie wakes up in the middle of the night, his mind racing: These kids need something to do, some kind of recreation. Somebody needs to do something. He realizes how long he's been saying these things — when he was in middle school and had to bust into the gym, when he was in his 20s and first formed the Bucks. He decides to go before Town Council, and with tears in his eyes and the memories of his players running through his brain, he tells them: We must do more. Chapter 6 It's a hot Saturday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend, and Willie flips burgers sizzling on a grill, taking care not to burn them or get burned. He knows better than most about fire's duality, its power for good and evil. Behind him, children's voices waft through the park. This afternoon, Willie is throwing an "Out of School" party. "The park revived me," he says. "It gave me meaning and self-worth, so the park saved me. I don't know where I'd be without it. Yes, I do know. I'd be in hell." It's not easy running this park. Sometimes he can't pay the electric bill, and so the lights on the basketball court stay off. And, he asks, shouldn't the town be doing this anyway? And who knows what will happen to this park? It's not Willie's, after all. Old man Roper, spry at 90, owns the land. But what if he decides to sell? What happens after he passes? Willie shakes his head. Nearby, the old middle school gym is being torn down, the one Willie used to break into. "That would have been a perfect recreation center!" Truth be told, the park isn't much to look at. The playground equipment is rusty; the shack where he keeps a cooler for the ice cream looks half-finished. Faded American flags flap around a roofline eaten up by carpenter bees. Parents sit outside on seats removed from cars. Willie looks toward the trees and remembers the yellow butterflies, and he sees what could be: children playing checkers, basketball, older people tutoring younger people. Maybe, he hopes, the butterflies will return to such a place. The sun sets, and the fire dies in the grill. Children scream "Buck! Buck!" and plead for Willie to spin them on the tiny merry-go-round. "Buck! Buck!" They want ice cream. Over on the court, youths play a pick-up game, and Willie announces on a second-hand PA system that he'll give $20 to any child who beats him in a three-point contest. One by one, the teens shoot around the three-point circle, each getting five chances. One by one, they fire blanks. Finally, a chubby boy sinks two. Willie takes off his shirt. He's 53 years old now. He's still thin, though his chest has a few ripples of flab. He trips on the edge of the court before squaring up to shoot. Miss. He tries again and sinks it. The third rolls around the rim and out. But then the old jump shot form returns, and he drains the next two, and now he's yelling, "I'm still the champ! I'm still the champ!" And the kids rush toward him, asking for another chance. Epilogue I met Willie Powell seven years ago by the statues of angels Willie placed at the front of his park, and from that very moment, I thought I heard music. Maybe it was from the voices of children playing in the park, or from the rhythm of basketballs bouncing on pavement; or from the sound of Willie’s voice. Willie isn't a preacher, but he sure talks like one. His voice rises at the beginning of a sentence and then falls near the end, like a singer doing scales. When he really wants to make a point, his voice rises and then stops abruptly. Like a preacher, he talks about devils and God and love, especially when the subject is a park. A few years after I wrote about his Roper Wall Street Park, the owner of the land told him to shut it down and move all the equipment somewhere else. The landowner was getting on in years and wanted to pass the property to his children. Neighbors protested, but it was on private land so they couldn't do much about it. Willie was depressed for a while but then did what he'd done before to get out of a funk: build another park. As with his first one, he did this by pleading with local businesses for supplies and doing much of the work himself. And by preaching. To anyone who would listen, he preached a sermon about danger and hope: The danger was that we have let our children down by failing to offer them alternatives to drugs and violence; the hope is that there are answers. Faith is one. Providing children recreational facilities is another. And yet, Willie “Buck” Powell’s story was always about more than parks. It was about black men in rural South after segregation; about the success of the Civil Rights movement, and how the legacy of slavery still has a gravitational pull. Willie’s life was about success, failure, and thank the angels, redemption. In 2013, redemption came in the form of a dream come true. That's when the town of Moncks Corner, led by a white mayor who also thought the city needed more recreational opportunities, broke ground on a large new public recreational center. It was exactly what Willie thought should have been done decades ago. And they built it in the right place. Town leaders could have built it in a field on the edge of town, in a less crowded area away from the town's poorer neighborhoods. Instead, it’s going up on a field within shouting distance of where Willie built his ?rst park, the one with the angels. About the author Tony Bartelme, a two-time finalist for Pulitzer Prizes in feature and explanatory reporting, is a special projects reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. His work has been featured in Essence and other national magazines, and his investigative reports have garnered top awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Gerald Loeb Foundation. In 2011, he was awarded a Harvard University Nieman Fellowship. His most recent work is an eBook, Second Chance: The Mark Sanford Story. Willie Powell challenges neighborhood children in a three-point contest. He misses his first few attempts, then the old form returns, and he beats all comers. Photo/Alan Hawes of The Post and Courier When the owner of Roper Wall Street Park decided to give the property to his children, it forced Willie to close the neighborhood park he had worked so hard to build and maintain. Instead of giving up, he began work on another park in the town. Soon after, town officials, led by Mayor William Peagler, began work on a large public recreation center.