Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Friends urged Johnson to invest in real estate and build his fortune that way. He briefly scandalized the wealthy white residents of Brooklyn Heights by offering sixty-two thousand dollars for a big ivy-covered mansion at 82 Pierrepont Street (His offer was not accepted.)* Later he paid sixty thousand dollars for Chicago’s Turner Hall, a South Side complex of theaters and dance halls at State Street and Thirty-first Street. The previous owners were German immigrant societies, which had barred Negroes from renting the facilities; he planned to turn part of it into a black-and-tan club, catering to blacks and whites alike, to be called the Café de Champion.†

  Outside the few big northern cities where the Johnson–Jeffries films were shown, black Americans had little opportunity to see their champion in action. It didn’t seem to matter. His impact was everywhere, among all kinds of people. In the all-American Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, the master comic Bert Williams played Johnson in a burlesque version of the Reno battle, sandwiched between Fanny Brice singing a song called “Goodbye Becky Cohen” and a chorus of dancers costumed as southern colonels. In the Richmond Pilot, a black poet named Lucille Watkins expressed her pleasure in the champion’s triumphs in formal verse.

  Jack Johnson, we have waited long for you

  To grow our prayers in this single blow.

  Today we place upon your wreath the dew of tears—the wordless gratitude we owe. We kiss the perspiration from your face.

  In North Carolina, others used simpler words to sing the same sentiment.

  Amaze an’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,

  Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down,

  Jim Jeffries jumped up an’ hit Jack on the chin,

  An’ then Jack knocked him down again.

  The Yankees hold the play,

  The white man pulls the trigger;

  But it make no difference what the white man say,

  The world’s champion’s still a nigger.

  Along a street in Monroe, North Carolina, an old blind beggar was heard rattling his cup and chanting, “Jack Johnson be the champion of the worl’,” over and over again. When a white passerby demanded to know what he was singing, he quickly switched to “Oh, blessed be the name of the Lord.” In small southern towns, black men who refused to follow white law and custom—often called “bad niggers” by people of both races but with very different emphasis and meaning—now sometimes became “Jack Johnsons.” When ordering breakfast in a Negro restaurant, a diner was likely to get a laugh out of the waitress by ordering his coffee as strong and black as Jack Johnson and his scrambled eggs as beat up as Jim Jeffries.*

  Word of mouth may have accounted for most of what southern Negroes knew—or thought they knew—of Johnson. But the growth of his legend was also immeasurably aided by the Chicago Defender. By the mid-teens, it would be the most widely read Negro newspaper in the nation. Pullman porters carried bundles of papers into the deepest south, where the Defender was quietly distributed from churches and barbershops. Its arresting headlines, often printed in crimson—

  WHITE GENTLEMAN RAPES COLORED GIRL;

  SOUTHERN WHITE GENTLEMEN BURN RACE BOY AT STAKE;

  WHEN THE MOB COMES AND YOU MUST DIE

  TAKE AT LEAST ONE WITH YOU

  —were meant to stir blacks to action, to encourage them to leave Jim Crow behind and come north. The Defender’s publisher, Robert S. Abbott, considered Johnson both a personal friend and a hero of the race. In his eyes, nothing Johnson ever did was wrong. When the champion was arrested for driving too fast, the paper asked, “Why not arrest the man who built the auto for speed violation instead of the innocent purchaser? Then Jack would go free.” The Champion Statuary Company of Chicago was speaking for the Defender as well as for itself when it assured readers that for just $2.50 they could possess their own eighteen-inch statue of Johnson: “AN ORNAMENT for the home of every negro for he is the first negro to be admitted the best man in the world.”

  By the end of July, the champion had been training or performing onstage for twelve straight weeks and wanted a few days’ vacation before returning to the road. He and Etta, Sig Hart, and Barney Furey drove to Atlantic City, where he rented rooms on the stretch of Boardwalk around Missouri Street reserved for blacks called Chicken Bone Beach. It was the kind of neighborhood Jack Johnson liked best, a garish jumble of hotels and boardinghouses and clubs and cafés that never closed, and he was determined to have the best possible time.

  He hadn’t seen Belle Schreiber since March—she was still working in Lillian Paynter’s Pittsburgh whorehouse—but she’d written him from time to time while he was out west and congratulated him after his victory at Reno. As soon as he got to Atlantic City he wired her money to come and join him. She said she would; she was eager to return to Johnson’s fast-moving world. Telling her employer she had a family emergency and would need some time off, she and her maid, Julia Allen, hurried aboard a train for Atlantic City on August 1. Hart and Furey met them at the depot and took them to Young’s Hotel, where Belle registered as “Mrs. Jack Allen.”

  The champion was out strolling the next morning when he happened upon Charles Horner, a former sparring partner who was now working as a chair-pusher, wheeling tourists up and down the Boardwalk. Johnson hired him to bring a woman he identified only as “my girl” from Young’s to Ben Allen’s, a café with upstairs rooms, where he said he would be waiting for her. “Fully expecting to see a colored girl,” Horner said, he did as he was told, and was astonished when a white woman emerged from the hotel and took her seat in his chair. As he rolled her along the Boardwalk, he remembered, Belle “talked very loud and considerable” about her closeness to the champion. After an hour or so upstairs, Belle came down again and Horner took her back to where she was staying. Johnson gave him $1.75 for his trouble.

  By mid-August, Johnson and his entourage were back on the road for another six-week theatrical tour with a burlesque revue called The Rollickers. They traveled in two big cars. Johnson drove one, with Etta at his side. A second car, with a chauffeur named Jack Mervin at the wheel, carried Barney Furey, Sig Hart and his wife, and Johnson’s onstage sparring partner Walter Monahan. Belle Schreiber went, too, but separately, moving from town to town by train—Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Boston—staying in different hotels as she had the previous spring, and visiting Johnson at the theater for an hour or so before or after most of his matinee performances. One Cleveland hotel employee remembered seeing Belle “on the stage and about the dressing rooms … carrying on and kidding with Johnson” in what he called “a disgusting manner.”

  During the week they spent in Buffalo, Etta seems to have discovered Belle’s presence and to have bitterly protested. The landlady at the Munroe Hotel, where she and the champion stayed, remembered her steadily drinking champagne and “grieving” over being “married” to an unfaithful husband. For her part, Belle, still resentful that she was no longer first in Johnson’s affections, still searching for a way to pry him away from his new lover, told him Etta was being unfaithful to him. He took the accusation seriously, confronted Etta, and forced her to spend a humiliating day sending telegrams to old friends, asking them to vouch for her character.

  Johnson fired Sig Hart that week, perhaps because Etta had insisted she couldn’t bear to see every day the little man who made the secret arrangements that kept her rival always available. But as soon as his party reached Canada, Belle turned up there as well.

  In Montreal, Johnson tried to cheer Etta by buying her a whole new wardrobe. While he bought his way up and down the aisles of a St. James Street department store, the Montreal Daily Herald reported on September 19, a crowd gathered outside.

  One of Jack’s retainers came out of the store entrance, staggering under the weight of an armful of parcels, but he couldn’t get through the crowd. So a shower of parcels was sent flying out into the hands of a colored gent in the auto.

  Then Jack in all his glory emerged. He lifted his big grey felt hat in response to
the cheers, beamed his golden smile, and the car rolled off.

  The tour went on. In Boston, Johnson and Etta stayed at the Upton, “a colored hotel” near Back Bay Station. Belle had a room at the Brewster; she took all her meals in her room, a bellboy remembered, but she had eagerly shown him a magnificent fur and a silver manicure set and said they were gifts from the heavyweight champion of the world. There, Julia Allen remembered, Belle and Johnson had another fierce quarrel. This time he tore off most of her clothes, perhaps to demonstrate that everything she wore belonged to him, that if she was not willing to accept her subordinate position she would have to move on. She did—and he gave her money to get back to Pittsburgh and resume her life as an inmate in Lillian Paynter’s whorehouse.

  The tour continued without her, a series of grueling one-nighters in Albany, Granville, and Binghamton, New York; Rutland, Vermont; Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania. In Scranton Johnson heard from Belle again. She needed help, she said. She had no one else to turn to. Lillian Paynter had been ill when Belle went back to work. Her sister, Estelle, had been in charge. Somehow, Estelle learned Belle had been sleeping with Johnson and instantly ordered her off the premises. Desperate, again without a home or a place to work because of her relationship with the champion, she had moved into her maid’s house, then talked Johnson’s old friend Frank Sutton into helping her track him down by telephone.* He heard her out and, on October 15, wired her seventy-five dollars. Later she said he also told her to go to Chicago, get a room at Mrs. Graham’s boardinghouse on Indiana Avenue, and wait for him. She boarded the train that evening.

  He wasn’t able to come to Chicago himself right away because he had an appointment at the Sheepshead Bay dirt track in Brooklyn. Having conquered the boxing world, he had now convinced himself that he had the makings of a champion race-car driver as well. “I have the car, the money and the skill,” he said, and he was about to test all three against the man who billed himself as the “World’s Champion Automobilist,” Barney Oldfield.

  Once again, color had presented a big stumbling block, and, once again, Johnson had acted as if it did not exist. The American Automobile Association Contest Board, which governed sanctioned races, barred Negroes from the track. The previous December, Jim Jeffries had been given the honor of riding in the first car ever to circle the new brickyard track at Indianapolis. But when Johnson asked to be allowed to take part in a race there on Labor Day, he was told he could not. Might he simply take a turn around the track before the race, then, so his fellow automobile enthusiasts could see him as they had seen Jeffries the year before? No, he couldn’t do that, either.

  Johnson knew the board would never license him to race professionally, so he sent a surrogate to the board’s New York office, a white member of his retinue, who filled out the necessary paperwork, paid a dollar, and was issued license number 669 in the name of “John Arthur Johnson.” Then the champion issued a five-thousand-dollar challenge to the three most prominent drivers of the day: George Robertson, Ralph Da Palma, and the legendary Barney Oldfield.

  Oldfield and Jack Johnson were both sports pioneers. Johnson had shown how well a black man could do in what had been a white man’s game. Old-field had proved that a poor boy could succeed in what had been a rich man’s sport. Born on an Ohio farm in 1878, just a few weeks before Johnson’s birth, he left school at twelve or thirteen and worked at odd jobs, just as Johnson had, while looking for something exciting to do. Like a good many American boys of his era, he became obsessed with speed. He did well as a bicyclist, leading his Racycle Racing Team in contests all over the Midwest, and he toyed with motorcycles as soon as they were introduced. Then, in 1902, in his very first automobile race, and at the tiller of young Henry Ford’s “999”—nothing more than an engine and frame with exposed crankshafts that bathed the driver in oil—he careened past the American automotive champion Alexander Winton to win. Up to that point, American auto racing had largely been the cozy preserve of wealthy sportsmen like Winton and William K. Vanderbilt, for whom racing was an avocation. Oldfield dismissed them as the “Eastern Millionaires.” In 1903, he became the first man in America to drive a gas-powered automobile a mile a minute. “Men were white-faced and breathless,” said The Automobile magazine, “while women covered their eyes.” From then on, he was a legend. Automobile-mad schoolboys learned the names of the cars in which he smashed records and overtook rivals: “999,” “Bullet #2,” “Golden Submarine,” “Green Dragon,” “Old Glory,” the “Blitzen Benz.” They worried over his frequent crashes: he was badly injured several times and responsible for the deaths of three people when he hurtled through fences. And they pinned up his photograph: gloved hands gripping the wheel, goggles splattered with mud, a dead cigar clamped between his teeth. Thirty years after he left the track, policemen would still be pulling over speeders and asking, “Who the hell do you think you are, Barney Oldfield?”

  There were other similarities between Oldfield and Johnson. Oldfield, like Johnson, was fond of sealskin coats and diamond rings. He was married four times but rarely faithful. “He’s a devil with the ladies,” his forbearing second (and fourth) wife once told a reporter. He drank too much and brawled too often. “I’ve done more fighting getting old Barney out of scrapes,” his friend Jim Jeffries once said, “than I ever did in the ring.” And Oldfield once turned up for a race so badly hungover that he spun off the track on his first practice run. He spent too much, too, ordering two thousand cigars at a time, handing out five-dollar tips to startled busboys, running up an $845 bill buying drinks and dinner for all sixty-five members of a marching band that had greeted him at the depot in San Francisco. Above all, Oldfield shared Johnson’s willingness to run big risks, provided that the potential rewards were still bigger. “I’d rather be dead than dead broke,” he liked to say.

  Oldfield had jumped at Johnson’s challenge. “Automobile racing is my business,” he said, “and if Johnson or any other man in the world has $5,000 to bet he can beat me I am ready to meet him…. I will race Johnson for the same reason Jeffries fought him—for the money it will bring.”

  Most sportswriters thought the whole thing absurd. It would probably have been better if Oldfield had refused to race the champion, said a writer for the Milwaukee Herald, because it would have dealt Johnson “the snub he richly deserves”; on the other hand, he wrote, there was the hope that the race would permanently remove the champion from the scene, that there would be “a sprint, a crash and a funeral.”

  The British editor of Boxing saw it differently:

  It is impossible to withhold a certain meed of admiration for the heavyweight champion’s quixotic effort. It may, of course, be held that his action is only an effort to air his overweening vanity. Admit that much if you will; it is patent, if he succeeds in forcing the white automobilists of America to accept him amongst them as a competitor on equal terms, that he will have done something towards weakening the rigidity of the colour line, and to that extent will have been instrumental in making life socially fuller, if not for the great bulk of the coloured population at least for those amongst them who stand possessed of this world’s wealth.

  That was precisely what the members of the AAA Contest Board feared most, and when they figured out who “John Arthur Johnson” really was, they rescinded his license, mailed him back his dollar, and accused him of having obtained the permit under false pretenses. Johnson sent the dollar right back, along with a stiff letter of his own.

  I return herewith the $1 which you returned to me, same being in payment of license fee. I conformed to all conditions named on the application blank furnished me by your office, and will not accept cancellation of my license. You are in error when you state that I obtained the license by trickery or misrepresentation. You cannot blame me for your lack of office system. I will go to the courts if necessary to secure my rights and privileges.

  The AAA went further. Since Johnson had no legitimate license, it said, Barney Oldfield must not race wit
h him. If he insisted on doing so, his license would be canceled, as well. Oldfield didn’t believe they’d do it. “Barney Oldfield is bigger than the AA Contest Board,” his promoter, Bill “Soft” Pickens, said. “They don’t dare outlaw him.” A crew was hired to film the contest. Johnson and Oldfield would split the profits.

  In the end, the buildup to the race didn’t get the kind of coverage either man had hoped for. Automobile racing itself had received a blow earlier in the month when six onlookers were killed and twenty more were injured during the Vanderbilt Cup race on Long Island. And on October 15, the day before fifteen automobiles filled with “colored sports” welcomed Johnson to Sheepshead Bay, the sports pages were filled with stories about the murder of Stanley Ketchel.*

  Public interest was further undercut when several days of cold rain turned the track to mud and forced two postponements. On the morning of October 25, fewer than five thousand people were in the grandstand built for ten thousand. “I am going to win,” Johnson said, “or run through the fence trying.” Moments before the race began, he spotted a second, unauthorized film crew prepared to record the race. He ordered them to put their camera away; when they wouldn’t, he kicked the tripod out from under it, then stomped it to pieces. It might have been better for his reputation had he smashed the contract cameraman’s equipment as well.