By Carmen K. Sisson

Magnolia Springs, Ala. — Admittedly, the Gulf Coast hamlet of Magnolia Springs, Ala., is an easy place to overlook. Here, the mail is still delivered by boat, and the closest thing to a seafood industry is standing in line for blackfish at Jessie’s, the only restaurant in town.

President Obama did not put it on his itinerary this week, and when BP workers showed up in mid-May, they laid a single strand of boom across the mouth of the bay and left. The boom floated away hours later.

Magnolia Springs isn’t exactly a linchpin of the Alabama economy.

Yet if the Gulf oil spill arrives here this week as scientists have forecast, it will not find the town unprepared. A flotilla of nine spud barges – flanked by containment boom – will be waiting, ready to block the 530-foot-wide entrance to Weeks Bay.

If all goes according to plan, these rusted steel behemoths will form an impenetrable barrier, defending the estuary’s 19 federally-protected species and the vital marshland which serves as a nursery for shrimp and other seafood so crucial to the Gulf Coast region.

They will also preserve an unspoiled way of life.

The blockade is being led by Jamie Hinton, the local volunteer fire chief who, at one point, was faced with the possibility of being jailed for violating the federal and state chain of command.

His resourcefulness is a parable not only of how desperate Gulf Coast communities have become to save the shorelines on which their lives have taken root, but also of the confusion that can consume and undermine such a massive relief effort.

In the end, Magnolia Springs did not need BP or Mr. Obama or the governor in Montgomery. It needed the grit and determination of the people themselves – people like Hinton, who says he will stand chest-deep in the waters of the bay, linked arm in arm with his neighbors, if that’s what it takes to stop the encroaching oil from despoiling the sublime latticework of bogs and bayous that he calls home.

Hinton’s plan

Soft-spoken and polite, Mr. Hinton doesn’t fit the image of a rabble-rouser, but still waters run deep. He is passionate about this wildly beautiful place.

The plan he has been charged with implementing was the product of exhaustive community input. It is an attempt to defeat those forces of nature that have often defeated the Coast Guard and BP elsewhere. Boom is effective when placed properly, but even in relatively calm waters, some oil will always go over and beneath it. In Weeks Bay, where there is a constant one- to two-foot chop, booming is an extra challenge.

That’s where Hinton’s barges come in. Hinton hopes they will break any wave action, allowing the boom laid in front of and behind them to hold the oil.

It’s not a fail-safe plan, Hinton acknowledges. He would know. He has more than 400 hours of hazardous materials training, including booming instruction. “Can’t say [the oil] is going to make it through and can’t say it won’t,” he says.

But at least it’s a plan. Nobody else seemed inclined to do much of anything for Magnolia Springs, he says. When he first began gathering resources, county officials told him he was blowing things out of proportion, that it was just sweet crude.

“I don’t care if it’s sweet, sour, light, or black,” he says. “I don’t want it in my river.”

Others told him the government would handle it. He scoffed. He remembered the Exxon Valdez, hurricane Katrina, hurricane Ivan. If anyone was going to save Magnolia Springs, it wouldn’t be the feds, BP, or environmental activists. It would be the thousand-odd people who live here. After all, the locals knew the water – knew every twist and turn of Magnolia River, Fish River, and Weeks Bay. They would handle things the way they always did – together.

While the community struggled to get its plan approved by Deepwater Horizon Unified Command, BP workers arrived with their own plan: They laid a straight line of boom across the bay, tied it to pylons with rope, and left. Hinton tried to tell them the pylons were encrusted with barnacles, but no one listened. He knew the tossing waters would cause the sharp shells to sever the rope, and he was right. The boom floated away, and Magnolia Springs was left defenseless once more.

Instead of being discouraged, he redoubled his efforts, and by mid-May, the town’s plans had been approved, along with a $200,000 grant to keep the barges manned 24/7 – a Coast Guard requirement – for three weeks. All that remained was the decision about when to put the plan into action.

Jumping through hoops

Last Wednesday, that moment came. Hinton called the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and told them the time had come to deploy the
barges.

“They acted as if they’d never heard about it,” he says. “We started jumping through hoops to get the plan approved again.”

Hinton and Mayor Charles Houser conferred. If the small-town fire chief blocked the bay without permission, he could be jailed or fined, but he was willing to take that chance.

In a way, the decision was an easy one. There is a timelessness to the marshes of Magnolia Springs, where ospreys glide across the water and cottonmouths slither through pitcher plant bogs. It is “the most beautiful place on earth,” Hinton says, and he wants his grandchildren to see it – just as it is now.

Friday afternoon, Hinton learned his plans had been approved once more, backed by another grant that should allow them to keep the barges in place for as long as three months if necessary.

“We’ve done all we can do,” he says.

The uncertainty leads to sleepless nights for both Hinton and Mayor Houser, who says he’s confident about their course of action but still feels a queasy tension. He’s frustrated by BP’s overall plan for the Gulf Coast, calling it confusing and disjointed, with no clear chain of command.

“I’ve been in meetings with BP and they seem like they live in a vacuum,” he said Friday as he stared out at the water. “They just don’t get it. How can you replace this? It’s our little slice of heaven.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Brenton Sanders will always remember the import of the moment – both the poignancy and enormity of the first African-American taking the oath of office. But he will be carrying home something else as well: the civility and kindness of the throng of nearly 2 million people braving brisk temperatures to witness a piece of history.

The 16-year-old African-American from Selma, Ala., didn’t expect to see crowds of whites and blacks standing shoulder to shoulder, smiling, happy. He didn’t expect them to even look him in the eyes, let alone say, “Excuse me.” To him, the chemistry of the crowd may have been as much of an affirmation of the spirit of the moment as what was being expressed on the bunting-bedecked terrace a long – very long – distance in front of him.

“I think things are going to get a lot better,” he says with a blend of conviction and hope.
Brenton’s memories of the historic time on the National Mall are echoed by many of the adults and students from Selma who journeyed to the nation’s capital to see the swearing in of Barack Obama as the 44th president.

Every generation has its defining moments, ones that elicit the refrain, “Where were you when…,” whether it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in Washington, or the first moon walk, or 9/11. For the students of Knox Elementary, this will be one of theirs, even though many of them aren’t yet fully aware of it.

Yet as they head home, they are reveling in the minutiae of the event even while working through its magnitude – a time of benumbed fingers and soaring rhetoric, of long bus rides and mass brotherhood.

“I’m not going to say I had fun,” says Tamira Bolden, 16. “But it was the best experience ever, if that makes sense.”

•••

The adults knew it would be a life-changing experience. Few of Knox Elementary’s children had ever strayed beyond the perimeter of Selma. For most, Washington, D.C., was a strange, exotic place. They knew the president lived there. They could identify the White House – sort of. They had heard of the National Mall, though they weren’t quite certain of its purpose – park or shopping center?

Yet they could tell you all about the man about to be sworn in as president, from his children’s names to the dog breeds he’d considered adopting as primoris canis. Barack Obama was very real to them, and they were excited to see his inauguration, whether it happened outside among bicyclists and joggers, or inside between Sears and J.C. Penney.

They expected to leave with Obama buttons and pennants, or perhaps one of the dozens of “I Was There” T-shirts. But no one, not even Knox principal Joslyn Reddick, could have anticipated the overwhelming surge of hope and patriotic pride the 43 students and parents are carrying back to Alabama. Ms. Reddick spent almost a year planning this trip, gathering donations and trip agendas, worrying and praying over her young charges.

She wanted them to witness a moment in history that would never happen again – the first black man laying his hand upon the Bible, pledging his fidelity to our nation – even if the lines were flubbed.

They knew it would be much colder than the South, so they prepared for it by outfitting the youngsters with enough apparel accouterments to survive a wilderness trek through the Yukon. The mittens, earmuffs, parkas, and pocket hand warmers proved little help, though, against the frigid 19-degree temperature.

Yet, afterward, the students agreed: It never would have been the same if they’d watched it on television. “I’d never been here before,” says Brenton. “If you were there, you just felt this rush from the people.”

•••

It didn’t start out that way. Students rubbed their eyes and stumbled down the stairs shortly after 3 a.m. Tuesday, climbing onto the warm buses and promptly falling back asleep for the long ride to Washington. At 5 a.m., they arrived at the corner of L St. and First and tumbled out into the frigid air. The capitol’s dome, splashed in shades of predawn blue, immediately greeted them, and all seemed to perk up.

But after a few minutes, the brisk cold became biting, and the light crowd intensified. By daylight, they were trapped in a sea of people, with even adults and teenagers clutching one another’s hands to keep from getting separated.

Reddick patrolled the outer edges of the group. “Knox, KNOX!” she yelled. “Keep to the right! Get out of the street!”

In the beginning, it was easier to stay together because most of the children and chaperones donned bright yellow scarves. By the time they rounded the first corner, they’d separated, but the error was quickly corrected and they continued walking.

“If I didn’t love Joslyn, I wouldn’t be doing this,” one parent muttered.

“Ain’t that the truth,” another answered.

The crowd soon swelled, and all anyone could do was press forward. People began jumping barriers, trying to reach the National Mall. One group was flagged away by a police officer, only to find themselves facing a hedge of holly at the Department of Agriculture.

For one small Knox group, it took nearly four hours to reach the mall. Who knew where the others were. Things weren’t turning out as they’d planned.

And then, suddenly, it all came together – why they’d needed to be here so much, why they’d endured the arduous trek just to squint at a distant screen. As they reached the foot of the Washington Monument, so starkly white against a perfect blue sky, encircled by American flags, another sight resonated even more deeply: a rainbow of people of every size, race, and age standing together.

“It was very cold, and we walked about six miles,” says Ashley Simpson, 17. “I went through a lot of pain to get there, but looking back, that’s probably not going to matter. I didn’t see any racial tension going on. That was a shocker.”

All eyes turned to the monitors, and a cheer erupted as Obama took the stage. A murmur swept through the crowd as he promised change.

“It was an experience of a lifetime, something you will never ever forget,” says chaperone Dorothy Hatcher. “I didn’t expect to see that many people there. There were tears shed, and people hugging. I shed some tears, too.”

If the melting pot of people at the mall Tuesday – smiling, linking arms, waving flags, sharing blankets, lifting their voices in song – is any indication, the Knox students may be right: Change can happen, one American at a time.

“Everyone had that hope, that sense of possibility,” says Talisa Bolden. “Now we have
something to look forward to.”

SELMA, Ala. — The night Frankie’s mother didn’t come home, she suddenly knew how far her mom would go to bring about change. It was 1962 in Selma, Ala., and she was only 9. The idea of change enthralled her, even as a youngster. But at the moment she just wanted supper. And her mother had gone out to get a few last-minute items.

Frankie stared across the dining-room table at her father, her eyes asking an unspoken question – where is she? Then the phone rang. Her mother wasn’t at the grocery store. She was in jail. Ruby Walker had been arrested on the steps of the local courthouse with several others who were demanding equal voting rights for black citizens. At the time, more than half of Selma’s residents were black, but, given the phalanx of institutional and racial barriers, only 1 percent were registered to vote.

The protesters wanted to change that, to stop the intimidation and harassment, and eradicate the division between the races, which still left them shuffling through the back doors of doctor’s offices and restaurants.

It’s an indelible memory that Frankie, now the Rev. Frankie Hutchins, will be carrying today as she stands on the National Mall in Washington with more than a million others to watch the inauguration of the first African-American president.

As one of the adults traveling this week from Selma to the nation’s capital with a group from Knox Elementary School, she brings different emotions and motivations than the idealistic young students, all clad in their new winter clothing and visions of a race-free America. For her and many of the other adults, this is a spiritual journey, both an intensely personal moment and a time to celebrate what they and their forebears suffered and accomplished, as well as to see the opportunities facing a new generation.

Many had grandparents who were born into slavery. They themselves experienced the lash of racism and the Klan. Now they will be watching their children see a black man take the oath of the highest office in the land. “I couldn’t miss this event,” says Hutchins. “I’ve got to do this.”

•••

Hutchins is something of a pioneer herself. She is the first black female pastor of the Clinton Chapel AME Zion Church in Selma, where she has served for three years. The trip for her will be a family affair. Along with her two daughters, Talisa Bolden and Tamira Williams, she’ll be watching her grandchildren, Brenton and Brittney, witness a moment even her mother had never anticipated.

“I remember asking as a young girl why this was so important,” Hutchins says of her mother’s protests. “And she said, ‘Well, change needs to come so you will have a better life.’ ”

Ruby Walker’s mother was born into slavery, and she worked in Alabama’s cotton fields. She didn’t want her daughter to grow up believing this world of separation was to be borne without complaint. No longer would they bow their heads in submission. They were ready to fight.

Hutchins says she was inspired by her parents at an early age to take up the struggle, too. So when blacks and whites were given freedom to attend any school of their choice, she chose to do what few students in town were brave enough to do. She enrolled in the Albert G. Parrish High School and was soon joined by seven other black students. By the end of her first day, she realized she was in a different world, a world where she was unwanted.

“It was really the worst year of my life,” she recalls. “I was called ‘nigger’ every day. Leaves were thrown in my face. Students in class spat on the seats next to them because they did not want me to sit there.”

She thought it was because she was poor. The other girls had nice clothes. When her father bought her four new dresses, she was certain things would get better. “I went home, and I thought, ‘When I wear this nice, pretty dress to school tomorrow, they’ll accept me just like one of them,’ ” she says of her white classmates. By the time the school bell rang, she’d learned a harsh lesson: Nothing she did made a difference. “It hurt me so bad,” she says.

She came home that night and begged her parents to let her go back to the voluntarily segregated R.B. Hudson High School. “My Dad gave me a hug and he said, ‘Everything’s going to be OK. This is the change that your mother was talking about,’ ” she says.

Mr. Obama’s election has galvanized the city, but few more than this family. “That is the change that Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about, my mother talked about, and my father’s mother talked before,” she says. “I think it’s the most remarkable thing that could have ever happened in America.”

•••

Change has come slowly to Selma. Strip malls and big box merchants have infiltrated the area, and yet a third of the residents live below the poverty line. Schools are segregated by choice now. Especially on Sunday, there’s no blending of races. Sometimes Hutchins stands at her pulpit and looks out over the sanctuary filled with black faces. Across town, whites attend other churches.

All this is one reason Hutchins has been so adamant about attending the inaugural. She wants to honor what change has come about. Initially, she hesitated to take the trip. She knew it would be an arduous walk.

But she’s been exercising and doesn’t want to watch such a historic moment on TV. More than anything, she wants to see the fulfillment of her parents’ labors. “I’m mentally prepared for whatever I have to do, because it’s so important to my family,” she says.

Hutchins spent the night of Obama’s election phoning back and forth with her daughters. Talisa, the eldest, was working the night shift at Hyundai, and was depending on her mother for updates. Her younger daughter, Tamira, who is 16, was in her bedroom watching the returns as well.

“I was still on the phone, and she came running in the room, saying, ‘Mama, mama, he’s been elected!’ ” she says. “And I just threw the phone away and started crying as we rejoiced.”

She wants her children to understand the struggles her mother and she went through to get to this point. “It’s a moment in history,” she says. “To be there to witness this is the best thing that could have ever happened in our lives.”

SELMA, Ala. – Excited chatter falls to a hush as Knox Elementary School principal Joslyn Reddick enters the library. She peers into two large boxes, then casts a worried glance over the throng of fourth- and fifth-graders. The donated coats are small. There are gloves and hats of every color, but there’s not a matching set of anything.

Still, the Selma, Ala., community has been generous, and she’s grateful. When Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president next Tuesday, her students will see it firsthand, and it won’t matter if their socks match their shoes or their sleeves are too long. They will be there.

She hands Alexis Norwood, age 9, a slim package of pink thermal underwear. “They’re to go under your clothes,” Ms. Reddick says. “They’ll keep you warm when we’re in Washington.”

The girl eyes the clothing dubiously, then grins and returns to her cluster of friends, eagerly waiting to inspect the apparel. She tears the plastic carefully and slips her hand inside. Her eyes grow wide.

“I thought they were pajamas,” she whispers.

It’s a tiny detail, making sure the students are adequately clothed for the cold weather when they leave Sunday, but Reddick has left nothing to chance. Nearly a third of Selma’s 20,000 residents live below the poverty level, and long-abandoned businesses and shotgun houses border her 220-student, all-black school.

Reddick wants the children to see beyond graffiti-strewn walls, beyond limitations, beyond a town where violence is a daily reality. She wants them to witness something people in this racially torn bastion of the civil rights movement never believed was possible. She wants them to see a black man become president of the United States, to hear his voice ring out across the National Mall and know that anything is possible.

•••

Reddick has had to repeat that mantra to herself many times over the past year. When she presented the idea to parents last spring, no one was sure whether Obama would even receive the Democratic nomination. She spent the summer formulating a rough itinerary anyway.

She researched chartered buses and settled on a local bus line. She booked 25 rooms at a hotel in Waldorf, Md. By the time classes resumed, she’d taken on a new challenge – how to raise the $18,000 that had already been spent to see a man who had not yet been elected.

The students held a doughnut sale, but it brought in only modest funds. They barely broke even with a fall festival. Reddick had quoted a cost of $155 per student, but if the school couldn’t raise the money she’d have to charge more. Many families wouldn’t be able to afford it.

“Money was coming in, but it just wasn’t enough,” Reddick says. She e-mailed Obama and Oprah. No response.

Things got worse. Talk surfaced in the community that the trip was a bad idea. For most, it was simply a fear of the unknown. Many of the parents had never been to Washington. They didn’t know what to expect. The crowds worried them. Would their children get lost? Would they even be close enough to see Obama?

Few of the children had ever spent the night in a hotel or seen a city larger than Birmingham. “I know they’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to another world,’ ” says Lachune Simpson, a local parent. “There was a child at Knox who had never been to McDonald’s.”

A few older residents were haunted by history. They lived through the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. They recalled the violence that occurred in 1965 on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge – how 600 activists who attempted to march to Montgomery were met by police, beaten, and turned back on “Bloody Sunday.” They knew the tauntings of the Klan – intimately. Could something disruptive happen in Washington? A violent demonstration? A shooting?

Reddick watched in shocked dismay as parents began withdrawing their children from the trip. By Christmas, she wasn’t sure it was going to take place at all. Local factories were idling production lines. A major plant closed. People who had little money suddenly had even less. The hotel manager in Maryland called to say city fire codes required fewer students to a room than originally estimated.

“This might be a life-changing experience for some of my students, to let them see a different world and break the cycle of the community they live in,” Reddick says. “There’s a lot of drugs, a lot of gangs. I was trying so hard to raise funds and get people’s support. I just thought, ‘OK, I’ve done everything I can.’ ”

She called a parent, and they prayed together over the phone. By the time they were finished, Reddick’s faith was restored. She redoubled her efforts, and, slowly, more donations trickled in. Since then, there have been new setbacks, but she says she isn’t worried.

Knox Elementary is going to Washington.

•••

With less than a week before the trip, the reality is sinking in for everyone. Ms. Simpson clutches a list as she looks at insulated socks and hand warmers at a Wal-Mart. When she told a co-worker at Selma Waterworks she was going as a chaperone, the woman didn’t believe her at first.

“Both of us were in her office just crying, and right at that moment, I understood exactly what it means to people,” Simpson says.

She’s disappointed by the lack of support, but blocks out the negativity. “I think it’s so worth it,” she says. “At one time, we weren’t even allowed to vote, and [now] we have a black president.”

She glances at her daughter, Trenda, who’s trying on rhinestone belts with her friend, Brittney Sanders. The girls agree – the white belt won’t match the tasseled snow boots Trenda hasn’t stopped wearing since she got them for the trip. Clippings of Obama grace Trenda’s bedroom walls, alongside High School Musical and Jonas Brothers posters. New earmuffs and a scarf sit in a basket on her dresser.

Though the group won’t be touring the White House, as she had hoped, she’s excited anyway. She wants to go to the zoo. She wants to see the Lincoln Memorial. She devours everything she can find about Obama and the city he will call home for the next four years.

“Trenda’s always asking, ‘How many days left?’ ” her mother says. “That’s it right now.
Washington is the place.”

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – The gray Cape Cod is easy to overlook on this quiet street in Knoxville, Tenn. No team pennants hang in the windows, no collegiate flags wave in the breeze. The parlor is surprisingly devoid of sports paraphernalia as well.

Paintings adorn the walls, and an eclectic mixture of books lines the bookshelves. There’s a mounted bass above the fireplace, and a cowhide rug covers the floor. If you ask, Ken Mink will show you the modest display of basketball medals he’s received. Otherwise, he won’t mention them at all.

This isn’t your typical college athlete’s home, but then, Mr. Mink isn’t your average basketball player. He’s climbed the Matterhorn. Parasailed over the Caribbean. Water-skied in Jamaica. And this fall, at age 73, he became what may be the world’s oldest college basketball player, joining Roane State Community College as a shooting guard and shattering stereotypes in a sport where youth is everything and players over the age of 25 are anomalies.

But Mink’s not looking to break records. He says he’s seeking redemption, attempting to fulfill a dream he’d abandoned and forgive a betrayal he can’t forget.

He left college in 1956 believing he’d never touch sneakers to hardwood again. Now he’s running suicide sprints, practicing free throws, lifting weights, and trading passes with players half a century younger.

Last fall, joining a college basketball team at his age seemed as likely as lapping Michael Phelps in the pool. He’d considered returning to school in his 20s, but by then he had a family. He played ball with his three children, but as the years passed, he thought less and less about joining a team again.

While shooting hoops in his neighbor’s driveway not long ago, though, he noticed something remarkable – he was nailing every shot.

“He said, ‘I’ve still got it!” his wife, Emilia, recalls. “And I said, ‘Got what?’ I didn’t take him that seriously, but then a week later, he told me he’d contacted all these colleges.”

Mink wrote to eight schools, knowing it was the longest shot he’d ever taken. Weeks passed. No one replied, not even to say, “You’ve got to be kidding.” Then coach Randy Nesbit called from a small college in Harriman, Tenn., 35 miles away. Mr. Nesbit was willing to give Mink a chance. Most of all, Nesbit was intrigued: He wanted to know if Mink was serious.

“I reply to everybody, whether they’re 8 or 73,” he says. “I didn’t 100 percent believe it was real.”

It was one thing to play ball in your driveway, but Mink hadn’t undergone any sort of formal conditioning, nor played competitive ball, since the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

There was no way he could match the speed and intensity of the 19-year-olds he’d be playing against, but years of swimming, golf, tennis, skiing, and other activities had kept him at an enviable fitness level. More than that, he had what every athlete needs – a little talent, a strong dose of moxie, and a whole lot of heart.

The season was already under way, but Mink didn’t waste time. He sat in on practices and got to know his future teammates. He trained at his church gym and joined a senior basketball league, the Smoky Mountain Papas.

“The first game, I scored one basket,” he says. “I was so sore I could hardly stand up. When I got home, I thought, ‘Well, my basketball career is over.’ ”

Still, he ignored the naysayers and pressed forward. “I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone except myself,” Mink says. “I wanted to replicate a dream that got interrupted.”

•••

Growing up in Eastern Kentucky, Mink couldn’t imagine far beyond the confines of Vicco, where most men earned a living as his father did, deep within the bowels of the earth, clawing through rock to find coal. The area was too mountainous for most sports, but basketball was popular, and before long, Mink was a starter, earning a name for himself as well as the occasional free milkshake from the corner soda jerk.

He graduated from high school – the first person in his family to do so – and accepted a scholarship to Lees College in nearby Jackson, Ky. By the end of his freshman year, he had a 1949 Ford, a steady girlfriend, and a good shot at a scholarship at a four-year school.

Then the bomb dropped. Someone had covered the coach’s office in shaving cream, and school authorities accused Mink. Before he could plead innocence, he was kicked off the team and expelled.

“I went to the dorm, packed my bags, got in my little car, and drove home,” Mink says. “It was too late to get into college or get on a team, and I didn’t want to hang around.”

The next morning, he enlisted in the Air Force, and for the next 38 years worked as a journalist, garnering bylines in papers where his name had once been headline news as a ball player. In 1998, Mink retired, but he didn’t want to sit home and “vegetate.” He had mountains to climb, links to conquer. Age wasn’t about to stop him. Plus, in the back of his mind, the humiliating end of his college basketball career continued to churn. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t let it go.

“I’d still like to know to this day who, and why, I was blamed,” he says. “I would dearly love to find the answer to that 52-year-old mystery. I hold no animosity, but it would be a great relief to me to find out what really happened.”

•••

Returning to college basketball at his age is physically humbling. His vertical leap barely clears 20 inches, less than half that of teammate Larriques Cunningham. His 6.6-second 40-yard dash is a relative crawl. At 6-feet tall, he’s half an inch shorter than the last time he donned a jersey.

The game, too, has changed. Along with his required 12-hour college course load – Spanish, computer science, US history, and criminal justice – Mink must learn new defensive and offensive schemes. Vintage moves perfected by players like Bob Cousy and Cliff Hagen – the Michael Jordans of their day – are outdated.

Still, Mink brings his own magic to the court, not so much in his athletic prowess as his strength of character. He knows he’s the 11th man on the team, and he only leaves the bench when the Raiders have a comfortable lead. So far, he’s only played once, making two free throws, in Roane State’s 93-42 victory over King College.

“I’ve been competitive all my life,” he says. “I like to be a winner. If I don’t win, I don’t get bitter, but next time, I think, next time I’m going to get that sucker.”

His determination and love for the sport have earned respect from his teammates. Sophomore Chase Bell says he thought Nesbit was joking when he told them Mink was joining the team, but on the first day of practice, they realized it was real.

“It was odd,” Bell says. “We didn’t want to be too rough on him, but as the days went on, we realized we could play hard against him. He’s just like a regular player. He gives you motivation, and you know, players like me, we need that kind of stuff. Every player’s going to have his bad days.”

In a few months, Mink will step off the court one more time, and the lights will dim permanently on his college basketball career. When that day comes, don’t look for him on the bench or in the bleachers – that’s not where dreamers live.

Instead, seek the shadowy corners, the obstacle-strewn paths, the harrowing chasms where limits meet determination and hopelessness meets conviction. That’s where dreams flourish, and that’s where you’ll find Mink, lacing up his shoes, living out his passions.

NAUVOO, Ala. – The road to Liberty Grove Primitive Baptist Church meanders through northern Alabama, a lazy, looping ribbon of smooth blacktop at times, a treacherous snake of faded, broken gray asphalt at others. It’s a path not unlike that of faith. Not unlike that, at times, of life itself.

Voices rise and fall in the breeze, audible long before you see the simple wooden church resting beneath a canopy of hundred-year-old oaks. The doors and windows are open, and music pours out across the desolate landscape, winding through the trees and lifting through billowing white clouds to a heaven of clear blue sky.

The music is Sacred Harp, a nondenominational form of choral singing that encourages community participation. Despite suggestions that the tradition is dying, there are singings from Chicago to San Francisco, and even the United Kingdom, every week, some attracting as many as 1,000 participants.

Slick CDs are being produced, and professors from around the world are hunching over atlases and MapQuest directions, trying to find their way to churches like Liberty Grove, hoping to study a culture that has become synonymous with the rural South but began in the singing schools of colonial England.

Today, fans of the music face a steep challenge – how to bolster the momentum of Sacred Harp and continue to make an ancient folk tradition relevant in today’s modern world.

Liberty Grove, established in 1835, is the type of church typically associated with Sacred Harp. The church interior is unadorned. Bare pine walls. Plain metal fans and naked bulbs dotting the pine ceiling. Worshippers scattered among straight pine pews in uneven clusters, their hands rising and falling in 4/4 rhythm, down on the first beat, up on the third. Feet keep time as well.

Everything here is about time. Man’s journey through life. God’s infinite presence from creation through eternity. The music itself, sparse and raw, hearkening to a world where salvation and redemption were the backbone of rural culture.

The songs, culled from an 1844 hymnal, The Sacred Harp, were updated in 1991. The music is a style of shape-note singing, also known as fasola, in which the notes are printed in special shapes that help the reader identify them on the musical scale.

The songs center around death and resurrection, sin and repentance, minor keys lending a sad poignancy. Despite the name, there is no instrumental accompaniment. “Sacred harp” refers to what followers say is a God-given instrument – the human voice.

Singers face one another in straight-backed wooden chairs forming a hollow square – men on one side, women on the other – altos, basses, tenors, and trebles holding songbooks they no longer need to read.

The music is entrenched, etched into memory by childhood Sundays that seemed too long – itchy, starched dresses and pinching patent leather shoes, choking ties and hair slicked down with mothers’ spit.

• • •

“Fa so la,” Arthur Gilmore begins, his deep voice providing the pitch to guide the singers. From his position in the center of the square, he gets an experience unique to the leader – a wall of sound buffeting from four directions in quadraphonic stereo. There’ll be no sermon today. Never is. The songs themselves are lessons for the followers, but religion is left on the doorstep, as are politics.

The purpose is the music, and its unique sound attracts people from all walks of life, from Buddhists to Jews. Sacred Harp singing is participation more than performance, open to anyone who wishes to enjoy it, out of spirituality, curiosity, or a love for music.

Dr. Eric Eliason, a music professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, is one who has come to participate in the once-a-year event at Liberty Grove. He says he’s taught Sacred Harp for years, but just began singing five months ago when he discovered a group meeting weekly 10 minutes from his house.

“I thought it was a Southern thing,” Mr. Eliason says, filling his plate during the customary dinner on the grounds here, spread upon a long picnic table beneath the trees. For visitors like Eliason, the home-cooked meal, prepared over several days, is exotic. Sweet potato cobbler, fried okra, Coca-Cola ham, coconut cake, banana pudding. For others, it’s everyday food, another day in the South.

Though some attribute the resurgence of Sacred Harp to its vignette in the movie “Cold Mountain,” Eliason says it began rebounding in the 1970s thanks to singers like Bob Dylan, who spawned a renewed interest in folk music. Dr. Warren Steel, a professor of music at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss., says technology has helped fuel the movement. Mr. Steel runs a website devoted to fasola and attends singings 30 weekends a year.

Today, both he and Eliason have been invited to lead. There’s no pressure. If the singers falter, they begin again. Steel says singings still fulfill their original purpose – to gather communities together in a world where religion can be divisive and the arts are a commodity. “You can’t buy this,” Steel says. “You can’t make money off it.”

Still, there is some money involved. Liberty Grove gives $3,000 in scholarships every year and is seeking a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and donations to build a music and cultural center. The purpose is to promote Sacred Harp singing, but other traditional music will be featured as well. The church has also taken advantage of technology, producing CDs, brochures, and operating a website.

Despite the publicity, everyone admits attendance is waning. There was a time when a singing like this would draw people from across the state to pile food and blankets into wagons and travel the dusty roads leading to the church. In later years, there were shiny campers and children buying snow cones from vendors, heedless to the white dresses and shirts that often fell victim to sticky-sweet rivulets of colored syrup.

• • •

Those days are gone now. The creek bed is dry, the tin dippers and wooden pails giving way to indoor plumbing and the steady beat of progress. Snow cone vendors haven’t been here for years. The grounds now are spacious. A scant 40 people have gathered today in this one-red-light town of 284 people. Yet still, they come. And still, they sing.

Septuagenarian Sarah Beasley-Smith stares heavenward, her voice mingling with the others. Most of the people here today are related to her. Her mother and father met here. Her grandfather taught the singing school. She says the singings remind her of childhood and a time when she thought of this as “old folk’s music.”

She understands its appeal now. It’s become a piece of her heritage she intends to keep alive. “It would have died if we’d kept it in the South,” she says.

Seth Holloway leans against a sports car in front of the church, sending text messages and checking his MySpace page on his cellphone. A Christian music producer in Tennessee, Mr. Holloway comes home every year for the celebration he found boring as a child and admits is still somewhat tedious.

People are beginning to leave, a steady stream flowing to a slow trickle until at last the church is silent, windows lowered, doors locked. The wind kicks sand in great sweeps across the church’s century-old cemetery. There is history here. Life, death, continuum.

And always, there is song.

IRVING, Texas – It doesn’t look like a church. At the moment, it doesn’t even sound like a church. The Pigeon Hole used to be a bar, and for all some people here know, it still is.

Motorcycles clog the sidewalk outside, engines idling. Children play tag while burly, tattooed men sit on the front porch, trading stories. If you poke your head inside and peer into the dark recesses, you may still be confused. Chinese lanterns strung from the ceiling cast a soft glow on card tables below. Mothers dole Cheerios to chubby-fisted toddlers. Adults buy soft drinks from “Moose,” a man with Samson biceps.

But looks can be deceiving, and stereotypes don’t fly too well at the Hope Fellowship Church, anyway. In fact, it’s that one quality – an inclusive, nonthreatening atmosphere – that draws more than 200 people here each Sunday to worship, eschewing the megachurches so prominent throughout the Dallas area for what they say is a deeper, more spiritual connection.

Biker churches have become so popular in recent years they’re almost mainstream, but if you discount this ragtag assortment as just another symbol of a growing trend, you’d be wrong again. Most attendees have never sat on a bike, and the Rev. Dennis King, who does glide into the parking lot on a Harley, once wore a suit and tie to church every Sunday, preaching from the pulpit of a fundamentalist Baptist church.

Still, Pastor King admits, some stereotypes are true. Many of his parishioners have served time. Almost all – King included – have a background of hard drinking and hard living. But those are the very people who need to be in church, he says. It’s not for the saints, it’s for the sinners.

•••

King was on a rocky road until he met his wife, Cindy. He started riding motorcycles when he was 10 and started drinking at 18. For a while, she lived the life with him, but when they had two children, it lost its appeal for her. She wanted to go to church and get right with God, but he told her to go alone.

“Every week she’d ask, and every week I’d say, ‘I’ll go when I’m good and ready,’ ” King recalls. “My heart wasn’t in it.”

Then one night, Cindy had a dream – God had taken their children. She woke up terrified, inconsolable, and once more, she asked him to go to church. This time, he said yes.

Soon, he was in church every week. He’d stopped drinking and was doing everything they’d let him, from sweeping floors to driving the church van. He started teaching Sunday School, but still felt called to do more. One day, watching a group of children at the altar, tears rolled down his cheeks. God was calling him to preach, and though he tried to ignore it, he was ready to accept the call.

He worked as a salesman by day and took ministry courses at night. Then one day he graduated and waited to be snapped up by a church in need of a newly minted preacher. It didn’t happen. Four years passed before King found a church, and after four and a half years there, he realized he was being led in a different direction again.

His children were grown and he was resuming his love for motorcycles, hanging out at the local pawn shop with a group of Christian bikers who gathered for weekly Bible study.

Still, even after his stint at Northview Baptist Church, he found his quest to form a new church difficult. Every week, the struggling ministry met in homes and local businesses, garnering only a handful of worshipers. And once again, King felt his faith tested. “I wondered why other churches were growing and we weren’t,” he says. “Some Sundays there weren’t but three people there: me, Cindy, and one other person.”

In December 2005, his prayers were answered. While preaching to a crowd of 10, he was interrupted by a familiar rumble outside – motorcycles. Forty-five leather-clad bikers poured in, bringing family and friends. The next day, King learned the news. The men were so moved by the service that space was being offered in a local blues-bar venue, The Pigeon Hole. Hope Fellowship finally had a home.

“I realized God had been answering my prayers all along,” King says. “He wasn’t bringing the men to me. He was bringing me to them.”

Initially, Saturday nights meant blues jams at The Pigeon Hole, with a quick cleanup for Sunday church. Though it didn’t begin as a biker church, word spread quickly. This was a place where everyone was welcome, even bikers. And though King wasn’t a hard-core biker, he knew if he wanted to minister to this flock, he had to ride. Suddenly the former Baptist preacher shed his tie. He got a tattoo while church members stood around, some teasing, all impressed by his dedication to become one with them. The Pigeon Hole became a full-time church.

“A lot of churches expect you to change before you come in, but change doesn’t take place until you’re in the presence of Jesus,” King says. “People will stick their heads in here and say this isn’t a church, but the people are the church.”

Roger Brown says the open attitude is what drew him and his wife, Lindy. “I’ve gone to churches where no one would speak to you,” he says. “You were an outsider, and you’d wonder why you were there. Here, you’re not gonna get in and out without somebody hugging you.”

Vee Miller agrees. She was initially suspicious of the church when her son joined, but King quickly put her fears to rest. “I was really impressed with the sincerity of the men that went there, how they worshiped,” Ms. Miller says. “You have these men who come from very rough backgrounds, and I watch these tough-looking men praying, raising their hands in worship, and singing, and I know it’s sincere.”

She thinks that King is uniquely fitted to understand the needs of his congregation because he has walked in their shoes – and that empathy has worked a miracle in her family.

•••

That, in fact, may be the biggest value of “niche” churches like Hope Fellowship: They can take the Gospel to segments of society that traditional churches often eschew. “If we look at the ministry of Jesus, he associated with those the religious establishment had no time for,” says Eddie Gibbs, a senior professor at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. “He was at ease with the outcasts of society.”

Yet in catering to special groups – there are now cowboy churches, Goth churches, even NASCAR churches – ministers need to avoid adopting the same exclusivity they fled. “We all feel most comfortable with our own,” says David Wells, a theologian at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass. “But what the church is about is giving us something in Christ that is greater than any of the things that typically, and naturally, divide us.”

Church is over at The Pigeon Hole for the day, but the ministry continues. As the men tromp down the wooden steps, slinging on denim jackets with patches proclaiming “Real Men Love Jesus,” they stop to fashion a game plan.

The mission for the day is to visit a sick parishioner, part of the group’s weekly “Ridin’ ‘n Prayn’ ” ministry. Sometimes their visits are routine, sometimes not. King recalls one house call where they’d driven away and were scarcely a mile down the road before they received a phone call – the woman they’d just seen had passed away peacefully right after they left.

One by one, the motorcycles file out of the parking lot, chrome flashing in the afternoon sun as they head down West Irving Boulevard. Outlaws. Sinners. Believers.