Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Meanwhile, a man named Brooks Buffington was trying to get into the arena, a drunken white southerner later said by the New York Times to have been “hostile to the colored race.” He had a revolver in his pocket and had hoped to shoot the champion the moment he climbed into the ring to introduce his fighter. The ticket taker turned him away: he was too drunk to be let in. After the fight, Buffington went to Frank Sutton’s hotel and café, where a reception for Johnson was under way, but couldn’t get in there, either, because of the big crowd of the champion’s friends. Frustrated and angry, he’d staggered into a nearby saloon and loudly cursed Johnson. When a black patron named Robert Mitchell objected, Buffington shot and killed him. This genuine attempt on Johnson’s life can only have intensified his fear that people were plotting against him.

  The Christmas holidays in 1909 had been marked by chaos, as Hattie McClay, Belle Schreiber, and Etta Duryea all found themselves at Tiny Johnson’s home at the same time. Christmas Eve 1910 would be far worse.

  Back in Chicago that afternoon, Johnson drove to Lippman’s jewelers, where he purchased something, perhaps an engagement ring. He may have been planning to ask Etta to marry him. But then he got a telephone call at home from the detective he’d hired. Etta and the Frenchman had been seen together at several South Side cafés.

  Here the stories diverge. According to the version Johnson later gave to the Chicago Tribune, he got a second call moments later, this time from Etta, who was at the Pekin Café and in what the Tribune called a “hysterical condition.” He rushed there, found her badly beaten—presumably by Gaston Le Fort—and sent her in his car to the Washington Park Hospital. Later that night, he charged, the Frenchman had tried several times to break into his Wabash Avenue home. Johnson’s mother and sisters, he said, had scared the driver off.

  Federal prosecutors would later insist that Johnson himself had beaten Etta while drunk, and the preponderance of evidence suggests that they were right. According to his friend Roy Jones, the champion turned up at his door in the Levee District late that night, clearly frightened that Etta would file a complaint against him. Johnson told him he and Etta had had “a disagreement … a fight,” and implored Jones to visit her in the hospital as soon as he could, “to intercede and bring [us] together again.” Later, asked in court why he had been entrusted with these delicate tasks, Jones simply said that Etta “always had a lot of confidence in me.” But like Johnson, Jones was a black man who lived with a white woman; he was also a brothel keeper and therefore presumably expert at talking abused women out of going to the law. (In the end, he was never allowed into the hospital to see Etta.)

  Meanwhile, Johnson got out of town. At eight o’clock the next morning, he picked up Belle Schreiber at her new apartment and, with Barney Furey, set out for Milwaukee, where he was scheduled to appear onstage that afternoon. A new chauffeur named Charles Lumpkin was behind the wheel. It was bitterly cold, and Johnson was ill as well as hungover. He thought a drink might steady him. They stopped in Libertyville, Illinois, long enough to get him some brandy. It made him feel worse. He asked Lumpkin to pull over on a bridge. Johnson urinated blood. They continued on to the St. Charles Hotel, where he and Belle registered once again as husband and wife. The champion was too ill to spar that afternoon or evening. The next day, the Milwaukee Free Press played Johnson’s illness for laughs and he went along, grateful that the press hadn’t yet caught wind of what had really happened.

  SNORT OF SQUIRREL WHISKEY PUTS

  JACK JOHNSON DOWN FOR THE COUNT

  SMALL TOWN BOOZE SCORES CLEAN CUT VICTORY

  OVER THE BLACK DEMON AND CAUSES HIM MORE TROUBLE

  THAN JEFFRIES OR BURNS EVER DID

  On his arrival here at 1 o’clock he was forced to take to bed. He was routed out at 5 o’clock just long enough to allow him to appear at the Star Theatre and make a short speech, and after that he took to the hay again. He expects to be in good shape today.

  “Mercy me, that sure was some red-eye they handed me…. You see it was pretty chilly drivin’ that buzz wagon up here so I thought I’d take a little swing of ol’ corn to warm me up a bit. We stopped at some small town along the way and I asked the barkeep for a drink of his best whiskey. He handed out a black bottle and remarked that it was guaranteed to be the best in the land. Well, all I got to say is if it was his best, I’d hate to tackle the rest of the stock. Any drink of that stuff will kill an ordinary man at ten paces.”

  The whiskey must have been unusually bad because it was plainly evident that Johnson felt the effects. Beads of sweat stood out on his close cropped head and it was with difficulty that he was able to move around in the afternoon.

  Early the following morning, Johnson took the train back to Chicago and was at his home shortly after noon when Gaston Le Fort appeared suddenly on the front porch, waving a pearl-handled pistol and shouting that he was going to “wipe out the whole goddamned Johnson family.” Johnson yelled for him to go away, then telephoned the police. The chauffeur left. Two officers turned up. Johnson told them he thought Le Fort had also tried to poison him in Massachusetts. While the policemen were talking to Johnson, the Frenchman reappeared. They seized him, took his weapon, searched his pockets. He had a note from Etta at the hospital asking him to bring her some things from her trunk, and a letter from him to her, written in French.

  Why did the champion think this man wanted to kill him? the police asked. Johnson said he didn’t know.

  “Sure he does,” said the Frenchman as they led him away. “Sure he does.”

  Le Fort told the police he had fallen in love with Etta. He had visited her in the hospital, where she had asked him to pawn a diamond ring and bring her at least a hundred dollars in cash. She had also given him money to spend from time to time. Johnson’s sister Jennie told reporters she had seen her do it.

  Johnson followed the police to the central police station and visited the prisoner in his cell. No one knows what they said to each other, but four days later Le Fort was released after paying a fifty-dollar fine for threatening the champion.

  Etta, her eyes blackened and her face badly swollen, blamed no one for her condition. She told the admitting physician that she had hurt herself falling from a streetcar, and she never deviated from that story. All week Johnson commuted back and forth between Chicago and Milwaukee by train, but no one knows whether he tried to visit Etta. A nurse at the hospital recalled that there had been a long-distance call for her from Milwaukee one evening. She had been reluctant to leave her bed to take it at first, saying it must be her mother, with whom she did not care to speak. But Mrs. Terry lived in Brooklyn, not Milwaukee, so it seems likely it was Johnson or someone calling on his behalf. In the end, she took the call. On the twenty-eighth Johnson called the Chicago Tribune and claimed that the whole thing had been “a misunderstanding.” But in a Washington Post story headlined “CASTS JOHNSON ASIDE: Former Companion Prefers the Black Man’s Chauffeur,” he was said to have declared himself “through” with “the white woman whom he introduces as his wife.”

  On New Year’s Day, the champion paid Etta’s bill and checked her out of the hospital, nonetheless. A nurse remembered that her face still showed the marks of her beating.

  According to the Washington Post, Johnson had planned to bring Etta home to Wabash Avenue that morning, but Tiny Johnson had refused to have the woman the paper called “the Duray person” in her house. Her son would have to choose between his mother and his white companion. Johnson chose Etta, staying only long enough to gather a few things, then storming out to join her somewhere else in the city.

  He surfaced briefly three days later in a Chicago courtroom. George Little’s suit had come to trial. Johnson testified that he and his ex-manager had once been so close Little had called him “Little Jackie,” and when times were hard, had sometimes shared a room with him.

  “I never slept with a nigger in my life!” Little shouted.

  Johnson jumped up from the witness chair at that, fist
cocked, and had to be ordered to sit down. The jury failed to reach a verdict. Little would eventually drop the suit, but the charge that Johnson was ungrateful to those who helped him would persist.*

  Several newspapers ran articles that week hinting at Johnson’s personal troubles. “Daily dalliance with the grape and its attendant evils combined with the wearisome grind of stage work … are having a serious effect on the giant black,” said the Milwaukee Free Press on January 6. “Erratic events are developing fast in Jackey Johnson’s life,” the Pittsburgh Press reported the same day. “They sound ominous. Old sports can well shake their heads. They will tell you, if asked, that a run of domestic and other escapades usually prefaces the beginning of the end of a star’s fistic existence.”

  No one knows how Johnson and Etta were reconciled, but on Wednesday afternoon, January 18, 1911, they walked into the office of the marriage clerk in Pittsburgh’s City Hall and applied for a license to marry. She was divorced, she said. He said he had always been single. They were married that evening in the parlor of Frank Sutton’s hotel. Alderman John Pugasi officiated, and was said to have been paid five hundred dollars for performing the ceremony and promising to keep it quiet.

  Tiny Johnson and her daughters were bitter. They believed that Etta was after Jack’s money; that she was liable again to be unfaithful to him, as they believed she had been with the French chauffeur; that Johnson’s marriage to a white woman could only result in more trouble for him and his family.

  Etta’s people were horrified at the news. In its lurid posthumous profile of her, the New York World probably overstated its impact on them, but not by much. Etta’s folly in falling under Johnson’s spell, it said, had been the cause of it all:

  She must have known … that her act had ruined her younger sister’s romance, that this spirited and estimable girl had insisted upon releasing her fiancé from his given word, that her brother was suffering a self-imposed ostracism from his social comrades and young women friends. She knew, too, that she was taboo with every relative she had. Not even her cousin, Florette Whaley—who had eloped with the Rev. Jerre Cooke, the Long Island clergyman who deserted his wife in running away with the young choir girl—had sent her a word of condolence.

  Etta’s father was said to have refused to speak to his daughter again and, already ill, to have taken to his bed out of mortification. Only her mother kept in touch, and when relatives asked how her daughter could have done such a thing, she told them an injury to Etta’s spine in childhood had destroyed Etta’s ability to think clearly and made her “not altogether accountable.”

  The marriage—and the identity of the bride—were to remain a secret to spare further damage to the feelings of both families.

  For a few days, at least, back in Chicago, Johnson seemed determined to get his life under control. Thanks to him, Belle Schreiber was now in business for herself. He contacted Hattie McClay and amicably settled his affairs with her as well, handing her a check for five hundred dollars (more than nine thousand dollars today) in exchange for all the letters and photographs he’d sent her over the years—plus a promise never again to go to the press to complain about him.

  He seemed clear about business matters as well. When Hugh McIntosh offered him 60 percent of thirty thousand dollars to fight Sam Langford overseas, he indignantly turned him down. “I don’t understand McIntosh,” Johnson said.

  I informed [him] some time ago that I would require as much as Burns received…. Surely, if he could afford to give Burns $30,000, he can offer me an equal amount to box in a big city like Paris or London…. On my way up I made up my mind that when I was on top of the ladder I would treat others just as I had been treated. I am on top now and I am not asking a cent more than was asked by the champion who won before me…. Let Langford take a share, same as I did.

  If his demands weren’t met, he’d leave the ring. “And when I retire, I’ll stay retired. There will be no getting me to come back to regain the supremacy for the black race.”

  Then he announced he was going west for two months, back to San Francisco and a rented eight-room cottage at Forty-eighth Avenue and K Street. There, just a block from the ocean, he and Etta, his brother, Charles, Walter Monahan, and Monahan’s new bride all planned to rest away from the Midwest’s bitter cold. All three of his cars were going with him: two racers and a big “pleasure machine.”

  But if he really had resolved to straighten up, that resolution did not last long enough for him to get aboard the train. He continued to pull up in front of the Ridgewood Apartments in his conspicuous car so often, honking his horn for Belle Schreiber to come down and join him, that the other tenants complained to the buildings’ owner, John Worthington, who was finally “compelled to see Jack Johnson and have him take the girl out of the apartment.” Belle had lost yet another home because of her relationship with the champion. What was she to do now? Johnson tried to talk her into joining him in California. She refused, she later explained, because when she confronted him with the rumor that he and Etta were legally married, he had denied it, but his mother had told her it was true. Instead, she vanished into a whorehouse at 1229 D Street in Washington, D.C., run by a woman named Grace Sinclair. It must have seemed to both of them as if Belle Schreiber and Jack Johnson were finally finished with each other.

  Johnson got little rest on the West Coast. As soon as he reached San Francisco and had seen to the unloading of his automobiles, a local car dealer had one of them seized for nonpayment of an old bill for twenty-five dollars. When the champion tried to take it back by force, a policeman threatened to shoot him. “All right, white man,” he said. “I’ll be good.” He paid the bill and reclaimed his car. A week later, he was arrested for speeding and for refusing to stop when told to do so by a policeman. When he protested the stiff five-hundred-dollar bail imposed on him, the judge would not reduce it, and the chief of police warned him to “watch your speedometer and keep out of trouble.”

  Three weeks later, he was driving through Golden Gate Park in his Thomas Flyer when he came upon two men in a gleaming new Simplex. The man behind the wheel was a Simplex demonstrator named Johnny Burge. His companion was a potential customer from the South. Johnson pulled alongside and asked Burge if he’d like to race. The customer bristled. “If you beat that nigger,” he told the salesman, “I’ll buy the car.” The two roared off and were clocked side by side at sixty-two miles per hour by a traffic policeman, who arrested both drivers.

  Johnson failed to turn up in court to answer the charge the next day. Two days after that, on March 25, Acting Peace Judge A. B. Treadwell, citing the fact that Johnson had now been arrested at least fourteen times on similar charges, sentenced him to twenty-five days in the county jail at Ingleside. The champion refused to ride in the prison van like an ordinary prisoner and hired a car to drive him to jail instead. Most newspapers were gleeful. The Police Gazette, which had once championed Johnson’s cause, now praised the judge for the way he’d dealt with “the big, black swaggering bully.” The sheriff put him to work whitewashing cells, currying horses, and cleaning out the stables. An enterprising movie cameraman turned up one day, convinced that white filmgoers would flock to see exclusive footage of Jack Johnson behind bars, maybe even shoveling horse manure. The champion refused to cooperate. “You all get away with your picture machine,” he shouted, “and don’t mind coming around again.”

  Johnson pleaded with the judge to be allowed out early. Etta was ill, he said. So was Charles. He had been a model prisoner. He promised never to exceed the speed limit again. The judge agreed to cut his sentence to eighteen days. When he was released, on Easter morning, a Los Angeles Times reporter asked if he was going to be good from then on. No, he said. “I think I will drive as fast as ever.” All he wanted now, he added, was to get out of California and then never to return.

     •   •   •

  On May 15, he was in Manhattan, where police arrested him for having Illinois, not New York, lice
nse plates on his car and for going too slowly around Columbus Circle. “Pinched again,” he said. “If I go fast they arrest me, and now it seems like if I go too slow they do the same. Next thing, somebody’ll arrest me for being a brunette in a blonde town.” This time, the magistrate agreed with Johnson: he’d been unfairly treated by policemen out to get him because he was black and famous. The charges were dismissed.

  Johnson was in town that week for a special event at the New York Athletic Club, where a promoter named Tom O’Rourke had organized a round-robin tournament to name a “World’s White Champion.” The hunt for some white man—any white man—who could conceivably take back Johnson’s title had been going on ever since he’d won it from Tommy Burns. Jeffries’ failure had only intensified the effort.

  “In the heat of the search,” John Lardner wrote, “well-muscled white boys more than six feet two inches tall were not safe out of their mothers’ sight.” Jim Corbett spotted Oscar W. Stuckey, a twenty-year-old Floridian who stood six foot nine and declared that beating the black champion was his “sacred duty.” The Los Angles Times on March 26 called him the “Florida Hercules” and with no evidence at all alleged he had SLEEP WALLOP IN BOTH MITTS. He didn’t, however, and soon returned to his father’s turpentine business. Joe Choynski came up with an overgrown seventeen-year old Missouri farmboy named Miles McLeod, whom he took on a vaudeville tour, sparring gently with his discovery onstage, then listening with a suitably grave expression as the youngster told respectful audiences what he planned to do to Johnson once he got him in the ring. At the end of the tour, student and mentor split the proceeds; Choynski returned to retirement; and McLeod went back to Missouri without ever having fought a single authentic round.

  Twenty-three hopefuls had answered Tom O’Rourke’s invitation to the New York tournament, weighing from 105 pounds all the way up to 280, but on the evening of May 26, only eleven actually turned up to fight. Johnson sat in a special ringside box, trying to keep from laughing as the big, poorly trained white challengers pounded away at one another. The winner was a big New Yorker named Al Palzer.* It was an entertaining evening but, as the New York Times reported, “there was nothing uncovered that will cause John A. Johnson to lose any sleep.” There was no money to be made in fighting anyone he’d seen, the champion said. “Nobody wants to see me win.” He needed new fields to conquer. A trip overseas would provide them, and maybe, away from America and its pressures, he and Etta would have a chance to start over.