Michael Jordan

by Roland Lazenby

  His great-grandfather “Dasson,” as he was often called, loomed as a figure of authority in the young life of Michael Jordan. The entire family lived together for almost a decade in the farming community of Teachey, North Carolina. Even well into the age of automobiles and four-lane highways, Dawson Jordan insisted that his mode of transportation remain the mule he proudly hitched to his oxcart. Even as an old man, he would wrap the feet of his mule in pads and keep the axle of his cart extremely well greased so that he could move silently on late-night moonshine runs. In the daytime, his great-grandchildren loved jumping on that little wagon for a ride into town, and Michael and his older brothers sometimes amused themselves by teasing the hogs that the old man raised until he passed away in 1977, just days after Michael turned fourteen.

  Little did the Jordan boys realize that the mule and the hogs—indeed, all the memories of their great-grandfather—were the trophies of a life well lived. As Michael explained years later, Dawson Jordan was not one to talk about the past or the significance of the animals. But even the casual mention many years later of Dawson Jordan could cause a tear to mist up in the eye of his famous great-grandson.

  “He was tough,” Jordan would say of the old man. “He was that. Yes, he was.”

  The River

  You begin to gain the slightest sense of Dawson Jordan’s world if you stand in the morning air along the Northeast Cape Fear River in Holly Shelter. Today the place is mostly a rural game and wildlife preserve, but the light there was then as it is now, harsh and blinding most days, dancing as it glints off the water, diffused only by patches of morning fog. To find relief, you have to push inland, among the swamp forests and creeks, to the solitude in the shadows once cast by the majestic virgin stands of longleaf pines.

  Dawson Jordan spent his youth there, working amidst the tar pits on the forest floors, taking down the last of the magnificent trees, bundling the logs into huge rafts and floating them down the Northeast Cape Fear River to the shipyards of Wilmington.

  It was no job for cowards.

  Dawson Jordan grew into manhood just after the turn of the twentieth century, just as this old way of life on the river was fading, along with the last of the great longleaf pines and the arrival of the trucking industry. The ancient river and the dependable forests and woods had been the defining element in his young life. He knew how to hunt for wild game, knew how to clean what he killed and cook it up just right. Years later, as an old man, he would be employed by the region’s hunting lodges to cook tasty wild game delights for its members.

  His working life began at age nine, when he convinced census workers he was eleven and old enough to head into the fields. He could already read and write, having attended the local one-room “common school for coloreds,” where the four-month academic year was frequently interrupted so the children could work in the fields or at the nearby sawmills. “My parents used to tell me how hard it was making them shingles at that mill,” recalled Maurice Eugene Jordan, a distant relative who lived and farmed in Pender County. The students cut their own firewood and tended their own stove in the little schoolhouse, which was the standard even for the white children in their better-appointed schools.

  In those first decades of the twentieth century, there was no electricity, little running water or plumbing, and few paved roads. And, not surprisingly, there was almost no middle class, which meant that just about every male, black or white, spent his days in the desperate business of subsistence farming as sharecroppers and tenants and laborers providing service to a select few landholders.

  An in-depth study of one thousand farming families by North Carolina’s Board of Agriculture in 1922 found that the state’s sharecroppers earned less than thirty cents a day, sometimes as little as ten cents, despite working long hours; the report added that most sharecroppers had no means of growing their own food and often needed to borrow money just to eat and pay the bills. Some forty-five thousand landless farm families lived in cramped, one- and two-room shacks with no indoor plumbing and nothing but sheets of newspaper to cover cracks and holes in the walls and ceilings. Only a third of the sharecropper homes even had an outhouse.

  The unsanitary conditions explained to a large degree the high rate of disease and infant mortality among landless farm families, the report said, adding that the death rates for blacks more than doubled that for whites.

  Charlotte Hand and her son, Dawson, somehow managed to get by in these bleak circumstances with the help of the Hands, who worked logging the river and likely taught Dawson how to steer a raft; family and community lore has it that he became very skilled at a young age. It wasn’t easy building those huge log rafts and moving them down the treacherous river, with its snakes, storm surges, and shifting tides. It took tremendous physical strength to steer a chain of three log rafts through the river’s many bends and turns. But, as perilous as it was, Dawson apparently relished the river, which was the main road of commerce for that era.

  Young Dawson worked with his cousin Galloway Jordan, who was also crippled. Maurice Eugene Jordan, a relative who lived and farmed in Pender County, recalled hearing his own father, Delmar Jordan, recount tales of Dawson Jordan. “They say he was real good with rafting those logs,” Maurice Eugene Jordan remembered. “Galloway Jordan, he had a bad leg just like Dawson. They was real close.”

  The Northeast Cape Fear was a tidal river, which presented an extra challenge, Maurice explained. “They had to watch out for them tides. They ran in and out, in and out, on a cycle with the moon. If the tide was high enough, they could make a move. But when the tide would get so weak, they’d have to tie their rafts off on a tree and wait for it to come back.” The wait would take hours. “They’d have pots and food, and when the tide was out, they’d tie off the rafts and get off on a hill and cook ’em up a little something to eat.”

  It was cold, dangerous work that had been performed since Colonial times by a mix of freed slaves, rafters, and roughnecks equal to the challenge. Those doing the work on the rivers inhabited the lowest rank in social class and were poorly paid, often making just a few cents a day, about the same as the lowliest sharecroppers. Still, Dawson Jordan seemed to enjoy the independence of working on the river. Census records list him as working on his “own account” rather than in the employ of someone else. In addition, the work offered the regular opportunity to ride down to the exotic port city of Wilmington, with its busy harbor full of ships and sailors from all over the world, and its many bars and bordellos.

  One can imagine Dawson Jordan sitting on his raft in a calm spot in the river on a cold, clear night a century ago, gazing up at the brilliant stars. It is likely that those nights on the river underneath the firmament offered young Dawson his only true moments of escape from a world that was often overwhelming. This was, perhaps, about as good as it got for Michael Jordan’s great-grandfather.

  Decades later, his great-grandson would remark that his moments on the basketball court were his only haven, his only times of true peace, his singular escape from a world that was deeply troubling and far more frustrating than any of his millions of fans and followers could imagine. In very different ways, these two Jordans shared much across the span of a century, although their stations in the world were so vastly different. On many of his brutally difficult days Dawson Jordan would certainly have loved just a taste of the sweet gravy of his great-grandson’s lifestyle.

  Clementine

  Unlike Michael, who would have his choice among legions of the planet’s most sophisticated and attractive women, short, crippled Dawson lived in a small, isolated community with his mother while working long, dangerous days in the woods and on the river. He got a hint of what romance might be like when his mother found love at last with an older sharecropper in Holly. Isac Keilon was twenty years her senior and well into his sixties when they married in May 1913, and their happiness must have served to spur on Dawson’s thoughts about his own prospects.

  In time, despite the odds stacked a
gainst him, Dawson began to find favor with a girl named Clementine Burns. The song “Oh My Darling, Clementine,” which had first gained wild popularity in 1884, probably factored into her naming at birth. She was a year older than Dawson and lived with her parents and seven younger siblings right there in Holly Shelter. In some regards, her prospects may have been as limited as his. Their courtship began like all others in that day, with shy talk that grew bolder over time. Dawson was soon in love, never a casual thing for the deeply emotional Jordans.

  They exchanged vows in late January 1914 and began their lives together. About eight months later Clemmer, as she was known, told Dawson she was pregnant, and in April 1915, she delivered a strong, healthy boy in their tiny shack. They named him William Edward Jordan. There’s every indication that the event brought immense happiness for the new father.

  If only that happiness could have lasted.

  The first signs of trouble came hard on the heels of the birth, the night sweats and the urinary discomfort. Then Clemmer began coughing blood. The most telling symptom was the development of the tubercles themselves, the small rounded masses or nodules that attached themselves to bone and tendon.

  “That was the black people’s disease, tuberculosis,” recalled Maurice Eugene Jordan. “Back then there wasn’t too much they could do about it.”

  The airborne disease was highly contagious, and though North Carolina was one of the first Southern states to open a sanitarium for blacks, in 1899, the privately financed facility had a mere dozen beds, and the cost was exorbitant. The only other option for the families was to set up a white screened tent or temporary building in the yard outside their homes, which allowed loved ones to spend their last days close to family with a hope of not spreading the tuberculosis. The demise of loved ones could drag on over agonizing months or years. Clemmer Jordan saw a doctor in the early stages of the disease but died on an April morning in 1916, not long after her son’s first birthday.

  It was not uncommon for a young widower to abandon his children in that era. It would have been simple enough for Dawson to allow Clemmer’s family to raise the boy. Certainly Dawson Jordan had his options. As a seaport, Wilmington was alive with opportunity to sign on as a cook with one of the many vessels coming and going. But the simple truth that emerges from the public records of his life was that he loved his mother very much, just as he loved his toddling son. That’s what his actions said. And his determination to build a family provided the first great fiber of strength in the story that would become Michael Jordan.

  A few months later, Dawson suffered another great blow when he learned that his mother, only in her late forties, was dying of kidney disease. Death visited early and often on the Coastal Plain, but mortality rates doubled, then tripled and quadrupled, in Pender County in 1917 and 1918 with the notorious Spanish flu epidemic. Dawson saw members of the Hand family, as well as his coworkers and their loved ones, pass in record numbers. In ninety days, between September and November of 1917, the influenza epidemic killed more than thirteen thousand North Carolinians.

  Dawson’s mother’s worsening disease necessitated her moving from Isac Keilon’s home back in with her son. As her end neared and she could no longer help Dawson care for his young son, he took on a boarder, a young woman named Ethel Lane who had a small daughter, and who was able to care for the children as well as for Charlotte. A short time later, Isac Keilon died unexpectedly. They buried him, and three months later, Dawson’s mother succumbed to her kidney disease.

  Dawson buried Charlotte Hand Keilon down by the river on Bannerman’s Bridge Road in Holly. The boy who always wanted a family was now quite alone, except for the busy little child under his feet. Father and son would spend the rest of their lives together, living and working in one small shack after another in the same small coastal communities, pooling their resources to make their way in the face of poverty.

  The public record would eventually show that neither man acquired much of anything in life, yet time would reveal that they still bequeathed a great deal to the next generation. They did so despite another legacy lurking in the haze of Cape Fear, something insidious and even surreal.

  Chapter 2

  BLOODY WILMINGTON

  THE PATH BACK through yesteryear is one that Michael Jordan himself has taken often enough, back down through the country roads and simple memories of the Cape Fear coast. If you roll east down Interstate 40 out of Chapel Hill, the Piedmont gives way to the Coastal Plain, its rich, open fields bordered by a drab mix of scrub pines and decaying tobacco barns. Soon enough come signs for Teachey, then Wallace, and later Burgaw and Holly, the farming communities where the Jordan Brand first took root many years ago.

  These days the interstate highway system cloaks much of Cape Fear’s disquieting legacy with miles of even pavement and clusters of gas stations and chain restaurants relieved only by the faintest connection to Carolina’s cultural past, an occasional barbecue stand. Nowhere, it seems, can you find mention now of the Democratic party’s white supremacy movement, but it was much in the air during Dawson Jordan’s early years, and these ancient injuries—tied to events long ago in old Wilmington—would surface in odd, ironic fashion in Michael Jordan’s life.

  By the 1890s, Dixie Democrats had been able to reestablish white political control over much of the rest of North Carolina in the years following Reconstruction, but Wilmington and the Coastal Plain stood apart, largely on the strength of more than 120,000 black male registered voters. The place was on its way to becoming a peer of Atlanta with an emerging black upper class, two black newspapers, a black mayor, an integrated police force, and an array of black-owned businesses. The answer for Democrats was to foment rebellion in Wilmington with a race riot on November 11, 1898, in which whites, stirred by Democratic political rhetoric, took to the streets to burn the offices of a black newspaper that had dared to challenge the Democrats.

  Later that day, gunfire broke out, with armed whites, called Red Shirts, taking to the streets. The local morgue reported fourteen bodies, thirteen of them black, the next day, but others claimed the death toll ran as high as ninety. As the violence spread, terrified blacks took their families and fled into the nearby swamps, where the Red Shirts were said to have followed to execute many more whose remains were allegedly never recovered.

  The second phase of the well-planned rebellion began the next day as whites escorted prominent blacks—clergymen, business leaders, politicians—to the local train station and packed them out of town for good.

  The resounding victory for white supremacy would secure the doctrine for decades to come. Charles Aycock, elected governor in 1900, set a legislative agenda that followed through on the riot’s violent message. “There shall be no progress in the South for either race until the Negro is removed permanently from the political process,” Aycock had declared. The backbone of the plan was to limit voter registration with a literacy test, and the number of black males on North Carolina voting rosters quickly plummeted to fewer than 6,000 from better than 120,000 before the riot.

  Such inequity and violence had the tacit backing of state and local law enforcement, with strong intimidation by other forces as well. By the 1940s and ’50s, there were only two black voters registered in all of Duplin County, where Jordan’s family lived, according to Raphael Carlton, one of those two registered voters.

  The son of a sharecropper, Raphael Carlton worked as a contemporary of the Jordans in Duplin as a young man, even as his father insisted he allow time for school. Carlton eventually went to nearby Shaw University, earned his teaching degree in the 1940s, and returned home as part of a generation of dedicated black educators. He recalled attending a black faculty meeting at the height of segregation; the local school system’s white superintendent stood up and told his black teachers, “You niggers better get your act together.”

  “People in modern times don’t understand how we could be so intimidated back then,” Carlton said. “But the intimidation was complet
e. You didn’t dare challenge them.”

  Changing the Mind-Set

  In 1937, John McLendon was hired to coach basketball at the North Carolina College for Negroes (later to become North Carolina Central University) in Durham. He was astounded by the beaten-down mind-set of his young players. “My biggest challenge as coach,” McLendon recounted, “was to convince my players that they were not inferior athletes. Even the black population didn’t know it and didn’t believe. They had succumbed to the one-sided propaganda.”

  The coach’s mere presence in North Carolina served to highlight yet another major influence in Michael Jordan’s life, one that also had come to being in 1891. Just five months after the birth of Jordan’s great-grandfather, James Naismith nailed up a peach basket in a gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts, thus beginning the age of basketball. Decades later Naismith would move to the University of Kansas as a member of the education faculty, where he coached the university team for a while before turning it over to Phog Allen, who would come to be considered the “father” of basketball coaching.

  John McLendon had come to Kansas in the early 1930s as one of the university’s first black students, but he was barred by Allen from competing on the basketball team and from swimming in the university pool. The situation would have been far worse for the black student if Naismith himself had not sought him out and arranged for McLendon to coach a local high school team while he earned his undergraduate degree at Kansas. After McLendon graduated in 1936, Naismith helped him obtain a scholarship to earn a master’s degree at the University of Iowa. Finishing his graduate studies in a year, McLendon took the coaching job at little North Carolina College, where he founded the first physical education program that began training generations of black teachers and coaches in North Carolina. That program would produce Clifton “Pop” Herring, Jordan’s high school coach.