“Four credits short,” Proctor laments. “Such a great kid.”
After William’s stabbing, Proctor helped him move to an apartment in the District. Every so often, Proctor ran into him on the street, once outside a downtown homeless shelter where William was living at the time. William was in his wheelchair, greeting him, as always, with a big smile. Proctor did not have to ask to know he was scraping by, that he was hustling.
William could still get his GED, Proctor says. He could go to trade school. He could still make something of his life. Proctor is willing to help. All William has to do is ask.
On a Sunday morning, Jeffery Norris is at Little Rock Bibleway Church for Christ in Northeast Washington, playing the organ and helping to lift the spirits of the people standing in the pews.
“Who am I?” the preacher shouts, his voice filling the small church. “I’m a child of God!”
Even at the height of his drug-dealing days, Jeffery Norris made it to church on Sundays. Now, he says, he doesn’t sell or use drugs. He is done with all that. He is, he promises, a man redeemed.
Jeffery lives in his grandmother’s house in Capitol Heights. He sits on the couch on a summer afternoon, the TV turned to ESPN, the front door open. His old classmate, Terrell Jackson, who once aspired to play professional basketball and who survived not one but two shootings by the time he was 15, is next to him, their conversation meandering back to their days as Dreamers.
All these years later, Terrell, now 6-foot-5 and working as a waiter, remains bitter that he never got the tryout with the Bullets that he believes he was promised as a kid. He knew a couple of millionaires, he says, and what did he get from it? A few minutes later, he answers his own question.
“I’d be dead without the Dreamers,” he says.
Jeffery Norris says they were too young to appreciate what Pollin and Cohen were offering. “You can’t just throw money. It came too soon,” he says. Now, at 34, he wants to go back to college and get a music degree. He wants to open a barbershop.
The Dreamers’ scholarship money is gone, the last of it spent in 2009. But their ambition, their sense of possibility, remains palpable. They are a work in progress, their story still being written.
Darone Robinson shares the desire to achieve more. He lives in a brick colonial with his wife and two young children in Sun Valley Estates, a neighborhood in Upper Marlboro. Darone is proud of his house, the five bedrooms, the granite kitchen countertops, the two-story foyer, the light pouring in through the window. Not bad for a man who almost got kicked out of high school.
Darone works long hours as a Pepco customer service rep. But he hasn’t given up his ultimate aim, the one he voiced as a fifth-grader at Seat Pleasant.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” a reporter had asked him.
“A lawyer,” he’d replied.
Twenty-two years later, Darone drove to College Park to take the LSAT, the standardized test required for admission to law school. In the next year or two, he hopes to enroll at UDC.
At 34, he no longer wants to defend people accused of crimes, as he did when he was a kid. He wants to be a sports agent. He wants to find the next LeBron James. Ten percent of a $10 million contract is $1 million, he says, enough to make him a millionaire.
Imagine that: Darone Robinson, millionaire. He smiles. He likes the way that sounds.
Read the rest of the Seat Pleasant 59 series:
Part I: The Promise
Part II: The Reality
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