Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  By the time Johnson, Etta, and their entourage got to Las Vegas on May 26, Jim Flynn had been in residence for nearly three weeks, and the white citizens of the town had taken him to their hearts. He was invited to use the handsome Montezuma Castle Hotel as his headquarters, asked to lead the grand march at a dance held in the armory and to throw out the first ball at the local baseball team’s opening game.

  To train Flynn, Curley had hired Tommy Ryan, the former middleweight and welterweight champion, and then had spread the story that Flynn was battering his sparring partners so badly that they regularly had to be replaced. Flynn assured the press that he would fight Johnson differently this time—outbox him, force the champion to come to him. Once he’d restored the title to the white race, he added, he’d be “a bigger man than Taft, and running neck and neck with T.R.”

  Johnson just smiled. Flynn would touch him only twice, he promised: once when they shook hands and again when he tried “to hold on to keep from being knocked out.” The original plan had called for the champion to live and train at the Forsyth Ranch, six miles from town. He lasted just two days there. Coyotes interrupted his sleep, he said, and there weren’t even any trees. Instead, he shifted into town, “where I can see people and where they can see me”; that way, “there will be no stories told of me fooling away my time.”

  The Johnsons moved into a two-story house in the Mexican-American neighborhood called Old Town. Crude bleachers and a thirty-foot training platform were banged together in the yard so their new neighbors could see the champion spar every afternoon at a dime a head.*

  After an anonymous note signed “K.K.K” arrived, telling Johnson to LIE DOWN OR WE’LL STRING YOU UP, he tucked a revolver into his pants and hired an armed guard to patrol the yard at night, just as he had at Reno.

  Otherwise, the life the Johnsons led in Las Vegas was comparatively tranquil. Their legal troubles seemed far away. So did the temptations of the big city. Etta had her husband to herself at least part of every day. A cameraman caught the Johnsons breakfasting together on the porch of their rented home, Johnson absorbed in the sporting section of the newspaper, Etta gazing warily into the lens.

  After at least sixteen years of it, Johnson was weary of training—he would enter the ring against Flynn twenty-five pounds heavier than he was when he faced Jeffries—and he was rarely content to stay on his porch for long. “He may be seen at any time of the day driving around in his big touring car,” reported the Optic, “his rah-rah hat turned up in front and down in the back and his diamonds glittering like headlights on the California Limited.” He drove out of town to shoot prairie dogs, mired his car in mud one day, and tried to race a train the next, terrifying Curley, who feared that the champion—and his own potential profits—would end up at the bottom of a canyon. Johnson went along with publicity stunts, eating the better part of two watermelons sent to his camp by a Florida admirer as the press looked on, and picking up an extra six hundred dollars for sparring onstage at the Elks Theater in Santa Fe.* And he delighted in the attention his clothes drew in the dusty little town: “Johnson continues to dress up in his dandy togs,” the Optic reported. “He looks like a Rah! Rah! Kid from some Ethiopian College with his fancy duds and loud hosiery.” When the national press began turning up a few days before the fight, he and his trainer Tom Flanagan had a good time roaming through town with scissors, snipping off the ends of sportswriters’ ties.

  Curley’s outdoor stadium—built at the town’s expense and never completely paid for—was made to hold 17,950 fans. But Las Vegas, New Mexico, was a long way to go to see a fight that seemed sure to be one-sided, and when the afternoon of the fight arrived, fewer than four thousand turned up.

  Both men were to drive to the arena. Johnson refused to get into his car until Curley handed him his promised $31,100 in cash and he had a chance to count it.

  When the two men were finally in the ring, Flynn spotted Etta seated in the crowd. He broke away from his handlers, leaned over the ropes, and said in a loud voice that since she was a white woman she really ought to cheer for him. She didn’t answer, but her husband was not amused. When the referee, Ed Smith, sporting editor of the Chicago American and one of the few writers willing to give Johnson a fair shake in print, brought the boxers together for their final instructions, Johnson refused to take Flynn’s hand.

  At the opening bell, Flynn returned to his old ways, rushing at Johnson, trying to bull his way inside. Johnson alternately jabbed him and tied him up. By the middle of the second round, there were cuts over both of Flynn’s eyes and he was gulping blood. “Time and again,” one ringsider recalled, Johnson would “stick out his big black stomach that looked like an inflated bass drum and invite Flynn to punch at it. But every time the white man was foolishly lured into this trap he was peppered with a series of stinging lefts and rights to the face which … continued to disfigure his already awesome countenance.”

  Johnson smiled and laughed and kept up a running conversation with Etta. A spectator shouted for Johnson to end it. “Wait a minute!” he shouted back, and brought more blood from Flynn’s nose. By the sixth round, the challenger had grown so frustrated by Johnson’s ability to smother him that he began employing what he apparently considered his secret weapon—his skull—trying repeatedly to slam his head into the point of the taller man’s chin. When Ed Smith warned him that he would be disqualified if he kept it up, Flynn shouted back: “The nigger’s holding me. He’s holding me all the time,” and went right back to butting. “Flynn’s feet were both off the floor time and again with the energy he put into his bounces,” noted the New York Times. “Sometimes he seemed to leap two feet into the air in frantic plunges at the elusive jaw above him.”

  Johnson continued to evade Flynn’s angry leaps—and to punish him mercilessly—until Captain Fred Fornoff of the New Mexico Mounted Police, a revolver strapped to his side, stepped in and stopped the bout in the ninth. He said it had turned into “a slaughter and a merely brutal exhibition.” Smith then awarded Johnson the fight because of the challenger’s repeated fouling. Afterward, Johnson told reporters he would have knocked Flynn out a second time had he stuck to fair fighting and not acted “like a billy goat.”*

  Cynics—and there were a lot of them—once again suggested that Johnson had simply carried Flynn in order to make the fight films more lucrative. The champion, said his old rival Joe Jeannette, was now just a “motion picture fighter.” Johnson didn’t care what anyone thought. Within moments of his victory, he, Etta, and their party crowded into his touring car and roared off toward Albuquerque to catch the train for Chicago. With them went the $31,100 Jack Curley had handed over, plus $5,000 more the champion had won betting on himself.

  Somewhere along the way, distressed perhaps by the idea of returning to Chicago and the distractions that were sure to consume her husband when he got there, Etta tried to jump to her death from the window of their sleeping car. Johnson dragged her back inside. As soon as they got home, he hired two maids to be with his wife day and night to keep her from harming herself.

  In San Francisco a few days later, Sunny Jim Coffroth, who had bought the western distribution rights to the fight films, held a private screening for sportswriters and boxing insiders at the Miles Brothers motion picture establishment on Mission Street. When the lights came up again, most of the invitees had been struck by the same thing that had impressed ringsiders: the contemptuous ease with which Johnson had handled his smaller, bullheaded challenger. But two of the shrewdest among them thought they’d seen something else. W. W. Naughton of the San Francisco Examiner had been writing about Johnson for at least eight years, while the trainer Spider Kelly’s memories of the fighter went all the way back to the summer of 1901, when they’d barnstormed together through the mining towns of Colorado. Naughton conceded that the champion had deserved the decision, but Flynn, he wrote, had been the better trained and more energetic of the two—“full of fight and ginger at all times”—while Johnson had see
med to tire after the sixth, content to stall for half of every round, clinging to the “under-sized fireman like a creeper to a fence” and hoping to win on a foul. Kelly was still more blunt: “When Johnson boxes again, no matter where it is, I will be at the ringside to bet against him. He has had his day.”*

  Johnson may privately have agreed. He’d been talking of retirement for months, had even mused that he might oversee a tournament among the least implausible white hopes and then hand his title over to the winner without a fight, just as Jim Jeffries had done, to Johnson’s disgust, seven years before. “I’ve got sense enough to know that Old Dame Nature is going to take the speed and strength away from Jack Johnson the same as she did to Sullivan, Jeffries and the rest of them,” he told a visitor not long after he got back to Chicago. “When a man gets to my age the training grind gets to be too much of a strain.” “No sir,” he told another visitor, “this pitcher is through going to the well.”†

  Besides, he now believed he’d found a way to support himself and his wife in something like the manner to which both had become accustomed. There was nothing new in his plan to go into the saloon business: John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett, Jim Jeffries and Tom Sharkey and Spider Kelly and Joe Gans had all tried their hands at it.

  But Johnson’s Café de Champion at 41 West Thirty-first Street, between Armour Avenue and Dearborn Street and just south of the wide-open Levee, was going to be something else again. With help from several silent partners, including the Heilman Brewing Company, which supplied the café’s beer, he had transformed the old Palace Theater into a three-story showcase for himself, a glowing backdrop against which he could present himself as the man he had always wished he could become: elegant, sophisticated, surrounded by friends and admirers, whatever their race.

  Every newspaper in town, white and black, covered the grand opening on the evening of July 10. To the Chicago Tribune, Johnson was “the white man’s despair,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd that began gathering at noon and eventually grew so large it halted streetcar traffic reminded its reporter of “the coal bin of the wise purchaser in midsummer.” Street vendors peddled novelties. The best-selling item, the Chicago Defender reported, was “a miniature frying pan with a piece of bacon in it,” symbolizing the “bacon” Johnson had brought home with him from Reno.

  The doors were scheduled to open at nine. As the sun went down, workmen were still laboring frantically to finish up the interior. The wine and liquor arrived late, and Johnson himself lent a hand, unloading the trucks and carrying cartons inside. Then, he had rushed home to dress.

  Meanwhile, the doors opened and the crowd began to push its way inside. There were “three drink-dispensing parlors,” according to the July 11 Examiner: the grillroom on the main floor, with a gleaming mahogany bar, mosaic-tile floor, gilt-rimmed silver spittoons said to have cost sixty dollars each, and walls hung with oversize portraits of the champion and Etta; the Pompeiian Room, in which singers, dancers, and an orchestra offered a nonstop show; and a private second-floor room for more intimate dining. Johnson and his wife were to live in a large, richly furnished third-floor apartment, which would offer Etta shelter from the continuing hostility of her mother- and sisters-in-law.

  No nightspot quite like it had ever been seen in Chicago, certainly none that welcomed black patrons as well as white ones. It was always Johnson’s intention, he said, that “in my cabaret the races [would have] an opportunity to come in contact.”

  Each opening-night customer received a handsome green-and-gilt-covered, thirty-two-page souvenir program that explained what it called the “Why and Wherefore” of his establishment. The Café de Champion was meant to be a headquarters for Johnson’s “many acquaintances and friends throughout the civilized world,” it explained. A lengthy tribute to his “Many Sides” attested to the champion’s wit and musicianship, his skills as swimmer and horseman, wrestler and automobile driver. A separate section proclaimed his devotion to his mother “an inspiration to every race in every clime.” There were advertisements for Johnson-related products—“The Johnson-Flynn Feature Film Co.,” “Jack Johnson Drives a Chalmers,” “Our Champion Jack Johnson Clear Havana Cigars”—alongside notices for Levee establishments run by Johnson’s sporting friends, including the Marquette Club, a “Swell Café with Private Dining Rooms for Private People,” and Roy Jones’ Casino at Wabash and Twenty-first.

  At nine forty-five a great cheer went up as Johnson and his mother pulled up in his red limousine. Policemen ran interference as they made their way inside. Two minutes later, the grinning champion raised his hand and shouted to the orchestra leader, “Let ’Er Go!” just as Billy Jordan had shouted at him and Jim Jeffries to begin the big fight at Reno. “La Paloma” was the first selection, followed by the “Barcarole” from Tales of Hoffmann. But according to the Examiner, things soon heated up:

  Owing to the audience cabareting down the aisles the promised cabaret show was abandoned. Lena Leanor, the “Southern Oriole,” made the audience stand on the chairs when she sang “All Night Long,” accompanied by a “modified” turkey trot (modified being placed in quotation marks so the police won’t recognize the dance).

  “Although many of the daily [white] newspapers delighted in quoting the champion in ‘dis and dat,’” said the Defender, even they had been forced by the crowds attending the opening of his café to concede that “Mr. Johnson [is] the most popular man in the city of Chicago.”

  Ada Smith certainly felt that way. As “Bricktop,” she would one day run a cabaret of her own in Paris that was a magnet for black and white celebrities, but in 1912 she was still just a nervous light-skinned, red-haired teenager from West Virginia, new to the Chicago black belt and working her first cabaret job as a singer and dancer in the back room of Roy Jones’s Casino. One evening Johnson dropped in to see Jones and stayed on to watch the show. He was “surrounded as always by friends, fans and hangers-on,” Brick-top remembered, and “you could feel the electricity in the air. The entertainers put a little extra into their performances, and whatever I sang must have pleased him. The ‘no entertainers at the tables’ rule was suspended for me when Roy Jones said, ‘Ada, the Champ wants you to join his party.’” Johnson was kind, attentive, and encouraging. “There were reasons why his smile was so famous,” she remembered. “It reflected the real champion, the warm, generous, impulsive, wonderful, loveable man. That smile gave him a handsomeness his looks didn’t really deserve.”

  When he offered her a job at his new café, she jumped at the chance. There were eight pieces in the orchestra that played in his Pompeiian Room, she remembered, and six or seven singers took turns performing with them.

  You began your song from the platform, then started down and went from table to table. At each table—there were about forty—you stopped and sang a half a chorus…. You carried a little skillet—the “kitty”—and the customers would drop money into it. It was nice to hear the tinkling sound of coins, but even nicer when the money was a bill and made no sound at all. Any time you got to the table where the Champ was sitting, you knew you were going to get a lot of that silent green money in your skillet. Big bills, too. People naturally showed off for the Champ.

  So did the entertainers. Each performer had his or her own special tribute to the boss. Bricktop’s was a ragtime tune the Whitman Sisters had introduced on the black vaudeville circuit:

  You do the Teddy,

  and you do the Bear,

  but when you do the Jack Johnson [fists up in a winsome boxer’s pose]

  kid you’re there!

  Whenever she sang it for him, Johnson was good for a fiver.

  He was a wonderful man [said Bricktop]. I never saw him once being ordinary or vulgar. When he hit the door of the place at night, the millionaires from Lake Shore Drive and everybody else would all be screaming, “Jack come over here!” He would just stand there with his big, wonderful self and say he’d be right over. Sooner or later he’d hit all the tables, having a dr
ink at each. He never drank anything but champagne. He cleverly covered up for his lack of education by letting other people do the talking. There was always a twinkle in his eye, as though he was saying, “This is all a funny game, isn’t it?” He wasn’t a bowing man.

  Nor was he a faithful one. His old acquaintance Tad Dorgan once dropped in from San Francisco to spend the day and watched as a series of women made their way up to the private dining room where Johnson often held court. “I made it seven in twelve hours,” Dorgan told the sportswriter Al Stump, “not counting repeaters.”*

  Johnson’s attention lingered longest on two women at the café. One was Ada Banks, the club’s “star songstress,” a classically trained soprano from Texas who had toured for three seasons with the vaudeville team of Williams and Walker. “She was a good-looking, brown-skinned girl with a lovely … voice,” Bricktop remembered. “The rumors [of a romance] must have been true because she was a haughty big-timey girl who … paraded around like she was too good for us.” (The rumors were true; Banks’ husband, a dining car waiter for the Pennsylvania Railroad, would eventually sue Johnson for twenty-five thousand dollars for alienation of his wife’s affections.)

  The other woman was Lucille Cameron, a pretty, blond eighteen-year-old from Minneapolis who caught Johnson’s eye when she visited the Café de Champion with a friend shortly after it opened. He put her on his payroll at one hundred dollars a week, and took her for automobile rides from which they didn’t get back till morning. He would one day claim she’d simply been his “stenographer” and “a companion to his wife,” but few believed it.

  Two days after the grand opening, Johnson and his wife were arraigned before U.S. Commissioner Charles Buell for smuggling Etta’s diamond necklace into the country. “The pugilist regarded the proceedings as a joke,” reported the Chicago Examiner. “When arraigned he chewed on the end of a big black cigar and kept his straw hat on and raised his left hand to be sworn. The bailiff rushed to his side, pulled down his arm, snatched the cigar from his mouth and his hat from his head.” Johnson stopped smiling and raised his right hand. Etta looked frightened. The Johnsons were each released on a five-hundred-dollar bond. If found guilty, they faced up to two years in federal prison.