he was as surly and ugly as a caged bear. He would ride past you on a country road, returning alone from a fishing trip crouched in the rear seat of his automobile, swarthy, glowering, chewing gum, and never so much as notice your greeting by the flicker of an eyelid. After the machine had stopped at the gate of his training quarters and a crowd of harmlessly demented admirers had gathered about it, he would sometimes sit there without moving for five and ten minutes, still glowering straight ahead, chewing gum and seeing only, as it seemed, the vision of his black rival coming to meet him across the ring. There was something peculiarly sinister in this static ferocity and he did not lessen the impression when he climbed down at last and walked slowly away, seeing no one, with his huge right arm partly contracted and slowly sawing the air as if aimed for a blow.
Even celebrities were discouraged from trying to see him. When Governor Dickerson arrived unannounced, Jeffries reluctantly took his hand, but then turned his back without another word to play with a terrier puppy. John L. Sullivan himself was refused entry for having earlier suggested that the fight was fixed. “I’ll turn the fire hose on him,” Jeffries said when he heard Sullivan had come to call. “I always hated a knocker.”* And when Stanley Ketchel came to call after visiting Johnson, Jeffries ordered him out, shouting, “I don’t want you here. You’ve been fooling around with that nigger.” Ketchel was slow to leave, so Jeffries had Farmer Burns pick him up and throw him into the dusty street.
Jeffries seemed almost allergic to the hundreds of people who stood for hours outside the picket fence hoping for just a glimpse of him. By contrast, Johnson and his boisterous entourage took over a resort three miles from town called Rick’s Roadhouse, where everyone seemed welcome. There, Rex Beach reported,
You find yourself in a honky-tonk. A pair of muscular pianists and a fiddler poison the air with ragtime. There are two roulette tables going constantly, drunken men abound. The rooms, the porches, the yards, are packed with all classes and conditions of people. They elbow their way upstairs to the quarters of “L’il Artha.” They pinch his muscles and prod him in the ribs to discover his condition. I have a mental photograph of the distorted remains of the stranger who would presume to thrust a curious finger into Jeffries’ ribs.
An armed guard patrolled the grounds at night—Johnson continued to get death threats in the mail—but otherwise his doors were open to anyone.
Beneath the big trees at Moana Springs, Jeffries’ afternoon workouts drew big crowds, and he dutifully went through his paces in front of them—skipping rope, grappling with Farmer Burns, going through the motions with Joe Choynski, chewing gum all the while. Reporters marveled at how the former champion had transformed his physique over the sixteen months since he’d begun to train. Rex Beach wrote:
I saw that which I never expected to see, a man who has come back. Jeffries has renewed youth. [Ponce de León] should have gone west in his search for that fabled fountain, the waters of which he believed could roll back the years from human shoulders…. I believe Jeffries to be the most dangerous and most rugged fighter the world has ever seen.
The former champion’s demeanor—taciturn, introspective, unsmiling—only added to that impression.
Johnson, on the other hand, constantly displayed what Beach called “the soul of a joy-rider.” He loved the crowds his presence invariably drew and, as Robert Edgren reported in the New York World, did his best to turn even the most routine sparring session with his onetime opponent Al Kaufmann into an entertaining show.
He has an eye for what goes on outside the ring. He kids along with the spectators and his handlers. While he was fighting with Kaufmann he managed to work around to the side of the ring where I was standing, camera in hand, and said: “Get a good one now. I’m going to punch him on the nose.”
Later, he began kidding Al by pretending to dictate a round by round account of the fight. “They are fighting fast,” said Jack, blocking Kaufmann’s left hook and slapping him on the chin with his right. “Johnson lands a right. Kaufmann staggers around the ring.” Here there was some fast fighting, for Kaufmann objected to the account of the battle. He slugged as hard as he could, rushing Johnson up against the ropes, and the black champion postponed his dictation. But a moment later he was at it again.
“Johnson is beginning to feel tired,” he said, and then threw his head back and chuckled, apparently paying no attention at all to the flailing blows that whizzed about his ears.
After Kaufmann came one [Walter] Monahan, an ex-amateur heavyweight Coast champion. Monahan meant well. He rushed and jabbed, and Johnson, watching him with a wide grin, timed his jabs and beat him to it. In a moment, Monahan was bleeding freely. For all that he kept on fighting as hard as he could. He reached Johnson now and then, and Jack rushed him to the ropes and nearly knocked him out.
“Johnson wins in a walk,” said Jack, beginning the dictation again, and turning to grin at me, “he let Monahan recover.”
When Tex Rickard arrived at Rick’s Roadhouse with Governor Dickerson in tow, the champion was effusive. Dickerson was the greatest governor in the country, Johnson said, and if he lived in Nevada he’d vote for him as often as they’d let him. Dickerson assured the champion that if he proved good enough to beat Jeffries, no race prejudice would be allowed to keep him from getting the decision he deserved. Johnson thanked the governor and put on an especially impressive display for him, urging his sparring partners to come straight at him and pull no punches. When Kid Cotton did just that, and managed to land a left hand that cut the champion’s mouth, Johnson rushed him and left him dazed and helpless on the ropes. Dickerson was impressed. “I have never seen a man who can whip Jack Johnson as he stands today,” he said, “and I am forced to bet on him.”
When John L. Sullivan asked the champion what kind of shape he was in, Johnson answered, “Cap’n John, if I felt any better, I would be afraid of myself.”
Jeffries was favored 2 to 1 a week before the fight—and since most writers believed Johnson doomed, they found his resolute cheerfulness baffling. “To all appearances,” said the Baltimore American, “the black man is as happy and carefree as a plantation darky in Watermelon time.” “The man is a puzzle,” said the Chicago Tribune.
Physically, the greatest athlete the colored race has produced and mentally as keen as a razor in a sort of undeveloped way, he fiddles away on his bull fiddle, swaps jokes with ready wit, shoots craps, plays baseball, listens dreamily to classical love songs on the phonograph and is going to fight Jim Jeffries for the world’s championship one week from tomorrow.
What on earth was wrong with him? Alfred Henry Lewis thought he knew. Johnson was “essentially African,” Lewis wrote, and therefore
feels no deeper than the moment, sees no farther than his nose [and is] incapable of anticipation…. The same cheerful indifference to coming events [has] marked others of the race even while standing in the very shadow of the gallows. Their stolid unconcern baffled all who beheld it. They were to be hanged; they knew it. But having no fancy, no imagination—they could not anticipate.
Arthur Ruhl of Collier’s had another theory about the fight’s inevitable outcome; while Johnson was undeniably fast and clever, he wrote, he lacked the all-important “dogged courage and intellectual initiative which is the white man’s inheritance,” while Jeffries, for his part, would be able to call upon “thirty centuries of traditions …, all the supreme efforts, the inventions and the conquests … Bunker Hill and Thermopylae and Hastings and Agincourt.” Johnson loved to read about himself in as many newspapers as he could get his hands on, but, sadly, his opinion of this kind of solemn nonsense was never recorded.*
Reno’s dusty downtown was now packed with strangers. “An army of unknowns is rapidly gathering,” Rex Beach reported.
They come tripping forth from Pullmans, day coaches and smokers; they come tumbling down from flat-topped box cars or creeping forth from between the trucks, their faces black with dust, their bodies scarred by the
print of brake beams.
They are coming from England and Hawaii, from Australia and Alaska, in special trains and side-door sleepers. But whether they be globe-trotters or grangers, homebodies, hobos, gentlemen or grafters, they are all red-blooded, full-fashioned men, with the age-old primitive love of fighting in their veins. There are no mollycoddles in Reno.
Reno did its best to accommodate them. “People eat at ragtime,” wrote Harris Merton Lyon in Hampton’s Magazine. “One restaurant with a seating capacity of 40 served 3,600 suppers…. For sleeping you take anything you can get: sometimes a seven-dollar room, sometimes a private car, … a cot, a billiard table, a hammock or a park bench.” Hundreds of Reno residents—including the mayor—offered rooms for rent. The lobbies of the better hotels were lined with cots; so were their flat graveled roofs. A fleabag called the Stick Awhile raised its overnight fee from fifteen cents to a quarter.
Black fight fans faced problems of their own. “There are few negro families in Reno,” the Chicago Tribune explained, “and in matters of dispensing hospitality to the colored brother old mining camp ethics prevail.” An enterprising real estate man rented three empty storefronts and ordered three hundred cots for black spectators who couldn’t expect to find a bed anywhere else. A saloon was renamed the Johnson Club, and in the evenings Johnson’s two most important black detractors, Bob Armstrong and Sam Langford, could be found there with their backs to the bar, explaining to angry Negro customers why they were sure Johnson didn’t stand a chance against Jim Jeffries. “I told Johnson in Chicago I’d be at ringside when they were carrying him out,” Langford said. “He ain’t got no right in the ring with this man Jeffries at all.”*
Pickpockets worked the crowds, lifting wallets and watches from unsuspecting fight fans—so many, one reporter noted, that “if a hand was not dipped into your pocket sooner or later it was almost a sign of disrespect.” One especially skilled thief, the reporter continued, plucked the silver badge from the vest of a local policeman, then hired a boy to return it to its owner at police headquarters just “to show he was a good fellow and enjoyed a good joke.” Sports thought it wise to slough off their jewelry, according to Rex Beach: “No longer does one see diamond scarf pins or jeweled watch fobs in public; neck-ties are worn with a hole in them; watches are piled in safes.”
A couple of days before the fight, two movie cameramen visited both camps, collecting human-interest footage to supplement straightforward coverage of coming events in the ring. Most of the sequences featuring Jeffries were suitably serene: he punched a bag and skipped rope, played hearts on the dappled lawn while Mrs. Jeffries and four other women in vast hats looked on, and clasped the hands of well-wishers—including Sam Langford and John L. Sullivan, who had by then restored himself to Jeffries’ good graces. Only one scene suggested something of the bout’s racial undertow: an exercise sequence ended with the ex-champion bouncing a medicine ball off the head of his black sparring partner Bob Armstrong, who was instructed to pretend to be knocked out.
At Rick’s Roadhouse, the filmmakers found things much livelier. Johnson shot craps for the camera, fed chickens, and drove a sulky down a dusty road. Surrounded by a laughing, mostly white crowd of hangers-on, he also pretended to drink from a bottle belonging to a blond infant until Sig Hart snatched it from him; then Johnson shaded the baby from the sun with his big Stetson. He also staged an extraordinary tableau of his own devising, a mock trial over which he presides from a chair set up on the porch. His seconds drag a struggling white member of his entourage before him. The stern-looking champion, his arms folded across his chest, finds the man “guilty” of coming back to camp drunk after a lively night in Reno, orders him tied to a chair, and then whacks him on the backside several times with a plank. When the man has been punished, he treats another one the same way.* It was all in good humor, but the subtext seems unmistakable: Jack Johnson wanted the moviegoing public to understand who was in charge in his camp, as well as in the ring.
Newspaper editors outdid one another in talking up the fight’s momentous importance. The question to be settled, said the Omaha Daily News, was nothing less than whether Jim Jeffries could “beat down the wonderful black and restore to the Caucasians the crown of elemental greatness as measured by strength of brow, power of heart and lung, and withal, that cunning and keenness that denotes mental as well as physical superiority.” The Afro-American Ledger had a special message for Johnson: “Thousands of negroes have nailed your name to their masthead. Nobody has so much to win or lose as you represent.”
No newspaper, black or white, seemed to have more of a stake in Jack Johnson’s success than the five-year-old Chicago Defender. “The World’s Greatest Weekly” was sensational, militant, and dedicated to the progress of what its founder, Robert S. Abbott, insisted on calling “the Race.” Some black papers did their best to play down the racial element at Reno, hoping trouble could be forestalled if people saw it simply as a contest between two heavyweight boxers who happened to be black and white. Not the Defender. After Johnson and Jeffries signed their contracts it had run a cartoon showing the champion surrounded by white enemies labeled “Negro Persecution,” “Prejudice,” and “Race Hatred,” with the caption HE WILL HAVE TO BEAT THEM ALL. THE FUTURE WELFARE OF HIS PEOPLE FORMS A PART OF THE STAKES. Now, as the contest drew near, the Defender remained steadfast:
On the arid plains of the Sage Brush State the white man and the negro will settle the mooted question of supremacy…. When the smoke of the battle clears away, and when the din of mingled cheers and groans have died away …, there will be deep mourning throughout the domains of Uncle Sam over Jeffries’s inability to return the pugilistic scepter to the Caucasian race.
Boxers and boxing insiders were canvassed for their predictions. “If Jeff is only half as good as he used to be he will win,” said Tommy Burns. “Johnson is game only against little fellows like Ketchel and myself. If Jeff ever wallops him, he’ll cave in all his ribs.” Johnson “doesn’t have a look-in,” said Bat Masterson, the gambler and onetime western lawman who now wrote a sporting column for the New York Morning Telegraph. Bob Fitzsimmons and Tom Sharkey and Battling Nelson all agreed. William Muldoon, the former wrestler and champion of physical culture who had once trained John L. Sullivan, concurred. “The negro won’t fight,” he said. “I pick Jeffries.”
On July 3, the eve of the fight, Jeffries issued his own forecast: “I realize full well what depends on me…. That portion of the white race that has been looking to me to defend its athletic superiority may feel assured that I am fit to do my very best…. I will win as quickly as I can.”
But privately, he did not seem convinced that he would win at all. He had been deeply wounded the day before when he learned that Billy Delaney, his longtime manager and trainer, had turned up in town, announced to the press that “Johnson will win. There can be no doubt about this point,” then hurried to Rick’s Roadhouse to offer the champion advice on how to beat his old friend. “To think of Delaney being with the nigger instead of me,” Jeffries said.
After that, Jim Corbett recalled, the former champion seemed almost in a daze, unable or unwilling to speak with anyone. “For God’s sake, Jim,” Corbett finally said to him that evening. “Open up and tell us what you are thinking about and what is the matter with you.”
“I’ll be all right once I get started” is all Jeffries would say. He went to bed early, but his wife heard him opening and closing his window all night. He couldn’t seem to sleep.
That same evening, Johnson said he wanted to have a look at the crowds. Some twenty thousand people were said to have come to town. He telephoned for an automobile and had himself driven to press headquarters on Center Street, where he joked with newspapermen, bowed to the throng that quickly gathered—then bet on himself twenty thousand dollars that had been wired to him by Barron Wilkins. Then, he returned to camp and presided over what one newspaperman called “a general jollification” until well past midnight.
Before he finally went to bed, Johnson sent two wires to his family in Chicago. The first was meant to reassure his anxious mother.
DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME. I FEEL GREAT. MY CONDITION IS FINE AND I AM IN GOOD SPIRITS. WILL WIN SURE. RODE DOWN TOWN AND GOT A FINE RECEPTION FROM THE PEOPLE. I FEEL PERFECTLY AT HOME BECAUSE I KNOW I WILL GET A SQUARE DEAL. LOVE TO ALL FROM ETTA AND I AND REGARDS FROM ALL IN CAMP.
The other telegram was to his brother, Charles:
BET YOUR LAST COPPER ON ME.
Blue smoke hung over the Reno rail yards on the morning of July 4, 1910. It rose from the dining cars of scores of special trains parked along a siding three miles south of town. Twelve had pulled in since eight o’clock the night before; seven more were due in by noon. Inside, uniformed Negro waiters served eggs, bacon, and coffee to hundreds of boxing fans who had arrived there from both coasts. Hundreds more had rattled their way over the Sierras in automobiles hung with signs that read RENO OR BUST!
Meanwhile, thousands of hungry men wandered the downtown streets in search of breakfast. Reno was running out of everything. Those lucky enough to get inside a restaurant had to settle for whatever was left in the kitchen. When Thomas’s Restaurant had no more clean cups, it served coffee in bowls; the proprietor’s wife just dropped money into a box after the cash register overflowed. Hundreds never got fed at all.
At midmorning, Rex Beach watched the crowd begin moving toward the arena, where the fight was scheduled to start at one-thirty.*
Everything that had wheels and could be propelled or pulled was loaded to capacity. The trolley cars…. had people sitting on the roof every trip. The chauffeurs, who have been making tentative holdups of passengers the past week, and grew bolder every day as the traffic on their machines increased, put all pretense of decency aside this morning and refused to consider anything less than $3 per single passenger for the one and one half miles from the town’s center out to the arena. At noon, they raised the ante to $5, and before one o’clock more than one $10 gold piece had been turned over for the privilege of riding on one or more flat tires from the Golden Hotel to the arena entrance.
Unforgivable Blackness Page 27