By Adam Lucas

“I could tell you some stories,” says Joel James one Tuesday afternoon at the Smith Center.

And for the next hour, he does. He tells you about stretching out his 6-foot-11 frame on a couch instead of a bed, and dodging bullets on the way home from school, and the day he passed a murder scene on the way to the bus stop.

But he does not tell all of the stories. He says he can't.

Why not?

“I don't feel like I should tell some of that stuff,” he says. “People would think I'm crazy. Maybe it's a little embarrassing because it's different. People don't really live like I lived.”

He's right: we don't. You can tell he's correct both by the stories he shares and by the stories he chooses not to share. He is one of 11 brothers and sisters, and this seems noteworthy until you realize that by the time he's finished talking, it now feels like one of the least remarkable things about him.

Joel James enters his senior season as a basketball player at the University of North Carolina as a likely reserve on one of the best teams in the country. He will graduate this spring. He is on a prestigious NCAA committee.

Which leads us to one very important question: how in the world did Joel James get here?

So he shares his stories, and laughs, and tells you about a life that he knows you probably don't understand. He answers almost every question with that same grin—it turns out that his family uses that grin as an emoji in their text conversations—you've seen on the Carolina bench for the past three seasons. He wants you to see what he has seen. Even if you know within minutes of starting the conversation that you've never seen anything like it.

*

The summer before James' freshman season at Carolina, Eric Hoots was prepared to help him move into his dorm room. Hoots, Carolina's director of player relations and before that a team manager, has been aiding Tar Heels as they move into new digs for more than a decade. He knows what to do. He knows what it takes to make an 18-year-old feel at home. He knows that there will be clothes and electronics and linens and…stuff. There will be lots and lots of stuff.

James made the 12-hour drive from his home in West Palm Beach to Chapel Hill with one of his older sisters, Africa, and one of his younger sisters, Kai. He had a duffel bag and a cardboard box. “Let's get you moved in!” the relentlessly helpful Hoots said.

“OK,” said Joel, and he looked at his box and his duffel bag. They held everything he'd brought to Chapel Hill.

The move-in process was more like unpacking at a hotel room. But the wide-eyed freshman still had one request for Hoots: “Can we go buy a bed?” he asked.

“I had saved up money to buy a bed,” James says. “It was the first time I had ever had a real bed. It was the first time I'd ever had a room by myself.”

So you can imagine what it was like that very first night in Ram Village, when Africa and Kai had returned home, when Joel stretched out on the first bed that had ever belonged solely to him and turned out the lights and pondered his new situation.

“It was amazing,” he says. “I woke up the next morning, and I was sprawled out in a nice big bed, and I had some nice air conditioning, and it was amazing.”

Let's stop a second, because you might be confused. Joel James is from West Palm Beach, right? That brings certain images to mind: the ocean, certainly. Beautiful, leafy, green trees. Plenty of sunshine.

Now, listen to how a variety of people describe James' neighborhoods growing up:

“Probably the worst in South Florida,” says his best friend from high school, Alex Junnier.

“Really, really rough,” says Africa. “There was crime everywhere.”

“One of the roughest and most violent crime areas in all of Florida, possibly the entire country,” says Nancy Hughes, Alex's mom, who spent a good portion of her time worrying about her son driving Joel home from school every day.

This September, the Palm Beach Post published a story detailing the summer of 2015 in an area that includes the neighborhoods where James lived for most of his childhood; 10 people were killed, 28 were wounded, and two-thirds of the victims were 25 years old or younger.

On July 22, the mayor announced an increased police patrol in the area. According to the Post, officers spend 1,800 hours per week patrolling the area. Even so, five more people have been gunned down since July 22.

More striking than the numbers is the way James describes his neighborhood. His mother still lives there, and the memories of his childhood are still vivid.

“When I was in fifth grade, I was on my way to the bus stop with two of my sisters,” he says. “About 100 yards away, they were zipping somebody up in a body bag. He was some drug dealer.”

These are the stories James can tell. Imagine the ones he can't.

“I used to live next door to a crack house,” he continues. “It was a drug house, and everybody knew it. A guy my older brother knew was shot in the head there and they just left him there. There were drug deals—like blatant drug deals—100 yards from my house.”

One afternoon, the Drug Enforcement Agency conducted a raid, kicking down the door of the house next door. Two years ago, James' cousin was shot and killed. Last year, one of his younger brothers was sitting on the front steps of his home and was almost shot when spontaneous gunfire broke out in the neighborhood.

And yet, here he is. Joel James is a college senior and will soon have his degree, joining a sister who is a teacher and a sister who is in law school and two siblings currently in college and a brother who was in the military and is now headed to law school. There is virtually no hint of serious trouble anywhere in the family, all 11 of them, in descending order of age: Contina Labady, Kimesha Brown, Solomon James, Isiah James, Africa James-Altidor, Elijah James, Iyata James, Joel, Kai James, Emporess James and Emmanuell James.

How, exactly, did they do this? His father had a saying: each man determines his own destiny. But the answer about who helped shape that destiny is universal.

“I think it was our mom,” says Africa. “Growing up, we weren't allowed to roam the streets. She always pushed positivity and education. So many people fall victim to that environment. But we weren't allowed to go out and play with the neighborhood kids. We went to school, we came home, and no one was allowed in our home. It was just us. There were 11 of us. We didn't really need outside friends.”

“My mother was so influential,” says Joel. “She didn't have the resources to get us out of that environment. But she was smart enough to know we had to make sacrifices by not having neighborhood friends or going outside to play. I was just a kid. All I knew was that I wanted to play in the yard. She knew better. She was the smartest woman I know. She knew the right thing for us to do in order to keep us away from what was happening in our neighborhood, and to this day none of us have a criminal record.”

Imagine that. In a neighborhood where it would be difficult to find a random sampling of 11 people without a criminal record, Cassandra Brown managed to raise a house full—and really it was 12 kids, because she also raised Joel's cousin, Mandela—without incident.

That meant turning down the easy money that was available outside the law in the neighborhood. That meant that when Joel saw schoolmates with new shoes or plenty of spending money, and he knew where it came from, he had to abstain. Sometimes it was hard. Sometimes—almost all the time, really—it didn't make sense.

This is a story he tells, a story you don't really understand, because you take for granted flipping the light switch and knowing there will be light. That's what happens when you flip the switch, right? Not for everyone.

“Sometimes we couldn't always keep the water on or the lights on,” Joel says. “That's life. If you go to any ghetto in America there aren't always lights on or heat or water. There's not always the best food in the refrigerator. But you're living. You're surviving.

“Sometimes you drive down the street and your car engine breaks down. You have to make a choice, and you use the money you were going to use for the water bill to fix your car engine, because that's what gets you to work and you have to keep your job. So maybe you go for a couple months without water or a couple months without lights. My mom made plenty of choices like that. In life you have to make sacrifices. And my mom always knew there was a greater picture to achieve.”

Her goal was to keep her children safe until they learned the tools to take them on to something greater. Joel spent much of his childhood building robots out of cardboard boxes. His older siblings thought he might be an architect.

Then he discovered basketball, which led him to an entirely new set of friends, which led him to Chapel Hill, which…

Well, hold on a second. For right now, all you need to know is this: basketball didn't save Joel James . He was bound to get out of West Palm Beach no matter what. He was too smart and too talented, from too strong a background, to be another victim.

For many kids, basketball is a gateway to money or fame. That's not what James wanted from the game. He wanted exactly what it gave him, something that was one of the most precious of commodities in his West Palm Beach neighborhood—opportunity.

*

Upon transferring to Dwyer High in Palm Beach Gardens, Joel James did something most 6-foot-6 high school sophomores would never do—he avoided the basketball coach.

James knew what the head coach, Fred Ross, would think: here's a tall kid who looks pretty athletic and would be a great addition to my team. But James also knew what Fred Ross didn't know: he had never played organized basketball and wasn't sure he had an aptitude for the game.

Within his first month at Dwyer, however, James encountered Ross on the school track. Ross asked the sophomore two questions:

“Can you get two rebounds?”

“Can you block a shot?”

Ross already had a very solid roster that included Jacoby Brissett, who was getting basketball recruiting attention but eventually went to Florida to play football before transferring to NC State, where he is now the starting quarterback. Ross didn't need James to be a star. He had time for him to learn the game and get in basketball shape.

Around the same time that James joined the team, he met Alex Junnier. The two outwardly appeared to have very little in common. James was tall, a little shy, from a questionable neighborhood. Junnier was none of those things.

In fact, Junnier's athletic dreams were focused more on video. He thought one day he might want to be a video coordinator for a college or pro team, and he spent dozens of hours filming James and cutting highlights. But he wasn't content just to sit in the stands and watch. James' weight was over 300 pounds, and Junnier knew he himself also had some weight to lose. So when James worked out, Junnier worked out.

Their daily routine was intense. Many days, they'd skip lunch to go to the school gym. James would shoot, Junnier would rebound. After school, they'd go to Junnier's house, where his mother, Nancy Hughes, would have something prepared for the duo. Then they'd go back to the gym to work out, then James would have practice, and then Junnier would take the big man home around 9 p.m.

It worked: Junnier and James each dropped approximately 60 pounds by the time they were seniors. Hughes saw the physical changes in her son caused by his close friendship with James, but believes the impact went beyond simple weight loss.

“Joel has a pure heart,” Hughes says. “He is honest, polite, personable, compassionate and driven to succeed…They rarely watched TV or played video games. They stayed busy doing more physical activities. They are the best of friends, and they bring out the best in each other.”

Of course, Hughes is still a mother. So she worried about Alex driving into Joel's neighborhood after dark. She installed an app on Alex's phone that enabled her to constantly update his location, and watched his progress on her screen to make sure his car wasn't stopping anywhere other than James' house.

Her concerns were well-founded. As James became known around his neighborhood as a basketball player with some potential, the shadier elements of the area largely left him alone. But one of the most dangerous realities of the Riviera Beach area was that even rejecting the street life didn't make a child immune from it. The shadows could still surround you, even if you were doing nothing more than walking home from basketball practice.

“Practice would finish around 9 at night,” James says. “On the days I didn't get a ride from Alex, I would take the city bus, and it would be dark by the time I got off. There were no streetlights in my neighborhood. One day, we had just gotten our team basketball shoes, and I was carrying them in my hand.

“As I was walking, I saw a guy about 50 yards in front of me near a giant, dark alleyway on the right-hand side near our house. On the left-hand side there was an old abandoned house. All I'm trying to do is come home from practice—I've got my bookbag, all my practice stuff, and my shoes. I'm worn out.

“Guys walk out of the abandoned house, and they say, 'What's up?' I say, 'Nothing, I'm just going home from practice.' At that same time, the guy 50 yards in front of me walks near the alley and looks at me. And I think, 'Uh oh, something is about to happen.' He runs back to the alley and I started running. All of a sudden I hear shots. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. I drop everything and jump over a fence and laid down in the yard. When I stopped hearing shots and I thought I could get up, I ran inside.”

These are the stories Joel James tells. Oh, but he wants to tell you one other thing.

“I went back and got those shoes, man,” he says. “They were my team shoes! There was no way I was leaving them there.”

Hughes eventually became like a second mother to James, packing him an extra lunch every day and including him on family trips. They soon learned they didn't have to plan anything extravagant. James had never seen the Intracoastal Waterway, which was less than a half-hour from his house. With Hughes and Junnier, he rode bikes and rented Segways and visited the Marine Life Center in Juno Beach, where the staff gathered around James to tell him he was the only visitor they'd ever had who was as big as a loggerhead turtle (everything is relative).

In some ways, he was a tourist in his own town. But he was also something else, something he'd never really had the chance to be: a carefree kid.

*

Every year at the start of her Introduction to Poetry class at Carolina, professor Gabrielle Calvocoressi asks each student why they're in the class.

In her first semester at Carolina, in the fall of 2013, one very large individual's answer made her pause.

“I just want to better myself,” Joel James told the class.

“I thought that was a really remarkable response from a person who was in his sophomore year of college,” Calvocoressi says. “Every moment with him was a moment where I realized he was serious about that. I admired him because it was never enough. He always wanted to push himself. He always wanted to find out more about what he was capable of. He seems like a true leader.”

James shows that leadership on and off the court. On the court, he's played a reserve role while adjusting to the nuances of the game that many of his teammates learned years ago. But he's always visible, due largely to the incredibly expressive faces he's prone to making after he—or even a teammate—make a big play.

Those looks aren't a new development. James' family, as you would expect with 11 siblings, has several group text conversations going at any one time. There are times they don't use emojis, those smiley-face methods of communication native to the texting generation. Instead, they use photos of Joel's face. There's one expressing surprise. There's one showing disbelief. Really, there's a Joel James expression for virtually any emotion.

Off the court, James has blossomed at Carolina. He's a history major who has entertained the idea of becoming a history teacher when his basketball career is finished. And as his professor predicted, he's established himself in leadership positions across campus and the nation.

He's a member of the advisory committees for UNC's Student-Athlete Advisory Council and the ACC's Student-Athlete Advisory Council. In April, he attended the NCAA Leadership Forum, and in June he was selected to represent the ACC on the NCAA's National Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, a prestigious group that includes just 31 student-athletes nationwide.

“I'm interested in the issue of mental health for student-athletes,” James says. “There's a mental strain with performing at a high level in front of thousands of people while still trying to balance academics and be a 21-year-old kid. That can be pretty stressful. And I also want to be involved with helping student-athletes give back in the community.”

It turns out that we were wrong. It turns out that the most important question is not how Joel James got here. The kid who arrived at Carolina having never had his own bed will leave as a college graduate, and a national leader, and, oh yes, a Carolina basketball letterman.

He will also leave us with a new question. What we should really want to know is not how he got here. It's where he is going, whose lives he might change, what differences he might make.

“I hope my classroom, and Carolina as a whole, was a place where Joel could use all of his skills as a person, and build something that allowed him to be a member of the community,” Calvocoressi says. “I hope Carolina was a place for him that allows him to build a vision for himself of what kind of man he's going to be in the world. I think he's going to do tremendous things. There is no end to what Joel could accomplish in this world.”