The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  With the family now numbering five, the apartment on 666 Wilkinson was no longer sufficient. In 1936, Gloria Aaron was born. Two more children followed, Alfred, who did not survive pneumonia, and Tommie, in 1939. At this point, Herbert began forming a bold vision for a semiemployed black person: owning his own house. In Down the Bay, both Elmira and O’Guinn streets were fairly integrated, but, according to census data, only the whites on the streets where Herbert lived owned their homes.

  For Herbert, ownership meant protecting his family from outside forces that could, at any time, take away what he had. Herbert had lived in Mobile for thirteen years and had already moved four times. “When you own something,”11 Herbert would tell his children, “nobody can take it away from you.” Herbert chose Toulminville, once an all-white enclave within the city limits, roughly seven miles northwest from Down the Bay. To black Mobilians, Toulminville was considered a step down from Down the Bay socially, and Henry would later recall that when he was a child, Toulminville kids absorbed insults from the blacks who lived closer to the city.

  Local blacks called Toulminville “Struggleville,” because people who had moved out to Toulminville, or so went the local folklore, did so anticipating a rise in social status but routinely found it difficult to pay the rent. Unlike Down the Bay, Toulminville was considered lower-middle-class by black standards, as the city housed numerous teachers within its borders. Herbert purchased two adjacent lots for fifty-three dollars apiece on Edwards Street and began culling wood. Herbert collected ship timber from Pinto Island. Young Henry, all of six years old, collected wood from abandoned buildings. Some of the wood came from houses that had partially burned down, and some of the original walls of the house still contained deeply discolored streaks, charred from fire. Herbert constructed a six-to-twelve-foot triangular gabled roof above the front door. He used the smaller, miscellaneous pieces of wood for the inside walls. The floor was made of yellow pine. Like most of the houses in the South, the structure itself stood on concrete blocks, both to cool the house and to protect the flooring from the damp southern soil.

  In 1942, when the house was completed, Herbert moved the family into 2010 Edwards Street, a narrow dirt road on the southwest side of Toulminville. Edwards Street bordered a wide playground and baseball field, Carver Park, to the west. By this time, Stella had given birth to six children. The house consisted of two rooms and a small kitchen area, the backyard big enough for a small garden, a livestock pen, and an outhouse. For lighting, Stella kept a kerosene lamp nearby. There were no windows, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, but the house did not belong to the bank, or a landlord, white or black. Herbert had built a piece of the world for himself, and it would become the cornerstone of the family for the next four generations.

  “The only people who owned their houses,” Henry would often say, “were rich people, and the Aarons.”

  Ownership was not a concept easily entertained by blacks in the South, but Herbert Aaron keenly understood its value. As much as southern whites would become stereotyped in their collective racial attitudes, so, too, did blacks in the Deep South suffer from the opposite labels of docility, too easily accepting of the withering effects of Jim Crow.

  As an adult, regardless of his actual position, Henry Aaron would always be perceived as too accommodating when it came to social conditions. The same was true with Herbert in Mobile. Such clichés were misleading at best. The truth was that Herbert Aaron developed a wide and serious strategy for dealing with the limitations placed on him by society; the first was ownership. He was sophisticated in his knowledge of the social code of Mobile, and fortified by a core toughness that was easily underestimated. Herbert fought for his space, but he used nontraditional weapons.

  Residents and historians routinely agreed that daily life in Mobile was not as hostile as in other southern cities. What was less easy to agree upon, however, was why. David Alsobrook believed the crackdown beginning with the streetcar ordinance at the turn of the century—and the violence that followed—served as a powerful-enough deterrent to any new generation of prospective black protesters. Other Mobilians, black and white, took a more benign view, saying that Mobile was simply an easier, less volatile place to live.

  Nevertheless, along Davis Avenue during the first years after Herbert arrived from Wilcox, the black community still kept fresh in its mind the handful of events designed to maintain order. There was the 1906 dual lynching of seventeen-year old Jim Robinson and twenty-year-old Will Thompson. Both had been jailed on the vague charge of “improper conduct” toward white women. A mob of forty-five men wearing masks captured the two and hanged them together from a tree just outside city limits. According to Mobile legend, whites heard about the lynching and boarded the streetcar to visit the hanging tree and collect souvenirs, cutting off pieces of clothing from the two victims as well as shaving off bark from the tree.

  Herbert possessed a keen sense of self-determination and self-sufficiency, and he knew what it took to survive in Mobile on his own terms. He had suffered humiliations too familiar to southern black males. During the days living in Down the Bay, Herbert was frequently laid off from jobs, although whites were retained in similar positions. Herbert would keep his family close, reminding the two oldest boys, Herbert junior and Henry, that whites wanted to “cut the head off of the snake,” which meant emasculating a black male in order to break his family. That was why Herbert may have responded to whites in a way that appeared subservient. But Herbert Aaron would not be one of the black men in town easily goaded into making an emotional mistake around whites, giving them a reason to break him.

  “My grandfather believed in the work,”12 said Tommie Aaron, Jr. “It got passed down to this day. He used to say it all the time, ‘Nobody is going to give you anything.’”

  As a young boy, Henry would watch as his father was forced to surrender his place in line at the general store to any whites who entered. There were boys who were never the same after they saw their own fathers back down, the leader of the family reduced. And there were men, unable to live after having been diminished, who lashed out at their own families. Herbert told his children that the psychological destruction of the black man, and by extension his family, was the white man’s true game. Living in the South was a daily contest of restraint, for one weak moment could finish a family. The newspapers were full of stories of black men who wound up dead for a minor offense. Herbert knew that, too, and told his boys. White overreaction was a dangerous weapon. If it were possible to be jailed simply for addressing a white person improperly, blacks in general would hardly dare broaching a more serious offense.

  Psychological intimidation was always reinforced by the physical. Periodically, in Toulminville, Stella would hear the ominous sound of a Klansman’s drum, first off in the distance and then closer. She would wake the children and force them under the bed. Peering out from the door, she would see the rows of Klansmen marching down her muddy street, armed, dressed in white robes and hoods, their torches terrorizing the night sky. The children remained quiet, lying on the hardwood floor, waiting for the danger to pass.

  “That was the way it was,”13 Tommie Aaron, Jr., recalled. “We used to hear stories like that all the time. But my grandfather also used to say, ‘Don’t let anybody break your will.’”

  By the time the family moved to the house in Toulminville, when Henry was eight, Herbert had been promoted to a full-time riveter at ADDSCO. The country was at war, fighting with bombs and bullets but also with its own contradictions of equality and fairness. In 1941, President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited discrimination in the federal workplace, an edict that confronted southern segregation and discrimination patterns directly. One practical application of the order occurred at ADDSCO, where a number of black assistants were promoted to welders, with the same title, same responsibilities, and same salary as their white counterparts. On Tuesday, May 25, 1943, at approximately 9:00 a.m., a fight broke out between white
s and blacks, which escalated into a full-scale riot. Black workers, fearing for their safety, were sent home for two days. Roughly 350 state and federal troops arrived to maintain order.

  For the press, it was 1902 all over again. The Mobile Register used the disturbance as justification for universal segregation.

  ABSOLUTE SEGREGATION OF RACE14

  THE ANSWER TO ADDSCO PROBLEM

  The bomb on Mobile’s doorstep has not been extinguished. It still smoulders and will continue to do so unless and until officials of the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company adopt a clear-cut policy of absolute racial segregation in the preparation of this great war enterprise.

  The son who would one day become the great Henry Aaron, from his earliest days on, would always be called a mama’s boy, but it was the desire of the father to escape the debilitating roots of Wilcox County and, in turn, to give the Aaron name meaning beyond its past, thereby setting the course the son would one day navigate.

  “Obviously,” Herbert said in an interview forty years later, “the black color of my skin15 presented many unnecessary problems in my life.”

  HENRY HAD BEEN taken with baseball ever since the family lived in the cramped spaces of Down the Bay. Herbert junior would toss bottle caps at him at top speed. Henry would watch the caps, flat and convex and erratic, whiz toward him and, unflinchingly, eyes steady and even, he would batter them with a stick. In Toulminville, his brothers and friends like Cornelius Giles would play baseball until the sun disappeared and it got so dark—streetlights were years away—that the kids couldn’t see their hands in front of them. So instead of going into the house, the boys would light rags on fire, toss them up into the dark sky, and hit the descending fireballs. These stories were true, and they would serve the legend.

  If there was a dominant memory of Henry during his boyhood days, it was that of a kid who perhaps more than anything else wanted to be left alone. When he was on the baseball field, he was dynamic, but the hard part often was getting him there. Henry was a loner. He would leave his house and venture alone through the tall brush to reach Three Mile Creek. There he would escape from the world and fish and think. He caught catfish and trout and would not be seen for hours at a time. Stella would always call him a loner and mentioned in interviews later in life that when he played baseball, it was not a social event, but his personal avocation. Unlike most kids, for whom sports was as much for camaraderie as for score keeping, Henry played for the game and not to make friends, she said. Many times, the kids with whom he played remained there on the diamond, cardboard cutouts for his ambition. Sports, in other words, did not transform him into a social creature. A female former classmate recalls Henry as certainly having been “interested in girls … but not as interested as he was in playing baseball.”

  When he wasn’t wandering along the riverbanks, Henry was playing baseball. His desire for solitude explained in part why he was so comfortable in the batter’s box, playing the game of baseball, the most individual of team sports. There, standing at the plate, he was alone, relying on his own ability to sustain him. No one could hit the ball for him, and no one else could take credit for what he did in the batter’s box. Hitting, it could be argued, represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life. In a world where virtually everything could be qualified, hitting was the most unambiguous of activities.

  Part of Henry’s emphasis on baseball in future retellings would obscure a more revealing element of his upbringing—that he was an unexceptional student. This was not due to unintelligence as much as to disinterest. Aside from his enormous baseball ability, his enjoyment of the game was, for an American boy growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, fairly unremarkable. School never held his attention, and he would admit, though only partially, that as a child the limitations placed on a black person weakened his young spirit. He would talk to Herbert about his dreams, and the old man could be withering in not sparing his children the bitter realities of his life, and, for the moment, theirs.

  At 2010 Edwards, Henry, Herbert junior, and Tommie slept in the same bed. Above the bed hung a sign—most likely hand-painted by Sarah—which read RELY ON GOD AND ACT ON THE THINGS YOU CAN CHANGE. Henry wanted to be a pilot and a baseball player, and the sign just above his head said that such things were possible. But Herbert disagreed. He said, “There ain’t no colored pilots. And there ain’t no colored baseball players, either.”

  It is safe to say Jackie Robinson’s signing was a transcendent day for America, and for Henry, it signaled the first time in his life that neither Papa Henry’s nor Herbert’s America would necessarily be his. The path of the son did not have to follow that of the father. Henry was eleven. Before Robinson signed with Montreal, Henry had played baseball, basketball, and football nearly equally. After, baseball was transformed into an obsession that did not diminish. Indeed, Henry’s connection to the sport only intensified as Robinson ascended. Conversely, his interest in school waned even more.

  In March 1948, Henry was fourteen, starting his high school career at Central High in Mobile. Robinson and the Dodgers arrived in Mobile for an exhibition game as the club made its way north to begin the season. The details of the day would always be sketchy—Henry recalled listening to Robinson in front of a drugstore on Davis Avenue; others recalled Robinson speaking at an auditorium. Henry had skipped school to see Robinson (though in those days, Henry did not need a reason to avoid classes), and for the next six decades of his life Henry would say that outside those with the members of his own family, no moment ever affected his outlook on what was possible in the world more than that day. “I knew I was going to be a ballplayer,”16 Henry wrote in I Had a Hammer. “There was no doubt in my mind, and so school didn’t matter to me. School wasn’t going to teach me how to play second base like Jackie Robinson. I could learn that better by listening to the Dodgers on the radio. And that’s what I did.”

  Robinson would have been disappointed by what the young Henry Aaron took from his message that day on Davis Avenue. Robinson told the throng of kids to stay focused on school, to gain an education, to work hard. Robinson’s words were not the preachy adult bluster that the kids ignored, but a blueprint for an America that had not yet met its enlightenment on civil rights. When Henry met Robinson in Mobile, Robinson was a college man, from UCLA, a prestigious, integrated school. He not only had a college degree but was a veteran, and yet he still was subject to the limitations of what blacks would be allowed to accomplish. The only way to combat such obstacles was through education, Robinson said, a path in which Henry had little interest.

  Instead, Henry would be mesmerized by Robinson. He would listen to him but not hear him. From that day forward, Henry started down a road Robinson himself never dared travel. Henry would bet his life on his talent, his ability to connect a piece of wood with a ball covered in horsehide. He would attend school sparingly, spending his time on the Avenue, in the pool halls, dodging Herbert, who knew his son was drifting away from his studies. Henry missed so many days of school—forty by the end—that he was expelled from Central High. He was enrolled at the Josephine Allen Institute, a small private school in Toulminville, on the corner of Sengstak and Walnut streets, run by a local educator, Josephine Blackledge Allen. The school, a long two-story rectangle, did not emphasize sports, but “basic grammar, mathematics and cultural refinement.”

  As the Aaron legend was being spun, an interesting caveat would find its way into each subsequent profile: Henry had promised Stella that if he didn’t make it in baseball, he would go to college. Stella would repeat the tale that Henry was headed to Florida A&M, a black college.

  For his part, Henry would debunk certain portions of the myth, denying that had he chosen not to play baseball, A&M would have been interested in offering him a football scholarship. This was almost certainly not true, as Henry did not play football as a junior or senior in high school. Henry would go so far as to say that he purposely stopped playing football because it would guarantee no school would h
ave an interest in him. In later years, he would laugh at the suggestion that he’d ever had any intention of playing college football or that a college existed that wanted him on its team.

  The truth was that Henry Aaron bet his entire life on baseball. The college promise was, given his high school academic career, empty and illogical, but the words sounded good. They created the fiction that Henry Aaron, who spent more time in a pool hall than in the classroom at a time when a young Negro with little education wound up working in the fields, a factory, or on a chain gang, had a backup plan. What Henry never told anyone was that he was so confident in his ability to hit a baseball that he never thought he needed one.

  “It was never one, two, three with me,”17 Henry would reflect. “It was never ‘this or that.’ I knew it had to work. I knew I had to do it. It was that or, well, I didn’t think I was going to the cotton fields, but it was going to work somewhere for one-fifty a week. It had to work. There wasn’t anything to fall back on.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HENRY

  HENRY AARON SET out to be a professional baseball player, having hardly been an amateur one. At Central High, he had dabbled in football, and once, either in 1947 or 1948, he played a regular-season game against Westfield High and its sensational running back, Willie Mays. Central, however, had no baseball team, and Henry would not play football with great enthusiasm, for fear an injury would ruin his baseball prospects. He was expelled from Central, and was uninterested in anything but baseball while at Josephine Allen, which only fielded a softball team anyway. Henry’s résumé consisted of hitting bottle caps with a broom handle.

  As he grew older and more prominent, journalists would seek to know more about his early years, about his upbringing and his family, about how he could have been so sure he possessed the special ability it took to play baseball at the highest level. A lot of kids were the best in their neighborhoods, but it wasn’t exactly a given that Henry was even that. Henry would depend on a few of the old chestnuts that would be repeated for the next half century. The stories were odd and colorful, but none was particularly true or carried the kind of insight that would fill in the important pieces of his personal puzzle. At differing times, he told various tales about the origin of his legendary wrists. He told one writer that despite his wiry frame, his bulging forearms came from a job hauling ice in Mobile; he told another he benefited from mowing lawns; and he told people that for all of his right-handed greatness, he would have been an even better switch-hitter. That was because he batted cross-handed, which for a right-handed hitter was to say with his left hand on top, as a left-handed hitter would.