With his wandering, self-serving ways, Pink Ashe had forfeited his status as the family patriarch. But his unusual saga remained an important part of family lore. He became a kind of antihero whose missteps reinforced parental lessons of propriety and self-control. Arthur Ashe Sr. represented the antithesis of the colorful wastrel Pink Ashe, but he, too, had his limitations as a father. Emotionally stern and largely consumed by work and the task of providing for his family, he did not supply much emotional support for his young sons. “There was little gray in my father’s world,” his son recalled years later. “His rules were black or white, right or wrong, without regard to race, and there was a time when I actually feared him. . . . Go get my belt, he would say if I returned late from school or forgot a chore. The belt could have been a strap in a barbershop; it was thirty-nine inches long, at least an eighth of an inch thick, and first-quality cowhide. Only grade-A leather would do for my behind.” For a less severe male authority figure, six-year-old Arthur Jr. would have to turn to one of his uncles—or find someone outside the family, which is exactly what he did during the late summer of 1949.14
During the final weeks before he entered the first grade, Arthur Jr. had the good fortune to meet a young man by the name of Ron Charity, an eighteen-year-old Virginia Union student who frequented the courts that adjoined the Ashes’ yard. Considered one of the best black tennis players in the Richmond area, Charity often played or practiced at Brook Field, where he sometimes gave lessons to younger players. Just a few yards away on the front porch where he liked to sit and read, Arthur Jr. could not help but notice the activity on the courts, especially when Charity was there with the Virginia Union tennis team or with members of the Richmond Racquet Club, a small but growing organization dominated by some of the city’s most prominent black professionals. At first, the young boy was too shy to move close to the action, but on one memorable occasion he left the porch and joined a small crowd that had gathered to watch Charity and his Virginia Union teammates play an intercollegiate match. When Charity completely dominated his overmatched opponent, drawing loud cheers from the local rooters, even a six-year-old who knew next to nothing about the game of tennis was impressed. Exposed to the mystique of competitive tennis at such a tender age, he was all but hooked.
The fateful aftermath of Ashe’s first encounter with Charity was seared in his memory:
The next afternoon, he was out on the courts again, working on his serve. I watched for a while. Finally, he noticed me for the first time. “What’s your name? Arthur Ashe, Junior. Your dad runs the playground? Yes, sir.” He nodded and went back to his serve. His wooden racquet flashed high above his head in the late afternoon sun and sliced through the silence. White balls rocketed to the corners of the opposite court. After a while, he stopped and looked at me again. “You play tennis?” I shrugged. I had batted some old tennis balls around with the twelve-dollar nylon-strung racquet that had found its way into the wooden equipment box under my bedroom window. “You want to learn?” I nodded. At that age, any sport was a challenge I felt I could master. “You got a racquet. Go get it,” he said.15
At first, Arthur Jr., a fifty-pound stripling who could barely hit the ball over the net, was in no position to master anything. But in the weeks and months that followed, he improved enough to sustain both his interest in tennis and the personal bond with his new friend and mentor. Charity came to regard him as his pet project, teaching his undersized but enthusiastic pupil the basic rules of the game, how to grip the racket Eastern forehand style (“the best grip for beginners”), and how to maximize his power by hitting the ball using a “slingshot” motion with an exaggerated backswing. Largely self-taught with no formal training as a coach, Charity had little concern for classic form. He simply wanted Arthur Jr. to play well enough to enjoy the game and feel good about his efforts on the court. Only later did he begin to realize that this scrawny little kid had the potential to become an accomplished player.16
Tennis was fun, but to please his coach Arthur Jr. had to adhere to a regimen of concentration and studied practice. Indeed, the value and importance of practice and discipline were the primary lessons that he took with him to the first grade classroom at Baker Street Grammar School, where he soon became a model student. With Charity’s encouragement and with his father’s precepts ringing in his ears, he went off to school with strict orders to obey the teacher’s commands without hesitation or questioning. Unfailing obedience was required at home, and his father expected nothing less when his son was under a teacher’s supervision. As Ashe recalled, “Daddy expected me to bring top grades from school. I got straight A’s to the sixth grade. The dark day I got my first B, I thought sure he would spank me.” After he became an adult, Ashe loved to tell the story of how his father even monitored his daily trips to and from school: “When I entered Baker Street grammar school, Daddy walked with me at my gait, and timed how long it took: ten minutes. I had to be home every day ‘immediately’—which meant ten minutes, not eleven, after school let out. This rule lasted through high school. I never dared break it.”17
Fortunately, Arthur Sr.’s absolutist approach to parental guidance was tempered by the mediating influence of his warm and generous wife. Mattie Ashe, known to her friends as “Baby,” seemed to bring out the best in her husband, smoothing his rough edges with patience and understanding. And she displayed the same gentleness with her sons, providing a sense of security and sweetness that enveloped the Ashe household. Blessed with a solid and loving marriage, the Ashes looked forward to raising a large family and growing old together.
But it was not to be. During the winter of 1950, the joy of Mattie Ashe’s third pregnancy turned into a medical nightmare. A deteriorating gynecological condition compounded by high blood pressure led to an emergency surgery that triggered a massive stroke. When she died three days later, on March 23, her grief-stricken husband returned home to explain the unexplainable to his two sons. Their mother was gone, and she wasn’t coming back. Years later Arthur recalled the image of his father “crying uncontrollably after he returned from the hospital. . . . He woke Johnny and me, picked us out of the bunkbeds we shared, put my brother on his knee, squeezed me tightly, and told us that Mama had died. ‘This is all I got left,’ he kept repeating. ‘This is all I got left.’ ” The wake and public viewing held at the Brook Field house also left Arthur with a strong memory of a grieving family and community and a parting image of his mother: “Mama’s coffin sat in the middle of our living room, open so mourners could pay their last respects. She lay inside, wearing her best pink satin dress and holding a red rose in her right hand. Roses were her favorite flowers, and Daddy had planted rose bushes around our little front porch to please her. He must have cut the funeral rose that morning, and put it in her hand. Daddy lifted me to kiss her on the forehead for the last time.”18
Arthur Jr. chose not to attend the funeral, however, even though his father offered to take him. “I don’t know why, but I said no,” he explained with some puzzlement in his 1981 memoir. “It wasn’t an emphatic or emotional response, just a matter of fact ‘no.’ I’ve tried to reach whatever feelings I had at the time, but all I can remember is a certain distance from the rush of unexpected events that turned our lives inside out.”19
As an adult, Ashe repeatedly tried to recapture his feelings about his mother’s death. “When I think of my mother, the strongest feeling I get is regret,” he confessed in 1981. “I can remember her reading to me and encouraging me to learn. . . . But I can’t remember her voice, I can’t remember how she felt, smelled, or tasted. More than once, I’ve longed for a memory of my mother that seems just beyond my grasp.”20
This longing ultimately drove him to seek out a psychiatrist’s help, as he explained in his 1993 memoir, Days of Grace. “I knew I had to start with that figure of a woman dressed in a blue corduroy bathrobe who watched me eat breakfast one morning in 1950 and then went off to die and left me alone. In search of her, I found myself going
where I would never set foot: into a psychiatrist’s office.” During several visits and nearly a dozen hours on the analyst’s couch, he explored the mixture of shock and detachment that characterized his response to his mother’s death and came to the conclusion that the cool, aloof quality that seemed to dominate his adult personality was rooted in childhood trauma. “For a long time now,” he wrote a decade after the psychiatric sessions, “I have understood that this quality of emotional distance in me, my aloofness or coldness—whatever the name I or others give to it—may very well have something to do with the early loss of my mother. I have never thought of myself as being cheated by her death, but I am terribly, insistently, aware of an emptiness in my soul that only she could have filled.21
For a time, Arthur Jr.’s grieving father shared this emptiness. But an acute sense of responsibility for his children’s welfare was a steadying influence. Above all else, he was a strong-willed man who kept his pledges, including a heartfelt promise to his wife the night before her operation. “I didn’t bring them into this world to farm out,” she informed him. “They’re your children. I brought them into the world for you, so promise me that you’ll raise them yourself.” With a large extended family close by, the option of turning the children over to an aunt or a sister-in-law was tempting for a man with a full-time job. But, after a brief period of separation when Arthur Jr. and Johnnie went to live with an aunt and uncle, he honored his promise by scraping up enough money to hire a live-in housekeeper to manage the house and take care of his children. He needed a reliable helper, and a source of stability for his sons, and that is what he got in Mrs. Olis Berry, a childless widow in her early seventies who moved into the house in the spring of 1950 and stayed for fourteen years. A compassionate and good-natured woman, Mrs. Berry got along well with her employer and treated the Ashe children as if they were her own.22
Despite Mrs. Berry’s efforts and strong support from friends and family, being a widower was tough for Arthur Sr., and his personality became more austere and inflexible following his wife’s death. This harder edge did not detract from his working life at the park, where it was often advantageous to be an imposing authority figure. But at home his no-nonsense approach to life and his somber moods meant less laughter and more tears for his motherless sons. The impact on six-year-old Arthur Jr. was especially obvious, and some relatives became concerned he was becoming increasingly shy and withdrawn. “Arthur was so small and pathetic,” one aunt lamented. “He looked like a motherless child. It about near broke my heart.” There was no misbehavior and no acting out, and he continued to do well in school. But he talked less and read more, and his only source of solace seemed to be the pile of books that reminded him of his mother.
Three months after his mother’s death, the only person who could reach him emotionally and draw him out of his shell was Ron Charity. Tennis, it turned out, was the antidote to the young boy’s melancholy. The Ashe family did not know quite what to make of Arthur Jr.’s peculiar passion for a game that had little connection to their own lives and culture. But everyone was pleased and relieved that he had found something to ease his adjustment to life in a single-parent household. Arthur Sr. had never had much time for athletics, organized or otherwise, and preferred to spend his leisure time hunting or fishing. Yet he recognized the value of his son’s new interest, which had the added benefit of keeping him close to home. Working hard, keeping busy, and staying close to home were the basic precepts of his parental advice. “There’s to be no hanging around,” he liked to say. “If you don’t have to be somewhere you should be home.” As long as schoolwork and daily chores occupied most of his son’s time, he was willing to tolerate a few hours of outdoor play on the nearby courts of Brook Field.23
By the time eight-year-old Arthur Jr. had completed the third grade, in June 1952, devotion to tennis had become an essential element of his identity. Along with his love of reading, it was his most distinguishing characteristic, the thing that separated him from the other boys and girls at the Baker Street Grammar School. He had become, as he later put it, “the little boy who could play tennis.” No one else in his circle of friends was all that interested in tennis. Only “Little Ashe,” as he was often called, spent almost every afternoon hitting and volleying with anyone, young or old, willing to join him on the court. And when he wasn’t on the court or on the sidelines listening intently to Charity’s instructions, he was often slamming ball after ball against a nearby backboard. “He was so eager to succeed,” Virginia Union’s longtime tennis coach John Watson recalled years later, “that he would get out of bed every morning at 5 o’clock, winter and summer, rain and shine, and before breakfast he would hit 1,000 tennis balls. One thousand. Think about that.” According to Douglas Wilder, the future Virginia governor who grew up in Jackson Ward and who was twelve years older than Arthur, the young enthusiast’s habit of monopolizing the backboard did not go over very well with some of the older boys in the neighborhood. On several occasions, he remembered with some embarrassment: “We told him to get out of the way and literally ran him off the court.”24
All of this hard work began to pay off during the summer of 1952. Though still limited by his height and small frame—“the racket was almost as tall as he was,” Wilder recalled—Arthur had clearly become the best nine-year-old player in the neighborhood and even found himself playing as well as or better than some of the older kids that he encountered in Charity’s group lessons. Charity encouraged him to test himself against kids who were much larger and stronger than he was, assuring him that his quick reflexes and timing would prove to be an equalizer. Early in the summer, Charity convinced him to enter a Brook Field youth tournament, where Ashe got his first formal taste of defeat at the hands of eleven-year-old John Gordon Jr., the future tennis coach at Virginia Union. Though disappointed, he had discovered the allure of head-to-head competition. Soon thereafter he entered several similar tournaments at other black parks in Richmond and actually won some of his matches. Thrilled by this turn of events, two of his favorite relatives, his Aunt Marie and Uncle E. J. Cunningham, bought him an expensive racket for his ninth birthday. The $22.50 price tag was steep by the standards of an economically pressed black community, and Arthur Sr. was not sure he approved of such extravagance. But this was only the beginning of an improbable adventure that would take his son well beyond the economic and social boundaries of the Ashe family’s experiences.25
TWO
PLAYING IN THE SHADOWS
FOR GENERATIONS ASHE’S ANCESTORS had lived behind an invisible wall of discrimination and prejudice, a barrier reinforced by custom, law, and a long legacy of fear and intimidation. Arthur Jr. would become the first of his line to breach this barrier, primarily because he learned to strike a white tennis ball better than just about anyone else. In the early 1950s, prior to the full flowering of the civil rights movement, no one but a clairvoyant could have foreseen tennis as a means of escape into the white world. Certainly no one in Richmond, black or white, would have made such a prediction.
When Ashe first began to play, tennis courts were among the most segregated places in the city. Despite a long list of local segregation laws, casual contact between blacks and whites was relatively common—on public sidewalks, in downtown shops, on factory floors, in the aisles of city buses. But there were certain places in all Southern cities where blacks knew they could not go. As far as tennis was concerned, blacks could play at Brook Field Park or at several of the city’s other black parks, or perhaps at one of the two courts at Virginia Union. But that was it. The rest of the city’s tennis facilities, including the sixteen public courts at Byrd Park and the private courts at the elegant Country Club of Virginia, were reserved for whites. The whites-only policy had been in force as long as tennis had been played, and no one in the black community seemed inclined to challenge these restrictive practices—no one, that is, until Bill Taylor showed up at Byrd Park in the summer of 1952 with his eight-year-old cousin in tow. “Litt
le Ashe,” all fifty pounds of him, was interested in registering for the upcoming youth tournament at the park. Sam Woods, the director of the park, turned the boys away, though he reportedly did so as gently as he could. “I would love to have you,” Arthur remembered him saying. “But the time isn’t right. The tennis patrons won’t allow Negroes.” Too young to be angry or embarrassed, Arthur simply giggled and admonished his cousin: “I told you they wouldn’t let me in.”1
When Ron Charity heard about his pupil’s disappointment at Byrd Park, he decided to press the matter with Woods. Known as “Mr. Tennis” in Richmond, Woods had been running the Byrd Park junior development program since 1943, earning a reputation not only as a successful coach, but also as a kind, respectful man. Born into a family of missionaries, he was the most approachable white official in Richmond’s parks department and the most likely to bend the rules for a good cause. Unfortunately, even he did not dare challenge the sanctity of segregation. Later that summer, and in the years that followed, Charity would make repeated attempts to register Arthur in Byrd Park tournaments. Each time the application was politely but firmly turned down. Byrd Park remained segregated until 1962, the year before Woods’s death, and Richmond’s private tennis clubs held out for years after that. Even in the late 1960s, long after Arthur had left the city and achieved fame in the wider tennis world, Charity was still bumping up against the local color bar. Each year he submitted an application to play in the Richmond city tournament held at the Country Club of Virginia only to be rejected without explanation or apology. “I don’t want to go into their clubhouse or their shower room,” he once complained to his former pupil. “I don’t want to buy a Coke at their refreshment stand. I just want to play in the tournament, see how many guys I can beat, then leave.”2
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