The lawyer had contacted the warden to ask whether the filming could be quietly done inside the prison; since Johnson had already been paid some of his money, the lawyer and his client both feared that Johnson might skip town after his release. The warden said that Andlauer would have to take his chances; there would be no moviemaking inside Leavenworth. To keep Johnson happy and more likely to fulfill his obligations after his release, Andlauer ordered him a blue serge suit from the best men’s tailor in Kansas City and had it delivered to his cell. Johnson liked it so much he asked for two more.
As spring inched along, the ex-champion worked hard to stay in shape. “Jack Johnson and his punching ball are inseparable,” the New Era reported in April. Warden Anderson was leaving Leavenworth in June. As a farewell to the men, he organized another “boxfest” on May 28. Johnson was again the feature attraction: he demolished Fred Allen, a fat white journeyman from St. Louis, in two rounds, and then—after allowing Joe Boykin, a black fighter from Philadelphia, to slam away at his stomach for two minutes to demonstrate that Johnson was in tip-top condition—he knocked him out, too.
Johnson was growing impatient. His sentence did not officially end until September 20, 1921, but with time off for good behavior he could expect to get out on July 9. That wasn’t good enough. On July 2 at Boyle’s Thirty Acres in Jersey City, Jack Dempsey was to defend his title against Georges Carpentier, Johnson’s old Paris sparring partner, who was now the light heavyweight champion of the world. Tex Rickard was the promoter. Just as he had at Gold-field and Reno, he’d seen the commercial possibilities in turning a simple prizefight into a contest between good and evil, light and darkness, that no sports fan would want to miss. The handsome blond Carpentier had served with distinction in the French army during the Great War. The dark, scowling champion had not served at all, and many believed he had dodged the draft—though Dempsey had been found innocent of that charge in court. Even though the challenger was a foreigner, American boxing fans seemed eager to see the supposed “slacker” toppled. Rickard was confident that this would be boxing’s first million-dollar gate. More than ninety thousand spectators were expected. Everyone was going to be there: Vincent Astor, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt, three of Theodore Roosevelt’s children, William H. Vanderbilt, Harry Payne Whitney.
Jack Johnson wanted to be there, too, to appear suddenly at ringside, leap into the ring to announce his coming fight with Harry Wills, and perhaps to challenge Dempsey as well, just as he had challenged other white titleholders in the past. What better way to begin his comeback? He enlisted the aid of Kansas Congressman Daniel Read Anthony, Jr., and former Illinois congressman James T. McDermott to try to get him an early release. At first, it seemed to work: on June 24, Attorney General Daugherty said he’d be willing now to consider a pardon in light of Johnson’s record as a model prisoner. But Justice Department prosecutors again protested, and Daughterty, like A. Mitchell before him, changed his mind. He would not issue a pardon, he said, “considering the crime.” Johnson would have to wait until July 9.*
The last few days seemed to crawl past, brightened only by the arrival of two more beautifully tailored suits courtesy of the nervous filmmaker, W. A. Andlauer. On July 3, Johnson sent Lucille a poem and two affectionate letters. She was thrilled: “DADDY,” she wired back, “TWO SPECIALS TODAY AND THE POEM OUR LAST SUNDAY AND OUR FUN BEGINS.” Gus Rhodes told his uncle to be ready for a warm welcome home. Chicago’s two most important Negro politicians, former alderman Oscar de Priest and Alderman Louis B. Anderson, would be there to greet him. So would Bill Bottoms and the black belt’s leading banker, Jesse Binga, as well as large groups of black Elks and Masons. “EXPECT A GOOD TIME,” Rhodes said. “GET IN GOOD CONDITION WANT YOU TO STEP.”
At a little before ten o’clock on the morning of July 9, 1921, Jack Johnson walked through the front gate of Leavenworth penitentiary a free man. Six motion picture cameramen were on hand to capture the moment. Johnson was dressed as only he could dress: straw hat, exquisitely tailored gray suit, blinding-white soft-collared shirt, bright polka-dot tie, gleaming patent leather shoes. Lucille was there. She had paid his thousand-dollar fine with cash advanced from Bill Bottoms. Gus Rhodes and his sister, Ada, were on hand to greet their uncle, too. “Many close friends came to meet me at the gates,” he recalled. “There was a sort of general celebration, the extent and nature of which surprised and disconcerted me. There were four bands. Hundreds of people…. If I had ever felt that my life had been a failure I changed my opinion and found myself rejoicing, eager and confident.”
He was chatty with the reporters who were waiting for him, optimistic, expansive, happy to be the center of attention again. He was forty-three years old—and “proud of it,” he said. The first thing he planned to do was order up a dozen more suits from his Kansas City tailor. Then he wanted a fight with Jack Dempsey. “It doesn’t make any difference what Dempsey says about drawing the color line, the public wants Dempsey whipped. And the public knows I am the one to do it.” Wouldn’t Dempsey’s youth and ferocity now simply be too much for Johnson? No, he said. Bullfighting had taught him everything he’d need to come out on top: “Many boxers are of the bull type. When they rush you four or five times and by deft footwork you have avoided them and jabbed them a few times as they pass by, you have them whipped—man or bull. I can use this,” he added, tapping his forehead, “to win from the best ones now boxing.”
With that, he shook hands with the new warden, W. I. Biddle, and Deputy Warden Fletcher, climbed with Lucille into his gleaming Haynes touring car, and led a cavalcade of a dozen automobiles roaring off toward Kansas City.
“What a relief,” said the warden.
“Amen,” said the deputy.
Johnson stayed in Kansas City for a few days, boarding with Kid Martin, an old friend from Galveston who had helped arrange his first professional fight against John “Must Have It” Lee back when he was a boy. He delivered a lecture at the Bethel Methodist Church, put on a sparring show for three thousand ticket buyers at Billion Bubble Park, an amusement park run by the Peet Brothers soap company. Proceeds went to the local post of the American Legion; unlike Jack Dempsey, he told the press, “Jack Johnson never was a slacker and never will be.” Then, to W. A. Andlauer’s intense relief, Johnson “posed” for the seven-reeler for which he’d already been paid his thousand-dollar advance.*
But he was eager to get back to his old life. He returned to Chicago on the morning of July 13. The editor of the Broad Ax spoke for a good many residents of the South Side.
Jack Johnson is out, and to tell the truth, he should never have been in…. The great crime Jack committed was to knock the crown off Jim Jeffries’ head. Stealing a lot of worn out old hens of course had to supply public sentiment some … excuse for imprisonment….
He is a great fellow, after all, and here and there can be found men with eloquent words in praise of his courage. He is not an object of anybody’s pity. He has stood the test and shown himself a man with all of the odds of white man hatred concentrated against him….
The Broad Ax wishes his after moments jeweled with the joys of a noble life and if he does not turn preacher, study law, or go into the undertaking business it appears he has done enough to make him honored and respected by his race. Success to you, Jack, and may you have luck in all the big things you contemplate for the future.
You are suffering because of your black skin. You whipped the white man’s hope. That was your undoing and we are proud of you.
The city refused his friends a parade permit, just as it had when he came home from Reno eleven years before, and there was no band to greet him at the station. Johnson professed not to care. “Chicago and my friends look mighty good to me,” he said, “with or without music.” When he pulled up in front of his sister Jennie’s apartment there were two thousand men and women on hand to shake his hand. “The reception and the feasting and the drinking of real wine,” reported the Broad Ax, “
lasted until 3 o’clock, at which time Johnson wended his way to the Dreamland Café, 3250 South State Street.”
Bill Bottoms’ Dreamland was an opulent, mirror-hung black-and-tan, the closest thing to the Café de Champion left in the city: pimps and prostitutes and the “fixers” who found black women for white men in more disreputable places were barred at the door; the New Orleans cornetist King Oliver had played there two years earlier; Louis and Lil Hardin Armstrong would occupy its bandstand in 1925. “There,” the Broad Ax continued, Johnson “received a great ovation from all of the leading white and colored sports, both men and women, in this great city.” For the next few days, the ex-champion made the Dreamland his headquarters, and to pay back the money Bottoms had advanced him while in prison, he staged several exhibitions in the cellar.
Then it was on to New York. There was no crowd to cheer him when he stepped off the Twentieth Century Limited at Grand Central on July 22. During the nine years since he’d last visited the city, the center of its black life had moved north from the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts to Harlem. His friend Barron Wilkins had moved north, too, and was now running Barron’s, a club for sports that was still more richly appointed and exclusive than his downtown café had been. Wilkins and Dick Ellis helped organize a hero’s welcome along 125th Street, hosted a reception and dance in Johnson’s honor at the Manhattan Casino, too, and paid him one thousand dollars just for turning up.
At first, then, it seemed like old times, as if the years of exile and incarceration had never happened. But reality quickly set in. Jack Dempsey would not fight him. “Johnson is through, through with his own people,” explained Doc Kearns, Dempsey’s manager. “He stands discredited in the eyes of the civilized world.” There was no sum of money large enough, he said, to persuade Dempsey “to dignify the Negro with a fight.”* The chairman of the New Jersey boxing commission wouldn’t allow the Jersey City fight with Harry Wills to go forward: “The commissioners are in office to promote and protect the boxing game in the state,” he said, “and we believe the appearance of Johnson in a contest there would be derogatory to the sport.” Then, William Muldoon, John L. Sullivan’s onetime trainer and now the chairman of the New York Boxing Board, refused to grant Johnson a license to fight in his state either: he was simply too old; New York boxing law barred anyone over thirty-seven from getting into the ring.
And once again, he was without a permanent place to live. His sister’s home was now off-limits to him: he and Bill Bottoms had disagreed on whether he had put on enough exhibitions in the Dreamland cellar to repay the money advanced to him in prison, and Bottoms said he’d sue Johnson the moment he set foot in Chicago. Johnson’s life after prison, like his life before he won the championship and during the years he and Lucille were wandering overseas, would be lived largely on the run.
Black Manhattan had changed since Johnson had last seen it. He had not: he still seemed to be one person one day, another the next. On Friday evening August 1, he spoke at the Baptist Tabernacle at 125th and Madison. His old friend, the Harlem attorney Frank Wheaton, introduced him as “the victim of unfair treatment.” “Denied a square deal,” Wheaton said, “this man has declared, ‘If society feels wronged I have paid the penalty.’ Should not a Christian community receive with open arms he who comes out into the world with clean hands and a clean heart?” The one hundred members present, almost all of them women, certainly thought so. They cheered the exchampion as he stepped to the pulpit, and they punctuated everything he said with cries of “Yes!” “Yes!”
Pointing to the Bible, Johnson said,
This book teaches you to be fair-minded and sympathetic to others in their trouble. I have always tried to live by the Bible’s teaching, as my mother told me to do. Is there anyone here who has done more, anyone who has really lived up to the Golden Rule? If there is one without sin here, let him rise.
The Bible teaches us to go into the bottomless pit, if need be, and get out the one who is sinking there. All the dirt that has been done me was done by those cowards with prejudiced minds, those hypocrites who kneel and pray on Sunday and commit slander the rest of the week. Cut me open, and you will find written upon my heart that I have never done wrong to my fellow men.
The Bible says, “Thou shalt take unto thyself a wife.” It doesn’t say what kind of wife. Chinese or white or green or black, or any other kind. I took unto myself a wife, just as the Bible told me to, and just because she was a college woman people were down on me. If I had married some woman of the streets it would have been all right. I’m sure I’ve lived up to all the rules any husband should live up to.
For Johnson, of course, those rules were always made to be broken. A few weeks later, he was back onstage, headlining at a Philadelphia theater with an “Extra Added Attraction—Ethel Waters and Fletcher Henderson’s Jazz Masters.” The twenty-five-year-old Waters had begun her career as a tent-show shimmy dancer billed as “Sweet Mama Stringbean,” but she had recently become a headliner on the strength of two sly blues recorded for the brand-new, Negro-owned Black Swan Company. Johnson fascinated her. She had heard about him since childhood, and now never missed a chance to watch from the wings as he sparred and shadowboxed. But she also knew enough about his reputation to keep her distance—which only served to whet the ex-champion’s interest, Waters remembered.
I was in my dressing room between shows one day when Jack’s valet came in and said, “Mr. Johnson wants to see you.”
“All right,” I told him, “it is exactly the same number of steps from his dressing room to mine as it is from mine to his. So tell him to drop over.”
The valet got an odd look on his face. I guess no colored person had ever responded like that before to an invitation from his boss. When Jack Johnson said, “Come!” they all came running. Especially the girls. But in a few minutes Jack himself knocked on my door and asked very politely if he could come in. He said, “May I ask you something?”
When I nodded he asked why I was so unfriendly and standoffish with him.
“I always speak to you, Mr. Jack, don’t I?”
He invited me to have dinner with him that night. He was surprised because, unlike other colored girls, I didn’t get blown over when he spoke to me. I thanked him and shook my head.
“But why not?” he asked. “Why won’t you have dinner with me?”
I told him I wanted to make myself clear. “That white girl I see hanging around the theater, Mr. Jack—isn’t she your wife?”
“No, she’s just a friend.”*
“But I never see you with any colored girls.”
“I have nothing against colored girls,” he said. “And I’d be proud to be seen out with you, Ethel.”
But I wouldn’t have dinner with him…. I don’t think he had met one other colored girl since becoming famous who didn’t try to track him down.
Johnson and Waters remained friends over the years. “He regarded me as one of his buddies,” she remembered, and once she said to him, “It’s universally known, Jack, that you have the white fever.” Johnson replied:
I like colored women. I could love a colored woman. But they never give me anything. Colored women just won’t play up to a man the way white girls do. Look at you. What do you tell me? You fluff me off. No matter how colored women feel toward a man, they don’t spoil him and pamper him and build up his ego. They don’t try to make him feel like he’s somebody.
Johnson’s desire to be “somebody,” to enjoy “the distinction,” as he himself wrote in his American autobiography, “of being a celebrity pointed out above all others,” burned as brightly within him as it ever had. After most boxers’ careers ended they had to be content with the nostalgic applause their names evoked when they were introduced from the ring before a big fight. Not Jack Johnson. He would spend the rest of his life struggling to stay within the spotlight that gave his life meaning. With time, that struggle would become more and more difficult. The newspapers chronicled some of what he did. But
increasingly, Jack Johnson was old news, and he would only occasionally turn up in their pages, just as he had in the years when he was struggling toward the championship.
Johnson’s love of speed had not diminished while he was in prison. While playing Philadelphia that fall, he was also commuting daily to a small-time studio in Cliffside, New Jersey, where he was starring in another movie, a melodrama called For His Mother’s Sake. A sleet storm settled in one morning as he and the director, R. E. Wortham, set out for Cliffside in Johnson’s Franklin racer. Johnson just went faster, Wortham remembered, splashing along at eighty miles an hour:
I just held my breath and it was hard enough holding on to that, for Johnson forgot all about traffic regulations and the driving sleet. That machine must have had invisible wings…. My hair stood on end … and I for one want it emphatically understood that while I like Jack Johnson, he will never again entice me to take an auto ride with him.
The film opened at the New Douglas Theater at Lexington and 142nd—advertised to the people of Harlem as “Your Theater”—in January of 1922. It was billed as “a super production of mother love…. A story of pathos, home and filial devotion. A blending of sobs and laughter, the love of a son who shouldered hardship and misfortune for love of his mother.” The film didn’t do well—and there was evidently only a single print; the owners of the studio in which it was made seized the negative because the producers failed to pay their bills.
Unforgivable Blackness Page 56