Unforgivable Blackness
Page 20
Reporters haunted the sidewalk outside, hoping for more scandal. To get rid of them, and to do what he could to restore his reputation among whites and Negroes alike, Johnson eventually called them in and offered his own wholly invented version of the facts. His wife was actually black, not white, he now said. Her name was Hattie Smith, not Nellie O’Brien. She’d been born in Mississippi, not Philadelphia, and he had married her two and a half years earlier “in a small Nevada town.”
There was nothing secret about it. The only thing is that as she has traveled with a vaudeville show we separated and it was not generally known that I was married. I wasn’t in the limelight so much in those days and the public was not much interested in my affairs.
I want to say one thing—that I don’t see where the outside world need concern itself with a man’s private affairs. If my wife were of white blood and really loved me, I can’t see why we shouldn’t be married. I know that I love the girl and she is fond of me, and I think that is all that is needed. I would like for people to go over my record and see if I have done anything a white man would be ashamed of doing. I wish this talk about my wife would stop. She is in Milwaukee visiting friends, and she went there to escape publicity.*
Then he tried to focus the public’s attention back where he thought it belonged, on boxing. “I can lick Jim Jeffries,” he said. “Jeffries never licked a young man. I am the best boxer in the world. I am not only accepting challenges, I am making them. The man I want is Jim Jeffries. I will fight him winner take all or any way he wants to split the purse.”
While he waited for Jeffries to make up his mind about his ability to get back into shape, he said, he would fight Stanley Ketchel in San Francisco, in October.
He also backed out of the promise he’d made to fight Sam Langford in London for five thousand dollars. “I beat Sam easy before,” he explained, “and a match between us wouldn’t draw.” But there was more to it than that. He had not forgotten the morning he’d been made to wait in the foyer of the National Sporting Club until summoned inside by white men who thought themselves free to decide his fate without him, and he had long since developed his own version of the Golden Rule: do unto others as they have done unto you. “Being a champion,” he now wrote to the club manager, Peggy Bettinson,
I don’t see that the National Sporting Club has a right to dictate to me as to how much I shall receive for my appearance and boxing ability. If they don’t want to give my price, which is [thirty thousand dollars], win, lose or draw, [the precise terms Tommy Burns had insisted upon before fighting him] they can call things off…. I am a boxing man and can now get my price, and I don’t care what the public thinks.
Two weeks after talking to the press, Johnson boarded a train for New York to begin a seven-thousand-dollar two-week engagement at Hammerstein’s Victoria on Broadway. Hattie McClay was not with him. Later Johnson would say they’d parted because of her beer drinking, that he’d found bottles under their bed after she’d promised him she would stop. Whatever happened, she melted back into the sporting life she’d known before she met him, working for a Philadelphia madam until her new employer got wind of her liaison with a black man and fired her. But she remained on call, ready to become “Mrs. Johnson” again whenever another one was not available.
Johnson got a warm welcome in Manhattan. A jubilant, mostly Negro crowd filled the cavernous waiting room of Grand Central and followed him to an open automobile, shaking his hand, patting his back, shouting his name. Barron Wilkins, one of black Manhattan’s leading sports and an old friend of Johnson’s, had organized a parade in his honor. A brass band playing ragtime from an open car led the way. Behind it came the champion, waving and bowing, escorted by a dozen touring cars “crowded with colored ‘sports.’” The procession swept down Forty-second Street past cheering crowds into the heart of the wide-open Tenderloin District and pulled up in front of Barron’s Café and the attached Little Savoy Hotel at 235 West Thirty-fifth Street. It was Jack Johnson’s kind of place—the basement was given over to gambling, and a horseshoe hung over the door with a sign that read NO ONE ENTERS THESE PORTALS BUT THE TRUE IN HEART SPORTS. It became his headquarters whenever he was in town.
Black fans followed him everywhere, and blacks and curious whites alike packed Hammerstein’s Victoria to see him perform five times a day. “There were no preliminaries about the act,” wrote the reviewer for Variety.
An announcer proclaimed Johnson the undefeated champion of the world. The hisses which greeted this speech drowned the applause. The gallery held many colored people.
Johnson stepped on the stage, disregarding the disturbance, and went at the bag. On the third punch it flew into the balcony. The stage hands removed the apparatus without further ado, and Johnson proceeded to box his sparring partner, [Marty] Kid Cutler, a white man…. The white man, handicapped by height and reach, could not touch Johnson, who toyed with him.
The audence offered much advice. At the conclusion, [Johnson] stepped forward, and made the following speech, which turned the tide in his favor, winning him some genuine applause to close with:
“Ladies and gentlemen, kindly give me three minutes of your valuable time. Today I have deposited with the New York American $5,000 as a deposit on a side bet for $10,000 to fight any man in the world. If there is a fight, I hope the best man will win.”
Johnson is a drawing card and seems to attract even those hostile to him through his color. His bearing while making the speech and the language proved the black champion is no novice on the stage.
Booker T. Washington had been the best-known black man in America for as long as Jack Johnson had been a professional fighter, but by the spring of 1909, his power and influence were slipping away. Segregation and the constant threat of white violence that characterized life in the South seemed to be spreading northward. A riot the previous year in Springfield, Illinois—which had seen whites storm through black neighborhoods howling, “Lincoln freed you, we’ll show you where you belong,” killing eight Negro citizens, and driving two thousand more from the town where Abraham Lincoln had lived (and the site of the battle-royal victory that sent Jack Johnson on to Chicago)—had provided graphic evidence that Washington’s gradualism was not working. Then, when Washington called at the White House in April, hoping to go over Negro appointments to federal jobs with the new Republican president, William Howard Taft, as he had with Taft’s predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, he was turned away: Taft didn’t have time to see him. Whites began replacing Negro officeholders. And a group of Washington’s critics, black and white—including the Atlanta University sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, the anti-lynching campaigner Ida Wells-Barnett, and the New York newspaper editor Oswald Garrison Villard—had recently voted to establish a new “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” to take the kind of direct action in support of political and civil rights that Washington had always discouraged.
But Washington still saw himself as an arbiter of black behavior, and Jack Johnson’s conduct frankly alarmed him: the champion seemed the antithesis of everything Washington had always said a black man should be: he was free-spending, not thrifty; brash instead of humble; defiant in the face of white laws and customs intended to hamper his movement and limit his choices. Hoping to bring the champion into line, he asked his private secretary, Emmett Jay Scott, to write a note enlisting the aid of a New York friend of Johnson’s, a prominent black criminal lawyer and onetime Republican politician named J. Frank Wheaton.
Scott was writing out of personal as well as racial pride, he told Wheaton. Like Johnson, Scott was a Texan and therefore especially keen that the new champion always do “the absolutely proper and dignified thing.”
We all believe that he can defeat Jeffries, but I think it would be much better for him not to boast about what he is going to do in that particular, but simply stand on his record and on the statement that “he would fight any living man for the Heavy Weight Championship of the World.”
You can talk these matters over with Johnson in your own way.
If Wheaton did offer Johnson any advice during his New York stay, there’s no evidence the champion followed any of it. He saw no need to hide his eagerness to get Jim Jeffries into the ring; wanted no part of a reunion with Sam Fitzpatrick, whose patronizing treatment of him he would neither forgive nor forget; and never had much interest in anyone else’s notion of “the absolutely proper and dignified thing” to do, especially if it interfered with what he called his “pleasures.”
In mid-April, Johnson returned to Chicago, still without Hattie and looking for a good time. More than forty-five thousand Negroes now lived in the city on the lake, and three out of four of them made their homes in the black belt, a narrow strip that began just south of the Loop and in 1909 already ran southward along State Street for some thirty blocks. More refugees from the Jim Crow South were arriving every day, and leadership in the neighborhood was steadily shifting from the handful of shopkeepers and professionals who had once catered to the white community, to a new generation of black entrepreneurs, editors, clergymen, and politicians whose power and profits were drawn from a fast-growing but increasingly segregated black world, with its own institutions, athletic teams, and forms of entertainment.
But there was one section of the black belt—the twenty square blocks from Eighteenth to Twenty-second streets between Federal and Halstead—where blacks and whites continued to meet and mingle, at least from dusk till dawn. It was called the Levee District, and—like Manhattan’s Tenderloin and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast and Beale Street in Memphis and the wide-open neighborhoods in all the other towns through which Johnson had traveled where vice was tolerated—he already knew it intimately. By one count, the Levee was home to five hundred saloons and just as many whorehouses, fifty-six poolrooms, fifteen gambling halls, six variety theaters, countless nickelodeons and peep shows, opium dens, and cocaine parlors, as well as “buffet flats”—apartments that provided food and drink, piano music and prostitutes—and “winerooms,” where women sold watered drinks along with their company. There was something or someone to suit everyone’s wallet and everybody’s taste: on a single Armour Avenue block stood separate “resorts” offering Chinese women, Japanese women, “Mulatto girls for white gentlemen,” and, for customers with catholic tastes, the “House of All Nations.”
For nine years, the showpiece of the district had been a pair of attached three-story mansions at 2131–33 South Dearborn. Known as the Everleigh Club, it was run by Ada and Minna Lester, Kentucky-born sisters who had married and divorced a brace of brothers back home, spent several years on the road as actresses, and then gone into the brothel business. (They were supposed to have adopted the last name Everleigh because their grandmother had signed her letters to them “Everly Yours.”) In the judgment of the Chicago Vice Commission, which yearned to close it down, their fifty-room establishment was “probably the most famous and luxurious house of prostitution in the country.” Certainly, it was the highest priced and most exclusive. It cost ten dollars just to get past the door. In an era when fifty cents bought a three-course meal, dinner at the Everleigh Club cost fifty dollars. Female companionship cost a great deal more. The club had a library, an art gallery, and a dozen parlors, each with its own distinctive décor; the Gold parlor featured gold spittoons, a gold-rimmed goldfish bowl, and a miniature piano covered with gold leaf, said to be worth fifteen thousand dollars. Specially designed fountains filled the air with the scent of flowers.
“Minna and Ada Everleigh are to pleasure,” said the veteran Chicago newsman Jack Lait, “what Christ was to Christianity.” They were particular about the thirty young women who worked for them. No “inexperienced girls or young widows” were ever hired, Minna once explained; “we do not like amateurs.” “Be polite and forget what you are here for,” she told her employees. They were required to wear formal gowns, forbidden to curse, and entitled to keep half their earnings, all unheard-of anywhere else in the district. The sisters were no less choosy about their clients: “The Everleigh Club is not for the rough element, the clerk on a holiday, or a man without a check book,” Minna said. Would-be customers had to send in their business cards before being allowed inside; those not known personally to the sisters or without a written introduction from someone they knew were sometimes turned away.
Jack Johnson wanted in. Black customers were barred: even the “professor” who played ragtime favorites on the Everleigh Club piano was white. Not even Johnson’s newfound fame could get him past the front door. But his connections could.
He had a new manager now, a sad-eyed, pear-shaped man with a mustache named George Little. He and the champion had known each other for ten years, ever since Johnson’s first visit to Chicago, when, Little remembered, “ten cents was a big meal.” He had run the stable at the Palmer House hotel then and allowed Johnson to come inside and sleep on its straw rather than on the lakefront. Since then, he had come up in the world and was doing so well that he could provide the champion with a fifteen-hundred-dollar diamond ring to seal their new relationship. He operated his own West Side saloon, the Here It Is; ran a combination bar and brothel called the Imperial on Armour Avenue; and helped oversee the Buxbaum Catering Company at State and Twenty-second, which billed itself as the “Acknowledged Bohemian Center of Chicago” but was actually the ground-floor restaurant of the Marlborough Hotel, which provided prostitutes and their customers with five-dollar rooms.
But more important for Johnson’s purposes, Little was also now the Levee “czar,” the man who collected protection money from everyone in the district each week and passed it on to “Bathhouse John” Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Mike Kenna, the famously corrupt aldermen who made it all possible.
To stay in business, the Everleigh sisters had to pay Little one thousand dollars a month, and when he turned up at their door one April evening with the heavyweight champion of the world looming next to him, they had no choice but to let them both in. All Johnson got that evening was a chance to look around; Little had not insisted that Johnson be allowed to sleep with anyone. But he and the Everleighs alike seem to have underestimated the power of the champion’s charm, wealth, and celebrity over the women working at the club. When Johnson invited five of them to go for a ride in his big touring car with him, Little, and a Chicago hustler and sometime beer salesman named Abe Ahrens, they all piled in.
One was a slender twenty-three-year-old who called herself Belle Schreiber (her real last name seems to have been Becker, though she would use at least a dozen other aliases over the next few years). She was said to be the daughter of a Milwaukee policeman who died when she was a child, and she had learned stenography and worked at the downtown Plankington Hotel for a time, taking letters for visiting businessmen. At twenty, she had come to Chicago, searching for secretarial work. Then, like many other rootless young women of her generation, she found she could do better pursuing what she called “the sporting life” instead. After answering “calls” out of a Michigan Avenue boardinghouse for a few months, she began working at the Everleigh Club in December of 1907.
Johnson showed unusual interest in her after their drive together. He pursued her with telephone calls and gifts—flowers, theater tickets, money, a framed photograph of himself signed “To my little sweetheart, Belle, from Papa Jack”—and within a few days had persuaded her to spend the night with him in his room at Toots Marshall’s. The Everleighs warned her not to do so; when she disobeyed them, they let her go.* Johnson told her not to worry. He would help se
t her up in an apartment of her own. He also promised that when he went out on the road she could join him, with all her expenses paid plus what she remembered as “a little over to have in my pocketbook”; she could wear the jewels and finery Hattie McClay had worn, too, and be the new “Mrs. Jack Johnson,” at least part of the time.
The arrangement seemed to suit her, at least at first. Johnson led what must have struck her as a glamorous life: constant travel, big money, big crowds. He could also be generous, and even an unsteady relationship with one generous man likely seemed better to her than congress with strangers, however well screened by her employers.
There was clearly more to their relationship than simple commerce or convenience. We can never know precisely how one person feels about another, but on the witness stand a few years later, Schreiber would be asked whether she had given herself over to Johnson “out of affection or [for] compensation.” “Compensation, mostly,” she answered. But when pressed as to whether she had ever been in love with Johnson, she would say only, “I don’t know what love is.” She did not say no.
On April 19, 1909, Jim Jeffries made it official. Standing on the stage of the American Theater on Broadway and speaking to a full house that included reporters from all the New York dailies and many out-of-town papers as well, he said he was now convinced that within eight to ten months he would be ready to wrest the title back from Jack Johnson. He planned a summer trip to Europe. The final fight details would be worked out when he got back.* The crowd stood and cheered. The Broadway song-and-dance man George M. Cohan leaped onstage waving a thousand-dollar bill and shouting that he was ready to bet it on the white man’s hope.
A few days later, Jeffries drove down to the Bowery to visit an old saloonkeeper friend, “Diamond Dan” O’Rourke. No one in the neighborhood had known he was coming, but before his automobile could come to a stop, it was surrounded by passersby shouting greetings to the man they all called “the champ.” He hurried inside O’Rourke’s establishment and disappeared upstairs. The crowd continued to grow until all traffic was stopped; “Men and boys—and even women—were fighting for a vantage point,” one newspaper reported, and reserve policemen had to be called in to clear a path for the line of waiting streetcars.