Unforgivable Blackness by Geoffrey C. Ward

Author:Geoffrey C. Ward [Ward, Geoffrey C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-49237-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Christmas holidays in 1909 had been marked by chaos, as Hattie McClay, Belle Schreiber, and Etta Duryea all found themselves at Tiny Johnson’s home at the same time. Christmas Eve 1910 would be far worse.

Back in Chicago that afternoon, Johnson drove to Lippman’s jewelers, where he purchased something, perhaps an engagement ring. He may have been planning to ask Etta to marry him. But then he got a telephone call at home from the detective he’d hired. Etta and the Frenchman had been seen together at several South Side cafés.

Here the stories diverge. According to the version Johnson later gave to the Chicago Tribune, he got a second call moments later, this time from Etta, who was at the Pekin Café and in what the Tribune called a “hysterical condition.” He rushed there, found her badly beaten—presumably by Gaston Le Fort—and sent her in his car to the Washington Park Hospital. Later that night, he charged, the Frenchman had tried several times to break into his Wabash Avenue home. Johnson’s mother and sisters, he said, had scared the driver off.

Federal prosecutors would later insist that Johnson himself had beaten Etta while drunk, and the preponderance of evidence suggests that they were right. According to his friend Roy Jones, the champion turned up at his door in the Levee District late that night, clearly frightened that Etta would file a complaint against him. Johnson told him he and Etta had had “a disagreement … a fight,” and implored Jones to visit her in the hospital as soon as he could, “to intercede and bring [us] together again.” Later, asked in court why he had been entrusted with these delicate tasks, Jones simply said that Etta “always had a lot of confidence in me.” But like Johnson, Jones was a black man who lived with a white woman; he was also a brothel keeper and therefore presumably expert at talking abused women out of going to the law. (In the end, he was never allowed into the hospital to see Etta.)

Meanwhile, Johnson got out of town. At eight o’clock the next morning, he picked up Belle Schreiber at her new apartment and, with Barney Furey, set out for Milwaukee, where he was scheduled to appear onstage that afternoon. A new chauffeur named Charles Lumpkin was behind the wheel. It was bitterly cold, and Johnson was ill as well as hungover. He thought a drink might steady him. They stopped in Libertyville, Illinois, long enough to get him some brandy. It made him feel worse. He asked Lumpkin to pull over on a bridge. Johnson urinated blood. They continued on to the St. Charles Hotel, where he and Belle registered once again as husband and wife. The champion was too ill to spar that afternoon or evening. The next day, the Milwaukee Free Press played Johnson’s illness for laughs and he went along, grateful that the press hadn’t yet caught wind of what had really happened.

SNORT OF SQUIRREL WHISKEY PUTS

JACK JOHNSON DOWN

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