Unforgivable Blackness

by Geoffrey C. Ward

  Later that evening, their ex-chauffeur Charles Brown dropped by the café. He had been called to testify before the federal grand jury as to what he knew about the smuggled necklace. When Johnson demanded to know exactly what he’d said, Brown refused to answer. He’d been sworn to secrecy, he said. The champion slapped him, and members of Johnson’s entourage kicked Brown into the street. He pressed assault charges. Johnson was arrested and bailed out again, for five thousand dollars this time.

  He was still not unduly worried. The line between lawbreaking and law enforcement in Chicago was always hard to discern, and he was used to paying his way out of trouble. Every city official who had anything to do with the Levee District was on the take, and Johnson had always been willing to shoulder his share of the cost of doing business—one thousand dollars a week in his case just to keep his club open. And even though his break with George Little had damaged his relations with the political machine that ran the First Ward, he seems to have feared no one. When several thugs called on him to pass the word that their bosses thought the presence of white women in his establishment was bad for the neighborhood, he threw them down the stairs. He paid his protection money; he didn’t have to listen to anyone’s advice.

  Why should he assume that federal officials would be immune to the same enticements that made city and state officials cooperative? Johnson believed that his personal charm and the power of his celebrity could win over anyone. All they had to do was to get to know him. And so one evening that summer, he arranged for a friend of his, a bail bondsman and sometime courthouse fixer named Sol Lewinsohn, to shepherd a party of six into his café. They included Assistant U.S. District Attorney Harry A. Parkin; Charles F. DeWoody, chief of the Justice Department’s Chicago office; and DeWoody’s younger brother, Wade, who happened to be in town and was eager to “see the sights” of the Levee. Johnson greeted them all warmly and, after several rounds of drinks on the house, led them upstairs to his private dining room, where a chicken dinner had been prepared by his chefs. Johnson seated himself between Parkin and Charles DeWoody. “I am going to get fixed for life now,” he said as he raised his glass to his new friends. “I surely feel as safe now as though I was home and in bed.” Lucille Cameron, not Etta, acted as his hostess that evening, and at three or so in the morning, she joined Johnson and his guests as they piled into two of his cars, headed for the lakefront, and raced each other up and down Michigan Avenue until dawn.

  Johnson had not exaggerated the power of his personality, but he had underestimated the complexity of the challenge he faced from the federal government. Treasury as well as Justice handled smuggling cases like his. And while Parkin and DeWoody may have had a good time in his company, their first allegiance remained to their superiors in Washington.

  The Café de Champion continued to flourish. One evening in early September a reporter for the Chicago Defender accompanied a band of five black big spenders as they wove their increasingly cheerful way down State Street, moving from one bar to the next. Their host was a prominent South Side attorney, Beauregard F. Moseley. The climax of their tour was Jack Johnson’s black-and-tan.

  The Café de Champion, both on the main and second floors, was crowded to its fullest capacity with men and women of both races mixed in together and all seemed to be having the time of their lives….

  Champion Jack Johnson, in an easy quiet manner, and with a mild voice, walked around … and cordially shook hands with all of his white and colored guests and before sitting down he eased up in the corner of the café reserved for the entertainers, reached for his “Bull Fiddle,” the very same fiddle he practiced on at Reno, Nev., prior to putting James J. Jeffries to sleep in that city, July 4th, 1910, and assisted the orchestra to play several lively and catchy selections, much to the great delight of his many patrons.

  Jack Johnson, without any question about it, is smooth goods or a smooth article; and he knows how to get the money, or the “bacon,” as he calls it, and he is doing his part in his own way in helping to solve the “Race Problem.”

  Many very beautiful pictures hang on the walls … including the life-sized picture of Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, which is encased in a fine and very heavy gold frame.

  Etta Johnson’s portrait gazing up in apparent adoration at her husband was an important part of the club’s décor, but she herself remained a sort of prisoner, confined to the apartment on the top floor, aware of her husband’s pursuit of other women but unable to do much about it, constantly watched as well as waited on by the two maids, Helen Simmons and Mabel Bolden, he had hired to keep her from harming herself. The death of her father had added to her sense of isolation, and she may have in part blamed herself for it.

  A neighbor remembered hearing her complain that she had become a recluse and a social outcast. Her family felt itself disgraced by her. Most whites scorned her. She had grown used to that. But “even the Negroes don’t respect me,” she said. “They hate me.” She could see no way out.

  On August 12, sitting alone in her room, Etta Johnson wrote a note to her mother in Brooklyn.

  My dear Mother:

  I am writing this and am going to have Jack put it in his safe, so if anything should happen to me there will be no hard feelings left behind me. I would send this letter to you only I know much you worry and I do not want you to know how sick I really am.

  Jack has done all in his power to cure me but it is no use. Since papa’s death I have worried myself in[to] my grave. I haven’t been worrying about papa’s loss, only over some horrible dread—I don’t know what.

  I want to be buried here in Chicago. Never try to take my body to Hempstead only to be a mark for curiosity-seekers—let me rest for once.

  With love and always the sweetest to you,

  I am your loving daughter,

  Etta

  She slipped the letter into an envelope, sealed it up, and locked it away.

  Nearly a month later, on the morning of September 11, a furrier called at the café to say that the new winter furs Etta had ordered were ready to be tried on—five thousand dollars’ worth, including a twenty-five-hundred-dollar sealskin coat. Mrs. Johnson seemed strangely “disinterested,” her visitor remembered; she said she might come to the shop that afternoon but never turned up.

  Depression had enveloped her again. Seeking to raise her spirits, her husband bought her a train ticket for a trip out west. Ed Smith’s wife was heading back to Las Vegas, New Mexico, on the evening of the twelfth to be with her tubercular daughter, who was undergoing treatment at a local sanitarium. Johnson urged Etta to go along. She had been relatively content there, away from the turmoil that always seemed to surround him. Perhaps she could be happy there again. A rest in the sunshine would do her good.

  But that evening Etta suffered another attack of “nervous prostration” and said she wasn’t well enough to go. Johnson drove to the railroad station to change the tickets. When he got back to the café about ten thirty, police vans were parked at the curb and people were milling around the entrance. As he pushed his way through the crowd, someone told him something had happened to his wife.

  He vaulted up the stairs.

  Etta was lying on their bedroom floor in her nightdress, a revolver by her side. Her “horrible dread” had evidently overwhelmed her. There was a bullet hole in her temple. She was still breathing. Her eyes were fixed and staring, but her lips were moving soundlessly.

  The distraught maids took turns telling Johnson what had happened. As soon as he had left, they said, Etta had telephoned her sister-in-law Lucy and asked her to come over. It had struck them as odd, since she and her husband’s family rarely spoke. They had helped her dress for bed. She asked them to pray with her. All three women knelt. The maids left the room. She closed and locked the door.

  Bricktop was performing in the private dining room on the second floor that evening. “I was singing Sheldon Brooks’s ‘All Night Long’ when a shot rang out,” she recalled. “Everything came to a standstill
in the private dining room. No one heard it on the first floor and the orchestra kept playing.”

  A bartender broke down the door. Someone called the police.

  Johnson followed along behind as Etta was lifted onto a stretcher. He held a big white handkerchief to his eyes. “That woman has been troubled with nervousness for two years,” he told a newspaperman as he climbed into the ambulance. “Ain’t got no more to say. I’m going to the hospital.”

  Etta died at Provident Hospital at about three in the morning.

  A coroner’s inquest was held at a mortuary on South State Street that afternoon. Johnson was the most important witness. He testified that he had himself sometimes felt suicidal since winning the title. He had broken down after beating Jeffries, he said—“although it has not been known generally”—and only Etta’s selfless nursing had kept him from being institutionalized. He was afraid it was that ceaseless devotion that had finally destroyed her will to live. She had tried to kill herself several times before, her father’s death had added to her unhappiness, and Johnson had hired two maids “just to prevent her from doing what she did.” Reports of trouble between him and his wife did him an injustice, he added. “I thought the world of her and she thought the world of me.”

  The jury ruled Etta’s death a suicide.

     •   •   •

  Later that afternoon, a reporter for the Chicago Examiner joined the throng gathered outside Johnson’s home.

  Wabash Avenue [he wrote] was crowded with people, black and white, rich and poor, who were neither the friends of the living nor mourners for the dead. They were sightseers. “Well, I guess Jack’s lost his lucky horseshoe,” said a Negro, and that was typical of the sympathy he could get from his own race. Fashionable people in their automobiles switched over from Michigan Avenue, millionaires who have seen Johnson fight and now wanted to see his “knockout.”

  The champion stood in an open first-floor window, gazing out at the crowd. The newspaperman made his way across the lawn to speak to him. A friend of Johnson’s had remarked that, for all her finery and jewels, Etta had been profoundly lonely. The reporter asked Johnson about it. “Yes, she was lonesome,” he answered. “We were both a little lonesome, I guess. But God, how we loved each other—and how lonesome I am now.”

  “Never had Johnson looked so dark,” the reporter wrote. “He was a black man garbed in black.”

  “There’s one thing I’ll never get over,” said Johnson as he stared down into the street. “She had a message for me—and I couldn’t get it. Understand that? Can’t you see how I feel? When my head was right down close to hers and I begged her to speak to me—then to see her lips tremble and twitch a little—but no message—Oh, for God’s sake go away and leave me alone.”

  Motives for suicide rarely make sense to anyone but the desperate people driven to it. Even those left behind who loved and thought they knew them best never fully understand. The circumstances of Etta’s life had undoubtedly been hard. She was often betrayed and sometimes abused by her husband. She was lonely, scorned by whites and blacks alike. Everybody stared. But what else may have been at work beneath the surface—what emotional wounds and chemical disturbance helped deepen her despair and strengthen her resolve to end it all—is unknowable now.

  At the time, however, a host of strangers were quite sure they understood and only too eager to offer explanations. The New York World’s account was gaudier than most, but the argument it made was echoed on editorial pages all over the country. Etta’s death had been the preordained outcome of a union between a white “girl of gentle breeding” and a “negro with … shining gold teeth and diamond-bedecked fingers.” At first, it said, she had “seemed actually unconscious of all this.”

  She even publicly flaunted herself with the big, notorious negro. When she did not remain impassive before the sneers of even the painted women she encountered at cafés and racetracks and notorious motorcar roadhouses, she spiritedly returned them.

  This was at first. But gradually the stings sunk to the woman’s heart. She was a woman without a race. She was on occasion even ostracized by the women in the cheap burlesque shows in which her husband punched a bag.

  And the negro women were as pitiless. They were jealous of her possession of the negro hero and Croesus; they were even honestly contemptuous of her superior race….

  Ostracism was the inevitable penalty of this ill-assorted marriage, as it is of marriages between white men and negro women. Political equality under the Constitution is one thing, but a degree of social equality admitting of the intermarriage of the races is impossible.

  The New York Times was no friendlier to miscegenation than was the World, but Johnson’s obvious grief did elicit at least a modicum of pity from its editors.

  While it cannot be said that [Johnson] will have anything like general public sympathy because his venture in miscegenation has come to an end [only] a little more dreadful than was confidently to be expected from such a violation of the social proprieties, still his apparently sincere grief over the suicide of the white woman who married him will have its effect in mitigating judgment of him. It at least shows that he is not the entirely callous animal that a Negro prize-fighter is supposed by most to be…. His display of emotion may be racial rather than personal [but] animal or not, he is not callous.

  Etta’s funeral was set for noon on Saturday, September 14, at St. Marks A.M.E. church at Fifteenth Street and Wabash Avenue. Jack Curley had stepped in to make the arrangements. Thousands of curiosity seekers again surrounded the Johnson home that morning, and police had to clear a path from the front porch to the waiting hearse. The onlookers fell silent as the front door opened and six pallbearers, picked from among Johnson’s closest friends both black and white, carried the gray casket down the front steps. The champion was right behind it, his arm linked with that of Etta’s widowed mother, so distraught that she had difficulty walking on her own. Mrs. Terry, with her younger daughter, Eileen, had come in from Brooklyn the night before. “My daughter,” she explained to a reporter, “begged me not to put her out of my heart and I did not.”

  Why her daughter had married Jack Johnson was a “mystery” to her, she would tell another newsman, “although Etta was never right in her mind, and I have attributed many things to that fact. And I believe her suicide came at a period, not of temporary madness, but of ultra-lucidness. I believe that for one brief moment the mental fog lifted from her, revealing the position to her in all its hideousness. In the revolt which followed, she shot herself.” She had asked Johnson to allow her to take Etta’s body home to be buried with her father, but he had refused. Etta had been his wife, he said. They had loved each other, and someday he wanted to be buried next to her.*

  Scores of cars fell in line behind the hearse, including a big touring car filled with reporters from all the Chicago dailies, and another from which a movie cameraman ground away.†

  The church was small and stifling, the scent of flowers overpowering. Johnson’s sister Jennie fainted. Jack Curley had to carry her outside. The choir sang “Nearer My God to Thee” and Etta’s own favorite anthem, “Take the Name of Jesus with You.” Ada Banks, the entertainer whose relationship with Johnson was common gossip at the Café de Champion, sang a hymn. The pastor, Reverend John H. Robinson, gently chided those among his parishioners who had questioned Etta’s devotion to her husband. “Is there anyone in this church who can be so cruel as to deny the star of hope to the weary one?” he asked. “Is there anyone who cannot let the great mantle of charity cover the call of a disquieted heart?” The black-owned Chicago Broad Ax was harsher:

  Many colored women who in the past had bitterly denounced Jack Johnson for his marriage were dead anxious to occupy the seats of honor in the church … and to be ahead of everyone else during the progress of the funeral…. If these women [had] extended the hand of love, friendship and sympathy to Mrs. Johnson in her lifetime instead of belching forth indiscriminately loud slur
ring remarks in relating to her marriage, she might be living today.

  At the end of the service the casket was opened once more so that Johnson and his mother-in-law could kiss Etta’s brow. Then it was closed and blanketed with flowers for the journey to the cemetery. HUSBAND TO ETTA, read Johnson’s floral tribute, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN.

  The cortège moved away from the black belt toward the North Side and Graceland Cemetery, the beautifully landscaped final resting place of Chicago’s elite. Governors of Illinois and mayors of Chicago were buried there; so were many of the city’s leading merchants and industrialists: Philip Armour, Marshall Field, Potter Palmer, George Pullman. Johnson had purchased plots for himself and his wife. It was the sort of company he thought they should keep. And he had already commissioned a $3,500 stone monument to mark the spot.

  As the mourners filed back to their cars from the gravesite he spoke to a reporter. “It’s over,” he said. “That’s all I can do.”

  * Memories of the newspaper fuss made over Johnson’s traveling first class on an ocean liner would become confused with reports of the sinking of the Titanic the following spring, and the legend grew that Johnson had been refused passage on the fatal voyage. Blind Lemon Jefferson performed a song about it that was later recorded by Huddie Ledbetter—Leadbelly. In it, Johnson is refused passage by the Titanic’s captain, who says, “I ain’t hauling no coal.” When Johnson hears that the ship has gone down, he dances on the dock with glee.