ine o’clock on a Sunday morning. “B.B.” Battle jumps out of the car and races ahead of his mother and his little sister so he can be the first one inside the door.

He’s the first to slip off his shoes for the guards to inspect, the first to empty his pockets and step through the metal detector. Before anyone else has a chance to look around, he’s already sitting down at a table on the far side of the visiting center at the Dick Conner Correctional Center, north of Hominy and an hour’s drive from B.B.’s home in Tulsa.

Margo Battle is frisked as she enters for a visit at the Dick Conner Correctional Center Sept 7, 2008.

His mother brings him breakfast from the vending machines – Dr Pepper, hot Cheetos and chocolate Donut Gems -- but B.B. ignores the food to rummage through a stack of board games.

He gets the chess pieces set up by the time his father walks into the room.

“Want to play with me, Dad?”

A month shy of his 10th birthday, B.B. has to stretch on his tiptoes to hug his father’s neck, watched by a pair of guards seated on elevated chairs next to the door, and several more guards stationed behind bulletproof windows. Dovel Battle, inmate No. 119310, wears an orange jumpsuit from medium security.

“Remember what I taught you?” Dovel asks as he sits down at the opposite side of the chess board, with B.B.’s mother and 7-year-old sister ready to watch the game. “What’s your first move?”

B.B. pushes a pawn forward on the side of the board.

“No,” Dovel shakes his head. “That’s not how I taught you.”

Dovel pushes one of his pawns to the center of the board, seizing what chess players call the high ground. His knights and bishops quickly follow, and B.B. struggles to recover. “Go easy on him,” his mother pleads with Dovel.

But Dovel presses on: “I’m trying to teach him a lesson.”

B.B. loses a knight. Then a bishop. Then his other knight and a rook. Soon, his queen is gone, too.

Putting his elbows on the table, B.B. hides his face behind both hands. the odds keep stacking up against him.

He comes from a single-parent home, making him twice as likely to commit a felony someday as a child with both parents at home, according to research cited by the Oklahoma Criminal Justice Resource Center, a state office that collects data for the Legislature.

He’s black, making him six times more likely to go to prison eventually than a white child is.

He comes from a low-income family. And attends an overcrowded school. And lives in a neighborhood troubled by gang violence.

Dovel Battle, left, defeats his son B.B. in a game of chess.

“You’re not going to get any second chances,” his father tells him. “You have to look ahead, think about what you’re doing.”

He pushes a bishop across the board, taking B.B.’s last rook. Checkmate.

When Margo Battle was 11 or 12, she needed a coat for winter, but her mother couldn’t afford one. So they drove to her father’s house and, while her mother waited in the car, Margo knocked on the door to ask for money.

A woman answered.

“And she didn’t know who I was.”

When her father came to the door, he didn’t know either.

“I’m your daughter. Don’t you remember?”

No. He didn’t.

“That took a lot of out of me,” Margo says. “As I was growing up, that hit me real hard.” The absence of a father, more than any other single factor, makes nearly every kind of catastrophe — from obesity to felonies — more likely for a child, according to research compiled by the National Fatherhood Initiative, an advocacy group that encourages men to be active parents.

Without a father at home, a girl becomes twice as likely to collect welfare, twice as likely to suffer child abuse and twice as likely to die before she turns 18.

Without a father, a girl is nearly three times more likely to flunk a grade in school and seven times more likely to get pregnant as a teenager.

Overall, the federal government spends $100 billion a year coping with social ailments that come from absent fathers, according to an estimate from the Fatherhood Initiative. Margo, of course, didn’t know the statistics. She just wanted a coat.

A nice coat. And blouses, too.

Skirts. Jeans. And jewelry.

“I wanted everything.”

By the time she was 13 or 14, she learned how to take stuff and walk out of a store without being noticed.

“When my mother found out what I was doing, she just told me, ‘You’re going to get caught one of these days.’ She didn’t really try to stop me.”

Margo grew up in Checotah, half an hour south of Muskogee, with two brothers and two sisters, each with the same mother but different fathers.

“I was the only one whose father never really came around. My brothers and sisters at least had some kind of male role model, but not me.”

Her mother tried to fill the gap with a string of boyfriends.

“I would tell them: 'You’re not my dad. Don’t come in here acting like my dad.’ A kid, you know, needs to feel that connection with flesh and blood.”

She had her own boyfriends, too. And maybe they were substitute fathers as well. “A girl wants to be loved by a man, one way or another.”

She was still a teenager when she had her first baby.

“I should’ve stopped shoplifting right then. I should’ve taken care of my son. But I was addicted. It sounds funny, but you can be addicted to clothes. I had to have them. I couldn’t stop.”

Her mother was right. Margo got caught.

Margo Battle.

Named after a warden who died in a shootout with inmates in 1941, the Jess Dunn Correctional Center near Taft, an hour southeast of Tulsa, used to be a co-ed prison. Margo met Dovel in its dining hall.

“He was tall. Good looking. Smart. And he treated me with respect.”

They used to hold hands near the goldfish pond and take long walks across the open farmland, where the inmates raised a lot of their own food.

With red-brick buildings and grassy lawns, “it was just like a college campus,” Margo says. Except, of course, for the barbed wire and armed guards.

“At night, men and women were supposed to stay in their own dorms, but you know how it is. People found ways.”

Dovel wanted her to wait for him when she got released. They’d get married. Stay off drugs. Get away from bad influences. Raise children of their own.

“I wasn’t ready to hear any of that,” Margo says. “I already had two kids, and I had just gotten out of a relationship that wasn’t so great.”

She was 21 when she met Dovel at Jess Dunn, and already the mother of two kids – a toddler and an infant, who were both living with her mother.

“I’ll never forget what that felt like.” She still can’t talk about it without crying. “I felt like a slave. Like nothing. I couldn’t even keep my own baby.”

More than 1.7 million American children – 1 out of 50 – have a parent in prison, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. But counting parents who have been paroled from prison, the number jumps to 7.3 million children – 1 out of 10.

Seven times more likely to go to prison some day, these children risk becoming the next generation of crime. They even seem likely to commit the same kind of offenses when they grow up – 67 percent of all parents in prison are there for drug-related offenses, and their kids are two-thirds more likely to use drugs, too.

Released from prison after a year, Margo came out addicted to cocaine.

“And I kept doing the same things,” she admits. “The second or third time of getting in trouble and being away from my older boys for a while, I kind of sat back and realized that I needed to fix the problem.

Margo Battle.    

“And the problem was me.”

She put herself in a treatment program, started going to church regularly and married Dovel when he got out of Jess Dunn.

They made a promise to themselves, to each other and to God: No more drugs. No more stealing. No more jail time.

“He wanted children of his own, and when you marry someone you give your whole self to him. I thought giving him children was just part of that.”

While she was pregnant, she worked at a dry cleaners, where the steamy heat made the unborn baby restless. He used to kick so hard, her shirt would bounce.

“The other girls would see it and laugh. They would say, 'There he goes again. Boom-boom! Boom-boom!’ ”

B.B., for short.

The police used to come nearly every day. If Margo didn’t call them, the neighbors would.

She had a happy marriage for more than 10 years – “a picket-fence kind of life,” as she describes it. “He was a good man, a good husband.”

Then Dovel started staying out all night and refused to say where he’d been. Any questions sparked his violent temper, and the police would show up again.

Once, Dovel grabbed his son, who was just 5 at the time, and took off on foot down Sheridan Road, around the corner from their house near Interstate 244.

The police followed.

“B.B. was hitting them and telling them to leave his daddy alone,” Margo says, a tear starting down her cheek. “That’s not how I wanted to raise him.”

She recognized the symptoms from her own experience with crack cocaine in the ’80s. Dovel wouldn’t admit it, but he was hooked.

“I call that stuff the devil. It’s Satan. I knew it wasn’t him acting that way, it wasn’t the man I knew. It was the devil. That’s how I could still love my husband and how I could stand by my husband.”

But, if she stayed with him, she exposed herself and her kids to the wrath of Dovel’s drug-induced chaos.

B.B. and Marshayla run together after gymnastics class at McClure Park on June 13, 2008.

On the other hand, if she left, she’d be taking her kids into the kind of environment in which she grew up – the kind that led to teen pregnancy, drugs and prison.

“I didn’t want my kids to grow up without a dad. That’s no way to grow up.”

At least a million U.S. women a year face the same dilemma, according to a study by the American Bar Association – stay in a potentially abusive relationship, or face the uncertainty of single-parenthood.

“At some point,” Margo says, “it’s not a decision anymore. The choice is taken away from you because you just can’t take it anymore.”

She hadn’t seen or heard from her husband in months when she was lying in bed one night listening to the local news.

“They said his name and I looked up.”

Dovel had been convicted of burglary and robbery by force. With his several prior convictions, his sentence was harsh. He’s scheduled for release on May 12, 2147. “Well, that’s that,” Margo thought. “My kids won’t have a dad ever again.”

Their daughter, Marshayla, was just learning to talk.

Michael Overall 581-8383
michael.overall@tulsaworld.com

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