The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (8 page)

On May 23, Scott received a letter from George Sisler
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—“Gorgeous” George Sisler, who hit .400 twice in his fifteen years in the big leagues—confirming Rickey had received Scott’s letter, dated May 21, 1952, “regarding Henry Aaron, 17 years old, 170 lbs, 5’11”. We will send the contents of your letter to our scout in the area who will endeavor to see him play. Mr. Rickey wishes to thank you for having thought of him.” Scott had already contacted the Boston Braves, and Dewey Griggs, the club’s top scout, was watching Henry. Griggs, in fact, had been following Henry since he first joined the Clowns. The New York Giants were watching Henry, too, the luscious prospect of Mays and Henry in the same outfield tantalizingly close.

Henry joined the Clowns in Winston-Salem, but his Negro League career lasted all of fourteen games. He was skinny and poker-faced, quiet around older, calloused men who had grinded on the black baseball circuit for years. Teammates barely knew what to make of him—until he stepped into the batter’s box. There was the double header against the Memphis Red Sox, June 1, 1952, in Buffalo. Jim Cohen went the distance, winning 6–4. Henry went four for five with a home run. In the finale, an 11–0 washout, Henry went three for four, and Dewey Griggs was on the phone to Boston faster than Henry’s first home run left the park. John Mullen, the Boston Braves general manager, authorized Griggs to “do whatever it took” to wrest Henry from the grip of Clowns owner Syd Pollock. The secret was out.

MAJOR LEAGUE SCOUTS TAKE GANDER
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AT
CLOWNS’ SHORTSTOP, HENRY AARON

K
ANSAS
C
ITY
, M
O—…
Rookie Henry Aaron, Clowns’ sensational shortstop, continued his blazing slugging, getting four of five in the opener including a long home run over the right field wall.

Major league scouts are swarming into parks where the Clowns are playing…. All seem to agree he stands at the plate like a young Ted Williams.

By June 7, four teams had scouts tracking Henry. Fay Young, the venerable
Defender
sports columnist, had already signaled to any fans interested in seeing Henry to head to the nearest ballpark to catch their “last glimpse of Henry Aaron, the league-leading Clowns shortstop.” With the first half of the Negro League season complete, Henry had run away with the league.

CLOWNS’ AARON LOCKS UP
NAL SLUGGING HONORS
²⁶

Rookie Henry Aaron will win slugging honors in the Negro American League, according to the latest figures of the How News bureau.

Aaron leads the league in batting with .483, in runs with 15, hits, 28, total bases, 51, doubles, 6, home runs, 5, and runs batted in, 24.

Henry was destined for greatness, but there was a certain melancholy to it all. A decade earlier, Henry would have been a major attraction for the league, a drawing card in the vein of Josh Gibson or a Satchel Paige or Oscar Charleston, or any of the old-time greats of the black leagues. But Henry was heading beyond the segregated life. He represented progress, and for as many avenues as the future opens, it closes just as many. Henry Aaron’s month in the Negro Leagues was nothing less than the final period on the obituary of the great black leagues.

Bunny Downs had promised Henry that the Clowns would pay him two hundred dollars per month. Henry lasted with the Clowns exactly one month. On June 11, 1952, the Boston Braves and the Clowns completed a deal for Henry Aaron. Henry’s last act as a Negro Leaguer, according to the
Defender
, was to rap two singles in the opener and play a “whale of a game” in splitting a doubleheader at Comiskey Park against the Chicago American Giants. The Braves sent Henry to its farm club in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and sent Syd Pollock and the Clowns a check for ten thousand dollars.

Six weeks earlier, Henry had never been outside of the Mobile city limits without his parents. The farthest from Mobile he had been was to visit Papa Henry and Mama Sis in Camden—on horseback. But now, during the second week of June 1952, Henry was boarding a North Central Airlines plane for the first time in his life, choking on his own panic from Charlotte to Eau Claire, close to retching on each turbulent bounce across the Appalachians to the broad expanse north. He was eighteen years old and had never had anything close to an extended conversation with a white person. He would now engage in activities that Alabama had drafted laws to prevent: He would live among whites, play ball with and against them on the same field, and talk to them—at least under the strict definitions of the law—as equals.

Henry had never played against white players—interracial competition had been prohibited by custom in Alabama since the late 1880s and would soon be enacted into law during the 1950s. Unlike Robinson, he did not have the advantage of social refinement afforded by education and experience. One would have had to look hard to find a kid less prepared to navigate this sudden new world. He was completely on his own.

Clell Buzzell, the sports editor of the local Eau Claire paper, picked Henry up from the airport and took him home so his wife, Joyce, could meet the newest member of the Eau Claire Bears. As author and Eau Claire native Jerry Poling wrote in his book
A Summer Up North
, “The introduction might have been a pleasure
²⁷
for Joyce but not for Aaron. Seeing the scared, skinny young man in her living room, she thought he was fourteen or fifteen years old and feeling out of place. She felt sorry for him.”

“He was shaking,” Poling quoted Joyce Buzzell as saying. “He had never been in a white person’s home before.”

The Eau Claire Bears had been integrated three seasons earlier by Sam Jethroe. Jethroe himself had played a small role in the early story of integration in April 1945, when he and Marvin Williams accompanied Jackie Robinson to Fenway Park for a notorious, humiliating tryout with the Boston Red Sox. Jethroe would never be contacted by the Red Sox, but in 1950 he became the first black player with the Boston Braves, and won Rookie of the Year. Another top black prospect, Bill Bruton, had played for Eau Claire in 1950.

The population of Eau Claire in 1952 was virtually 100 percent white—35,000 residents, seven blacks, twenty more nonwhites. Henry kept his distance, adopting the proper code of conduct for southern blacks: Do not approach whites unless directly addressed. He would walk the streets of Eau Claire and the young children would stare at him as though he were a foreign species. Sometimes their mothers would apologize with polite nods to him; the children had never seen a black person.

The adults weren’t much better. At least the children had the excuse of being young. It was as though he had entered an alternate universe in that Henry walked around town among whites but did not sense the inherent hostility that was an ingrained element of the Mobile social atmosphere.

Henry rented a room at the Eau Claire YMCA at 101 Farwell Street, which was located downtown, a mile and change from Carson Park, where the Bears played their home games. The two other blacks in the club—outfielder John Wesley Covington and the catcher, Julius “Julie” Bowers—also lived there, while the white players roomed with families.

Henry did not often socialize with Covington or Bowers, though the three men lived in the same YMCA building. In later years, Covington recalled the young Henry as distant, hard to read. Even in private settings, even around his black teammates, Henry wasn’t exactly the guy cracking jokes at the card table. He was guarded, mostly trying not to betray all that he did not know. “He just would not open up to you.
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Hank was as far away from me at times as he was from anybody else on the ball club,” Covington recalled in 1993. “I don’t think at that time we were trying to be close.”

For the prospects, Class C ball was just a stepping-stone to bigger things, a place to start an expected ascension. For the others, baseball might never be as good as it was in the Northern League, which made it the perfect place to travel and party and bond.

In June 1952, Henry was neither the can’t-miss phenom nor the teenager happy to stretch a baseball dream as far as his middling talent would take him. He knew he had the ability to play, but he also knew that he could be right back with the Clowns should anything go wrong in Eau Claire. He had, the contract said, thirty days to prove that he was worth the investment.

And so he kept his distance, adopting an immersion technique his family would have immediately recognized as belonging to Papa Henry: he kept to himself, studying others and forming opinions without volunteering much. While it was a protective device, designed not to expose his limits in education and sophistication, it was within this total immersion into the white world where a damaging Aaron caricature first took root. Marion “Bill” Adair, the Eau Claire manager and a southerner from Alabama, began what would become a career-long commentary on the Aaron demeanor, and by extension, his intellect. “No one can guess his IQ
²⁹
because he gives you nothing to go on. He sleeps too much and looks lazy, but he isn’t. Not a major-league shortstop yet, but as a hitter he has everything in this world.”

Eau Claire was a lonely and distant place. From the hallway phone at the YMCA, Henry would call Stella not only to hear a familiar voice but to tell her he was coming home, he was quitting. Each day the conversation was similar: he wasn’t afraid he would fail. He just didn’t care for being so far away from home. Homesickness was especially acute for the first generation of black players integrating the game. Virtually all of them, before reaching greatness, told a story about wanting to quit. Some of them, like Billy Williams, actually jumped their clubs and went back home. More than half a century later, Williams remembered leaving his farm club in Amarillo, Texas, and returning to Mobile, not picking up the phone even when the big club, the Cubs, called personally to bring him back. And the stories always ended the same, too: Once a player arrived home, it was his family who sent him back out into the world, making sure a special opportunity to escape was not wasted.

The difference was that these kids weren’t just learning how to adjust to curveballs far from home, nor were they integrating the game. They were integrating society. Henry would answer for the next half century the question of what those days in Eau Claire were like, being the only black person sitting at the drugstore counter, but the inverse was also true: The overwhelming majority of his white teammates had never engaged in a meaningful conversation with a black person, either.

And the worst thing of all for an eighteen-year-old ballplayer was the lack of girls. Naturally, there were girls all over the place. Black girls, however … well, that was a different story. The Northern League consisted of teams in Eau Claire, Duluth, Fargo-Moorhead, Grand Forks, Aberdeen, Sioux Falls, and St. Cloud—not exactly the best advertisement to meet eligible black women.

Herbert junior would often be the one to tell him to forget about the idea of coming back to Mobile, that there was nothing in Mobile for him. He would do himself no good being just another southern black boy without prospects. Herbert had persuaded him, boosted him, revived him. Then came the moment that transformed two lives: June 20, Carson Park, Eau Claire versus the Superior Blues, the White Sox farm club. Henry is playing shortstop. In the top of the eighth, Gordie Roach hits Superior’s Gideon Applegate and then walks the next batter, Chuck Wiles, the Superior’s catcher. The next ball, a chopper to second, would play in slow motion to anyone who was at the park that day.

Bob McConnell fields the ball and flips to Henry for the first out, and Henry steps on the bag and winds to throw back to first for the double play.

Wiles is racing for second but has not yet gone into his slide. Henry fires sidearm to first. These were the days before batting helmets. Wiles took the full force of Henry’s throw in the flesh of his right ear. He stood for a moment before crumpling to the ground, unconscious, while Applegate rounded third for the tying run. Wiles was taken off the field on a stretcher and rushed by ambulance to Luther Hospital.

That might have been the end of the story, one of those fluky baseball accidents. Except that upon arriving at Luther Hospital, Wiles slipped into a coma, in which he remained for three days. His career was over. The doctors consoled the young catcher by telling him had his outer ear not borne the brunt of the impact, Henry’s throw would have killed him.

Wiles spent two more weeks in the hospital, his inner ear crushed. He lost his equilibrium. Periodically, he would entertain the thought of returning. The next year, Wiles and his family moved to Albemarle, North Carolina, where he signed on with a semipro club, the Cotton Mill Boys, but the experiment ended in a heartbreaking finale, Wiles losing his orientation while on the base paths, to the amusement of fans, who thought he was joking. “One time I got to second base.
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I was determined I was going to get home,” Wiles told Jerry Poling. “I don’t think I even knew where I was. I missed home plate by a lot. The fans thought I was clowning.” Chuck Wiles never played baseball again.

The Wiles incident rattled Henry, as would the vitriolic response from the Superior fans when Eau Claire next arrived. During moments of despair, he called home and told Stella he was returning to Mobile. Each time Henry called, Stella would hand the phone to his brother Herbert, who took the receiver and told him the same thing each time: “The future is ahead of you, not back here in Mobile.”

For years, Henry would recall how close he came to quitting the game, fearful that he could kill someone on the baseball diamond. Not an interview regarding his Eau Claire years would pass without a reference to Chuck Wiles. Henry would be betrayed by his lack of world experience, for while Wiles lay in a coma, Henry hit his first home run for the Bears, June 22, against Reuben Stohs. Wiles would never hold a grudge against Henry and he would say he believed Henry was remorseful about the accident. But he also would never forget that Henry did not apologize or console him in person.