The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (3 page)

Like most people connected to Wilcox County, the Aarons were touched by the enormous shadow of the Tait dynasty. Charles Tait’s grandson, Robert, was a Confederate captain, and in 1860, he owned 148 slaves. During the ruthless white reclamation of power that dissolved Reconstruction, the foundation of the sharecropper system was born and blacks who had once worked the land as slaves now tended to the same land as free blacks, and for many—because of the illegitimate bookkeeping and other shady practices that left blacks in a perpetual state of debt—there was no escape from the system. According to the 1920 census, Papa Henry and his family lived next door to Frank S. Tait, Charles Tait’s great-grandson. The Taits were the only white family on the street, suggesting that the black families on that street rented their housing from the Taits and worked the family land accordingly as sharecroppers. This was almost certainly true in the case of Papa Henry, whose World War I civilian registration card listed F. S. Tait as his employer.

As a boy, Herbert worked the fields in Camden, picking cotton into his teens. Though public records are unclear, it is likely at some point or another he worked the enormous Tait property, as had his father.

Herbert was restless and dreaded a life of dreary, hopeless agrarianism. The routine in Camden had not changed for a century: work the land for nonexistent wages, with little chance for self-improvement or respect from the white community, which for the better part of two centuries had held absolute power. In later interviews, he would say the members of his family lived in the fields and the church. As he grew older, he was aware of an important, curious phenomenon: Many blacks he knew were leaving Wilcox—for Mobile, and even Chicago and California—and he decided he would be one of them. From the time of Herbert’s birth, in 1908, up until his twentieth birthday, the black population in Wilcox County dropped nearly 30 percent.

And yet, despite the obvious contradictions, whites still clung to the old paternalisms. In
The Reins of Power
, Clinton McCarty recalled the prevailing attitude regarding blacks in Wilcox County during the time Herbert Aaron was coming of age in Camden:

Blacks as a race were commented
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on in routine white conversation mostly in terms of the care they needed, the trouble they caused, or the anecdotes and jokes they lent themselves to. Except for those long loyal to and productive for one’s family, they were said to be lazy, shiftless, promiscuous, addicted to petty theft, quick to ingratiate for a purpose, childlike in their intellectual capacity; on more than one occasion, I heard adult white males address adult black males in the sort of sing-song cadence usually heard when adults talk to small children. Blacks were described as incapable of good taste, humorous in their speech, often amusingly animated in their actions. But with it all they were credited with being the occasional sources of heart-of-the-matter descriptions and homely wisdom. Always there was the suggestion that whites were still the blacks’ truest friends … and would come to their aid in time of trouble.

Herbert had been secretly dating a young girl, also from Wilcox County, named Stella, whose family names were Pritchett and Underwood. In the records, Estella’s birth year ranged from 1909 to 1912, and the exact dates of her family origins would also remain unclear, even to the family.

Herbert had plans to leave Camden, with its grim prospects. He was heading for Mobile. Herbert and Stella waited until she was old enough to leave town, but in 1927, Stella became pregnant and the two moved south down the river, four hours from Mobile. Later that year, Stella gave birth to their first child, Sarah, most likely out of wedlock. As much as movie theaters and water fountains, city records were segregated during those days, and the records of blacks were not nearly as accurate as those of whites. According to Book 36 of the Mobile Colored Marriage License Book, page 503, Herbert and Stella Aaron were married in Mobile on August 22, 1929, by justice of the peace and notary public Thomas B. Allmann. On his marriage certificate, Herbert spelled the family name “Aron,” and he was listed as twenty-two years of age, five eight, and weighing 142 pounds. Stella was listed as nineteen years of age, five seven, and weighing 115 pounds. The license book stated both were Protestant and were marrying for the first time.

The original surname, the first one the clan would claim as a free American family, had been Aaron. As the country moved through the wrenching antebellum period, the hope and disappointment of Reconstruction, and then the subsequent establishment of Jim Crow as the southern rule of law, the Aaron name would move along with it. For a man who would carry his name with an eaglelike pride, Henry recalled his name weathering numerous variations, from Aron to Arron and occasionally Aarron, a stinging byproduct of the lack of educational opportunities afforded blacks at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1930, the family name had returned to its biblical origins, and would not change.

“Our name changed often,”
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Henry would explain. “My mother and father, they could not read or write, and so it was spelled differently many times over the years.”

Herbert Aaron had come to Mobile as a slender nineteen-year-old without prospects beyond labor, and although he was unable to read or write, he was determined nevertheless that life would be better for him than it had been for his father. He considered himself religious—he attended Episcopal Sunday services in Mobile—but, unlike his predecessors, did not envision a life rooted in the church.

In Mobile, work was plentiful but unpredictable in its reliability. Mobile was Alabama’s main port city, and in the years following World War I, it boasted a growing economy and a diversity of jobs. This optimism stood in strong contrast to the city’s sagging economic fortunes in the decades following the Civil War. In later years, when his son grew famous, Herbert would tell interviewers that, in terms of manual labor, he had done it all. In Camden, he had picked cotton, as well as operated heavy machinery and motorized farm equipment. According to city records, Herbert and Stella moved to 1170 Elmira Street in Down the Bay, one of the two major residential areas for blacks inside of Mobile’s city limits. Rent was six dollars per month. In the Mobile city directory, Herbert listed his first job as a laborer, and later he drove a truck for the Southall Coal Company.

Down the Bay was situated in the southern part of the city, blocks away from the idyllic magnolia-lined beauty of Government Street, bordered by the Magnolia Cemetery to the south, Government Street to the north, and Cedar and Ann streets to the east and west, respectively. Demographically, Down the Bay was poor, unemployment high. The neighborhood was primarily black, but, unlike Davis Avenue—the main thoroughfare, which served as the center of the other predominately black section of Mobile—not without diversity. The 1930 census listed fifteen dwellings on Elmira Street, seven white households, eight black. Whites lived on each end of Elmira, the blacks in the middle. To the north, by contrast, was Davis Avenue, once known as Stone Street and then renamed before the Civil War for Jefferson Davis. It was called “Darkey Town” by blacks and whites alike before adopting the more modern and proud nickname “the Avenue.”

To northerners, Mobile seemed both formidable and chilling. The city was situated in the deepest part of the Deep South, just miles from the Mississippi border, a frightening pocket of intolerance, where good people who said or did the wrong things might just disappear. To white and black southerners alike, however, Mobile was one of the more livable cities for blacks. Bienville Square, with its rushing alabaster water fountain and softly blossomed magnolias and oaks, represented the best of Mobile for its whites, the middle- and upper-class gentry, and on special days—birthdays, holidays—the white poor. The park represented southern beauty, especially on those perfect spring days before the heat soared, and for a time in the late nineteenth century, both blacks and whites had come to see Bienville Square as a place representative of all of the city’s residents.

Both races, naturally, came to resent the northern view of Mobile as another intractable southern monolith. It was not uncommon for blacks to rise to the defense of Mobile as an example of southern tolerance. One of the reasons Mobilians tended to take a more benign view of race relations was due to its population. Unlike Wilcox County, where a small number of whites controlled four times as many blacks, the white population in Mobile hovered around 50 percent.

By the time Herbert and Stella arrived, legal and social segregation had been firmly entrenched for nearly two decades, and in that regard Mobile was no different from the rest of the South. Locals believed that despite the law, daily accommodations had allowed both blacks and whites to live in relative dignity. It was an idea, of course, that rested on the notion that moderation resided in the eye of the beholder. If you were the ones on top, daily life might have been fine, acceptable, without the coarse and brutal edge of, say, Birmingham.

If you were black and did not upset the social order, it was not necessary to live in fear. Moderation also depended on one’s standard of measurement, and in the South, the measure had always been Birmingham, two hundred miles to the north, centered in the heart of the Black Belt, both in the agricultural and racial sense. The locals would always use the backbreaking rigidity of Birmingham as the standard, and the contrast always worked in Mobile’s favor. Compared to Birmingham, Mobile appeared almost sleepy.

Part of the reason for this was its quirky history. Where most regions in the South were demarcated by the oppressive and linear weight of slavery, Mobile’s racial lines were somewhat less obvious. The city had been inhabited by the French and the Spanish. Where in much of the South there were just blacks and whites, Mobile was populated with another racial group, Creoles of Color. Though the event would first be co-opted and later defined by New Orleans, Mobile was the first city in the United States to celebrate Mardi Gras. The historical demographics of the city—with its high number of French and Spanish and a high number of citizens of mixed racial origin—made it difficult to strictly enforce the emerging racial codes that had effectively destroyed the promises of Reconstruction.

The truth was, however, that during the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, whites across the South organized a massive resistance to whatever gains blacks had made during Reconstruction. If fond memories existed of Bienville Square as a gathering place for all Mobilians, it was also true that long after the nation had abolished the slave trade, illegal slave ships docked on the Mobile River, next to the L&N Railroad and the Mobile and Ohio docks, and chained-together captured Africans were sold at auction in Bienville Square during the week. Another old slave market stood blocks away, on Royal Street, between St. Anthony and Congress.

During the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century, southern whites methodically restored the old social order through a punishing combination of legal and extralegal means. Mobile, despite an exterior gentility and a favorable comparison to some of the harsher southern cities, did not escape this organized assault on black freedoms.

In 1900, Montgomery adopted a series of segregation ordinances. Mobile was under similar pressure to enact stricter segregation laws, though the city had been relatively free of major incident. The following year, numerous states, including Alabama, rewrote their state constitutions, legally imposing segregation orders, disenfranchising blacks from voting and other social freedoms they had enjoyed during Reconstruction. Between 1895 and 1909, the first year of Herbert’s life, a massive campaign of disenfranchisement had begun.

South Carolina enacted laws severely limiting people of color from voting and prohibiting contact between the races in terms of education, marriage, adoption, public facilities, transportation, and prisons. During the same period, similar laws were enacted in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia (“White persons who marry a colored person shall be jailed up to one year, and fined up to $100. Those who perform such a marriage ceremony will be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined up to $200”), Maryland, Washington, Idaho, California (“Persons of Japanese descent in 1909 were added to the list of undesirable marriage partners of white Californians as noted in the earlier 1880 statute”), Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota (literacy tests) and South Dakota (intermarriage or illicit cohabitation forbidden between blacks and whites, punishable by a fine up to one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment up to ten years, or both), Kansas, and Nebraska.

In justifying separation of the races, the press served as an effective tool to incite fear among whites. It purported that blacks did not possess the social capacity to be treated with the same courtesies as whites, and that blacks were dangerous, uncivilized, a grave threat to the safety of the white women of Mobile. (In 1915, Alabama passed a statewide law prohibiting “White female nurses from caring for black male patients.”)

The social order had been upset by the large influx of blacks who inhabited the city during the final decade of the 1800s. The
Mobile Daily Item
was the most actively hostile newspaper in the city toward blacks—its coverage only spurred growing insistence among whites for the return of segregation. During a ten-day period in October 1902, its coverage proved even more relentless:

FURY OF A TEXAS MOB
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Finds satisfaction in lynching of negroes

H
EMPSTEAD
, T
EX
., O
CTOBER
21—After being tried with legal form and procedure for criminal assault and murder and given the death penalty in each case, Jim Wesley and Reddick Barton, negroes, were, late this afternoon taken from the authorities and lynched in the public square by an infuriated mob