The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  PART ONE

  ESCAPE

  CHAPTER ONE

  HERBERT

  DURING THE QUIET times, always in a small group, or more preferably, a one-on-one setting—in the back of a cab on the way to the airport, over dinner after an exhausting afternoon of smiles, greetings, and waving to the aggressive gaggle of fanatics that always made him nervous—he would try and let people in, try to help them understand him. Henry Aaron would drift back, far past his life and his own individual achievements. You had to go back to the first decade of the last century, and then flip the calendar back further still into the bitter contradictions his people lived, to the land of the ghosts that forever remained inside of him. He would try to explain rural Alabama, across the southern Black Belt into the corner of America that created him.

  Even the name, “Black Belt,” meant different things to different people, spoke of conflicting layers. Some people said its origin derived from the dark hue of the southern soil, moist as a chocolate cake. Others said the name referred to the immense financial potential of the land, which offered such lucrative possibilities that its owners would always be, at least according to financial ledger, in the black.

  And yet for others still, the etymology of the Black Belt simply described those black people, Henry’s people, whose dark hands dug deep into the land every day for centuries, from sunrise to dusk, whose feet trudged thanklessly across acres of unrelenting realities: the richest land in the country would always be worked by the poorest people—once for free, and then for pennies.

  It was into this life that the original Henry Aaron was born, on December 20, 1884. In the spring of 1910, a part-time federal employee named Louis J. Bryant combed an important southern set-piece—the wide swath of cotton fields and dirt roads—collecting data for the United States government. In late May of that year, he arrived at Camden, the venerable county seat of Wilcox County. Rich in harvestable soil and advantageous geography, Wilcox County had been one of the richest cotton-producing counties in Alabama during most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Camden, the Alabama River twisted southward, then turned into the Mobile River before emptying free into the Gulf of Mexico.

  Slavery had long been the lifeblood of Wilcox County. Paddleboats carrying cotton and tobacco crowded the Alabama, but it was the transportation of slaves from down the river that gave Wilcox County its special economic power. So important were slaves to the financial fortunes of the region that whenever a prominent slave ship docked in Canton Bend—the county seat during slave times—town business effectively stopped. Auctions for newly arrived blacks commenced promptly at noon each Thursday, and the ships that served Wilcox County were so well known for producing quality slave manpower that Canton Bend bankers would close early on Thursdays in order to attend auctions in the town’s center. The custom was so deeply ingrained into the fabric of Wilcox County that even a century later, after slavery had become only a haunting memory, many southern banks in the old Black Belt areas still closed at noon midweek. Just before the Civil War, the county seat was moved from Canton Bend to Camden, and its preemancipation customs moved along with it.

  The black population of Wilcox underscored the county’s economic reliance on slavery. According to the 1860 census, twenty-six blacks were listed in the county rolls as “free colored,” but each lived uneasily, in constant danger of being captured and resold into slavery. Government records show 905 whites owning 17,797 African slaves. Even with a relatively low white population (slightly under seven thousand), Wilcox County nevertheless held the ninth-highest total of slaves in Alabama and the nineteenth-highest in the entire country.

  The county was run by influential families with deep Confederate pedigrees. The two leading family names in Wilcox were Tait and Gee. The Gees were the first white inhabitants of the county, and the northernmost arch of the river was named Gee’s Bend, after the ten-thousand-acre cotton plantation settled on the banks by Joseph Gee. The Gees facilitated slave trades between the family estates in North Carolina and Wilcox County, while the Taits routinely enjoyed the privilege of having among the highest number of slaves in the county, and generations of Tait men, led first by the patriarch, Charles Tait, would hold prominent positions both in southern politics and social circles. Powerful Confederate organizations, such as the Daughters of the Confederacy, were, in part, founded in Wilcox County. Slavery and cotton combined dominated the economy, and the Tait name was an affluent one, the family exploiting one of the most profitable of slave-trading corridors in the state. A few years after Bryant’s visit, on April 1, 1913, another former slave owner recorded his recollections for the state archives in a typed letter:

  My Dear Sir,1

  Your favor of recent date received. I take pleasure in furnishing the following information regarding slavery.

  CABINS AND QUARTERS

  The cabins were generally one- and two-roomed. They were constructed of pine poles, had plank windows and floors and were ceiled.

  The slaves were required to make their own furniture. This was plain, nude, and consisted mainly of a table, benches and a few chairs.

  The cabins had one and two rooms. A slave family was housed in a two room cabin. The rooms were all ceiled up well, and were very comfortable in the winter.

  CLOTHING, SHOES, ETC …

  The slaves were furnished with good warm clothing which was made of kerseys and osnaburg. They were allowed four suits a year. These were made by the white women and the negro seamstresses on the place. The “Lady of the White House” superintended the making.

  FOOD

  Their food mainly consisted of bacon, bread, potatoes and peas. 3¼ to 4 pounds of meat was the allowance per week. They had little “extra patches” which they worked at odd times and made money to purchase extras.

  They did their cooking at night for the following day. They generally ate their breakfast at home and carried their dinner to the fields in a little bucket.

  WORK AT THE HOUSE, IN THE FIELD, IN TOWN, ETC …

  Their work was mainly ploughing, hoeing, and splitting rails, and any work that would naturally be performed at a plantation. The work hours was from sun-up to sun-down. They were allowed holidays on Christmas and 4th July.

  The region, like the nation, collectively could not envision a world without slavery. In Wilcox County, slaves were not merely purchased but also bred by slaveholders, with the intention of creating a workforce in perpetuity. In The Reins of Power, his memoir of growing up in Wilcox County, Clinton McCarty wrote that when James Asbury Tait, son of Charles Tait, the first federal judge from Alabama and later a U.S. senator, inherited the family business following his father’s death, he perfected the practice of maximizing the financial value of slaves.

  Charles Tait rejected the convention of paying more for slave boys, McCarty wrote, and instead would pay an average of $625 for girls. Because any baby born to a slave became by law the property of the plantation owner, Tait set out upon breeding his future workforce, routinely paying as much as fifty dollars more for slave girls just reaching puberty than for teenage boys. The Tait plantation, for example, owned 180 slaves in 1835, but between 1819 and 1834, Tait estimated that fifty-eight slaves were born on his property.

  In the surviving family business journals, James A. Tait left a portrait of his slaves’ living conditions and their necessity in providing labor for the Tait plantation. In memorandums titled “The Sickly Season” and “Negro Housing,” he wrote:

  More care must be always be taken2 about health during the sickly season than at other times…. There is more danger to Negroes picking cotton than any other, the hot sun shining on their backs whilst stooping…. 30,000 lbs of cotton total Negroes equal to 18 bales … crop of 1837…. Negroes housing ought to be moved regularly once in two or three years … this is essential to health. The filth accumulates under the floors so much in two years to cause disease. This is cheaper and easier than to pay doctors and nurse sick wages. The putrid thre
at that prevailed so fataly [sic] in the winter of 1837, 38 was caused by the filth under the houses, and I have no doubt 4 little Negroes died of it.

  During the Reconstruction years, when the plantation system gave way to sharecropping, blacks in Wilcox County fared no better than they had prior to emancipation. By 1890, well after the war, blacks outnumbered whites by four to one, the slavery system was dead, and the depression in cotton harvesting had dramatically reversed the affluent position of many whites, but the culture in Wilcox County of whites living in complete dominion over blacks endured. The ensuing result was a region that housed thousands of blacks working the unforgiving land, generation following hopeless generation, prospects as bleak as the granite sky. The topography of the county had virtually guaranteed that change, if at all, would take place at a lethargic pace. The river opened into a teardrop called Millers Ferry, which isolated the portions of the county—such as Gee’s Bend—that had yet to be bridged, leaving the great plantations essentially walled off from the rest of the area. As one visiting writer observed, “Gee’s Bend represents not merely a geographic configuration drawn by the yellow pencil of the river. Gee’s Bend represents another civilization. Gee’s Bend is an Alabama Africa. There is no more concentrated and racially exclusive Negro population in any rural community in the South than in Gee’s Bend.”

  Over the days Louis Bryant visited Camden, he discovered just how little life had changed for the black people of Wilcox County. The homes that bordered the pockmarked dirt roads were virtually identical to those that had been written about in the old letter: dilapidated wood-planked cabins that had once been slave quarters balanced unevenly on wooden blocks to protect the rough pine floors against worms and flooding, the rot the moist Alabama soil so easily accelerated. The raised floor also provided marginal relief against the intense heat of the summer months—just enough so little kids could play and cool off underneath the houses. The roofs were comprised of a patchwork of rectangular shingles varying in length. The cabins were spartan, having only one or two rooms, a woodstove with cook-top, and a small four-paned window on each side, patched with newspaper to insulate its borders. Some cabins were constructed with pine logs, insulated by a crude combination of mud and grass. Bryant’s recordings would be included in the vast database that would become the thirteenth Census of the United States.

  Bryant recorded on May 23, 1910, that Henry Aaron lived with his family in a rented cabin on 325 Clifton Road in Camden. The 1910 census listed Henry as twenty-five years old, the head of the household, living with his twenty-three-year-old wife, Mariah, born 1887, and their eighteen-month-old son, Herbert, born October 24, 1908. Family members would describe Henry as a man who did not speak unless spoken to and who was slow to come to his opinions of people, but once he had reached a conclusion, his assessments were firm and accurate. Once he had become a famous baseball player, Henry would often say not only that he had been named after his grandfather, whom he referred to as “Papa Henry,” but also that he owed his methodical approach to work and his deliberate style of communication not to Herbert, his father, but to Papa Henry.

  Papa Henry told the census taker that both he and Mariah had been born in Alabama, as had their parents. His occupation was listed as a “laborer” who worked as a “general farmer.” According to the census, Papa Henry could neither read nor write and had never attended formal school. Mariah, according to the same data, was recorded as able to read and write and was listed as being school-educated, making her one of the very few blacks on Clifton Road who had attended school. Mariah was among a small percentage of blacks in Wilcox reported to be literate.

  Official documents paint a skeletal picture of Papa Henry’s roots. A basement fire at the Commerce Department in 1921 destroyed most of the data from the 1890 census, leaving little, if any, paper trail to Henry’s father, who was likely either one of the last children born into slavery or part of the first generation of southern blacks born free in the United States. Poor record keeping, gaps in memory, and, most disastrously, the disinterest in the black community expressed by local and federal record keepers—the official term to describe this phenomenon was undercounted—would leave mysterious but not uncommon holes in the family story. The irony was that it was easier to keep track of blacks in captivity—slaves were, after all, property no different from a horse or a wagon or a house—than the freedmen who comprised the first generation of post–Civil War American blacks.

  When the census was done again in Camden ten years later, on January 24, 1920, the census taker, a man named Joseph H. Cook, recorded the family name as “Aron.” Cook reported that that the Aarons now had six children: Herbert, eleven; Cottie, nine; Mandy, seven; Olive, seven; William, five; and James, three. Herbert would say in later interviews there would be six more children. “I am the oldest of twelve children and father of six,” Herbert told an interviewer in 1985. Age would always pose a riddle throughout the family. On the 1920 form, Mariah, whom Henry and his siblings called “Mama Sis,” was listed as being born in 1894, making her seven years younger than she was listed as being on the 1910 report, which would have made her fourteen years old when Herbert was born.

  Like most people connected to Wilcox County, the Aarons were touched by the enormous shadow of the Tait dynasty. Charles Tait’s grandson, Robert, was a Confederate captain, and in 1860, he owned 148 slaves. During the ruthless white reclamation of power that dissolved Reconstruction, the foundation of the sharecropper system was born and blacks who had once worked the land as slaves now tended to the same land as free blacks, and for many—because of the illegitimate bookkeeping and other shady practices that left blacks in a perpetual state of debt—there was no escape from the system. According to the 1920 census, Papa Henry and his family lived next door to Frank S. Tait, Charles Tait’s great-grandson. The Taits were the only white family on the street, suggesting that the black families on that street rented their housing from the Taits and worked the family land accordingly as sharecroppers. This was almost certainly true in the case of Papa Henry, whose World War I civilian registration card listed F. S. Tait as his employer.

  As a boy, Herbert worked the fields in Camden, picking cotton into his teens. Though public records are unclear, it is likely at some point or another he worked the enormous Tait property, as had his father.

  Herbert was restless and dreaded a life of dreary, hopeless agrarianism. The routine in Camden had not changed for a century: work the land for nonexistent wages, with little chance for self-improvement or respect from the white community, which for the better part of two centuries had held absolute power. In later interviews, he would say the members of his family lived in the fields and the church. As he grew older, he was aware of an important, curious phenomenon: Many blacks he knew were leaving Wilcox—for Mobile, and even Chicago and California—and he decided he would be one of them. From the time of Herbert’s birth, in 1908, up until his twentieth birthday, the black population in Wilcox County dropped nearly 30 percent.

  And yet, despite the obvious contradictions, whites still clung to the old paternalisms. In The Reins of Power, Clinton McCarty recalled the prevailing attitude regarding blacks in Wilcox County during the time Herbert Aaron was coming of age in Camden:

  Blacks as a race were commented3 on in routine white conversation mostly in terms of the care they needed, the trouble they caused, or the anecdotes and jokes they lent themselves to. Except for those long loyal to and productive for one’s family, they were said to be lazy, shiftless, promiscuous, addicted to petty theft, quick to ingratiate for a purpose, childlike in their intellectual capacity; on more than one occasion, I heard adult white males address adult black males in the sort of sing-song cadence usually heard when adults talk to small children. Blacks were described as incapable of good taste, humorous in their speech, often amusingly animated in their actions. But with it all they were credited with being the occasional sources of heart-of-the-matter descriptions and homely wisdom. Always the
re was the suggestion that whites were still the blacks’ truest friends … and would come to their aid in time of trouble.

  Herbert had been secretly dating a young girl, also from Wilcox County, named Stella, whose family names were Pritchett and Underwood. In the records, Estella’s birth year ranged from 1909 to 1912, and the exact dates of her family origins would also remain unclear, even to the family.

  Herbert had plans to leave Camden, with its grim prospects. He was heading for Mobile. Herbert and Stella waited until she was old enough to leave town, but in 1927, Stella became pregnant and the two moved south down the river, four hours from Mobile. Later that year, Stella gave birth to their first child, Sarah, most likely out of wedlock. As much as movie theaters and water fountains, city records were segregated during those days, and the records of blacks were not nearly as accurate as those of whites. According to Book 36 of the Mobile Colored Marriage License Book, page 503, Herbert and Stella Aaron were married in Mobile on August 22, 1929, by justice of the peace and notary public Thomas B. Allmann. On his marriage certificate, Herbert spelled the family name “Aron,” and he was listed as twenty-two years of age, five eight, and weighing 142 pounds. Stella was listed as nineteen years of age, five seven, and weighing 115 pounds. The license book stated both were Protestant and were marrying for the first time.

  The original surname, the first one the clan would claim as a free American family, had been Aaron. As the country moved through the wrenching antebellum period, the hope and disappointment of Reconstruction, and then the subsequent establishment of Jim Crow as the southern rule of law, the Aaron name would move along with it. For a man who would carry his name with an eaglelike pride, Henry recalled his name weathering numerous variations, from Aron to Arron and occasionally Aarron, a stinging byproduct of the lack of educational opportunities afforded blacks at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1930, the family name had returned to its biblical origins, and would not change.