The Best American Series 2017

16 Short Stories & Essays

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781328512710
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country’s finest short fiction and nonfiction. 

This special edition contains selections from the following 2017 editions:

The Best American Short Stories edited by Meg Wolitzer
The Best American Essays edited by Leslie Jamison
The Best American Mystery Stories edited by John Sandford
The Best American Nonrequired Reading edited by Sarah Vowell
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Charles Yu
The Best American Travel Writing edited by Lauren Collins
The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Hope Jahren
The Best American Sports Writing edited by Howard Bryant
 Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. The special guest editor then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish.  This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected – and most popular – of its kind.

LUKE CYPHERS AND TERI THOMPSON

Lost in America

from Bleacher Report

The calls came around 11:00 p.m. on a cold January night in 2015, first to the Serbian boy with the little Samsung Android phone, then to the Cameroonians. “You ready? I’m gonna come tonight,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Pack your stuff.”

Within hours, four teenage basketball players had hurriedly filled their gym bags with their scant possessions, including the clothes that now hung off their tall frames like cheap drapes, the result of months of having to scavenge for food from a nearby suburban Atlanta strip mall. They sneaked out of the drab townhouse apartments where they slept jammed into small rooms, usually on the floor and often without heat, and silently piled into a rented gray van.

They had never heard of Lake Wales, Florida, the place where the driver of the van, Gordon Gibbons, an assistant coach who had taken pity on them, was delivering them. They didn’t care. It couldn’t be worse than the place they were fleeing in the middle of the night—Stockbridge, Georgia, and Faith Baptist Christian Academy North. They were sure they had been conned there, and they’d had enough.

Their tribulations began as soon as they set foot in America. Rostand Ndong Essomba, a quick, 6'0" point guard from Yaounde, Cameroon, was told back home that Faith Baptist North was offering him a full scholarship. He jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops, procuring a coveted I-20 form that grants permission for international students to apply for a non-immigrant visa to enter the country and study in the U.S.

But when Rostand arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta in October 2014, he says Faith Baptist North’s founder, George Flint, took one look at him and told the 17-year-old African he was too short. Rostand says that Flint told him that if he wanted to stay in America, he had to cough up $2,000. “Where’s the money?” Flint allegedly asked his new recruit.

Franck Tsoungui, Rostand’s slender, sharpshooting 6'7" countryman, had left a stable situation at a prep school in Maine five months earlier, enticed by Flint’s promises of a new program playing a powerhouse schedule that would expose his talents to Division I coaches. What Franck got was a merry-go-round of missed meals and canceled games.

Mahmadou Ngoucheme had only been at Faith Baptist North for six weeks, but he packed plenty of suffering into that time. He was seven feet tall, but that was about the only thing he had going for him as a U.S. hoops prospect. He was raw, which was a nice way of saying he possessed few offensive skills, and he had a gentle disposition off the court—and on it.

What he really wanted was an American education, but after arriving in December 2014, Mahmadou had yet to attend a single class. Faith Baptist North had held no classes since mid-November.

Stefan Nakic-Vojnovic grew jaded early. The 6'5" shooting guard from Belgrade, Serbia, had been in Georgia the longest, since July, meaning that he had heard more broken promises than any of them. First there was the matter of the Faith Baptist North campus. There wasn’t one, despite the brochure Faith Baptist North circulated to starry-eyed teens around the world via the Internet, with photos of a beautiful lakeside compound and state-of-the-art athletic facilities.

The real Faith Baptist North was a football field and a rented gym housing a few unused classrooms behind a small church in Stockbridge, south of Atlanta. Stefan lived first in the basement of Flint’s two-story home in Conyers, a few miles from Stockbridge, with as many as 20 other boys, then in a run-down apartment building, where he and some Serbian players pooled what money they had to buy a tiny electric heater to fend off the cold.

During the few weeks of classes held in the fall, Stefan says he took math tests for football players and laughed as Flint lectured students on avoiding bad people. Much of the rest of the time, he says he slept on cold floors and scrounged for food and free Wi-Fi hotspots. He sums up Faith Baptist North in three words: “a big nothing.”

The van ride promised something better. For a little while, anyway. About five hours into the seven-hour trip to Lake Wales, a town in central Florida, Stefan received another call from a Serb who was at Faith Baptist North. Flint now was aware of the getaway, and in response, the founder who referred to himself as a preacher and a man of God had apparently told people he’d canceled the four teens’ I-20s, rendering their student visas invalid.

“We knew that we were basically illegal now,” Stefan says. The boys all had the same thought: “What are we gonna do?”

Over the past six months, a Bleacher Report investigation into Faith Baptist Christian Academy North has revealed how the start-up school ended up crushing dreams, squandering families’ savings, and disrupting lives. The four boys who fled Faith Baptist North for Lake Wales are now witnesses in a widening federal investigation into human trafficking, allowed to remain in the country under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Their flight that January night set off a chain of events that led to the resignation of the Lake Wales High basketball coach and federal raids of Faith Baptist North, which has since closed, and its sister campus, Faith Baptist Christian Academy in Ludowici, Georgia, a four-hour drive southeast of Atlanta.

In a letter sent by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency on behalf of one of the boys, Faith Baptist’s south campus in Ludowici was described as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)–certified school that “worked in conjunction with a noncertified northern campus to recruit, exploit and defraud hundreds of international and domestic students.”

George Flint, who founded Faith Baptist North, declined multiple interview requests from Bleacher Report by telephone, text, and mail, saying in a text message in late May, “I really have no comment at this time.”

However, he has denied any wrongdoing to others interviewed by Bleacher Report, including Matthew Sellars, the athletic director at Faith Baptist’s south campus in Ludowici. Sellars recalls seeing Flint at a JUCO jamboree in October 2015, seven months after Faith Baptist North closed. “The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I had nothing to do with that; whatever it is they said, it isn’t true,’” Sellars says.

Bleacher Report has learned that the probe, which includes agents from Homeland Security’s Atlanta, Savannah, and Tampa offices, has expanded its scope beyond Faith Baptist Christian Academy’s two campuses to include potential trafficking cases elsewhere in the Southeast.

On May 16, law enforcement officials in Alamance County, North Carolina, arrested Aris Hines, a former Flint associate who sometimes coached players from Faith Baptist North and worked briefly with Flint in a failed attempt to start another prep school, on state law charges of obstruction of justice and obtaining property by false pretense.

Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson told Bleacher Report the charges are part of an investigation into human trafficking of athletes. He said the FBI, ICE, Homeland Security, including Homeland’s Atlanta office, and the U.S. Department of State have entered the investigation, which involves a 15-year-old Nigerian basketball and football player and three girls from the Dominican Republic whom Hines allegedly attempted to enroll in a North Carolina high school with false documents and expired visas.

The sheriff’s office said the search warrants in the case are sealed and police reports are not available to the public because of the investigation. Hines, who did not return messages left by Bleacher Report, denied wrongdoing in an interview with WTVD, a North Carolina TV station.

Depending on the source, the Faith Baptist fiasco was either a cascading failure that started with good intentions or a corrupt, cynical grab for money and sports glory at the expense of gullible foreign athletes and their families. It also reveals that in the U.S., there are still Good Samaritans willing to help kids in trouble. Thanks to the actions of the Lake Wales community, and one family in particular, the four Faith Baptist North players still have a chance at an American education.

Anyone familiar with modern prep school sports agrees the system is rife with problems. A number of American prep schools effectively operate as AAU teams with a “school” around them, coaches say.

For decades, the NCAA has tried to crack down on “diploma mill” prep schools designed to make academically struggling athletes eligible for college ball. The incentives to run such programs are strong. Successful programs not only enjoy prestige for winning and turning out star players, they also can earn money from sneaker company sponsorships.

There are also age-old stories of prep and AAU coaches paying handlers for access to players and getting kickbacks for sending players to certain colleges or steering them to certain professional agents. But the international component has added a new dimension—a massive, global pool of athletes to be exploited.

“This whole prep school thing is an absolute scam,” says one veteran basketball coach who asked not to be identified. “There are literally hundreds of these bad situations throughout the country.”

These situations can appear attractive. “Corrupt schools can put up a front; they may look credible on the surface, but once we peel back the layers, we find irregularities,” says Lou Farrell, director for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), the arm of ICE that certifies and monitors U.S. schools that enroll international students on an F or M visa. “Schools and individuals who try to manipulate the student visa system for personal gain are being held accountable for their actions.”

While human trafficking cases involving sexual exploitation of women are well documented, trafficking of athletes is a subset of labor exploitation that has only recently shown up on the radar of activists and government agencies. But it is a crime nonetheless, says Katherine Kaufka Walts, director of the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University in Chicago.

“It’s the recruiting, it’s the moving, it’s the harboring and financially benefiting from the involuntary servitude, debt bondage, peonage, or slavery of another person by force or by coercion,” Kaufka Walts says. “The common thread is the economic exploitation of someone else’s body, whether it’s to perform labor in a field or to perform labor on the court.”

At the heart of the U.S. athlete trafficking issue is the quest for I-20s, the necessary form for student visa status. The latest quarterly statistics released by SEVP reveal 1.2 million international students studying in U.S. elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and vocational schools. It is unclear how many are athletes—students aren’t required to reveal their athletic ambitions to immigration agents—but prep school rosters across the country are dotted with, and sometimes laden with, international players.

The come-ons prep schools use to attract these players can be comical. Until recently, the website of the Evelyn Mack Academy, or EMA, a Charlotte prep school stocked with international athletes, featured a photo of an imposing domed structure fronted by Ionic columns. The building didn’t belong to EMA but to MIT—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But serious national security issues come into play. Even before 9/11, when some of the foreign nationals who brought down the Twin Towers trained to fly planes in the U.S. due in part to improperly issued visas, security experts worried about bogus student visas being a portal for terrorists.

There are also health concerns: some players arrive in the country without proper immunizations, and their schools never bother to vaccinate them. Mahmadou, Rostand, Franck, and Stefan didn’t receive their mandated shots until they arrived at Lake Wales High.

Those are worst-case scenarios, but the everyday abuses are bad enough. Whether through incompetence, ambition, or, as several international students allege, corruption, schools like Faith Baptist North can leave aspiring athletes out on the street in a foreign land, disillusioned, vulnerable, and illegal.

The Georgia school is rare in that it has precipitated a federal investigation, but as the North Carolina investigation reveals, there are other schools and individuals allegedly abusing the I-20 system, potentially leaving students in deplorable conditions with little or no way out.

“I would try every day to get back in my country,” says Mahmadou. “Because in Georgia, I didn’t go to school. I didn’t sleep good, eat good. Nobody to tell me how I would do. My first plan was to get back to my country. Because I was . . .”

He pauses, struggling to find the word. “Lost.”

As dawn broke over the citrus groves in Lake Wales on April 22, 2016, Lora Watts Donley was in an urgent care office pleading for antibiotics and anything else that would knock out the walking pneumonia the doctor had diagnosed. She felt like hell, but there was no time for coddling a 102.7 degree fever. Lora rarely failed to complete a task, and this one was no different.

It had been more than a year since the four young basketball players, basically homeless in a foreign country, had landed in the Donley home near Lake Wales. Now, Lora was literally reversing their course, taking Mahmadou and Stefan to a junior college showcase in the Atlanta suburb of Norcross, nine hours away.

Things had gone well for the most part in the year since the boys had fled Faith Baptist North. The Donleys took them in because they believe in helping others in need, and because they have the resources to do it. They go to church, and it’s right to share blessings.

David, Lora’s husband, runs a family citrus-growing operation and owns land throughout central Florida. Lora’s family lives nearby and owns a blueberry packing house and floral manufacturing business.

Thanks to the Donleys, the boys were finally living the kind of American life they had seen on television and read about on the Internet. They had their own space in a beautiful home, nice clothes, plenty of food, good schools to attend, and sports teams to play on. The Donleys’ generosity included helping arrange for Stefan’s mother to come to Florida from Serbia to visit her son.

“Those kids lucked out,” says Donna Dunson, the Lake Wales High principal.

But the kids were still witnesses in a federal investigation, allowed in the country as long as investigators found them useful. Homeland Security agents told Lora the investigation could last two years, but nobody knew for certain, and their witness status was set to expire at the end of March 2016. After that, they would be vulnerable, much the way they were in the van the year before, when George Flint claimed to have canceled their I-20s.

Lora and David were keenly attuned to any change in the boys’ behavior, and it was clear that the ordeal they had endured in Georgia—the lack of food, the threats of deportation, the alienation—had taken a toll. The boys were homesick, yet worried about whether they could continue their educations in the U.S. “They were crashing on me, losing morale,” Lora says.

Lora figured the surefire way to keep the boys on track was to find them college scholarships and the I-20s that came with them. That way, even if the government dropped the investigation and no longer needed them as witnesses, they wouldn’t be deported.

Lora had already succeeded with Franck, who had graduated from high school by the time he arrived in Lake Wales and earned a JUCO basketball scholarship from State College of Florida in Bradenton.

For Rostand, Mahmadou, and Stefan, however, time was running out, and tensions were high.

Propped up by antibiotics, massive doses of ibuprofen, and a sackful of vitamins, Lora loaded Stefan and Mahmadou into the SUV along with Stefan’s mother, Lola, and Lora’s daughter, Kaylee, and began the long drive north. The destination: the All-American Showcase, an event for unsigned high school, prep, JUCO, and international prospects.

As they checked into their hotel and the boys registered for the tournament, Lora described her mission in a Facebook post:

✓ Basketball Showcase weekend: must get the boys a scholarship. ✓ Three days of being sick: bed is not an option. ✓ Predawn urgent care trip: 2 shots in my butt and a bag of prescriptions. ✓ 9 hour road trip through a monsoon with fever: we have arrived. ✓ God please send the right people this weekend. You know what everyone has gone through to get here.

Rostand landed in America on October 24, 2014, at exactly 3:35 p.m.; he checked his phone to mark the moment. He arrived with a small suitcase, two pairs of shoes, and an inconspicuous belt bag his mom had given him in which he kept his documents and $150 in cash. But he felt rich. This, he thought, would be the start of a new life, a chan...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Letter from the Publisher
• The Best American Short Stories 2017
• Let’s Go to the Videotape
• Famous Actor
• The Best American Essays 2017
• Cost of Living
• Snakebit
• The Best American Mystery Stories 2017
• Flight
• The Man from Away
• The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017
• Lucky Dragon
• Autocracy: Rules for Survival
• The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017
• The Venus Effect
• The City Born Great
• The Best American Travel Writing 2017
• Chiefing in Cherokee
• Land of the Lost
• The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017
• Unfriendly Climate
• The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene
• The Best American Sports Writing 2017
• Kaepernick Is Asking for Justice, Not Peace
• Lost in America
• Read More from The Best American Series®
• Connect with HMH