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.