The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (7 page)

In those days, children in Mobile were not obligated to attend school for their senior year. Students could enter the workforce after eleventh grade. That rule created an opening: If he did not make it, Henry promised his mother, he would return to the Josephine Allen Institute for his final year. Stella agreed. Henry Aaron would then report to Winston-Salem to meet the Clowns. Bunny Downs, the Indianapolis business manager, would be at the depot to meet him. Unlike Stella, Herbert tended to lean toward Henry’s way of thinking. Perhaps Henry’s leaving Wilcox as a teenager to discover his own destiny influenced Herbert’s viewpoint.

Ed Scott recalled the difficulty in convincing Stella to let her son go. As much as she wanted Henry to attend college, she was also largely unaware of just how talented her son was.

“I told her, if this kid was Satchel Paige,
²²
I wouldn’t be bothering you,” Scott said. “But you really don’t know what you have.”

E
D
S
COTT WAS
born near Dade City, Florida, in 1917 but was raised in Hobe Sound, ten miles from Jupiter, a few miles west of Jupiter Island, on the eastern coastline. The town was split into two distinct sections. There was White Town and Colored Town. “Hobe Sound proper was what we called White Town,” Scott recalled. “There wasn’t nothing in Colored Town back then. Now, there’s a golf course owned by Greg Norman.”

Though he was born years before integration, baseball was the center of Scott’s life. Unlike Henry, who was always something of a homebody, Scott was convinced at an early age that he would be a creature of the road.

A product of the Depression, he had a harsh childhood. According to the 1945 Florida state census, Scott’s formal education ended in the sixth grade, just before his twelfth birthday. Baseball provided an escape from a life of few possessions, and even less freedom. As a boy, one childhood memory stood out from the rest: the patch of field right outside of Colored Town, where a large slanted oak tree sat. To both races, it was known as “the Hanging Tree.” The Hanging Tree was where, Scott recalled, “you went when they wanted to teach the colored a lesson.” This was no product of a child’s imagination. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, more blacks were lynched per capita in Florida than in Alabama, Mississippi, or Georgia, the states with the most notorious reputations.

Baseball provided the diversion from such terrifying realities. It also provided Scott with an escape from his chores, especially the ones at which he was not particularly adept. Killing a chicken for supper was one such task. It was a chore that made him especially queasy, and he would never be particularly good at it. His mother, Anna May O’Neil, was unsympathetic.

“Back then, you didn’t tell your parents what you could and couldn’t do. She always used to tell me to take the chicken before the killing and put him in the pen. You’re supposed to hold and twist, in one motion. My mother came out and watched me. Instead of holding tight and twisting his neck, I was just twirling him. She’d just go out there and wring his neck like it was nothing. I never did kill one.”

When food supplies were low, the family subsisted on whatever was available. “We had a garden in the back. We ate gophers and sun turtle during the Depression. That, and biscuits and corn bread. No sliced bread,” he recalled. “That’s what you survived on.”

He set out for the road as a teenager, determined, not unlike Henry, to make baseball a part of his life. Unlike Henry, however, Ed Scott could not entertain the dream of playing in the major leagues. He caught on for a time with a Negro League team, the Norfolk Stars, where he considered himself an average player. He batted and threw right-handed, and had better than average speed and some power, but not enough to make a living playing baseball in the black leagues.

It was in reflecting on his own development as a player that Scott found the most kinship with Henry. In Henry, he saw a kid with raw ability who had not been taught the game of baseball. That made it easy for teams not to recognize his talent. It also made it easy for baseball scouts to make rash, inaccurate judgments about black kids who may have possessed the proper tools to play baseball but had never been taught
how
to play the game or told
why
certain elements of the game required specific skills.

“In those days, especially with blacks, you taught yourself how to play. You weren’t judged on how you caught the ball. You were judged if you
didn’t
catch the ball,” Scott recalled. “Fundamentals? Hitting was the fundamentals. If you could hit, you could play. You didn’t have a guy show you how to go after a ball and how to catch. The only thing they would tell you was to put two hands on it. Two hands on the ball, but I didn’t like that, because you can’t reach as high with two hands and you can’t run as fast. You had to learn it all yourself.”

Scott lived along the Florida Panhandle and arrived in Mobile in 1940. For him, Mobile was a haven. In many ways, Scott best represented the example of Mobile as a destination for blacks, in that it was, by degree, a more tolerant place than other southern cities. “It was a seaport town, so everything was a little easier. People came and went about their business.”

Herbert Aaron dealt with segregation by focusing on becoming self-sufficient. Herbert owned his own house. Most of his food came from his own garden. He restricted his interaction with whites whenever possible and did not assume equality.

Ed Scott was different. He was, in his own way, openly political, and his tongue could be sharp. He did not seek to confront whites, but nor did he shy away from contact with them, either. Segregation in Florida was far more debilitating, he thought. Scott believed Mobile’s whites seemed less convinced of the necessity for segregation. If he was wrong, he said, he felt at the very least that in Mobile he had encountered more whites who seemed willing to treat black people with dignity, if not total equality. Scott referred to them as “the good ones,” whites who would treat him with a measure of humanity, people who may have been frustrated as much by the racial environment as he. Mobile, he said, was full of “the good ones,” and they made his life in the city far easier. “That was why I fell in love with the city,” Scott recalled. “I found out that Mobile was one of the better places as far as the South. Later on, we had problems.

“Once, I was working at a country club, and I said something like ‘Okay’ to a white lady,” Scott recalled. “She turned away and later came back at me and said if I couldn’t address her as miss or missus or ma’am, then I should not say anything. When she was finished, I looked at her and said, ‘Okay.’

“See, that’s what you needed to survive. You needed the good ones, the ones who understood you were a person just like them. They had to go along with it all, because that’s the way things were, but they didn’t put their knee in your back, either.”

He always remained attuned to black life around the country, even though in those days blacks who simply read the Negro papers—the
Chicago Defender
and the
Pittsburgh Courier
, especially—were often branded as “agitators” and threats to the social order. “I would always buy the
Defender
and the
Courier
at the newsstand because all the Negro baseball—Paige, Luke Easter, Mule Suttles, Buck Leonard—was in there. I could keep up with them.

“Then one day, a white man said to me that the
Pittsburgh Courier
just caused a lot of problems. I told him that I bought the paper to read about the hangings and all the other things going on, because the
Courier
was the only way I could get my news.”

When he met Henry, Scott worked as a porter at the Scott Paper Company. He played with the Mobile Black Shippers and began to settle into a good life in Mobile, working during the week, playing baseball one day a week and doubleheaders on the weekends. On the side, as a way to maintain a toehold in black professional baseball, he became a part-time scout for the Indianapolis Clowns. Word got around that Scott was a conduit to professional ball. The kids began calling him “Scotty,” and he quickly became the most connected black baseball insider in Mobile.

One day in 1940, when he was using the Black Shippers team bus to transport WPA workers back from Brookley Field, a woman, Rebecca Deal, came out of the gate. “It was funny. I just happened to go out that way and she was standing at the gate. Before you know it, we ended up married.”

He used his old contacts in the Negro Leagues for a special purpose. Though the idea of playing in the big leagues would be unavailable to him, Scott never found himself embittered that post-Robinson blacks would enjoy opportunities denied him. He had always been close to the generations of black ballplayers who arrived too early to play in the major leagues and took seriously their brotherhood as men who would pave the road for the next generation. Scott was particularly close to Buck O’Neil, who, when he signed with the Chicago Cubs, became the first black scout in the major leagues, and the two maintained a friendly scouting rivalry over the years. Scott had taught O’Neil how to play golf, and then he became known as the man who had discovered the great Henry Aaron. Scott had the inside track on Henry, but a few years later, O’Neil and Scott were jousting over Clyde Williams’s little brother Billy, who had scouts buzzing from Florida to Texas. Buck O’Neil told everyone that Scotty had no chance at signing Williams. Scott, for his part, figured he had Williams to himself, as they shared the same outfield with the Black Shippers. But there was another scout for the Chicago Cubs, Ivy Griffin, who had been watching Billy Williams all along. And it was Griffin, working for the Chicago National League Ball Club, not O’Neil, who delivered Billy Williams to the Cubs.

There would be no place for men like O’Neil and Scott as players in the big leagues, but both would end up working for major-league clubs, and their satisfaction would have to come through developing the next generation of black players. For both men, that would have to do.

On the platform of the L&N Railroad, the train station on the southeast side of Mobile, Ed Scott said good-bye to Henry. It was March 1952. Stella and Herbert were there, as was Henry’s eldest sister, Sarah. He wore a dark work shirt with large pockets on each breast. His pants were neatly creased and pleated, and he wore a dusty pair of wing-tip shoes. To his right was not a cardboard suitcase, as was part of the lore, but a duffel bag. The bag contained two sandwiches, a baseball, and a baseball glove. Henry stood on the tracks, a frown on his face, his eyes closed against the sun, while Ed Scott took his picture. He then headed for Winston-Salem to meet the Indianapolis Clowns.

The story was that Henry promised his mother that he would return to finish high school, but the Josephine Allen Institute closed in 1953, and there would be no surviving document of a high school diploma. Henry would never answer the question directly as to whether he finished high school with a diploma or finished high school simply by not going back.

There was one thing about Henry that never made sense to Ed Scott, and throughout the decades he would be the only person to confront this piece of bedrock that was central to the legend of Henry Aaron.

“I never once saw him hit cross-handed,”
²³
Scott said. “I know, because I’ve seen guys who hit cross-handed and he didn’t. But that was something I missed, something I know for a fact I would have noticed. I’m telling you, I never saw it, but that became part of the legend. No point arguing about it now.”

H
ENRY
A
ARON WOULD
have the distinction of being the last Negro League player to be promoted to the major leagues who was talented enough to reach the Hall of Fame. After him, the best of the black talent would be cultivated directly by big-league clubs. Jackie Robinson represented the beginning of the end of separate baseball leagues and separate societies in general. Henry represented the end itself. When Henry met Bunny Downs in North Carolina to begin his career with the Clowns, it marked the final time the Negro Leagues would factor into the story of a black player ascending into the integrated world of big-league baseball.

The Negro American League in 1952 consisted of only six teams—the Indianapolis Clowns, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Philadelphia Stars, the Chicago American Giants, the Memphis Red Sox, and the Birmingham Black Barons—and the biggest name in the league, the legendary Oscar Charleston, was the Birmingham manager. The Clowns, and by extension the rest of the league, were ghosts-in-waiting. The team took Indianapolis as its name, but the Clowns were on the road every day of the year. They did not play in Indianapolis, nor did they have a home stadium there. Henry Aaron never played a game in Indianapolis.

The eighteen-year-old Henry would not enjoy the same experience as, say, Jackie Robinson on his way to the majors. When Robinson joined the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945, he was twenty-six years old. His teammates were Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. Buck O’Neil was the manager. The Monarchs were the kings of black baseball and therefore on a par with the great black entertainers. The Negro Leagues were always financially challenged and record keeping was, at best, temperamental, but during Robinson’s time, the Negro Leagues were still a vital part of black entertainment life.

In 1952, the dominant baseball team in black America was not even a Negro League team, but the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Negro League had lost its place. Henry knew if he showed any ability at all, it would only be a matter of time before a major-league team discovered him. Before he left Mobile, he had already seen the pathway to the big leagues. Willie Mays, for example, had played just a few months with the Birmingham Black Barons in 1950, and by the time Henry joined the Clowns, Mays had already played in a World Series.

It was only a matter of time. Within a week of the Clowns season opener, May 11, 1952, in Nashville, against the Philadelphia Stars at a ballpark called Sulphur Dell, the wheels were already turning. From his home on 472 East Ridge Road in Mobile, Ed Scott had begun a letter-writing campaign, keeping big-league teams informed of Henry’s talent. Scott had written to Billy Southworth of the Braves, and Branch Rickey in Pittsburgh. By 1952, Branch Rickey had left Brooklyn and was now running the Pirates. Nearly as much as Jackie Robinson himself, Branch Rickey had a name that was of great currency to black players. To be associated with the man who had desegregated the major leagues was no small thing. It was the reason why so many black kids wanted to play for the Dodgers, and why so many black adults from all over the country had adopted Brooklyn as their team.