TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — It’s dinnertime and 9-year-old Deontay Wilder and his three younger siblings take their seats at the family’s six-chair kitchen table.



One of the chairs, where Wilder’s mother used to sit, remains empty. She left the family not long before, temporarily leaving the care of the children to Gary Wilder, a heavy equipment operator trying to hold his family together without a partner and on $635 every other week. They are living in a three-bedroom home in a poor area of Tuscaloosa known as the West End.



Gary, a hulking man at 6-foot-6, is slouched over the stove, cooking up some magic. Some nights, he would stand there, staring down at a pot of boiling water, not even sure what to make with it. He’d think of his wife, of his kids missing their mother, and tears would fall. But on this night, he is drumming up something wonderful, a concoction of his own making:



Ya-Ya.



He skinned some chicken, put it in the...