Garden of The Humbled Gods

From Humble Beginnings

It's the 4th of July. D'Andre Buckner sits at a compressed wood table in the kitchen of his modest apartment. He's a lanky kid who stands at least 6'5. His long torso arches over a bowl of Choco Crunch— he shovels a spoonful into his mouth. He's still growing into his body, and everything he does looks a little awkward. A pullout couch sits behind him in the living room. The bed is unmade, and the fitted sheet is hanging half off the thin mattress. Next to the sofa stands a sizeable wooden china cabinet full of basketball trophies. He's the number four small forward prospect in the nation. He has offers from Kansas, Duke, North Carolina, Florida, UCLA, Kentucky, Baylor, Georgetown, UConn, Gonzaga, and just about every other program in the nation that matters. This is because he can jump out of the stadium and has handles like Steph Curry. He needs to work on his outside game though. He knows this more than anyone. He dropped 32 in an AAU game last week but only shot one of seven from behind the arc. If he wants to make it to the NBA, he's going to have to do better than that. If you can't shoot the three, then you'll never make it past the G-League. In today's game, even big men can drop the trey. Despite all of this, he has heard rumblings from some scouts who say that if the draft were held today, he would go in the top ten if it weren't for the one and done rule. His work uniform and a pair of old jeans are haphazardly tossed over the arm of the couch. The bedroom door at the end of the hall opens. A set of heavy feet shuffle down the hallway. The bathroom light turns on, and the door shuts behind it. That's his mother. She hasn't been sleeping well. Not since she threw her back out on the job a little over a month ago. She's been off work ever since. They were already putting water over cereal before she got injured, but things are so tight now that they might lose their home. She's getting workman's comp, but that only pays 60% of her pre-injury wages. He's been picking up extra shifts at the SuperCenter to try and make up the difference, but his grades have begun to slip, and they were never that great in the first place. He doesn't think Coach Summerfield will let him lose his eligibility, but ever since the 2017 FBI probe, everything has been a lot more by the book. He didn't turn in a single homework assignment his entire Freshman year and still passed all of his classes. This past season he barely maintained a 2.0 GPA, and that was with the help of a tutor that Coach Summerfield paid for out of pocket. A loud hacking cough reverberates through the bathroom door—

She's gotta quit smoking.

She's only 35 but looks ten years older. She's been working two jobs for as long as he can remember. A lifetime ago, she ran track in high school. She set the Georgia state record for the 300m Hurdles her senior year. She had a full ride to Georgia Tech but tore her Achilles in the district finals. Three months later, she was pregnant with D'Andre. There isn't a shadow of that girl left in her now. His father played basketball at Morehouse, but his parents were never in love. They met drinking in the park. Kids used to go there to hang out and make bad decisions after dark. They had sex on the slide, and then he was gone before she knew she was pregnant. According to his mom, he died in a car accident a year later. He doesn't have any reason not to believe her. When he was a kid, it used to make him sad to think about it. But there's no use missing something you never had. What his mom has never told him, is that she didn't want to keep him. She tried to get an abortion, but her mother found out and showed up at the clinic and caused such a scene that the police had to be called. D'Andre's grandmother's name was Dela Montgomery. She was a fire and brimstone Baptist, the kind who would rather go to jail for disorderly conduct than let her daughter commit what she believed to be infanticide. It was a unique sort of hypocrisy because although she stopped his mother from having an abortion, she also kicked her out of the house for getting pregnant. His mom came home one day to find the locks on the house changed, with all of her belongings boxed up and stacked on the porch. She waited on the front stoop for three hours until his grandmother came home, "I'm sorry Mama—"