The Last Hero

by Howard Bryant

  And there were many discrepancies with regard to race: what could be said and what could not, who could speak and how, what types of people carried themselves in a given way and why, and what it all meant.

  Most importantly, the presumption about who would be forced to sit and take it until the times were different remained. As Henry found during that first spring in 1954, Robinson was only the beginning. The real matters, the ones that made life normal, had not yet been addressed to any real degree, evidenced by his living in a rooming house while the white players (and their wives and kids) sat by the pool at the Dixie Grande. Henry tore into the baseball as the black leadership anxiously awaited a verdict in an important Supreme Court case that had been argued for the previous year and a half, Oliver L. Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et al. The case centered on equal facilities in public schools, but it spoke directly to the contradictions that defined Henry’s life: Was it possible for two parallel societies to exist? In Henry’s case, to play in the same outfield as white players, to use the same showers (perhaps one day at the same time, even), to hit in the same lineup, and yet be prohibited to sleep under the same roof? Henry received a six-dollar per diem for meals, the same as the white players, but in vivid ways he was being shown he was not on an equal basis with his teammates. Across the country, in Arizona, the New York Giants faced similar contradictions. Bill White played for the Giants minor-league system in 1954. He would play thirteen years in the major leagues, hit 202 home runs, and become the first black president of the National League, and to him, the absurdity of the situation was obvious. “I remembered thinking,44 If the accommodations were equal, why did they have to be separate in the first place?” he recalled. “Equal had nothing to do with it once you stepped off the field. They never thought we were equal. That’s why we couldn’t live where they were living.”

  MOTHER GIBSON SERVES VERY

  TASTY TABLE45 TO THE NEGRO

  MEMBERS OF BRAVES SQUAD

  BRADENTON, FLA.—“Come and get it, boys.”

  Three of the Braves’ Negro players answered the breakfast call at Mrs. Gibson’s home where they live.

  “This is really like home,” said outfielder Billy Bruton as he sat down to his platter of bacon, fried eggs and hot biscuits.

  “It sure tastes like home cooking,” agreed outfielder Henry Aaron….

  “Wonderful boys, all of them,” said Mrs. Gibson, a broad smile lighting her face.

  There were no complaints about the food. (“Mrs. Gibson must be the original home of southern fried chicken,” Braves assistant trainer and clubhouse man Joe Taylor said. “Hers is the best I’ve ever eaten.” But in a low and steady murmur, plenty of dissent was expressed regarding the system that forced Henry Aaron and Sam Jethroe to sit at Mrs. Gibson’s dinner table in the first place. When the time was right, it was Bruton (always beware of the quiet ones) who led the fight to eliminate segregated housing during spring training in the major leagues, thereby bringing to an end a valuable source of income and a sense of belonging for Mrs. Gibson and the other middle-class black families that took on the traveling famous—baseball players, jazz and bluesmen, all the blacks who were good enough to provide entertainment to whites but not good enough to occupy a hotel room. That spring, when integration existed in theory only, Lulu Gibson took pride in caring for her Braves, and she soon felt betrayed by the fact that Henry and “her boys” were angling to leave.

  “Mrs. Gibson’s was the best choice at that time,”46 Henry recalled. “When integration came, she thought we were turning her down, and she was not happy about that. To her, it was a choice. To us, we wanted to have the same opportunity everyone else on the ball club had.”

  During a meeting of player representatives during the 1961 All-Star Game in Boston, Bruton and Bill White canvassed support from the nascent players association and the white players, of whom Bill White said, “[They] only see us at the ballpark.” White by then was playing with St. Louis, Bruton with Detroit. It was White, focusing in the 1961 meeting on the new franchise awarded to Houston, who suggested that black players refuse to participate in cities that did not offer integrated housing. It was Bruton who said it was time for white players to support their black and Latino teammates off of the field.

  “Behind the scenes, we made things happen.47 We integrated before the military, before the schools. We were the first ones,” Bill White recalled. “In a lot of places, we integrated hotels and housing in Florida before the civil rights movement. It started with Jackie, but Henry and Billy Bruton and Frank Robinson and me, too. When Atlanta came in the league, Willie Stargell said in a meeting that unless everyone could buy a ticket and sit wherever they wanted to, we shouldn’t play there. We all had to deal with it. People always talked about how we handled living while America was changing. Hell, we were the ones who changed America.”

  In the spring, in between the long home runs that created myth and the nervousness of being a twenty-year-old trying to make a big-league roster, Henry represented the upsetting of another social layer. He was, along with Willie Mays, baseball’s first black superprospect, touted as a teenager, groomed by a big-league organization through the traditional, integrated minor-league system. Henry played in the Negro Leagues, but as a teenager who hadn’t finished high school, and his future would be radically different from that of his Indianapolis Clowns teammates, the men for whom the times wouldn’t change fast enough. The Negro Leagues were never a destination for Henry, and that made him different from the rest. Even Robinson at first believed Branch Rickey had selected him to be part of a potential Negro League rival.

  Evaluation of baseball talent was one thing—everybody in the Milwaukee system during spring training knew Henry had a special talent. Judging him as a man, however, was a completely different story. Two years earlier, in Buffalo, Henry had been questioned about how he conducted himself. Milwaukee scout Dewey Griggs, who signed Henry, asked him if he had another gear, which meant could he throw harder, put more snap on the ball, run harder, look like he was putting a full sweat into it. Griggs thought that Henry’s pace—languid to his coaches—might be problematic in a baseball environment where players were constantly and openly testing one another’s commitment level, and he asked Henry if he could run faster, if he could play more quickly than he was showing at that particular moment, and Henry said that he could. And Griggs asked him why he didn’t show maximum effort, each time, all the time, and Henry told him he was following old advice from Herbert Aaron: “Never move faster than you have to.”

  If you came from Wilcox County, where the work was merciless and the future nonexistent, the maxim might have made more sense. Never move faster than you have to. In Herbert Aaron’s America, these were genius words, essential passages in his personal survival guide, the strategy employed by poor blacks to conserve the energy they would need for the backbreaking tasks they would face every day for rest of their lives, tasks that would weigh on Herbert Aaron, with no relief and no justice in sight. And the words represented something else: a subtle articulation of the black man’s revenge, the poor man’s only fighting weapon. For whether you moved quickly or leisurely, the day’s worth of work still awaited; the load never lightened. There was no reward of promotion or of prosperity, hope just a dream on a kind horizon. Working faster would not lead to more respect or more rest, a larger share of the profits, or a better life. It would not change your prospects in the eyes of the boss or create a reexamination of the system that profited from your sweat and crushed you in the process. If you asked for more, the southern system would rather kill you than make you an equal partner in the American dream. Working faster would not better your position in the company. The only thing fast work produced was more work. In Herbert Aaron’s America, appealing to the boss was the worst thing you could do. It was just a waste of energy, because the status of the black laborer in the South always remained the same.

  On the ball field, Henry had not yet learned this key
piece of survival, and on the sun-and-dust ball fields in Bradenton, Dewey Griggs attempted to clue Henry in on how baseball’s version of office politics really worked. In baseball, perceived effort was often as important as actually working hard, and the appearance of working hard carried a great deal of value. Players with less physical talent knew it the best, for they were the guys whose very survival in the game depended on a manager or a coach believing that his lack of talent gave him a greater desire than the more gifted players, thus making him more valuable. Baseball managers often connected best with these players, the ones whose arms pumped and teeth clenched when they chugged helplessly to first, out by a mile. Since the great majority of baseball managers at one time themselves had had marginal ability and had to compensate with toughness and maximum effort, the player who used tenacity to compensate for a lack of foot speed often reminded the skipper of himself when he was young. It was the guy who couldn’t run who had to run the hardest, to prove that he was willing to overcome his physical limitations with extra effort. And in the dugout, there was no shame in that—unless, that is, you were trying to score unearned points with the manager. Baseball linguistics provided terminology for the culprits who embodied each end of the scale. The term was jaking it for the player who did not hustle and lacked work ethic, and goldbricking was the special designation for the players who mastered the fine art of false hustle. And it was always surprising just how many people in the big-league hierarchy— players, managers, executives, coaches, and members of the press—fell for the act.

  There was a difference between the player who played hard but could make it look easy and the guy who gave it his all, buttons popping, tumbling in the outfield, all to make a routine catch. The latter was a guy the shrewdest players in the dugout could sniff out faster than a bloodhound.

  In the beginning, Henry paid a severe price for not exploiting these subtle, variable distinctions, which took on greater significance with black players. In later years, once his talent had secured his legend, he would be applauded for running and fielding so effortlessly. As a twenty-year-old in his first spring camp, the unscientific art of reading body language never seemed to work in his favor, even as he revealed the depth of his awesome potential to his teammates. The initial impressions of his teammates were often harsh, exposing less about who Henry Aaron was as a man and more about the racial attitudes that supported an order that was supposed to be crumbling.

  “SLOW MOTION” AARON BECOMES48

  COLORFUL FIGURE IN BRAVES’ CAMP

  BRADENTON, FLA.—Henry Aaron is gradually becoming accustomed to major league surroundings. When he joined the Braves here three weeks ago, the 20-year-old Mobile (Ala.) Negro acted scared…. The bewildered rookie now acts like he is one of the gang. He smiles when Joe Adcock calls him “Slow Motion Henry” because he shuffles on and off the field.

  OFTEN, the white boys would slip beyond the light joshing, and the true face behind the mask would reveal itself. Joshing with Henry was never easy anyway, because while he liked to laugh, he did not like to be teased. Sometimes his teammates would watch him in the field, walking easily, and it would reinforce not only stereotypes about how a black man moved but the widely held paternalist belief that blacks did not take work, whether baseball or otherwise, as seriously as whites. Sometimes the slights could feel like pinpricks, nagging and annoying, reminders to the black players that they were different. Whenever a black power hitter reached the majors, the adjective du jour was husky. “[Grimm’s] first sacker was George Crowe, husky Negro, a graduate of the Eastern League,” the Journal wrote in 1951.

  Where matters became sticky was in the eye of the person doing the evaluating and whether he recognized his own prejudices, for the belief systems about what people were, in the case of black players in particular, of how hard they were willing to work, were capable of playing tricks on even the sharpest eyes. And that was why, if you were a white player watching Henry in those days, you had to ask yourself a question: Was he actually acting any differently from the thousands of inexperienced rookie ballplayers who had come before him?

  Joe Adcock was the first player about whom Henry was wary. Adcock was a son of the South, the South Henry Aaron had escaped either by daydreaming as a boy or by leaving as a teenager. Adcock was born two years before the onset of the Depression in the unsparing poverty and rigid segregation of Coushatta, Louisiana. He would grow to six four and 220 pounds. He was a star athlete in football and basketball. He played college football at Louisiana State University in the mid-1940s and chose baseball over the National Football League because Cincinnati signed him first.

  When southern resistance to Reconstruction reached its violent apex, Coushatta was the town best known for the Coushatta Massacre, when in August 1874 a mob of whites calling themselves the White League accosted members of the town’s political leadership, whites and their black followers, and threatened to murder each if they did not leave town. As the group of sixty blacks and six whites left the town limits, heading to Texas unarmed, they were followed and murdered by a gang of forty Coushatta whites, who chased them down and shot each one of them to death.

  Once in the spring, Adcock noticed Henry’s running style, nearly motionless from the waist up. Because Henry compensated for an ankle injury suffered when he was young, his stride was not always fluid. Adcock decided that Henry ran stiff-legged, and he coined another new nickname for the rookie, one that the press occasionally repeated. “Slow Motion Henry” wasn’t enough. Adcock now called him “Snowshoes.” In these instances, Henry might smile or pretend he did not hear. Spahn, he of the extensive vocabulary and cutting wit, might call you out, yelling something clever across the diamond or the clubhouse, shredding his tormentor into verbal ribbons. Mathews, on a dark day, might just break your jaw if you pushed him the wrong way. Henry was not an emotionally confrontational man. He would not say anything, and that made him in those years easy to underestimate. If Jackie Robinson would spark and combust, Henry would collect information about the people around him, quietly sharpening his judgments while smoldering privately at the same time, like the day he sat in a bathroom stall and overheard Adcock talking about “niggers.” “He was talking about something,”49 Henry said. “I don’t remember the whole conversation, but he said to somebody, ‘You couldn’t see a nigger if they put you in the middle of Harlem.’” There was no confrontation with Adcock that day, or any other during the decade they would play as teammates, but Henry knew he would never let Joe Adcock take him by surprise. He knew where Adcock stood, and to Henry, that gave him an advantage.

  To Chuck Tanner, Henry was a threat both to the order and to his new teammates. Like Henry, Tanner had been invited to the big-league camp and, like Henry, was not on the Milwaukee roster in the spring of 1954. Tanner was an outfielder who had first been signed by the Boston Braves in 1946 but had advanced slowly through the ranks. Tanner was born on Independence Day, 1929, in the tough mining town of New Castle, Pennsylvania, three and a half months before the stock market crash. Tanner immediately understood racial and ethnic divisions, divisions that were often muted because of the grinding poverty of the region. “We had so many different people50 from where we came from—Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and a few blacks—you couldn’t pronounce the last names of most of the people on my block,” Tanner recalled. “And believe me, when you had that many different people in one area, things could get heated. But none of us had anything, so it was hard for anyone to feel superior. When I was a kid, we all traded fruits and vegetables with one another instead of money, just so we could eat.”

  By 1954, Tanner had been in the Braves minor-league system for seven years and was not exactly certain he would ever make the major leagues. Tanner’s experiences gave him special insight into how established players could view a player so extremely gifted as Henry. While it was not a surprise to him that those from the Deep South, like Adcock, would be difficult, Tanner believed that racism, or even simple insensitivity, wa
s secondary to a certain kind of professional jealousy and a certain amount of fear both on the part of some of Henry’s peers as well as the writers.

  “The bottom line is that they were jealous of him,” Tanner recalled. “In those days, nobody wanted to go back to the farm, and Henry Aaron was so good, they knew that. They knew he wasn’t going to be the one going back to the farm. He made everything look so easy that even the writers hated him for it at first. Henry didn’t run; he glided. He just had so much ability. He could make everything look so easy, and I think people resented him for that.”

  The hazing was more a by-product of the players’ insecurities reaching the surface, Chuck Tanner believed. What increased the intensity was another layer of change white players were being forced to confront: There now would not only be black players in the game but the greater number of black players on a roster, the more white players who would be losing their jobs to blacks. It was bad enough to get sent out to the minors because a better player took your job, but it was even worse for a white player to lose out to a black. The thing the white players feared most, Tanner thought, was having to explain to all the guys back home that they weren’t as good as the black guys coming into the league.

  And Henry left Bradenton leading his team in home runs, extra base hits, and runs batted in. On the final day of spring training, the Braves purchased his minor-league contract from Toledo. George Selkirk’s premonition had come true. Henry would never play a game in Toledo. His big-league contract paid the major-league minimum salary of six thousand dollars per year. Charlie Grimm told him he was the starting left fielder, with Bruton in center and Pafko in right. As the team headed north to begin the season, Joe Taylor, the Braves equipment manager, told Henry to keep the number he wore during the spring. He would wear number 5.