Her name is Hannah. When I met her more than a decade ago, she was a wide-eyed and curious seventh grader with church-pew manners. She was chatty and clingy, a dreamer with a trusting heart. She played with dolls and sang in a choir. She wanted to be a veterinarian and live in a mansion.
Hannah came from a home broken by poverty and addiction. She found comfort at Carroll Academy, a court-run day school in West Tennessee for teens in trouble. The Lady Jaguars basketball team that Hannah played on was in the middle of a 312-game losing streak, stretching over 12 years, which is why I first went to Carroll Academy. She was the youngest player that season.
Now it was early 2023. The evening sky darkened over Carroll County Jail. I was in the parking lot. A familiar voice was on the phone from the other side of the thick walls.
It was Hannah, now 24, addicted to meth, caught in a sting operation a few weeks earlier.
Oh, Hannah. Is that you?
“Hi, Mr. John,” Hannah said. I recognized her honeyed, lilting voice instantly. It might have been the only thing that hadn’t changed since she was a girl. I rubbed one hand on my forehead. The other held the phone.
“You OK?” I asked.
Hannah was one of nine girls The New York Times had featured in a five-part series in 2012, and then in a follow-up series a year later. The stories were less about basketball than about growing up in a part of America often hidden in the shadows, culturally and economically.
I could still rattle off all their names: Hannah. Summer. Miranda. Alleyah. Leslee. Kiana. Constance. Jenna. Destiny.
Most of them had been birthed into tough luck and raised in the quicksand of rural poverty. Few had a two-parent household or a reliable address. Most had firsthand views of joblessness and drug addiction. Some had parents in jail.
As teens, they were fragile, awkward, wounded, resilient, optimistic. They were young enough to have dreams, modest ones, mostly of attaining something marginally better than what they were living.
The last lines of my final article in the 2012 series had left their future open, untold.
“A cold, late-winter wind blew, and the girls rushed to get into the warmth of awaiting cars, back into a life without a basketball team,” I wrote. “In a moment, it seemed, they were scattered like leaves, and it was impossible to know just where they would be blown.”
Was it?
No stories in my career have sloshed around my head as persistently as those about the Lady Jaguars. I have tried to keep tabs of their lives, mostly through the thin strands and curated footprints of social media.
I have thought of the persistent myth that people in the United States can rise above their inherited lot through dedication and hard work. The more clinical truth is that most of us are echoes of our parents, winners and losers of a genetic, economic and even geographic lottery system.
For a decade, I wondered about the Lady Jaguars. I worried for them. I wanted to know how the wind had scattered them. Over the past two years, the photographer Ruth Fremson and I reconnected with all nine of them. Seven agreed to open their current lives to us.
Mostly, we wanted to ask them all the same question I had asked Hannah: Are you OK?
Through the weak phone connection from inside the jail, Hannah’s voice was tinged with optimism and no-excuses frankness. Much as she had felt safer at Carroll Academy than at home as a girl, she felt safer in jail than she did on the streets. She had been locked up for weeks but had not heard from friends or family. I was the first to visit her, she said.
“I want to grow up,” she told me. “I want to own my own car, buy my own house, go to college. I want to have a normal life.”
I sighed. I promised to stay in touch. I hung up and went searching for more.
HANNAH: ‘I wanted to feel like somebody cared’
Voices are time capsules. So many years can pass, so many things can change — faces, places, personalities — but somehow people sound the same.
Hannah’s sugared voice through the jailhouse phone. Summer’s easygoing cadence in her chaotic living room. Alleyah’s Southern accent, laced with sass and confidence. Kiana’s fast-talking determination, Destiny’s I-gotta-do-better sheepishness. Even Miranda’s memorable laugh, through the screen door, saying to come on in.
The y’alls and dropped g’s, the heavy sighs and the girlish giggles were still there. The words had harder edges. Some of the sentences were weighted with fatigue. But I recognized the voices.
“Welcome to McDonald’s. How may I help you today?”
There she was again. Hannah, through the drive-through speaker, a few months removed from jail. I ordered a shake and pulled up to the window.
Hannah smiled. Her light-brown hair, long and flowing as a teen, had been shaved in jail because of a lice outbreak; now it had grown back to a short bob. Her arms were decorated with amateur tattoos, some unfinished, some she had done herself.
She had been released straight into a supervised recovery program. Her support system included a probation officer, a drug counselor and a women’s shelter in a town two hours from where she grew up. “Every storm runs out of rain,” a note on the house’s bulletin board read.
“I always just wanted to feel like somebody cared,” Hannah said. “That they know about me and cared that I existed.”
Hannah was 12 when she arrived at Carroll Academy after she had admitted stealing her mother’s prescription pain pills and taking them to school. It was a lie, authorities later learned, conceived by Hannah’s father, so that he could take the pills and avoid the wrath of his wife. Soon, the family dissolved and Hannah was bouncing from home to home, one relative to another. That’s when our stories published. I soon lost track of her.
I now know that she began using crystal meth at 18. She has three felonies on her record — two for meth and one for stealing a truck — and a litany of probation violations. They’re long stories. The last time she saw her father, a few years ago, she sold him drugs, she said.
“Ain’t nobody’s fault but mine,” she said.
Hannah felt lucky. She was no longer angry at the young man who set her up during the meth sting. He had probably saved her life. No more hiding from arrest warrants and probation violations. No more dodging dealers who wanted to kill her for not repaying debts. No more running from abusive men. No more sleeping under the bridge near downtown.
Hannah’s treatment required her to attend at least five substance-abuse meetings a week — Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and the like. The women’s shelter had strict rules, household chores and routine drug tests. She graduated to another house, to a bit more freedom. Eventually she could get a phone. With her first paycheck, she and I went to Walmart and picked one out. Within a week, the house mother had taken it away from her for misusing it.
At McDonald’s this spring, Hannah got a raise, to $12 per hour, and felt rich. She paid $124 a month in rent at the women’s shelter, and tried to set aside $100 a paycheck to pay off the $18,000 in court fees and fines she owed. Hannah studied for high school equivalency exams, knowing a diploma could unlock other job opportunities. She applied to work as a receptionist and was told that she was a great fit, except for the felonies.
In early November, she got a new job, cleaning rooms at a nursing home. “LOL I love it,” she texted.
More than anything, she was pleased to have friends and mentors, a tight community of women in recovery.
“I love you,” the women said to one another when they said goodbye each day.
Hannah turned and smiled after one such exchange. “That’s nice to hear,” she whispered to me.
Her belongings fit into three small boxes. Hannah spent long periods noticing things she had taken for granted: The sky. Trees. People shuffling through everyday lives.
“I like how normal I feel,” she said.
There were dark moments when Hannah came close to throwing it away again for one more high. But then she thought of jail. Of the house. Of the job. Of the meetings. Of the people she would disappoint — her housemates, her counselor, even the people at Carroll Academy who had embraced her as a teen. And she still didn’t want to let down her parents.
People around town soon knew Hannah from the meetings and from McDonald’s. Sometimes the cars stacked up as people made small talk with her at the drive-through window. People were happy to see her. She made their day.
When a man pulled up and realized that he didn’t have enough change for a cup of coffee, Hannah paid for him. Later, at Walmart, she bought $30 worth of clothes — not for her, but for a homeless man who hangs around McDonald’s.
She had nothing. She had everything.
ALLEYAH: ‘Everything’s going to be OK’
Alleyah sat in her bedroom, in a bland, suburban house in Florida, a few miles from the Atlantic coast. The bedroom looked a lot like the one that she had as a teenager in Tennessee — twin bed, colored lights, frilly accents. She felt lucky to have gotten from there to here.
“I’m really proud of myself,” she said.
The Florida house was a recovery residence similar to Hannah’s, but Alleyah seemed to be a year or so farther on the arc to recovery. She had been promoted to house mom, and her duties included administering drug and breathalyzer tests to housemates.
When we reconnected in person, Alleyah had just finished an eight-hour shift as a customer service representative for a moving company. Her Mazda sedan was parked in the driveway. The car’s starter was connected to a breathalyzer, the consequence of a D.U.I. in 2019. An app on her phone said she had been sober for 464 days. She wore her sobriety date on a beaded bracelet.
Alleyah had been sent to Carroll Academy at 13. I thought she was hilarious, a wisp of a girl with streetwise attitude and a broad smile. In 2013, I called her “a tiny dynamo of head-shaking self-destruction.” She could barely hoist a basketball to the rim her first year, but was point guard the second. She wanted to be a cosmetologist.
I remembered her single father telling me how worried he was about bad influences — boys, booze, drugs — that lingered outside their door. He wanted Alleyah to grow up and leave their town. “There’s better stuff out there if she can just get away,” he said.
Weeks later, at 15, Alleyah failed a drug test and was ordered to a rehab center in Memphis, two hours from home. She ran away and kept running, fueled by booze and Xanax. Scared to fly, she took a bus to Florida, where she heard she could do rehab in places that let people smoke pot.
She bounced from one place to another, most of them happy to accept her and her insurance money. People in the know call it the “Florida shuffle.”
She survived a sexual assault that she would rather not discuss. Exhausted and desperate, she got connected to Karlyn McAleer, a woman in her 30s recovering from addiction, who owns and operates Courage Houses, including three recovery residences for women.
“I kind of got a head’s up about her, a girl who has been bouncing through the ‘Florida shuffle,’” Karlyn said. She sat next to Alleyah on the porch. “Then I meet her, and she’s this sweet little Southern thing. I could see I was going to need to kick her in the butt. She was lazy. She needed motivation.”
“I did,” Alleyah said, nodding.
“She’s been through a lot of personalities here, but she’s always been kind,” Karlyn said. “She doesn’t like confrontation. Now she’s able to speak up for herself.”
There was no timeline for re-entering the world without the guardrails of a recovery residence. That’s the thing with all of the Lady Jaguars. In childhood, despite the problems they faced, they had scaffolding and safety nets, like Carroll Academy. As adults, on their own, they have to find support in unfamiliar places — through jobs or hobbies, at halfway houses or rehab meetings, maybe with a reliable significant other. Failing is more real now, in ways they didn’t fathom as teens.
“The thought of leaving here scares the hell out of me,” Alleyah said.
“When it comes time to leave, it’ll feel right,” Karlyn told her.
“Yeah,” Alleyah said, mostly to herself. She looked to the distance. “It’ll feel right.”
Alleyah returned to Tennessee for a few days to attend her grandmother’s funeral. She went back to the housing project where her father still lives, where she still has a bedroom, where the faces in the neighborhood look familiar, but older.
She felt anxious. Too many memories. Too many temptations. Too many ways to upend her simple dreams: a car, a job, a place to live, a family, someday. It can all feel so hard.
Alleyah pondered what she would tell her 15-year-old self. She cried.
“I would tell her that everything’s going to be OK,” she said.
She recently began hunting for her own apartment. This winter, she thinks, she’ll be ready to live on her own.
CARROLL ACADEMY: ‘They can’t see past the tree line’
For 30 years, Carroll Academy has snared teens before they slip into society’s cracks. A juvenile court judge assigns them there, mostly for bad behavior or chronic truancy, until they earn their way back to what the kids call “regular” school. That might take a few months, even a year or two. Three of the nine former Lady Jaguars graduated from Carroll Academy.
The idea is to nurture them with tough love and nudge them to adulthood — then release them, like fish in a river.
“We can’t be there to hold their hands forever,” Randy Hatch, Carroll Academy’s founding director and longtime basketball coach, now retired, told me this year.
Most girls at Carroll Academy are placed on the basketball team “to give their worlds a bit of structure and to teach them about teamwork and trusting others,” as I wrote in 2012. Many of them have no experience playing basketball, and they lose most games in a rout. The 2012 team extended the program’s losing streak to 184.
Carroll Academy serves five rural counties, dotted by small towns strung together by quiet roads that cut over rolling hills of cotton fields and forests. Midway between Nashville and Memphis, the region’s demographics skew older, whiter, poorer and less educated than the state’s averages.
In the 1990s especially, the area was hollowed out by the shuttering of manufacturing plants. Most residents were working class and deeply rooted, without the wherewithal to chase jobs elsewhere. Most of the 2012 Lady Jaguars were born into these families.
Back then, Hatch said that the children of Carroll Academy were hampered, in part, by a lack of imagination for a better life. “They can’t see past the tree line,” was how he put it to me.
It’s 2024. Plants have opened again and employers are desperate for workers. But not enough applicants can pass the drug screening, and many won’t be hired because of felony records.
And there is not a culture of work. Some of the Lady Jags had never seen parents with a steady job. “They’ve never seen someone who had to set an alarm clock,” Hatch said.
Drugs are a through line. Waves of them have crashed into communities like these in recent decades — crack, heroin, opioids, now fentanyl, taking shifts filling worlds of tedium and anxiety.
But methamphetamine is the constant, hiding in the hollers and bridging generations. “Hillbilly cocaine,” a Carroll Academy counselor called it, as inextricable from the landscape as summer humidity. Several of the Lady Jaguars from 2012 have fought meth addictions as young adults, just as their parents did — or continue to do.
KIANA, CONSTANCE, MIRANDA: Better lives for their children
Most of the former Lady Jaguars live day to day, month to month. Few have secure jobs or anything like a career. They don’t own houses. They don’t have saving accounts, retirement plans or big inheritances. Few have traveled far, and several have never seen the ocean. I remember how surprised I was in 2012 when I learned during a field trip to Memphis that some of the girls had never been on an escalator. Today, most haven’t been on an airplane. I don’t know that any of them voted in the recent elections; Hannah, as a felon, could not, by Tennessee law.
But none of them complained, at least to me. They did not blame others for their troubles. Every one of them felt that she was in a better place now than ever.
I marveled at Kiana’s optimistic resilience. Raised by a single father struggling with addiction, she found relative stability over two years at Carroll Academy before she got pregnant and dropped out of high school. As a jobless mother, she began using meth and opioids, along with a boyfriend named Matthew. They broke into houses to feed their addictions. They had more children.
An overdose episode — Kiana bolted barefoot from their rural home and went missing overnight in the woods — brought police attention and led to charges for child endangerment. Kiana and Matthew went to jail, then rehabilitation, separately. The four children, two girls and two boys, were sent to foster care.
Kiana told me their story last year as she pulled from a vape pen, kiwi-strawberry flavor. The family was back together, and Kiana and Matthew said that they had been sober for several years. Matthew had a job at a Walmart, working in the meat and produce departments. He set an alarm and reported at 4 a.m.
“I would have died without my kids,” Kiana said. “They’re what keeps me going.”
Kiana is one of the five former Lady Jaguars with children. Adding kids to their lives could have been disastrous for young women living in rudderless malaise. But some found motherhood to be an unexpected motivator — if not immediately — to strive for something more than what they had.
Kiana’s biggest worry was losing custody of her children again. The family’s house was clean. There was food in the refrigerator and children’s artwork on the walls. Kiana and Matthew had purchased a used truck to replace the dead one out front. Kiana studied for high-school equivalency tests and worked as a clerk at an AutoZone.
“We made it,” Kiana said. “At least this far.”
Then she and Matthew broke up. The pup-tent structure of a shared life collapsed. Kiana moved out. She often posts about her struggles on Facebook — her determination to stay sober, to fight for her kids, to never go backward.
At Halloween, she dressed her kids in costumes and took them to the town square to trick-or-treat. “The kids had a blast!” she wrote on Facebook.
You can’t choose your parents, I thought to myself, but you can choose how to parent.
I was curious to find Miranda, now living in Kentucky. The last time I saw her, she was newly graduated with a newborn daughter. Akyia was now 11, a bright sixth grader, sitting politely on the same sofa Miranda had as a child. Akyia listened carefully as Miranda detailed her life since Carroll Academy.
“Once you get out on your own, it’s not rainbows and ice cream,” Miranda said.
On an end table next to a Bible was a painted sign that read, “Grow through what you go through.” Miranda wanted Akyia to hear everything.
Miranda, 30, is a recovering alcoholic. She makes money cleaning houses, but Jesus is her calling. She has the same giggle from childhood, but speaks in the cadence of a preacher, spinning stories of being saved and saving strangers — at Food Giant, Walmart, the gas station, wherever she feels a person needs her intervention. She speaks openly about her alcohol and drug use, her D.U.I. and arrests for drug possession, her suicide attempts, her bouts of loneliness and feelings of abandonment.
“I’ve never felt so loved,” she said. “I’ve never felt so worthy.”
She looked at Akyia. Eleven years earlier, a crib had been set up in Miranda’s bedroom in her single mother’s house, under a poster of Justin Bieber. Now Miranda was the single mother, and that baby was headed to middle school. Time marches and echoes.
But Miranda believes that Akyia will not repeat her mistakes and experience because she will learn from them. Miranda will see to it, she said, by staying close. She smiled at her daughter.
“She’s a better version of me,” Miranda said.
Two years ago, they returned home from a Christmas play to find a neighbor on the porch, urging Miranda to drag a mattress into the utility closet and get underneath it.
Moments later, a massive tornado tore through the roof of the house. It ripped through a candle factory next door and killed more than 50 people and injured hundreds of others across several counties.
In the closet, everything went deafening and black. Then it went still and quiet. A neighbor banged on the door. “The hardest thing I ever did was let go of my daughter’s hand,” Miranda said.
I thought of Constance, whose three young children were regular parts of her Facebook posts. Over burgers, her family in tow, Constance cheerfully described her life — the familiar act of pinching pennies while juggling jobs and day care and a son with autism.
As a teen, Constance’s issue was unruly behavior, not drugs or alcohol, and she was a steady presence on the Lady Jaguars. She spent a few post-school years in the party orbit of some of her former teammates, but pulled herself away. She had support from extended family, bounced from job to job, and got into a serious relationship.
Now she and her husband, Elijah, who was working to become a licensed barber, were building a family. The two dreamed of buying a house in the next few years, but it still felt improbable. Constance volunteered at her kids’ school and entered their toddler-aged girls in beauty pageants. Elijah coached their soccer and basketball teams.
This summer, Constance learned that she was pregnant with her fourth child, due by year’s end. The gender-reveal party culminated in an explosion of blue powder. Elijah did a cartwheel and backflip in celebration.
DESTINY: ‘I am not my past’
The hardest Lady Jaguar to find was Destiny. She was the best player on the team in 2012, a rough-edged senior with a quick dribble and a good 3-point shot. On a mural at Carroll Academy, based on one of Ruth’s photographs from the 2012 series, Destiny is frozen in time, shooting a jumper with one person in the bleachers behind her — her grandmother, sometimes the only person, among all the families of the Lady Jaguars, who came to watch the games.
Destiny was living on the fringes when I last saw her in 2013. Then I lost track of her.
On a crisp afternoon this past January, Ruth and I found her at Carroll County Jail, the same place where I had reunited with Hannah. Destiny stood before us, wearing jail clothes. She smiled sheepishly. She seemed happy to see us.
Destiny had lost count of how many times she had been jailed over the years, mostly for minor drug offenses and probation violations. This time, she had been arrested on an assault charge and would spend 56 days in jail.
For years, Destiny hid in the shadows, on the streets, trying to live undetected. Alleyah and Hannah had done the same. Once they had rap sheets, they avoided public places and police officers, job applications and rental agreements — anyone or anything that might attract the authorities.
What struck me most was realizing that no one was looking that hard for them. As children, they were worth rescuing. As adults, they were considered barely worth finding.
Weeks later, out of jail and wearing donated clothes, Destiny sat across from me in a restaurant booth. She laughed at memories of playing for the Lady Jaguars. She hated Carroll Academy at the time but appreciated it now — a common sentiment. “They cared,” she said. She vowed to start applying the lessons, a delayed effect like a slow-release pill. She spoke as if she had been reading inspirational posters.
“I’m not going to let my mistakes dictate what my future holds,” she said. “I am not my past.”
She thought for a moment. “I’m not going to be what people think I am,” she said.
She wanted to move to Florida, away from bad influences and familiar cops and judges. She needed a fresh start in a new place. I thought of Alleyah, who happened to be in that same mural at Carroll Academy, frozen in time, watching Destiny take a shot.
“I want to go somewhere different, where nobody knows me,” Destiny said. A few months later, she moved into a rented house a few miles from where she grew up.
SUMMER: ‘You’ve got to break the cycle’
Her name is Summer, which fits her, carefree as a songbird. In 2012, she was a senior at Carroll Academy, a sweet-souled girl behind a sharp tongue and a tough exterior, admired by her younger teammates. She had a baby boy and a history of drug use, fighting and truancy. Behind closed doors, she cried as she told me the story of her young life.
She grew up playing soccer and softball, taking ballet lessons and competing in beauty pageants. She dreamed of joining the Air Force and going to college. Then she found trouble.
“Bad decisions, good intentions,” she told me when she was 17. That become a headline on one of the stories. But something else she said had stayed with me, too.
“I never blame anyone else for the choices I make,” Summer said in 2012. “But I do think if I was in a better environment, I’d be a better person.”
Now Summer was 30. She sat on a sofa in a three-bedroom rental house she shared with her longtime boyfriend, Junior, raising seven children. The living room was a swirl of kids and bleating screens.
“I’m in a much better spot than I’ve ever been,” Summer said. Her singsong lilt has not changed through it all.
Summer grew up fast, and it might have saved her. She bowed out of the toxic party scene after having a couple of kids and with Junior’s steadying influence. He is the father of the last six children, with a job at a factory that makes motor parts for cars.
He and Summer lived on the same street where Junior grew up, across from where Summer’s mother was raised. They paid $450 a month in rent. There was a trampoline in the yard, weeds in the rain gutter and, inexplicably, a pair of socks on the roof. Toys cluttered the porch, but inside was neat. School artwork and photos hung on the walls. The large TV was usually on, with at least one child staring at it.
I thought of all the homes where I had sat with Summer and DeMarion, her first baby — the trailer not far from here, the house outside town, her grandmother’s cabin that burned down.
Now she had something for her kids that she never had as a girl: stability and a steady address.
“You’ve got to break the cycle,” Summer said. “You’ve got to be parents who think ‘I don’t want the same thing for my kids.’”
Summer has always had a natural calm, on the basketball court at Carroll Academy and now in the madness of a crowded house. On a Friday in May, a birthday party for two of the kids was starting in an hour. She had things to cook and party favors to make. She sat and chatted.
I had told her about Hannah, about how when I went looking for her, I found her in jail.
“Really?” Summer said. She sounded surprised, but just a little. “She was so sweet and innocent.”
The front door swung open. Kids ran in, others ran out, like hockey players trading shifts. Summer noticed Junior outside holding a hose.
“Why is he giving the dog a bath? It’s going to rain,” she said, mostly to herself.
Junior walked in. “Your daughter’s literally playing in the mud,” he said. KaMyra, 4, had been inside a moment earlier.
“You’re literally out there with her,” Summer said. She shrugged. “She’s got to change, anyway.”
Summer talked about her everyday life — getting kids to schools and sports, KaMyra’s upcoming beauty pageant, building a float for the town’s annual fish fry, staying up at night taking online college courses. Summer hoped to be a counselor, helping kids like she used to be.
She wanted to find a bigger house, maybe through Habitat for Humanity. (This fall, the family moved into a four-bedroom, two-bath house. “Finally!” she texted me.) She had recently turned 30. The family celebrated at Texas Roadhouse, and Junior gave Summer a necklace with pink rhinestones.
They took family vacations, a slice of life I didn’t hear from other Lady Jaguars. They had just been in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and they had vacationed on Florida’s Gulf Coast the year before. Summer showed me photos.
Her children, pining for attention, kept interrupting. “Get out of grown people’s conversations,” Summer said. The baby, crawling on the floor, got Summer’s attention with a giggle. “You’re over here having a ball, ain’t you?”
Soon everyone was off to the recreation center. Summer and Junior had rented the gym for $15 an hour. Banners were hung. Cupcakes, chips and homemade sandwiches were laid out on folding tables. Family and friends arrived.
Adults sat in clusters, talking, as children chased each other and played games. Nyl King, celebrating his birthday, rode his new bicycle. It had a helium-filled No. 8 tethered to the seat.
I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. I thanked Summer for inviting me to the party and for letting us back into her life. I thought of the end of the last story in 2012. Scattered like leaves. Impossible to know where they would be blown. I headed for the door, toward home.
Summer held her baby and smiled. She liked her life. She was proud of it.
The post What Ever Happened to the Lady Jaguars? appeared first on New York Times.
