PRL Serials

“They were printing TAOT there?” I asked Deborah.

“I saw them. There was a big stack of the pages, before they were stapled together. It was the issue about pollution in the local streams.”

“Could it have been one of the teachers or instructors or whatever?” I asked.

“Only the owners were there that evening. You know Mr. Baucom and his wife. It was close to the holidays so there weren’t a lot of kids there. Maybe they know something.”

In the nineties, Mr. Baucom bought the building that today is the Kid Zone after school program. He is well known for owning multiple car dealerships in Ladoga and had donated a considerable amount of money to the building of the community center in east Ladoga. He is white, but had grown up on the east side in the seventies, before his father struck gold selling used cars. As soon as he’d earned enough, he moved his family to the nicest house on the west side, before he got even richer and moved the family to a nice mansion in Crowder Estates. Mr. Baucom didn’t seem to like the life his father had bought for his family, and he spends considerable time on the east side even today. He lives on the west side, but not in his father’s house in Crowder Estates that is like a mid-sized Biltmore replica.

Mr. Baucom is a very accessible man. He is a big fan of basketball and helps to organize most of the tournaments and events that take place at the community center. I found him there a couple days after coffee with Deborah and Mr. Smith. He was watching a three-on-three game on one of the outdoor courts.

I introduced myself, but he already knew my name. “Maxwell Roberson, you used to be all over the rebound, I remember you. You played with Jimmy, Tevin, Roger, them boys. Y’all made it to the states didn’t you?”

We had, but it was all thanks to Tevin’s three pointers, Roger’s dunks, and the almost telepathic connection Tevin shared with Jimmy that resulted in Tevin setting a statewide assist record and Jimmy outscoring every other player in our conference. My rebounding helped, I’m sure, but I had amazing teammates back then.

“You play ball in college?” Mr Baucum asked me and I explained that I only played pickup games in the park after high school.

“It was fun back then, but I knew I wasn’t good enough to get real time in college.”

“Smart man. You a doctor now, professor or something?” Mr. Baucum asked.

I explained my position at the law firm and he seemed legitimately happy to hear that I was doing well.

“I haven’t heard much about your teammates, but I know some older boys, they was some of the best ball players I ever seen, but they get in trouble and get stuck living a hard life. It’s a shame, they just fall into a hard way. They should be playing pro ball. I’m glad you did good for yourself, you hear me?”

Encouragement from anyone is a good thing, but Mr. Baucum made me feel extra vindicated about my argument with Rick at the coffee shop. He was a white man who had grown up alongside black people his entire life and seemed to truly regard them as his neighbors, his fellow Ladogans, not some second class population of others. If Mr. Baucum was the only white man in all of Ladoga who felt that way — a ludicrous proposition — then he alone would have rendered Rick’s resentment mute because it was based on the supposition that every white person in Ladoga was doing harm to black people.

I asked Mr. Baucum about his life and he told me that his wife was recovering from a hip replacement. She was younger than him, but apparently she was more brittle in her old age. “Feel kinda guilty, I haven’t been to a doctor in years. Seems like there’s always something bothering her, but I’m the one’s been smokin’ and drakin’ since I was ten years old.” He also told me about the mold problem at his father’s mansion in Crowder Estates. “The walls in the cellar are Duke blue. It would be nice if it wasn’t creeping up to the ceiling like some nasty veins, and it smells God-awful.”

The game Mr. Baucum was watching got interesting and we both sat, marveling at the heights the players jumped, their quickness. I casually brought up the after school program in west Ladoga. “How are things going over there?” I asked.

“Good. It used to be, mostly kids from the west side were out there, but we’re getting good crossover.” He pointed to one of the shorter black players and the tallest player out on the court who happened to be white. “Those guys take karate lessons at Kids Zone, they live in west Ladoga. They come out here to play basketball, but they parents only let ’em out here cause it’s pretty much the same staff and everything. Their parents believe the stories that the east is just all bad all the time, but the boys get along. When they out there playing ball, it’s just about fun.”

Aside from knowing that it existed, I didn’t know much at all about the after program, so it was news to me that there were employees of the east side community center who also worked at Kid Zone.

I asked Mr. Baucom about the activities that were offered at Kid Zone. “Mostly sports that don’t have public facilities,” he explained, “swimming, gymnastics, dance, karate. Aside from sports we have a computer lab where kids can work on school work if they need to, but all the activities we organize are sports related.”

“Someone told me the kids make a newsletter,” I said, and Mr. Baucum had no idea where someone would get that idea.

“We don’t have classes and like I said, the kids out there just use the computers for homework. Unless they been doing it behind my back.”

He had no idea about TAOT either, he had never heard of it. I assumed that Deborah had been mistaken, but just to be sure, I decided to make a trip out to Kid Zone.

The building is along a relatively bare strip of road in the southwest, in the vicinity of the Moore Brick Factory. They are about twenty minutes from area schools and they have two buses that picked kids up and for some, drop them off at home around six. The building is squat and wide, with yellow walls that easily stand out as you drive near it. There is a big white sign over the front door with the name in red letters. I never went to an after school program in school; throughout elementary school, after school meant TV and home work, and in high school it was basketball at the high school gym. My parents could not afford to send me to a place like Kid Zone, with its yards of blue gym mats, a room with a hardwood floor and mirrors for walls, balance beam, and a pit, like a swimming pool, but filled with big cubes of blue lux foam that gymnasts, and anyone else who was brave enough to try, could practice flips into. The day I took my son, Joel, he ran straight for the swimming pool and dove in before anyone could stop him. He disappeared for a second and I stood worried by the pool as some of the staff members came over to help him out, all the while I could hear him laughing and giggling in pure delight. Joel wasn’t school aged at the time, but the daycare that he attended while Mary and I worked would tell us that Joel had the most energy of all the kids there. He loved to run and when he wasn’t running he was jumping off of something, or throwing something. Both Mary and I were surprised that he hadn’t broken any bones by that point, but he was very sure footed and never overestimated his own ability to survive a fall.

I told the staff that pulled Joel from the ball pit that I was thinking about moving to Ladoga and that Joel and I were checking out activities that Joel could get into. I didn’t know any of the staff that worked there and I was introduced to Thomas and Kristen who were the most senior staff members and also served as the major coordinators of the activities that took place throughout the day.  They seemed very interested in selling me on the program for Joel even though he wasn’t old enough to enroll immediately, and my family lived a different town.

“There’s so much to do here and the kids love it.” Kristen said enthusiastically. She had a bright personality and her smile was big enough to occupy fifty percent of her face.

“It looks awesome,” I said, “I know Joel would love it here. Do you guys do other things? Tutoring, help with writing, stuff like that.”

Thomas looked genuinely pained to disappoint, “Sorry to say we don’t really. I mean, we help the kids with homework if we can, but we don’t have any tutors on staff.”

“I heard about a newsletter that some of the kids might have printed here. This and Other Things…” before I could fully finish my sentence, I noticed the smile on Kristen’s face disappear and she actually looked upset.

“That piece of shit? No, we would never be associated with crap like that. Excuse me.”

I watched her walk away angrily and Thomas apologized sincerely on her behalf.

“Please excuse her. The kids here don’t do any sort of newsletter and that one in particular is a sore spot for Kritsten.”

“May I ask why?”

“Some time last year there was a break in. Nothing was stolen but apparently someone was using our computer lab to print that newsletter. It could have caused really bad press for us if it had gotten out, that one they were printing was alleging some ridiculous things that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“Things about Kristen? I don’t understand.”

“Kristen’s brother that worked here was fired after Mr. Baucom saw some of the pages of that newsletter. It made some claims that are too salacious to repeat. Suffice to say, nothing about the newsletter was true, I don’t think it was ever circulated, and Mr. Baucom let the guy go to avoid any controversy. We here at Kid Zone are dedicated to the safety and health of our children. Can I show you around our outdoor facilities?”

“No, I think I’ve seen enough, thank you for your hospitality.”

“I assure you Mr. Roberson, our staff is very professional and we’ve had zero instances of child neglect or abuse at our facility.”

“Was that the allegation?”

“You didn’t hear about it? It was in the real papers along with a firm repudiation from police officials. One of the children that used to come here told a counselor at school about an incident that was never corroborated; not by staff or other children.”

“Well what happened exactly? Sexual abuse.”

“Oh, no sir, nothing like that. Our program does training for local AAU teams and those leagues can get very competitive. One of the children accused Kristen’s brother of working them too hard and of severe punishment for failure. We are not that kind of program Mr. Roberson. We encourage sports for a healthy lifestyle.”

He smiled at me and I returned it, but there was something strange about the way he insisted that the child’s story was overblown. Sports of any kind are a serious thing in a town like Ladoga; showing potential for a professional career was definitely encouraged and it would not be far fetched for a coach or parent to push too hard.

The conversation with Thomas begged another with Mr. Baucom and I found him on the east side that weekend. He was in his office at the community center.

“I hope this becomes a regular thing,” he said. “You’re always welcome to volunteer your time, be a positive role model to the boys here.”

“That would be nice, I should take you up on that. But I wanted to ask you about something else. The abuse allegations…”

Before I could finish Mr. Baucom cut me off. “That was an unfortunate incident that I wish the child had brought it to me first before is snowballed like it did.”

“So it was true?”

“I’m not saying that, I just wish I could have talked to Drew about it before school official, reporters and police started showing up. He clammed up, made it worse for himself. In all my time at that center, I never had a kid complain about their practices or training. We push the kids just as far as they want to go. We want them to have fun. Some want more than that, some want to compete at a higher level and we can accommodate that because we have good coaches, but the things Drew was accused of was crazy and I definitely would have seen it if it was really happening.”

“So what was he supposed to have done?”

“Sprinting drills for hours, no water breaks in the heat, beating in some cases to break bad habit, starvation. I watched Drew train that kid that said all this and it was obvious to me he was only there because his parents wanted him to be. I think he complained to get out of it and then people did their jobs and I had to let Drew go.”

“So it’s not possible all that was happening without your knowledge? Maybe there was other kids who just never came forward.”

Mr. Baucum shook his head. “You ain’t the first person to ask that. Of course imma say no, it ain’t possible. We care about the kids that come out there and ain’t trying to make star athletes. We’re after school care above all else. But anything’s possible, which is why we let Drew go, just to sure. And no single instructor or coach leads training sessions any more, there are no more single sessions to improve accountability.”

I believed Mr. Baucum, but I wondered what TAOT had reported about the incident.