They’re waiting on the breeze.
LESSONS OF THE STREET
It takes a while, but eventually I make friends in Overtown, and their help opens the neighborhood. Smiles replace stares. The barriers fall away. One morning, local social worker Al Brown and I walk into a barbershop on Northwest 3rd Avenue.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen, how are you?” Al says. “I got a gentleman here who’s looking for a guy that fought Muhammad Ali. Called him Sweet Jimmy.”
A voice calls out from a back room: “Sweet Jimmy’s dead.”
One of the old barbers introduces himself. “My name’s Payne,” he says. “I used to cut Jimmy’s hair, and the guy in the back used to cut his hair. When he was walking the streets, before he went to the homeless shelter.”
“Do you know what happened to him?” I ask.
“He got involved in drugs and walked the streets awhile,” Payne says.
“Did he have a job?”
“No job. The street, man. He became an addict, and whoever he knew from the past he would rely on.”
Payne knows a guy named Mr. Big, who was friends with Jimmy. He lives down the street in a squat, turquoise building, across from the empty lot where the old Harlem Square Club, the site of Sam Cooke’s famous live album, used to be. Al knocks on Mr. Big’s door until he steps out into the sunlight, squints a bit, then tells us he thinks Sweet Jimmy left town.
“How long ago?” Al asks.
“A good while,” Big says. “Back in the ’80s.”
Finally, I am learning some things. I learn most people here didn’t really know Jimmy; they just saw Jimmy. They didn’t know his last name or his hometown. None actually saw him fight Ali. He moved silently through their lives, as two-dimensional to them as he was to those who read his name in the old boxing records and yellowed newspapers.
I learn there are two groups of old-timers who live here. There are those who held down jobs, like Big and Payne, and there are the hustlers. Both groups knew Jimmy, but as the years passed, he seemed to spend less and less time with the people who kept a foot in the real world. Irby McKnight, a local organizer who’s helping me look, moved into the neighborhood the year Jimmy quit fighting.
“When I first met him,” he tells me, “he used to be loud and obnoxious, but he was well-dressed. I used to say: ‘Where’d this man get these old clothes from?’ And people would say: ‘That’s Sweet Jimmy.’ ‘You ain’t telling me nothing.’ ‘Oh, you don’t know him. He was a boxer, and he fought Muhammad Ali.’”
I learn a third thing, too, more slowly than the other two. I learn about the people searching with me. In the beginning, I wondered why they were doing it. I thought about that a lot, especially when I left them in Overtown every day to go back to my fancy hotel, and finally I understood: As long as they help me look, they are a part of my world and not of his. As long as they help, they exist to me.
“HE FORGETS ABOUT TOMORROW”
We keep looking for people who’d remember, driving every street in Overtown, Mr. Big and Al pointing out the former sites of flophouses and restaurants and nightclubs where Sweet Jimmy spent his days. One by one, they vanished. Wrecking balls took some; riots and fires took others. Sweet Jimmy’s world tightened until, finally, only the pool hall was left. He outlived his neighborhood. Old-timers moved or died. Not many folks who knew him are left.
“I tell you who would know,” Al says. “Shorty, who used to work at the racetrack.”
“Yeah,” Big says, “Shorty, he’d know about it. Shorty saw him fight.”
“Whatever happened to Shorty?” Al says.
“Shorty around,” Big says. “I saw him yesterday. He hangs around the corner here by Payne’s. Catch him around here in the evening time. Racetrack Shorty.”
The next day, we’re parked next to an apartment building when Shorty Brown comes outside, a faded hospital bracelet on his arm. The skin hangs loose around his neck.
“Is Sweet Jimmy dead?” I ask.
“If he died, he didn’t die here,” Shorty says. “He didn’t die in this town. If he’d died in this town, you’d know.”
Jimmy hustled for money, Shorty explains. Worked his angle, a game with a belt and a pencil, and he was good at it. Shorty is the first of many who try to explain this quaint street hustle, and nobody can do it. Is it real? Is Jimmy real? Did Shorty ever actually see Jimmy? “He used to come to the racetrack and break everybody,” he says. “Out at Gulfstream. The last time I saw him, him and Sonny Red screwed with everybody on the racetrack. They put him in jail.”
“Who was Sonny Red?” I ask.
“Sonny Red was one of those little hustlers. They go around swindling people. Sweet Jimmy liked that life.”
Guys like Shorty, and Jimmy’s friend Benny Lane, who called after seeing the flier, paint a picture. The kids made fun of Jimmy’s heavy, heel-first walk. He always carried a deck of cards and dealt a mean three-card monte. He laughed at his own jokes when no one else did. He shadowboxed when the fellas would yell, “Sweet Jimmy!” A guy punched him one night at the pool hall after Jimmy kept on about the man’s wife. By then, Jimmy couldn’t fight back. “He was always looking to tell a joke or get a joke or say something funny,” Benny says. “Get a laugh. A short laugh. Not a long laugh. That’s Jimmy.”
The years passed. More teeth fell out. He put up his game with the belt and pencil, shedding another thing that made him different from the faceless men and women who wander the Overtown streets. “He wasn’t in the best of shape,” Benny says. “He drank kinda heavy. And, uh, his mouth was kinda raggedy. Kinda like mine.”
Sometimes, Benny and Jimmy would talk. About women, about whatever current events led the news, about home. Now Benny can’t remember where Jimmy was from. He thinks Jimmy says he went to school in Kansas City. Sometimes, Jimmy’d pack up and leave for a month or so. He said he had a brother. “He talked about his family,” Benny says. “He didn’t forget about them.”
This picture of Jimmy is the saddest. Not some historical footnote, but Jimmy the man, making it as best as he could. A man who thought about his family and missed his home. Benny tells me that Clyde Killens and a few others who’d made money off Jimmy’s fighting watched over him. “Sometimes they cash his check,” Benny says, “and give him an allowance because he liked to gamble, and he didn’t care. If he gets in a game, he forgets about tomorrow.”
As we are about to pull away, Shorty comes running after my car. He’s remembered one last thing. “Sweet Jimmy was a disabled vet,” he says. “He gets checks from the army. He gets a check every month. We used to gamble it out of him every month. He said, ‘I’m getting 740.’ He always told us, ‘I get 740.’”
Shorty remembers the check. Benny thinks that Jimmy might have used Killens’s address. The current residents remember mail showing up every now and then for a Robinson.
The last letter arrived about a year ago.
IS ANYTHING REAL?
The stories go on as long as you care to listen, and they mirror one another mostly, though the few contradictions make it impossible to know what’s fact and what’s a cocktail of real memory and decades of street life. One guy who fought Jimmy twice claimed Sweet Jimmy was an impostor, that he didn’t fight Ali. I’m as sure as I can be that he’s wrong, but I can’t be positive. In a way, that’s perfect: The possibility exists that the only things people know about the man who was called Sweet Jimmy are made up. Brenda, who claimed she still sees him, turned out to be high, crazy, or running a scam.
All the twists and turns add up to one thing: I didn’t get to him in time, and he’s probably lost forever.
I keep asking whether anyone actually saw him leave, or saw his dead body, or went to a funeral. Nobody did. One person thinks they remember a program from a funeral, but it’s gone too. It’s comforting to those here to imagine him packing up and moving away. The alternative is ho
rrifying: that he died unnoticed, surrounded by people who used to be his friends. That he’s in the potter’s field down on Galloway Road.
“A lot of people remember him, but they can’t remember the last time they saw him,” says James Hunt, who managed the pool hall from 2002 until it closed in 2005.
Sometimes, Jimmy seems close enough to touch, sitting patiently in the pool hall every day, while Singer and I and everyone else look for him in other places. I can see him hiding in the smoke and the shadows, no past, no future, wearing charity clothes they gave him down at the Camillus House. I see his beard, and I imagine the long-forgotten passions that birthed his deep scar. I am close enough to know what his mouth looks like, to see the teeth disappear, and then, he’s gone, too, swallowed, a figment of the fractured memory of Overtown. Watching someone be forgotten is like watching them die, and the more people forget, the more it’s like he never existed at all. He used to tell some story, they say, but I really wasn’t listening.
In those final years, he got quieter, an outsider even here. Regulars shooting pool wouldn’t let him in on games. “If he got some money,” Hunt says, “he’d play a few games of pool and claim he could have been one of the world’s best. When he said things like that, a lot of people ignored him. He always said he could have beat Ali, but he got in the way of the punch.”
He didn’t like to be called homeless. “I pay rent,” he’d say. Nobody remembers where, or if that was even true. Maybe it was a defiant act of pride in a life full of compromises. He walked in the moment the pool hall opened, earlier if Hunt came to clean. Sweet Jimmy would help for a few free games and a soda. He liked Pepsi. People gave him their leftover food. First of the month, he shot a few games of pool, 50 cents a rack, and bought tobacco. He rolled his own cigarettes. Sometimes, Hunt would ask him why. Jimmy would smile and say, “So I can make ’em as big as I want.” The folks who’d loaned him money would line up then too.
“Jimmy,” Hunt would say, “when you get through paying out, you won’t have any left.”
“No,” Jimmy would say, “but I can make it.”
“He always said, ‘I can make it,’” Hunt remembers.
Then the pool hall closed.
He never saw Sweet Jimmy again.
III. WHERE THE HELL DID HE GO?
THE THING WITH FEATHERS
The most important thing in a search isn’t a database or contacts or cops. It’s hope, and Overtown is methodical in its assault on hope, just as it is unforgiving in its ability to chip away at reality.
Sometimes, people are lost for big reasons; sometimes, they are lost because of a typo.
I am in the Miami library, reading through all the issues of the African American paper when I see an item that mentions the name of the man originally scheduled to fight Ali on February 7, 1961: Willie Gullatt. I know immediately why I’ve been unable to find him. The white papers, and later books and magazine articles, misspelled his name.
He’s in the phone book.
The next afternoon, I am sitting under his carport as Willie, who has just lost a leg to surgery, holds court with his neighbors. He’s beloved, with folks crowding around to hear stories and others honking when they drive past. They call him Big Willie. I want to believe that somewhere in America, in a similar fashion, Sweet Jimmy is telling neighbors about the night he fought Ali. Seeing what his life could have been makes me mourn for him and makes him seem both closer and farther away than ever before.
“I’ll be 75 October 6,” Willie says. “And still getting me some unda-yonda.”
He grins, and his audience falls out.
“I ain’t did nothing since I had the operation,” he says, “but she gonna get right after a while.”
After some small talk, I finally get to ask the question: “What happened that night?”
Money, he says. Promoter Chris Dundee, Angelo’s brother, offered Ali $800 and offered Willie only $300. He told ’em where to stick it.
“What did you do instead?”
He smiles wistfully, remembering an army duffel bag full of bootleg whiskey. “Got drunk,” he says.
Looking back, he’s got a lot of regrets. “If I coulda, woulda have left that women and that drinking alone,” he says, “I believe I could have had a shot at the championship. But I didn’t have the sense I have now. If I’d have had the sense, I’d let that booze alone. Left that damn liquor alone and went out there and had a shot at the championship.”
But that’s all in the past. Now the triumphs are more modest. The folks in the neighborhood want to throw him a barbecue for Labor Day.
“Sunday?” one asks.
“Every day is Sunday with me,” he says.
CSI: MIAMI
Hope is good.
Hope keeps the city of Miami’s cold case detectives in business. They sit in a small office with a green door. Files fill the room, each a different victim, people like Sandra Jackson, who await closure inside a brown expandable folder, her entire existence reduced to the details of her death: found at empty lot . . . 3-23-85 . . . 14:34 . . . 1255 NW 38th St.
Inside, Andy Arostegui helps me run Robinsons through the system again. Nothing. There’s an internal database of information that doesn’t rise to the level of public information but might be useful to them one day. Among other things, it tracks nicknames. He gets the officer who manages that system to search Sweet Jimmy. Nothing.
Sitting with Andy and me are two cops from Daly City, California, in town to find witnesses for a murder case. I explain that I’ve been in Miami for a long time looking for a missing boxer. Frank Magnon and Al Cisneros dictate notes back to their home office to help me search another law enforcement database for Jimmy.
“This isn’t even a state,” says Frank, who’s worked down here before. “It’s an island of a country. It’s like a vapor. They walk in and they’re gone.”
I fill them in on the search: the fliers and the phone calls, the people in Overtown, the pool hall and barbershops, Mr. Big and Racetrack Shorty.
“His world kept shrinking and shrinking and shrinking,” Frank says, “until there was nothing left for him. Some of these guys just drop off the face of the earth.”
“And don’t want to be found,” Al says.
“There was nothing left,” Frank says. “He might have decided to just not wake up one day. Sometimes people just say, ‘I’ve had enough.’”
A woman circles the office, pouring the little plastic thimbles of café cubano for the detectives and me. All the homicide guys in the bullpen outside the green door get a midday shot of caffeine too. Andy finishes his last possible search. Sweet Jimmy’s not here. In the beginning, I wanted to sit across from Jimmy and have him tell me about his life. Now, near the end, I just want to find a body.
“I got a feeling,” Andy says, “you’re gonna find him at the medical examiner’s office.”
NAMING OUR DEAD
It’s time to meet Sandy Boyd.
We’ve spoken on the phone many times; she’s the cold case detective of the medical examiner’s office. Naming the dead is one of our human responsibilities, she believes, and she is tireless in her work.
Her office is like Andy’s, terraced in files. These are the people who died alone, who died with nothing in their pockets, who died in horrible fires or in dark waters or, improbably, both: A few they found in burned-out cars buried in silt at the bottom of the canal. These are the people who died seeking a new life, like the body who fell from the wheel well of an airplane, and those who died running from their old ones, like the young suicide victim who broke into a half-built skyscraper and jumped. Scratching out “Remains, Unknown” and writing in a name is a triumph. “One day, I’m gonna solve all these cases,” Sandy says. “Little by little, day by day, these cases are gonna get solved. They are someone’s loved one.”
The folks at the ME help me nar
row the search. Elise Bobbitt, who runs the indigent burial program, says Sweet Jimmy isn’t in one of the city’s potter’s fields. Sandy figures that there’s been only one unidentified African American body in the right age range found since the pool hall closed. The captain of a river detox boat saw him floating in the Miami River on December 8, 2008, and fished him out. His body’s still downstairs, waiting on a name.
Sandy walks me through the morgue, past the autopsy room. “You don’t want to see in there,” she says.
She explains the logistics of death. When a body comes in, it goes to Cooler 1, which has big stainless steel doors and looks like a restaurant walk-in. The bodies with names and family go to Cooler 2 after autopsy to await funeral home pickup. Cooler 3 is for bodies they’re still trying to identify. Cooler 4 provides extra storage space.
She takes me through the doors to another building and opens the door to the Decomposed Autopsy room, and the smell of death almost knocks me down—a combination of really strong blue cheese and old buttermilk. This is where Cooler 5 lives. There’s a person on the table. He’s got a tag on his left big toe. Bleached spots dot his body, and his skin is sloughing off in sheets.
Down the hall is Room M164: the bone room. She opens the door. There are rows of metal shelves with cardboard boxes. “These are all unidentified,” she says.
Most contain full skeletons. One is from 1957. She opens a box; the skull inside is missing a few teeth. It’s waiting on a name. In the back are the boxes from 2004 on.
Could any of them be Jimmy?
Back at her desk, she goes through the computer system. Of the 14 unidentified skeletal remains found since 2005, all can be eliminated, for one reason or another. And we also eliminate a final loose end.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 12