he other boys keep looking around, distracted by cars driving past the stadium, or girls running on the track or their parents watching from the stands.

Not B.B. Battle.

Shoulders back, head up, he keeps both eyes locked on the coach, listening.

“If you want something,” the coach says, “you have to work for it.”

As the boys line up on the 20-yard line to run more drills, his mother, Margo Battle, unfolds a lawn chair on the sidelines, looking for a sliver of shade on this 90-degree August afternoon.

She scraped together $300 to enroll B.B. in this summer football camp at East Central High School. But she considers it a necessity, not a luxury.

“I can teach him some things,” she says, “but I can’t show him how to be a man. He needs some role models.”

The coach, she hopes, can be one.

If not, Margo keeps B.B. involved in baseball, music lessons, chess clubs, art lessons and just about any other activity she can think of to put him in close contact with successful, adult males.

“If you stay busy, you stay out of trouble,” she says. “I don’t want to see him sitting around bored, nothing to do. That’s when the trouble starts.”

She can’t quote statistics. She doesn’t cite government research. But Margo knows what B.B. is up against. With his father in prison and his mother raising him alone, he’s more likely to become a victim of almost every social ailment she can think of — from gang violence to homelessness. When B.B. was 5, his father, Dovel Battle, was convicted of burglary and robbery by force, the latest of his several convictions. He was sentenced to prison, where he’s scheduled for release on May 12, 2147.

B.B. plays viola during strings class at McKinley Elementary School on April 8, 2008.

“Life’s going to be uphill for him in so many ways, but I just want to make it an easier climb, if I can,” Margo says of B.B. “This stuff’s not going to happen to him. It’s not.” Shopping for shoes one day, B.B. picked out a pair of baby blue sneakers.

Margo pretended not to notice the well-known gang color and simply bought a different pair . But later, B.B. wanted a baby blue T-shirt.

“What’s going on here?” she asked him.

Other kids were wearing them.

“Are you going to let other kids think for you?”

B.B. didn’t get the shirt.

“That’s how gangs work,” Margo says. “The younger kids look up to the older kids, and they become the father figures.”

While B.B.’s practicing on the field, his sister runs around the track with other girls her age. Now 7, she can’t remember ever having her father at home.

“I remember when she turned 3,” Margo says. “I asked her what she wanted for her birthday. Did she want a cake? Did she want a party?”

No, Marshayla didn’t want any of that.

“All she wanted was to go see her daddy.”

Marshayla had only seen pictures of him.

“I wasn’t expecting anything like that. I was through with him. I was finished, but she kept asking. It’s all she wanted.”

Marshayla got her wish.

Margo Battle gets up at 4:45 a.m. to go to work at McKissick Products on Aug. 1, 2008.

The sun won’t come up for a couple of hours, and B.B. struggles to keep his eyes open in the backseat. Curled up in a blanket, his sister goes back to sleep while their mother drives down a deserted Crosstown Expressway.

After suffering a shoulder injury at her previous job, Margo had been unemployed for a while. She could’ve relied on disability payments, welfare and charity.

Nearly half of all the kids in the United States with a parent in prison depend on federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to what the Urban Institute calls the “hidden cost of incarceration.”

“But I would never live like that,” Margo insists. “I want my kids to see me get up every morning and go to work.”

At her new job, she starts before dawn.

At McKissick Products, next to a railroad northeast of downtown, factory managers hand out ear plugs to protect against the noise from the clanking machinery. Red-hot sparks bounce off her plastic goggles as Margo stands next to a pit of molten zinc, which smolders at 800 degrees.

A machine lifts a basket of metal parts out of the pit. Margo dumps them into a shipping container, then pushes the basket onto a conveyor belt that takes it back into the pit.

Over and over, hour after hour, Margo empties the basket. Her hair sweats under the hard-hat and her feet ache inside the steel-toed boots.

Margo Battle works at her job at McKissick Products.

After a 10-hour shift, she drives back to her mother’s house to take the kids shopping for back-to-school clothes.

At Academy Sports, Marshayla finds a pair of $14 pants, but Margo tells her to put them back.

“We don’t want the expensive ones.”

On the way to the checkout stand, B.B. wants to know whether they’re going to see his dad on Sunday.

Since Shayla’s third birthday, they’ve made regular trips to Hominy on visiting days. But the kids haven’t seen Dovel all summer, since the prison went on lockdown after a round of violence between rival gangs in the cell blocks.

The lockdown has been lifted for a couple of weeks now, but Margo hasn’t found the energy to go.

“Hand me my purse,” she asks Shayla in line at the cash register. “I’m too tired.”

B.B. Battle waits to get into the car after shopping for school supplies Aug. 1, 2008.

Only one out of three inmates reports frequent visits with their children, according to research by the Urban Institute and other advocacy groups. The biggest obstacle is the distance that families have to drive to reach the prison – more than 100 miles, on average.

For Margo, the trip isn’t half that far, but it consumes most of her only day off from work, considering that she spends a lot of Saturdays at the factory, putting in overtime.

B.B. still wants to go.

“We’ll see,” she says, patting his head. “Let me think about it.”

B.B. crosses his arms, looks down and bites his lower lip.

“I know, I know,” Margo tells him, still rubbing his head. “You need your daddy.”

The gym’s a few blocks down the street, a 10-minute walk at most. But Margo prefers to drive there.

They keep a Rottweiler in the backyard and a pit bull puppy inside the house. But on the street, they have only each other for protection.

“ I want them to know how to handle themselves,” Margo says, “if they ever need to.” An old garage with the door open to let the evening breeze come through, the gym has a boxing ring in the corner, with a row of punching bags down one wall and a shelf of trophies on another. After some warm-up exercises inside the ring, the coach takes the class for a mile-long jog through the neighborhood. Shayla falls behind the older kids, but B.B. holds his own against the high school students.

Margo runs, too, sometimes, but not tonight.

“He’s going to be bigger than me someday,” she says, watching B.B. come back around the corner. “And it won’t be long, either.”

Back inside the gym, the kids pair off to spar, leaving B.B. the odd one out. Margo picks up a pair of gloves.

“Don’t hurt me now,” she jokes. But when B.B. seems to be holding back, she pushes him: “Show me what you got.”

B.B. boxes with his mom at Tomorrow's Champions Boxing Gym.    

Raising a kid is always a wrestling match, parents exerting authority and children rebelling against it. Younger and stronger, the kid inevitably wins.

“You just hope that when the time comes,” Margo says, “and you can’t control them anymore, they’re already grown up and know what’s right.”

By her mid-teens, Margo was firmly in the habit of shoplifting, no longer even thinking twice about it.

“When I got in trouble, it was just a slap on the hand,” she says. “And I kept doing it because I just didn’t care.”

B.B., if he ever steps out of line, won’t get a slap on the hand.

“He knows what I would do. He knows.”

But Margo has a theory about when the trouble really starts. It’s before people usually notice, before the teen years.

She was just a little older than B.B. when she knocked on her father’s door to ask for money to buy a winter coat. The damage was done; the consequences just took a while to show up.

“He’s at an age right now where a there’s a lot being decided — you know, what kind of man he’s going to be. That’s why I think he needs his father more than ever.”

At 9 o’clock on a Sunday morning in mid-September, B.B. finally gets to step through a metal detector, taking off his shoes for the guards to inspect before rushing into the visitor’s room at Dick Conner Correctional Center.

Marshayla and B.B. hug their father during a visit at Dick Conner Correctional Center.

When Dovel walks into room, Margo tries to hold back both kids to let him sign in first, but Shayla breaks away and jumps into her father’s arms, nearly knocking him over. B.B. has the chess board set up.

Serving what amounts to a life sentence , Dovel doesn’t ask for sympathy.

“I put myself in this situation,” he admits. But his children didn’t do anything wrong. “Ask anybody in here,” he says, gesturing around the room where a couple of dozen other inmates are sitting at tables with their loved ones. “They’ll all tell you the thing they regret the most is not being there for their families, not being there for their kids. That’s the thing that keeps you awake at night.”

He writes home every week, and every week he receives three letters. Shayla sends stick-figure drawings. B.B. mails his homework for Dad to check over. And Margo details everything else in their lives.

“I know how hard it is on you,” he tells his wife. “I can hear how tired you are in what you write.”

“I just stay on my knees and keep praying,” she says. “I have faith in God.”

“And I have faith in my wife,” Dovel says, noting that her two older children, who are now grown, turned out well, holding good jobs and staying out of trouble. “That’s the only way I can handle it in here, because I know she’s going to do what’s right for our kids.”

Part of that — maybe the biggest part, Margo says — is keeping their kids close to their father.

“I’m just glad he wants to be a dad now. Even though he’s in here, he wants to be a part of their lives as much as he can be. I wish it wasn’t like this, you know, but it is what it is.”

The Battle family chats during a visit at Dick Conner Correctional Center.    

Less than five minutes after the chess game begins, Dovel pushes a bishop across the board, capturing B.B.’s second rook and putting his king in checkmate.

Defeated, B.B. buries his face in his hands, but Dovel reaches across and gently pulls his arm down.

“Keep your head up,” he tells his son. “Learn from your mistakes and do better next time. You’re going to be OK.”

Smiling, B.B. sets up the chess board for another game.

“Some day,” he says, “I’m going to beat my dad. Someday, I’m going to win.”

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