Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  Alyne and Peter raised their children well, and took no chances. As the kids aged, their nonscholastic hours were filled with activities. Board games like Monopoly, Pokeno, and Chinese Checkers were rainy-day household staples. Walter enjoyed two years as a Boy Scout—especially the camping outings along the Pearl River, when the boys would bring along their rifles and shoot water moccasins before leaping into the water. He took numerous fishing trips with his father and brother, spent several years developing into a credible schoolyard marbles player, and also had a brief passion for painting and spinning wood tops.

  A brown upright piano stood in the corner of the den, and Eddie and Pam learned to play. Walter showed minimal interest in the instrument, opting instead for the drums. “He was a great drummer from a young age,” said Eddie. “We didn’t actually have a drum set in our house when he was very little, but he beat on anything you could make sound from. Books, tables, cans. Anything.”

  In the summertime, as other neighborhood kids ran from yard to yard seeking adventure, the Payton boys were put to work. Miss Alyne was not about to have her sons find trouble, so she made sure they were always occupied. An avid gardener, Alyne celebrated the end of each school year by having a local farmer deliver a mountain of dirt and dump it in the driveway. For the ensuing two months, Eddie and Walter were responsible for shoveling and pushing the topsoil over the entire yard, as well as applying fertilizer. Alyne’s goal was to win the Columbian-Progress’ Yard of the Week award (she eventually did). “It rains like you wouldn’t believe during the summer in Mississippi, and the whole yard would get wet,” Walter once said. “That caused the wheelbarrow to sink in the wet soil. We’d have to put boards throughout the yard and push the wheelbarrow to the end of them. I’d fill it, Eddie would pick it up and take it out and dump it, and Mama or Pam would spread it. At the time we thought it was good for the yard. We, or at least I, didn’t know until much later that Mom had the topsoil delivered to keep us out of trouble in the summer. If you want my opinion, there was no reason to spread all that topsoil except to keep us occupied and around the house.

  “[My mother is] probably the reason I’m so muscular. I was the one who did the shoveling. You can tell that by looking at my arms. [Eddie] pushed the wheelbarrow. You ought to see the muscles in his legs.”

  Though he gravitated toward his mother, much of Walter’s demeanor came from his father. He was the rare child who was content to be left alone; who didn’t need playmates or toys to keep him entertained. Often without company, Walter would dash through the woods, imagining himself as Robin Hood or Spider-Man or Zorro. “I rode pretend horses, swung on pretend vines, wore pretend outfits, shot pretend bandits,” he wrote. “A woods could be anything I wanted it to be. I loved to climb trees . . . I liked to be up there, above everything, looking down, in control, having done the impossible, saved the kingdom, loved for the right, for justice and for truth.”

  Unlike his soft-spoken younger brother, Eddie always had a flock. His nickname was “Chief,” appropriately coined because other kids followed his lead. If Eddie decided to hold an impromptu baseball game in the street, he was never alone. Walter often proved to be a perfect sidekick. When both boys were still young, one of their cousins, a pretty woman named Evelyn Carter, was dating Brady Lewis. If Eddie and Walter knew in advance the couple would be returning to Lewis’ house, the brothers would tiptoe inside and hide behind his couch. “They’d listen to us talk,” said Lewis, “and whenever I went to kiss Evelyn, they’d jump out and scare us.”

  When Eddie was twelve and his brother nine, the two boys snuck up the road to the home of Reverend LeRoy Hendricks, a local preacher. The house was surrounded by three towering plum tress. On most days, Eddie and Walter would look longingly at the plump fruit, hoping (never to avail) that a plum or two would somehow magically fall off a tree and fly into their arms. On this day, Eddie goaded Walter into crawling beneath the fence surrounding Hendricks’ yard, grabbing as many pieces of fruit as possible, then running home. “Reverend Hendricks saw us,” Eddie said. “But he only saw one of us, and he didn’t know which one it was. So I had an idea.” Eddie told Walter that, inevitably, their father would come home from work, hear the story, and select one of the boys for a beating. “Right when Daddy starts hitting one of us, the other has to walk in and confess,” he said. “Daddy will think it’s great we’re telling the truth, and he’ll let us both go!”

  As soon as Peter arrived inside the house, Alyne informed him of what had transpired. He stared down both boys, then grabbed Walter by the collar and took him to a back room. Just as he drew back the switch, Walter wailed, “I did it Daddy! I did it! But Edward Charles was with me, too! He was right there!”

  Both boys were pummeled. “That was the worst ass-whuppin’ we ever got,” Eddie said. “Both of us.”

  Not quite. Although Alyne spent most of her time either working, cooking, or gardening, her hobby was collecting old coins. Whenever Alyne stumbled upon a vintage piece of currency, she’d place it to the side and save it. “I had four to five hundred silver dimes,” she once said. “And ‘V’ nickels.” One day, little Walter figured out that his mother was stashing the loot in a closet by the staircase. “First he tries to pick the lock,” Pam, his sister, recalled. “Then he just got a hammer and beat off the door.” Walter filled up his pockets, taking—among other valuables—his mother’s prized 1805 silver dollar. “That evening I lined everyone up,” Alyne said. “I knowed who got the money. Who spent those dimes. But they had to tell me. My husband, he saw the whites in my eyes and without a word he went out and got a switch and started plaiting it. They were all sitting there looking pitiful. Pam and [Eddie] kept saying, ‘Walter, why don’t you tell Daddy you’ve got the money?’ And Walter, he’d just sit there with a straight face and say, ‘Why don’t you tell Daddy you’ve got it?’ ”

  Finally, after failing to elicit an admission, Peter Payton lined up his three children. He started with Walter, and unleashed a beating remarkable for its power and duration. “Before he was through Walter fessed up,” Pam said. “So the others didn’t have to get whipped.”

  Eddie and Walter took special delight in tormenting Pam, an easy target for the two boys. The brothers would wedge a bucket of water above her door, then wait for Pam to walk through and have it spill atop her head. In the middle of the night they scratched against her wall and made spooky sounds. “But the best thing we ever did,” said Eddie, “is we put this sheet outside her window, then started shaking it back and forth like a ghost. She freaked out . . . probably didn’t sleep for a month.”

  Years later, when Walter was asked how he developed his football skills, he thought back to the torturing of Pam. “When you have an angry sister chasing you with a broom and a wet dishrag,” he said, “you pick up moves you never had before.”

  In a typical sports narrative, Walter Payton should be a star athlete from the very beginning—the fastest, strongest, toughest, most hard-nosed fella on the black side of Columbia. He should be the can’t-miss kid; the hero in the making, bestowed with an uncanny greatness perfectly suited for a future in the NFL or NBA or major leagues.

  With Payton, there is little of that. He certainly wasn’t uncoordinated. The speed was good, the strength above average. But in the fall of 1960, as he entered the first grade at the segregated John J. Jefferson High School,1 Walter was merely one of thirty-two black faces in Mrs. Vonceal McLaurin’s class. He was on the short side, with closely cropped hair, noticeably dark skin, and wildly expressive eyes the size of his mother’s homemade chocolate chip cookies. Two years earlier, Eddie had begun his schooling at Jefferson, and the staff of gym teachers had immediately recognized something special in the boy. Walter, by comparison, merely existed. Whereas Eddie ran with the power of a motorcycle, Walter glided along, content to be just one of the kids. Eddie carried himself as a champion. Walter did not. If he longed to excel in sports, it was a tightly kept secret. “We didn’t have any great equipment
or sandboxes at Jefferson, so the only games we played at recess were tag and different races,” said Archie Johnson, Walter’s classmate and friend. “Walter was good, don’t get me wrong. But we all knew about Eddie and everything he could do. Walter didn’t touch that.”

  Over on the white side of town, young boys were being introduced to the joy of organized sports. There was Pop Warner football and Little League baseball. On spring and summer evenings, parents and kids alike congregated at Columbia City Park, an oasis of manicured grass and neatly placed dirt where the echoing of cheers could be heard from far away. Participants were supplied with bright red and green and yellow and blue uniforms, with names like PANTHERS and TIGERS and REDS screen printed across the chests. Afterward, everyone would retreat to Cook’s Dairy Delight on High School Avenue, where Lucille Cook (known to all as just “Miss Cook”) served up her renowned dressed jumbo hamburgers and fresh-squeezed lemonade to the white boys and girls. Were the day especially hot, some might stroll to the town pool, cleaned daily and exclusively white.

  Most black kids did not feel slighted, mainly because they knew no better. Cook’s Dairy Delight? Little League? Did those things even exist? What the black side of town lacked in grassy knolls and new bats and mitts and helmets, it made up for in spirit. Instead of wallowing in self-pity over what they understood to be shoddy conditions, black teachers and coaches encouraged their kids to combine the resources at hand with the power of youthful imagination. Jefferson’s playground was limited to a slide and the remnants of a wood swing. But running space was plentiful. “We didn’t have any feeding systems,” said Charles Boston, Jefferson’s varsity football coach. “We didn’t have junior high ball or Pop Warner—the white kids had all of that. In fact, we barely had enough equipment to field a high school team. What we did have was that when the bell rang at eight o’clock in the morning, and then two hours later again for recess, all the boys would end up in a football game.”

  “We all played football in the yard,” said Edward Moses, Walter’s childhood friend. “We used to go run in the woods, jump over ditches. We’d run straight down a row of corn in a cornfield, and when the corn was dry it’d really test your balance. If we were missing out on anything, I don’t think we knew it.”

  In the spirit of his father, Walter remained mostly quiet during his first few years of school. Though occasionally mischievous, he mainly sat in class, capably doing his schoolwork and pining for recess. He wasn’t one to sit up front, or raise his hand, or jump at the chance to show off his smarts. Nor was he one to fire spitballs at the blackboard. He was, in all senses of the word, ordinary. “Eddie loved school and he loved football,” said Alyne. “Now Walter, he was different. He never let you know what he was interested in. He’d watch people, and then do whatever that person did better.”

  In 1963, when Walter was ten, a man named Ezekiel Graves spearheaded a movement to bring organized Little League to Columbia’s black children. “Every year a couple of black families would come to the town’s Little League sign-up day,” recalled Colleen Crawley, a white contemporary of Walter’s. “And they’d always be turned away.” The local government denied Graves’ request to have the games played at Columbia City Park, so he settled on a field outside the poorly maintained Duckworth Recreation Center. Walter was drafted by the team sponsored by Columbia Electric, a little store located downtown. The uniforms were green and white, and Walter wore No. 11 and played first base. His best friends were his teammates—Michael “Dobie” Woodson at second, Moses (who went by “Sugar Man”) at shortstop, and Johnson in right field. The team played against other black Little Leagues in Marion County, and Walter fit right in. “I was OK in the field, but I couldn’t hit the ball,” said Johnson. “But Walter could hit the ball hard, and he was a good fielder. He looked athletic, even when we were young.”

  Because he was routinely compared to his faster, stronger, more developed and more gregarious older brother, classmates and teachers tended to overlook Walter’s abilities. “Eddie was cocky, and Walter wasn’t,” said Robert Virgil. “Walter was soft-spoken, and Eddie had this incredible vocabulary, where he knew every word the teachers asked. It would be hard to have an older brother like that and not go unnoticed.” Yet as he aged, going from elementary school to junior high, Walter’s athleticism began to blossom. To start with, he was uncommonly strong, with a grip that drained the color from others’ hands, and stumpy-yet-powerful legs that churned like a cement mixer. Walter never tinkered with weights (at black schools like Jefferson High, the very idea of any sort of weight room was laughable), but he developed early—the muscles along his chest and forearms beginning to sprout at age twelve. “Walter got big, and we could no longer handle him physically,” said Eli Payton, a classmate and distant cousin.2 “It happened overnight.”

  During recess, Walter and his peers played outside the school. On Sundays, he and a gaggle of friends headed over to Westerfield Park for violent pickup games of tackle football. Walter insisted on playing quarterback, and he did so brilliantly. His arm was a cannon, his feet light and quick. Most impressive, he broke out a move previously unseen at Jefferson; an unstoppable little device where, when a tackler approached, Walter lifted one of his arms and forcefully jabbed the kid in the sternum. THUD! “That’s the first time any of us saw the stiff-arm,” said Woodson. “Thing was deadly.”

  “I look back at my style of playing football, and that evolved from my childhood because I loved the game of war,” Walter once said. “When I held the football and somebody was going to take my football, I was going to hit them back first. I worked for that position and I wasn’t giving it up or backing down.... I started then learning how to juke and spin and make me impossible to catch. That all came from my childhood. That is something that a coach did not instill in me, that particular style.”

  While Walter enjoyed sports, his apparent calling—one vigorously pushed by his parents—was music. For their middle child’s seventh birthday, Alyne and Peter bought a drum set, then spent the ensuing years having their eardrums pulverized. What Jefferson High lacked in organized athletics, it made up for with a spirited music program that put the all-white Columbia High to shame. Beginning in sixth grade, Jefferson’s students could audition for the school’s dynamic marching band. Alongside Johnson, who mastered the trumpet, Walter tried out as a drummer/bongo player. Both made the cut. “It was thrilling,” said Johnson. “The band gave us a way to travel and go places. The football team had a rigorous schedule, so the band did, too.” Walter was eleven years old at the start of his sixth-grade year, and up until that point he’d rarely left the Marion County limits. Thanks to band, on September 11, 1964, he traveled via bus to Jackson, where the Jefferson High Green Wave faced the Jim Hill High School Tigers. Years later, Walter remembered little of the on-field action—the score, the stars, the uniform colors. What he could not forget, however, was the feeling of being there; of performing music before a large crowd; of seeing people stomp and clap and cheer. It was true love.

  Though he never fully learned to read music, Walter could hear a song once or twice and immediately play it to perfection. Because Mississippi’s black high schools were spread out across the state, the marching band made its way alongside the football team north and south, east and west. “We went to Biloxi, we went to Picayune,” said Johnson. “We’d go to high-powered schools with great bands, and we’d show ’em how it’s done.”

  By the time Walter entered the seventh grade, Eddie Payton was officially a local star. He was popular, funny, cocky, and good with the girls. Decked out in his band uniform, Walter Payton couldn’t compete. He was merely a kid with a snare drum.

  Then, one day, a man holding a whistle changed his life.

  CHAPTER 2

  LEARNING THE GAME

  HIS MEMORY IS FOGGY. UNDERSTANDABLY SO. IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FORTY years since Charles Boston initially laid eyes on the thirteen-year-old boy with the tears streaming down his cheeks. In the decades tha
t followed, kids have come and kids have gone. Many have graduated college, some have dropped out of high school. Most are alive. Too many are deceased. There are parents and grandparents, doctors and lawyers and garbagemen and street sweepers and drug dealers.

  “Hard to keep track,” Boston said. “Time flies.”

  This, however, the former head football coach at John J. Jefferson High School remembers. This, he will never forget.

  “The first time I saw Walter Payton?” Boston said. “Well, it was pretty obvious he was no ordinary kid.”

  The year was 1966. Though it had been twelve long years since the United States Supreme Court had declared racially separate public schools to be unconstitutional, nobody in the state of Mississippi paid the ruling much mind. So Jefferson High School remained what it had always been—underfunded, lacking resources, and, to Columbia’s vast white population, irrelevant.

  Walter Payton was an eighth grader, known in small pockets of the school either for his drumming or, more likely, for his relation to Eddie Payton. The brothers were separated by three grades; by this time Eddie was a certifiable star and the talk of Jefferson High athletics. Unlike his demure sibling, Eddie had it all. He dated the prettiest girls, hung out with the coolest kids, walked with a can’t-touch-this swagger. Though he was known to goof off and crack jokes in class, Eddie was largely given a free pass by teachers—a nod to his status.