ROOTS

The triumph can’t be had without the struggle.

—Wilma Rudolph

When I was eleven, I lifted a tractor with my bare hands. My grandpa, Alfred Bennett, was underneath, fixing the tractor, and the thing was about to fall on him. I didn’t want to see him hurt, so I picked the tractor up and said, “Popo, get out from under there!” He scurried out and, true to the man, got right back to work farming. He didn’t miss a beat. My cousins froze and just looked at me. Then one of them shook his head and said, “You strong as fuck!”

I was. It was old-school strength, developed from the moment I could stand. I was the oldest son, and both my grandpas were farmers. That meant I worked in the Louisiana fields during the summers, which gave me my calluses. My job was picking okra and bell peppers and carrying buckets for whatever pay Popo would throw at me. That’s what I did when school wasn’t in session: farm chores and, when needed, lifting up a tractor. When it was time to have some fun, we body-slammed each other in the cow pastures, right into the mud, pretending to be the wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin, while the cows looked at us like we were crazy.

Those buckets also strengthened my hands. I’ve got hands that can crush walnuts. Maybe that is why I wear the tiniest shoulder pads in the NFL. I’ve never felt the need to enhance anything. As a kid I loved the story about Paul Bunyan, the all-natural muscle man, and I want to feel my muscles work, not just for strength but for speed and flexibility. I still do the same workout. I still lift rice buckets, pull weights, and make sure I’m not just gym-strong but farm-strong. It’s like I’m the Black Rocky, from Rocky IV, when he was training on that Russian farm. (Or maybe Rocky is the white me.)

But it was when I lifted that tractor and saw the looks on my cousin’s faces that I knew I might have a different path from working in the fields.

Louisiana is the foundation for my life. My town goes back to the 1800s. A lot of my family still lives on a street called Bennett Road—same schools, same community, same church. It’s where we settled after we were no longer enslaved people, and where the Bennetts have proudly made not just a home but a community. Like I said, both of my grandpas were farmers and worked in the fields. My Popo Alfred also was—and still is—a Southern Baptist preacher. He can preach with the best of them, as good as any of the television pastors in their three-thousand-dollar suits, but he worked with his hands to build his own church in his backyard and packed it every Sunday. Because the church was next to the house, he once caught us playing Nintendo instead of getting ready for services, so he stopped what he was doing, smashed our Nintendo, and got right back to preparing his sermon. He taught me about the Bible, how to hunt and fish, plant, and work a tractor. (I learned how to body-slam from pro wrestling.) One time he had me slaughter a goat, and I did it wrong. The goat bled out quickly, but I felt terrible to see a living creature die. Popo didn’t care. He just said, “Death is death, no matter what. When it dies, it’s dead.” That has never left me. No matter what it is, when something is gone it’s gone, so make your mark.

Making that journey from boy to man might have been easier if we had stayed on Bennett Road, but that was not going to be the case. My father, Michael Sr.—otherwise known as Big Mike—and my birth mother, Caronda, started having kids when my mom was sixteen. I was the second of five and the oldest boy. Martellus was born eighteen months after me. By the time my mom was seventeen, she and my dad had three kids, and then five kids by age twenty-two. My dad and mom married right after they both finished high school. They never really got to be teenagers, just went from being kids to being parents. It wasn’t any kind of scandal. In a small Southern town, it’s normal for people to get pregnant early and get married. But it also meant tough decisions that affected their lives to this day. My dad had a scholarship to play college football at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but he abandoned those dreams to support his growing family and joined the navy. (Yes, my dad was in the navy, so—again—don’t speak to me about certain players being “unpatriotic” for taking a knee.)

Joining the navy meant leaving Bennett Road in Louisiana and moving to San Diego when I was six. San Diego is one of the biggest navy towns in the country, and we lived there as a family until I was eight, when my mom and dad decided to go their separate ways. That isn’t too unusual, but what was different from most divorced families was the decision they made with us kids. Out of the five children, the two youngest went with my mom; Martellus and I stayed with my dad; and my older sister went back to Louisiana to live with our grandma. The family was split, leaving me with the feeling that somehow my birth mother didn’t choose me. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that marriage is hard: to give up your selfish plans in order to build a life with somebody, and to continue to grow while keeping your family together. It can feel next to impossible. Sometimes people grow apart, and trying to keep the family together at all costs can cause so much unintended damage. As long as all the children end up cared for and loved … there is nothing more important.

I often think about their choice to split up and separate the kids—how different everything would have been if we’d stayed together or if we’d been divided up in another way, or if Martellus and I didn’t end up moving to Houston with a new mom when I was ten years old.

To be honest, if I’d stayed in Southern California, I might not be writing this at all, because gang violence was all over the place. There’d be drive-bys on the way to school, and stray bullets were a daily part of my young life. There were teenage twins who lived in the neighborhood, both with colostomy bags. They couldn’t even control their piss and shit because they’d been hit by stray bullets.

My dad kept Tellus and me clear of the worst of it, but there were no real safe spaces. I remember one time a guy in a gang beat up a girl so badly that a group of her people started looking for him. He was running through the neighborhood, jumping over fences, cutting through yards. Our front door was open because us kids were playing football out front. So he ran through our door and headed straight through our house and out the back. About forty-five minutes later, all these gang kids pulled up in their car. They looked ready to search our house, armed like The Expendables, announcing that they were going to get this guy.

My dad came out, no guns, calm as can be, and said, “Y’all come into this house, there’s going to be some problems.”

Then our neighbor appeared with a massive shotgun and said, “If y’all motherfuckers move, there’s going to be a shootout.”

Now everybody tensed up. My dad stood in the middle and told everyone to chill their asses out, that there were kids around. He explained to everyone that this dude who ran through our house was nobody we knew. “We don’t know what he did to this girl. This has nothing to do with my home or my family.”

The gang kids huddled up, and a couple of them realized that they knew my dad from his work as a volunteer flag football coach for kids around the neighborhood. One of the dudes replied, “Nah, you good, you would never do nothing like that.” They slowly backed away and waited around the corner. I don’t know what happened next, but I can’t imagine it was anything nice.

After that, we moved our asses to Texas. You know it’s bad where you’re living when you’re worried about guns and see Texas as a safe alternative. But we really moved because my dad met the woman I would learn to call my mom. In Louisiana for my Uncle Earl’s funeral, my dad met Miss Pennie, was struck by lightning where he stood, and just said, “We’re moving.”

I think about what my life would be if I’d never had the blessing of Miss Pennie, my new mom, a Grambling State University graduate and junior high school teacher, a woman who taught me to stand up for myself. Miss Pennie’s entrance into our family was a defining moment of my life. She was somebody who would not let us be “normal,” who said that no matter what the world tried to beat into our heads, we could be extraordinary. When I got in trouble, my punishment from her wasn’t spankings or sitting in a corner. It was reading encyclopedias. At first I hated it, but I learned to love this “punishment” and would get in trouble just to have some quiet space to learn about the world. Later, I read that studying encyclopedias was what Malcolm X did in prison to self-educate, and it blew my mind.

Miss Pennie has been there for every important moment of my life. Everything I’ve learned, I can see now, came from her. How to be the kind of father who can raise daughters. How to love. How to navigate this world. I see a lot of kids ask, “Why?” As in “Why are we here? Why is there war? Why are people hungry?” And they get a spanking for asking too many questions. Miss Pennie demanded that we ask “why,” and believe me, I took her up on that. I wanted to know why there was hate in the world, why my school wasn’t teaching me about our history, and why it felt like, from the schoolyard to the candy store, white kids were treated differently from Black kids.

When I asked her why, she would answer, “I know what it’s like out there, and I’ll teach you the truth so you understand. But I’m also going to teach you how to survive.” She told us we weren’t allowed to wear braids or saggy pants. This was not because she thought they looked bad or “ghetto” but because she knew what could happen if we were judged to be somebody we weren’t. Miss Pennie was always in my business, scared of what society would have in store for me, a young Black man, if I wasn’t on alert, reminding me that racism was real and I’d have to work twice as hard for anything I wanted.

Before Trayvon Martin’s murder brought it into some white people’s consciousness, Black families have always known, as my mom knew, that if I looked like I was in the wrong neighborhood, or if there were a case of mistaken identity, I could be put down for the crime of walking while Black. I was always reminded that being Black was dangerous, that people would see my skin as a weapon, a threat. But my mom’s lessons didn’t sink in until I was twelve years old, when a man named James Byrd was murdered in Jasper, Texas, lynched and dragged behind a truck. It brought the history that I was learning to life: the beating and lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 and his mother’s insistence on an open casket so the world could see what they did to her baby. Mamie Till was also a teacher, like Miss Pennie, and I saw myself in Emmett Till’s disfigured face, and I saw my community through the eyes of James Byrd, eyes that were popping out of his skull as he was dragged by the neck from a chain, and I cried until it hurt.

The lynching of James Byrd happened just a hundred miles from my house, and it felt like it happened a hundred yards away. A mental line was drawn in the sand for me, and I don’t think I was ever the same again. I saw Black leaders running around, asking for justice again, for another tragedy of a slain Black man. It felt like nothing had changed from Emmett Till’s day. It felt like we were being hunted and trophied, to be mounted on someone’s wall. I have never admitted this before, but I was scared to walk home at night by myself out of fear that I could be next. For a long while, every time a pickup truck rumbled around the corner, my breath caught in my chest. This was Texas, so pickups were everywhere, which meant that for a while my heart just raced nonstop.

I wasn’t the only one in the Bennett household on edge. I remember the time Martellus decided he was going to get lost for the whole day—normal kid stuff—but he didn’t tell anybody, and my father went searching for him, guns cocked, loaded, and thinking that the worst could’ve happened to his young Black child.

It made us feel threatened. But it also held a poisonous message that being Black was inferior, that somehow we deserved to be hunted and killed. In Louisiana and Texas, we’d see stories on television of shootings, deaths, Klan marches. In school, we never learned how Black people built this country. We built America, for free, but in class our contributions were invisible, at best there to entertain, or the same lesson about George Washington Carver—as if we were slaves, invented peanut butter, and became entertainers, and that’s our entire story. We built the White House. We built the Capitol Building. We built the Light of Freedom on top of the Capitol Building. That’s this country. The Light of Freedom, built by slaves.

Being born Black is a preexisting condition in this society, with a set of stressors that you can’t understand without living in our skin. It’s not just the fear that you’ll be the next James Byrd or Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland. It’s hearing dumb shit in school about America being the “land of the free” and having to speak up to remind my teacher of slavery, and seeing all the faces change expression, from getting red with anger to others rolling their eyes, with looks of relief on the faces of people who had been thinking the same thing. I felt like Kevin in The Wonder Years, if Kevin had been Black and had to face an ass-whupping every day for trying to tell the truth.

I’ve tried to tell people in Seattle—and I love Seattle—that, yes, Seattle has its problems, but there are parts of this country that are a lot worse when it comes to these issues. Of course there’s racism in Seattle. But in Texas, it’s right in your face. You’re hearing about people getting hanged. You’re seeing the KKK. There are Confederate monuments to people who owned your great-grandparents that you have to walk by every day. Until you’ve lived in that area, you just don’t know. Some of the stories my grandfather told me, even what my dad told me, would melt your brain. You grow up in the South, there are people who don’t want you alive! They don’t want you to have books. They don’t want you to even have a chance. I grew up in Texas, and there was a Red Dragon, a KKK leader, right there. This man is walking around, people know him, they say “Hi” to him at the truck stop, and he’s full of hate, plotting your death.

But it’s more than the fear. My family had been in Louisiana since the late 1700s, but after slavery they didn’t have access to bank loans; they weren’t able to own anything in their community other than the church my Popo built with his bare hands. We built our own community on Bennett Road. But we had no ownership. Seeing this with my own eyes was a crash course for my experiences in the NFL. That’s why I talk all the time about the lack of Black ownership in pro football and why it’s so important for us to own and not be owned. There is no self-determination without control, and there is no control without ownership, whether it’s your house, your car, or an NFL team.

I only have the tools to navigate both that past and my present because my parents taught us history, including what we had to overcome as a people. Malcolm X once said, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.” I don’t think he ever said anything truer.

Way too often, as athletes, we get pulled out of our environment, get some money, get some fame, and become so focused on “the life” that we forget we are still Black men living in this society. It’s so easy to lose our sense of self, to just float away on the cheers and forget who we are, who came before us, and how they bled. That mindfulness came from the people who raised me. As I got older, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the people I grew up reading about in those encyclopedias. I wanted to be a person who made an impact with my mind more than I wanted to grow up and be Charles Haley or my friend the late Cortez Kennedy.

Growing up in Houston also helped me understand this world and my place in it. Living there was an education. You’d see so many diverse cultures and run into so many different types of people that you couldn’t help but think about the world outside of H-Town. People don’t realize that Houston takes in more refugees than any city in the United States. If Houston were a country it would rank as the fourth-largest refugee population on earth. Look at the ways people pitched in to save one another after Hurricane Harvey, setting out on boats, pulling people from cars, opening up their mosques, synagogues, and storefront churches. That’s Houston, and that was my community growing up.

Our house was where the kids went. We were “the house.” Everybody knew where we lived, and they were like, “Let’s go to the house.” There was always basketball going on and the sounds of kids having fun. Big Mike was the dad for the kids who didn’t have dads, or who were in home situations that felt unsafe. They knew they would be all right in “the house.”

As for football, I didn’t even realize I was “college-scholarship-good” at it until high school. I played because it was something to do. I liked doing science projects, and I also liked football. It was just another pursuit on the list of my interests. I never thought I was going to the NFL. I never believed, “This is exactly what I want to do. This is the dream.” But when you’re big and Black, the grown-ups push you to play sports. They take an interest that is hard to ignore or resist. Also, when you’re big and Black, your peers challenge you all the time to scuffle. They challenge your manhood, as if fighting makes you a man. I never liked to fight, but I really didn’t have a choice, because I was Martellus’s big brother. Martellus occasionally would start the fights, but I always had to end them. People knew that if they fought one of us, they would have to fight both of us, which really meant that if someone tried to fight Martellus, they would be fighting me. Back-to-back fighting: the big Bennett boys, swatting people down like flies. That was just life. Everybody wanted to test us, every single day. My grandpa said, “Y’all need to stop fighting at that schoolhouse!”

In San Diego, we were “country” to the West Side kids, but in the summers, as soon as we were back in Louisiana, we were “city kids.” In Houston we were “the Bennett boys,” but no matter how people saw us, we were joined at the hip, two peas in a pod. Growing up, we spent so much time side by side that people thought we were twins. We had the same friends and took part in the same activities. We also shared a bed. I spent my childhood sleeping foot to head with that man. The house had three bedrooms, but my father wanted to have a guest room, so we shared a bedroom. Before we had to split a mattress we had bunk beds, but Tellus got bigger and heavier, growing up to six feet six and 270 pounds, and he was on the top bunk—until it collapsed. I’m still mad about that shit.

We both went to Texas A&M, so it wasn’t until we got to the NFL that we lived in different places and walked our own paths. Before that, we were always on the same team, whether it was football, basketball, or even dodgeball. There wasn’t a PE teacher in the state of Texas who was going to split up the Bennett brothers. Even now, when we play against each other, I say I only tackle him enough to get him down. He’s got a daughter, and I’m not trying to have to raise her. To this day, he tells me that he looks up to me because of the decisions I make, that he believes in me and I’m his role model. But the craziest part—and maybe he won’t even realize it until he reads this—is that, as much as he looks up to me, I look up to him. His creativity, the way he dreams, and his fearlessness about expressing himself. He’s my role model, too.

But it’s my dad who was, is, and always will be the most important figure in my life. In my mind he’s a superhero, but he’s also the real-life person who sacrificed for me to be who I am, never missing a game, always being there and doing what he needed to do. He was my football coach most of the time, but more than football, it was his approach to competition and manhood that made the greatest impact.

Once, after a game, the father of one of my friends yelled at another dad, “My son would beat your son up!”

The other dad yelled back, “No, my son would kick your son’s ass.”

They turned to my dad. “What about your son?”

And my dad just said, “No, no, we’re not going to do that. He’s going to walk away and live to fight another day.” One of the kids pushed forward by his father like a mini-gladiator ended up, years later, getting shot and needing a wheelchair.

My father kept us off the attitude that gets a lot of people in trouble: when, as Dave Chappelle puts it, “keeping it real goes wrong.” People try to keep up a persona, and it ends up coming back to bite them in the ass. My dad would point out our friends who had been shot or lost loved ones to violence and make clear that he didn’t want it to happen to us.

When we moved to Houston, my dad found a decent desk job at a company you might have heard of, called Enron. When Enron went belly up with all that corruption in 2001, I was fifteen. We were one of the many families of Enron employees who suffered because of the executives’ criminal lust for money. We had to move houses and switch schools, and everything got super tight as my dad looked for work. When I speak out on justice issues, I feel like I’m also speaking for everyone hurt by Enron. Corporate greed destroyed the lives of families. None of the company higher-ups asked themselves, “How much is enough?” Or, “Shouldn’t we care more about our employees than cheating people to increase our bottom line?” This is why I’ve never, ever, from day one, trusted the NFL fully, because I know that the bottom line is always the business. When people want the NFL to “lead” on issues like violence against women, or racism, or even head injuries, I roll my eyes. The NFL is just another corporation, and they’ll do what they have to do. Asking them to lead on social issues sometimes seems like asking a dog to meow.

I learned early on that I couldn’t count on kindly corporations or my teachers to show me morality or teach me my history, but I knew I could rely on my family—and also learned how quickly it could all disappear. I relearn that lesson every time I see myself with no shirt on. In the mirror, I’ve got my muscles all laid out and proportioned, and I look like what I am: an NFL player in prime shape. But then I’ve got a scar that runs across my stomach, just below my belly button, about as big and jagged as anything you can imagine. It looks like I escaped from the basement of those Saw movies.

The scar didn’t come from anything so dramatic, but it was a scenario just as deadly. I was ten years old, and my appendix burst. It almost killed me. I was getting ready for school and said to my mom, “I don’t feel so good.”

My mom, the teacher, cared about education above all else, so she said, “You’re going to school, no matter what. You’re going to school like it’s Walgreens, 24/7!”

I remember protesting, “But my stomach really doesn’t feel right.” She sent me off anyway. When I got to my classroom, I started throwing up like I was trying to empty my entire body onto the floor. It started with breakfast but then it was green liquid, like I was trying to vomit my stomach lining. I remember thinking, “I’m throwing up poison.”

The teacher sent me home, and my mom said to my dad, “Let’s just take him to the emergency room.” At the hospital, the doctor rushed me into surgery because my appendix had ruptured. That’s why I was throwing up so much: all the toxic fluid in my body needed to get out. I had surgery to remove the ruptured appendix, and they thought I was fixed. But I ended up having to go back two weeks later because I wasn’t getting better. That’s when they had to slice my whole belly open and clean out the infection.

I stayed in the hospital for a couple weeks, and that changed me. My bed was next to kids with burns all over their bodies and other kinds of life-changing injuries. I remember one kid who had been saved from a fire, and he had no skin on his face. I still see that when I close my eyes.

When they finally let me go home, I had a hole in my stomach that needed to be treated. My mom had to put gauze inside the incision to soak up the fluids. For days I had to stay still, and my mom and my dad never left my side. They felt guilty that they’d ignored the symptoms to make sure I wasn’t faking to miss school. Now, as a parent, I also understand their panic. There is no fear like worrying about your child. I’d rather go through a dozen ruptured organs and be laid up in bed for months than be in my parents’ place beside a hospital bed, looking at my child with a big hole in his stomach and a colostomy bag resting by his side. I remember so clearly their love and devotion during those days.

But I didn’t know how deeply it had affected Martellus until years later. ESPN did an episode of the show E:60 on the Bennett brothers, and my appendix rupture came up. Martellus talked about seeing me in the hospital and just started crying on camera, bending down, sobbing. I was as shocked as the camera people. I didn’t know what to do, so I just put my hand on his back and let him go. Growing up, I had always seen this story first through my own eyes—my fear, my pain—and then through the anxiety of my mom and dad. I didn’t know how much baggage from that experience my brother had been carrying.

Now I stare in the mirror and look at this scar. It’s wide, long, jagged, and ugly. It’s also a tribute to what I’ve been through: a reminder that I could so easily not be here. It reminds me that life can be over in an instant, so live every single day. People look at me and think, “Oh, he’s so happy, he’s always laughing. He’s so carefree.” Why would I ever sweat the small stuff? I almost died. I’m alive, so to hell with every single thing that you think I should or shouldn’t be. I love looking at the scar. I hate that I had to feel that pain, but I love the lessons it taught and the way it still motivates me. Years ago, I got a tattoo of Frankenstein on my leg. Underneath it reads, “Near death experience. Keep on rising.”

After I healed up I got back on the football field. Martellus and I both played on the defensive line and put other teams through hell. Martellus was a prodigy, starring in both basketball and football, something unheard of in in Houston’s Alief School District. I wasn’t the athletic freak that Martellus was, but I held my own. Also, through someone on the football team, I met a girl. I was sixteen and she must’ve been fifteen. I thought, “This is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.” One day there was an open seat next to me on the school bus. She sat down and I couldn’t believe it. Her name was Pele Partsch. She and her family were like no one I had ever met: traveling musicians from Hawaii, all in the same band, like a Polynesian Partridge Family. Now they’re my in-laws, and Pele and I have been together ever since.

She gave me confidence to push forward with football. After high school, I was supposed to play at Louisiana Tech, but they messed up my paperwork, which gave me a semester to try to land somewhere else. During those months out of school, I sent my game tape to everybody I could think of. I packaged it up and sent it to top football programs. Then I’d call the college coaching staffs, pretending to be a high school coach, saying, “I’ve got this kid named Michael Bennett. He’s got the goods! You guys should check him out. I sent you his highlight tape.” That’s how I ended up getting a ton of scholarship offers: I realized the recruiters usually didn’t watch the full game film—they just heard about a guy and then watched his tapes.

Texas A&M was one of the schools that offered me a scholarship. That’s also why my brother ended up at Texas A&M; he was originally going to go to LSU. But now it was all set. The Bennett boys were going to drive two hours from Houston to College Station to attend Texas A&M, but the real education, the real higher learning, would not be going down in the classroom.