Arthur Ashe

by Raymond Arsenault

  ONE

  UNDER THE DOMINION

  ARTHUR ROBERT ASHE JR. entered the world at 12:55 p.m., on July 10, 1943, at St. Phillip Hospital for Negroes, in the city of Richmond, the current capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the former capital of the Confederacy. His birth certificate recorded his arrival and clarified his assigned place within the hierarchy of Virginia’s centuries-old racial caste system. As the son of Arthur Robert Ashe Sr. and Mattie Cordell Cunningham Ashe, both brown-skinned descendants of African-born slaves, he was classified as a “Negro.” Under the laws of the commonwealth, he was a citizen with certain rights and privileges. But, in truth, he was legally consigned to second-class citizenship. Arthur Jr., like 700,000 other “colored” Virginians, had a special status defined by a long list of legal restrictions. Whatever his abilities and talents, there were places where he could not go and things he could not do. As he would learn, there were schools he could not attend, bus and streetcar seats he could not occupy, hospitals where he could not be treated, public parks he could not enter, and even tennis courts upon which he could not play. Born on the cusp of the civil rights revolution, he outlived these and other Jim Crow restrictions. But the indignities of his childhood and adolescence survived long enough to bruise his psyche and complicate his path to personal fulfillment and adulthood. To succeed, he would have to overcome.1

  Variously known as the “Old Dominion” and the “Land of the Cavaliers,” Virginia cultivated a distinct mythic identity rooted in a curious mix of aristocratic heritage and republican virtue. The commonwealth’s assertive elite evolved from seventeenth-century Royalists into eighteenth-century revolutionaries, before rising and falling as Confederate defenders of slavery and state’s rights—and later morphing into the post-Reconstruction and New South architects of Jim Crow. No one, black or white, could grow up in Virginia without acquiring a strong sense of place and a firm realization that history exerted a powerful influence over individuals as well as institutions. Vestiges of the past were everywhere, taking form in grand plantation houses and rustic shacks, historic churches and imposing county courthouses, Confederate monuments and memorialized battlefields. Living in Virginia in the mid-twentieth century as a white person was like living in a sprawling museum dedicated to an array of imposing ancestors, ranging from colonial and revolutionary ghosts to gallant Confederate brigadiers. Heritage and lineage were of paramount importance, especially in Richmond, where the statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis lined Monument Avenue in a sacred procession of marble reverence. All of this was refracted through the dominant cultural prisms of white supremacist and patriarchal ideology. The thought that a statue of Arthur Ashe, or anyone else of allegedly inferior stock, would ever grace the city’s most hallowed avenue was inconceivable in 1943.2

  Like all small children, Arthur Jr., or Art, as he was often called, had a vague sense of his place in the world during the 1940s. Only later did he learn the hard lessons of race, that his status as a “Negro” defined and limited his prospects for recognized achievement and personal fulfillment. His earliest experiences with whites were actually quite positive, limited as they were to Mr. Paul, the kindly Jewish owner of a nearby corner grocery store (“He even gave us free candy,” Ashe recalled), and Claire McCarthy, his father’s supervisor in the city parks and recreation department, who “always gave me all the pennies in her pocket” when she stopped by the house to talk with Arthur Sr.

  Over time he became acutely aware that most whites were considerably less generous in their dealings with blacks. “Growing up black in the South, for survival and protection your antennae were always out,” he observed in 1981. “My grandmother often used the phrase ‘good white people’ to describe those who helped us. She also talked about ‘bad white people’; the ultimate bad people were the Klan—the Ku Klux Klan.” He also came to appreciate the significance of his own mixed racial background, as he developed an increasing sensitivity to the nuances of color and class that often determined matters of identity and self-image in his community. “You knew there was something different about being black,” he recalled years later, “and it even came down to gradations of skin color within the black community itself. The lighter your skin, the more status you enjoyed in the black community.”3

  He was always grateful to his mother’s cousin, Thelma Doswell, for her dogged thirty-year effort “to piece our story together.” No ordinary genealogist, Cousin Thelma had “the results of her research painted on a large canvas in her home in Hyattsville, Maryland,” where Ashe and other family members sometimes came to marvel at her findings. The family tree carried a special meaning for Ashe, especially in his later years. “For black Americans,” he explained in his 1981 memoir, Off the Court, “research into our origins is a kind of shield against a barrage of propaganda about our alleged inferiority, our supposed lack of history, our response to the challenge that we should prove ourselves before we can be treated equally.”4

  Ashe took a particular interest in his enslaved ancestors, the most difficult to track. While he was reasonably sure his cousin had correctly traced his maternal ancestry to a slave woman transported from West Africa on HMS Doddington and sold at auction in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1735, it bothered him that “my first American ancestor didn’t count enough to record-keepers in the eighteenth century to warrant a name.” He knew she was sold to Robert Blackwell, a prosperous Virginia tobacco planter, but he couldn’t help but wonder about her ordeal. “I have tried to imagine the terror, rage, and fear of my nameless ancestor,” he wrote in Off the Court, “born free, captured and transported to a strange and brutal world. I would like to think that she tried to escape, as thousands tried, or that she joined one of the sporadic rebellions that were crushed harshly by masters who could not imagine that blacks were human beings. But along with her name, any record of rebellion or resistance has been lost.”5

  Fortunately, the record was somewhat clearer for the generations that followed, and Ashe was able to recapture the names of several pre–Civil War ancestors, including a Sauk Indian named Mike, who married Jinney Blackwell, the great-great-granddaughter of the nameless woman bought by Robert Blackwell a century earlier. Their son, Hammett Blackwell, born in 1839, would be the first of Ashe’s ancestors to experience a measure of freedom after emancipation. By the end of Reconstruction, Hammett and his wife, Julia, had produced nearly two dozen children, including Ashe’s great-grandmother Sadie, who raised a large family of her own. Sadie and her husband, Willy Johnson, lived on a small corn and tobacco farm near Kenbridge, Virginia, fifty miles southwest of Richmond. Among the more fortunate members of the local black community, the landowning Johnsons had high hopes their children would be able to escape the grinding poverty that afflicted most of the black population in south-central Virginia. So they were less than pleased when their young teenage daughter Amelia married Pinkney Avery “Pink” Ashe, a man of questionable reputation almost twice her age.

  Born in North Carolina in 1878 and descended from a slave family once owned by Samuel Ashe, the noted Revolutionary War leader and three-term governor of North Carolina, Pink was known as something of a local character in Kenbridge and nearby South Hill. A charming hustler and a restless roamer, he also turned out to be a serial bigamist who ultimately fathered twenty-seven children by a passel of women, some wives and some mistresses. “He was said to be half redskin and half Mexican,” his grandson recalled in 1967, repeating family lore. “There could have been some white mixed in too, to make me as light-skinned as I am. Pink’s hair was long and black and he wore a huge handlebar moustache. He loved drinks, hijinks, and girls. . . . He didn’t mind fights either.” For a time, Pink was a good provider, working fairly steadily as a carpenter and a bricklayer, and he stayed with Amelia long enough to father seven children, including Arthur Robert Ashe, born in 1920. But in 1932, just as the Great Depression was tightening its grip on rural Virginia, he abandoned his Lunenberg County family, repo
rtedly to spend time with “another wife in Washington, D.C.”6

  Pink Ashe’s departure made hard times even harder for his wife and children. Twelve-year-old Arthur had no choice but to quit school and look for work to help support his brothers and sisters. After three years of struggling to find steady employment in South Hill, he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which trained him as a carpenter, auto mechanic, and jack-of-all-trades. Though essentially illiterate, he gained enough confidence from his experiences in the CCC camps to move to Richmond in the late 1930s. The capital city of nearly 200,000 was also an industrial and commercial center and generally one of the best places in the state to find work. Obtaining gainful employment was never easy for a black teenager, and Arthur soon discovered that Richmond was among the most segregated communities in the South. Divided into racial residential zones, the city practiced an extreme form of codified Jim Crow that maintained cradle-to-grave segregation. The only force providing a measure of mitigation was a strong tradition of paternalism that sometimes benefited individual blacks fortunate enough to secure white patrons.7

  One such individual was Arthur Ashe Sr., who found work as a chauffeur, butler, and handyman for Charles Gregory, one of Richmond’s most prominent Jewish merchants. For five years he served Mr. and Mrs. Gregory, “driving them around the city, or answering the door as butler or waiting at table in a white coat.” Eventually, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, he found supplementary employment with several other prominent Jewish families. By 1938, through his attachment to this network of Jewish merchants, he could claim a decent livelihood and a growing circle of influential friends. And he soon added a beautiful young wife to his blessings. One of his weekly tasks for the Gregorys was a laundry drop on Glenburnie Road, “just down the street from the Westwood Baptist Church,” and next door to the house of one of Westwood’s parishioners, Mattie Cordell Cunningham. Spying “a young, slender brown-skinned woman with long hair hanging her family wash on a clothesline,” he somehow found the courage to strike up a conversation. Even though he was Presbyterian and she was Baptist, they soon discovered they had enough in common to form a relationship. A romance blossomed, and several months later they were married in the living room of her mother’s house.8

  The marriage of Arthur and Mattie was, by all accounts, a near perfect match, though it would take the young couple five years to bring their first child into the world. By then, the entire world was at war. On the very day that Arthur Jr. was born, Allied forces under the command of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and General George S. Patton landed on the shores of Sicily, initiating the long-awaited invasion of Axis-controlled Europe.

  Mobilization for combat energized and transformed Richmond just as it changed virtually every American city. Only the most privileged local citizens carried on with their prewar lives without disruption, but Arthur Jr. was fortunate to be blessed with a family resilient enough to make the best of a turbulent and unsettling time. Like many African Americans, the Ashes dreamed of a “Double Victory”—a twin triumph over totalitarianism abroad and discrimination at home. Their new son, they hoped, would grow up in a postwar society where liberty and justice for all was more than an empty shibboleth.

  During the final two years of the war, the Ashes suffered several anxious moments wondering if their frail and sickly son would even make it to the postwar era. Chronically undersized, with arms and legs that resembled pipe stems, Arthur Jr. looked more like a pitiable figure from a refugee camp than a boy destined to become a world-class athlete. In his preschool years, he contracted just about every childhood disease, any one of which might have overwhelmed his seemingly undernourished and unhealthy constitution. Yet, despite these physical challenges, he was a reasonably happy child, nurtured as he was by a close and loving extended family. Bright and curious, he learned to read by the age of four, thanks to an attentive mother who engendered a lifelong attachment to books and the written word.9

  Arthur Sr. worked long hours as a chauffeur and handyman to support his wife and child. Mattie, too, worked hard, not only at home but also as a cleaning lady at the Miller and Rhoads department store downtown. Even so, it was tough going financially. Like many young couples in Richmond’s black community, the Ashes could not afford to live independently and had no choice but to rely on the kindness of relatives to get by. Until 1947, they shared a house on Brook Road with the family of a favorite uncle, Harry Taylor. This less-than-ideal arrangement allowed for little privacy, but it did ensure that their son would spend his preschool years surrounded by a swarm of cousins, aunts, and uncles.

  Brook Road ran north and south along the western edge of Jackson Ward, an overwhelmingly black section of northeast Richmond celebrated as the birthplace of the famous dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1878–1949). Several blocks north of the Taylors’ house, the southern edge of the lily-white neighborhoods of Ginter Park and Lee Ward served as a racial boundary beyond which local blacks rarely ventured. A quarter mile to the east—on the far side of Chamberlayne Avenue, a busy stretch of Route 1/301—the predominantly white neighborhood of Barton Heights marked Jackson Ward’s northeastern border. Here the racial demography of the area was dynamic and sometimes even volatile.10

  For the most part, the black enclave living along or near Brook Road was solidly working-class in its socioeconomic orientation, and there was enough light industry nearby to give the neighborhood a gritty, urban feel. The area was not, however, a slum. “I didn’t live in a so-called ghetto situation,” Ashe assured the journalist John McPhee in 1968, “I never saw rat-infested houses, never hung out on corners, never saw anyone knifed.” Though clearly black and segregated, the northern part of Jackson Ward did not fit the stereotype of inner-city violence or pathology, perhaps in large part because it was situated close enough to Virginia Union College to provide a clear vision of middle-class alternatives.

  With its sprawling eighty-four-acre campus and large stone buildings, Virginia Union was the pride of Jackson Ward, the second largest institution of higher learning in the city, surpassed only by the all-white University of Richmond. During the late 1940s, Virginia Union was home to scores of theology graduate students and several hundred undergraduates, including future Virginia governor Douglas Wilder. Symbols of black striving and accomplishment, their presence in the neighborhood would have a profound effect on Arthur Ashe Jr.’s childhood.11

  Arthur Jr. spent the first seventeen years of his life in Jackson Ward, though his family circumstances changed dramatically in 1947, when his father found steady employment with the city of Richmond as a park manager and security guard in charge of the Brook Field Park, Richmond’s largest black park. The job required the family to move a few blocks to the south and to live on the park grounds in what turned out to be splendid isolation. The Ashes’ new home at 1610 Sledd Street—a five-room, one-story white-frame building constructed by Arthur Sr. during his first few weeks as a city employee—sat all by itself inside the park. Though modest, the Sledd Street house gave them access to a sprawling eighteen-acre complex that included baseball fields, four tennis courts, and a large swimming pool.

  The recreational facilities at Brook Field Park were spartan and run-down by white standards, but for a boy who had never seen Byrd Park or any of the city’s other whites-only enclaves, the Ashe family’s new domain was, as he later put it, “an athletic paradise, a dream world for a kid who likes sports.” The park was often full of black families, especially during the summer months when soaring temperatures drove people outdoors. “The field behind my house was like a huge back yard,” Arthur recalled. “I thought it was mine. . . . There was really no reason for me to leave the place. Everybody came to me. The athletic equipment was kept in a box in my house.” The biggest attraction was the pool; as one of the few places where local blacks could swim, it was “so full of kids in the summer you couldn’t see the water.” The park’s tennis courts, just a few steps from the Ashes’ front porch, were al
so popular, as were the baseball diamond, the outdoor basketball court, and the sprawling oak-ringed fields where both kids and adults tossed horseshoes and played football.12

  In May 1948, young Arthur Jr. welcomed a baby brother, Johnnie. Arthur Jr. doted on his younger brother and by his sixth birthday was sharing a small bedroom with him. The five-year gap between the Ashe boys seemed to keep sibling rivalry to a minimum, even though it was obvious they had markedly different personalities. While Arthur was generally quiet and somewhat introverted, Johnnie was outgoing and more prone to mischief. They were also physically different. Next to his stocky and muscular brother, Arthur Jr. appeared rail thin with spindly arms and legs. Only when one looked closely at their faces was it clear they were brothers.

  By all accounts, both brothers were happy, well-adjusted children, and the only serious upset in their lives during the first two years at Brook Field was the death of their grandfather Pink Ashe in 1949. Johnnie was too young to know what was going on, and Arthur Jr. had never known his grandfather, who had abandoned his wife and children in the early 1930s. But the old man’s passing was a momentous occasion, nonetheless. The funeral at South Hill was Arthur Jr.’s first direct confrontation with death, and years later he recalled the scene as “a very personal and emotional experience for me.” The raw images of a grief-stricken family stayed with him. “I don’t think I cried,” he recalled. “I was only five and a half years old. But I remember my Aunt Lola wailing uncontrollably, ‘Daddy, Daddy.’ I sat on my mother’s lap through the long, highly emotional service, and I remember peering into the coffin at my grandfather. I can still see that thick mane of gray hair and the full mustache.”13