By Howard Bryant
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 6, 2007

AMA, La. On the couch near his kitchen table, Frank Landry is thinking about the serious things that shape a man and his family: about race and transition and history and the moment in time when life for blacks and whites in Louisiana would never again be the same.

The old order was changing. Five years into the integration of Louisiana public schools, African American families such as the Landrys were given a choice to send their children to Carver, the old black high school, or Hahnville, the white school. Frank attended Hahnville, and more than 40 years later, he sifts for the right memories to best illustrate the completeness of the change and its effect on him.

There was the time during a football game when he tried to speak to an official, who responded, "Get your black hands off of me." And then there was the simple, material proof that his family had made the right choice.

"It was like a whole other world," he said. "The basketball goals had nets in them. The schoolbooks were new. Their baseball gloves weren't worn out. I mean, the leather was soft. We had home and away jerseys. The black schools had one. I talk to my kids about it, about these things we had to go through so they wouldn't have to, so they would have it easier than we did. Sometimes, I think they understand it, and sometimes I don't."

As Landry spoke, a hum, low at first, grew near, vibrating the kitchen floor ceramic tiles underneath his feet, like a freight car on the Union Pacific railroad that has snaked along the Mississippi River since before World War II. His wife, Rhonda, ignores the hum even as the back wall vibrates and the classic tuxedoed jazz figurines that rest atop the television shiver. The reverberations are joined now by the unmistakable thump of rap music.

Rhonda has heard it before, almost daily. The source is not a train or an earthquake, but a ghost-white Hummer H2 with blindingly shiny 30-inch rims loaded with enough subwoofer power to devour the remaining fragments of Frank Landry's story of integration, which succumbs to the generation gap and an overwhelming dose of bass.

"Oh," Rhonda says. "That's just LaRon."

The entrance of LaRon Landry, full of lyrics and thunder, speaks precisely to why the Redskins made him the sixth overall pick in last weekend's NFL draft. He is a hitter, and the Redskins need one.

"If they go over the middle, I'll bet on him. I'll give him a dollar if he take T.O. out," said Lou Valdin, Landry's coach at Hahnville High. "He'll shut him up because he can hit you and hurt your whole family. Interception for a touchdown or put a guy in the hospital? That's a tough decision for LaRon."

Once unsure of being able to cover elite wide receivers, Landry hears the name "Randy Moss" and says, "No problem." At LSU, he won a national championship as a freshman under Nick Saban in 2003, drew the nickname "Dirty-Dirty" because of his frequently borderline hits, and was one of three Tigers -- along with quarterback JaMarcus Russell and wide receiver Dwayne Bowe -- to be drafted in the first round.

Here in Ama, a speck of a town of 1,285 inhabitants, at home surrounded by friends and family roots, Landry's personality, both the raw and the cultivated, emerges. Landry wears the competitor's edge sharply. In many ways, he is just a kid, 22 years old, not far removed from high school jobs at Popeye's Chicken and the Winn-Dixie Supermarket, still addicted to his PlayStations.

"I love Madden," he says with a sunburst. "It's the only game I play."

But during a photo shoot along the Mississippi levees, Landry doesn't smile his mother's smile: slow in forming, quickly incandescent. Nor does he exude his father's boyish energy. He stares through the lens, now in game mode, the fiery player his high school coaches say took something of an odd joy in crushing even his own teammates during practice.

"I just don't smile," he says. "Sometimes, I'll give a smirk. That's as close as I get."

Smiling goes against the image. After all, it is kind of hard to be a fearsome, intimidating football machine while smiling like Magic Johnson.

Much of his edge is the cover of youth. In the days following the draft, Hall of Fame safety Ronnie Lott has called to congratulate him, perhaps as many as five times.

Yet days have passed, and Landry, perhaps not wanting to seem too eager, hasn't returned the phone call from the man he has called his idol. But just as much of his outward persona is a continuation of what his people say he always has been: the most fearless kid most of them have ever met. Along his right wrist are two teardrop-shaped lumps of skin lighter than the rest of his arm, scars from a basketball game against Terrebonne High when he leaped through a glass door diving for a loose ball.

Little time is required for the people of Ama to conjure images of Landry the football player. Barbara Fuselier, the principal of Hahnville, remembers the tense game against South Lafourche when, playing quarterback, Landry was ejected after kneeing a defender he believed hit him with one cheap shot too many. Landry still knows the sequence.

"It was the only time," he says, "I ever let a player make me lose my control. I still hate that."

Valdin, a stocky man with an energetic voice and a face that resembles the comedian Lewis Black, sips a soft drink and considers Landry with enthusiasm.

"He loved to run down the field on the kickoff. He would be the end guy on a kickoff and we would tell the guy on the other team that we going to kick the ball to him," Valdin says with a laugh. "The kids on the sideline, they would point at LaRon and say to the guy, 'We're kicking the ball to you, and he's coming. He's coming to kill you.' "

There was the story of Landry being tested at safety as a sophomore and during practice putting Hahnville's best receiver in the hospital.

"We had one of the top receivers in the South being recruited everywhere and one of the first plays of training camp, LaRon puts him in the hospital. Put his feet over his head, and so, we found a safety.

"Now, I let him have it after that. 'Do you realize that's the best receiver we've got? He's one of our starters!' I said. And then when the kid walked off, I said to the coaches, 'Did you see that hit? Boom!' and that was it. He was our safety."

Just before signing Landry, Saban was unsure of the rocket-fast Landry's position, and went back to Valdin.

"He asked me if he was a corner or a safety," Valdin said. "I told him he was a safety, because he hits like a train."

Finding Ama means traveling south on Interstate 310, away from the Louis Armstrong Airport, over the brown currents of the Mississippi into St. Charles Parish along the Hale Boggs Bridge, better known to locals as the Luling Bridge. Rhonda Landry remembers the day in 1976, back when she was 14 and the only way to cross the river at Luling was by boat, when the passenger ferry was struck by a tanker, killing 78 people. The bridge came a few years later.

There are intermittent footprints of Hurricane Katrina, but outside of moderate flooding and inconvenience, catastrophe largely avoided Ama. Mount Zion Baptist, Rhonda Landry's church since birth, was hit so hard, Frank says, "that it looked like a wrecking ball went right through it." Along River Road, whole pine and maple trees lay sideways, ripped from the earth. Sitting across the street from the Landry house are three FEMA trailers.

East on Route 18, along River Road, past the looming Monsanto plant where Frank Landry worked 31 years as an electrical engineer before retiring two months ago, is Kennedy Street, a middle-class street of bungalows, raised ranches and missions. For 28 years, the Landrys have lived in a modest, one-story structure with low gables that Ama realtors call a "Louisiana ranch," the distinction stemming from its brick exterior instead of the customary wood or siding.

On their street, neighbors honk each time they drive by, a combination of common custom in a place where virtually every resident knows each other and the reverence for a family that is football royalty here.

"This is Louisiana," says Rhonda Landry, whose warm eyes belie what people in town call her "very serious streak," especially when it comes to her youngest son. "It's the South. If you don't wave back, people will think there's something wrong with you. They'll think you're stuck up."

Frank played at Hahnville High School before tearing up both knees as an outside linebacker at Northeast Louisiana University (known now as University of Louisiana-Monroe). Rhonda also attended Hahnville, where she insists she was not a cheerleader but a member of the "pep squad," the difference being cheerleaders ran out on the field during timeouts. The first son, Derick, played football at Hahnville in the late 1980s and later college ball at Vanderbilt. The second, Dawan, was the Hahnville quarterback who moved on to Georgia Tech and now begins his second season with the Baltimore Ravens. Only the Landry brothers have left Hahnville to play in the NFL. Hahnville's great in-parish rival, Destrehan, produced Baltimore Ravens star safety Ed Reed.

"I didn't have any idea two of my sons would play in the NFL," Frank Landry says. "But LaRon was the one . . . if you were in front of a brick wall, Dawan would find the easiest way to get around it; LaRon would run right through it."

If Frank and Derick Landry were good players and Dawan a cut above, then LaRon was the prodigy.

"He was different," Valdin said. "Dawan led by example. LaRon led by fear."

In Hahnville, Frank Landry is known as big and opinionated, but respectful of the coaching hierarchy.

"Frank not only worried about his kids but everyone else's," Valdin said. "He was like the athletic bus to Ama. He had every kid from Ama. He'd bring the kids home. If I had a problem with kids in his neighborhood, I'd call Frank."

The Landry house was the one where the kids converged, and Frank was in the middle, picking up his own kids and others in the neighborhood. But Frank was not one to issue praise easily.

"The dad was very -- I don't want to make it sound bad -- but he was hard on them athletically," said Kenny Vial, who coached Dawan and LaRon at Landry Middle School. "One time we were playing a tournament in basketball. We ended up winning and Dawan had a fabulous game, probably 15 points, 10 boards, but Frank was just on him for missing a free throw at a critical time, and I asked why he was so hard on them. And he told me, 'If you're not hard on them, they become soft athletes.' "

There is attention and much more money to come. Yet, at the center of the Landry household is the notion of family and humility. Rhonda does not want a new house, and she won't quit working at the county clerk's office just because her sons are famous.

"I'm happy right here," she said, standing on her front lawn. "I don't want to quit my job. I like working. Why would I want to just sit around all day? If they want to build me a new house, it can be right here."

Once fierce, Frank Landry softens. He is proud of his two sons playing in the NFL, but senses the inevitable phase of adulthood, where the father will soon have to let go and newer elements of LaRon's life will begin to eclipse him.

They know about money -- Landry could claim as much as $15 million in guaranteed bonuses -- and hope their parenting foundation will be strong enough to help him make the correct choices.

"The attention has always been there, but it's never been like this," Frank Landry said.

Already there have been somewhat uncomfortable moments. The day following the draft, the Redskins sent Jerry Gray on a private jet to New Orleans to return LaRon and Frank to Washington for his introductory news conference.

When the jet landed, a short, bespectacled man with a squared face greeted the group. Sidling up to Frank Landry, Daniel Snyder turned toward the plane.

" 'How do you like my jet,' " Frank recalled Snyder asking. " 'I'm thinking about getting another one.' "

Lou Valdin was unconcerned.

"They were raised right," Valdin says. "Joe Gibbs won't have anything to worry about. If he's got a problem with LaRon up in Washington, don't even worry about Frank. Just call Rhonda. She'll take care of everything."