The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant Read Free Book Online

workplace, an edict that confronted southern segregation and discrimination patterns directly. One practical application of the order occurred at ADDSCO, where a number of black assistants were promoted to welders, with the same title, same responsibilities, and same salary as their white counterparts. On Tuesday, May 25, 1943, at approximately 9:00 a.m., a fight broke out between whites and blacks, which escalated into a full-scale riot. Black workers, fearing for their safety, were sent home for two days. Roughly 350 state and federal troops arrived to maintain order.
    For the press, it was 1902 all over again. The Mobile Register used the disturbance as justification for universal segregation.
    ABSOLUTE SEGREGATION OF RACE 14
THE ANSWER TO ADDSCO PROBLEM
    The bomb on Mobile’s doorstep has not been extinguished. It still smoulders and will continue to do so unless and until officials of the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company adopt a clear-cut policy of absolute racial segregation in the preparation of this great war enterprise.
    The son who would one day become the great Henry Aaron, from his earliest days on, would always be called a mama’s boy, but it was the desire of the father to escape the debilitating roots of Wilcox County and, in turn, to give the Aaron name meaning beyond its past, thereby setting the course the son would one day navigate.
    “Obviously,” Herbert said in an interview forty years later, “the black color of my skin 15 presented many unnecessary problems in my life.”
    H ENRY HAD BEEN taken with baseball ever since the family lived in the cramped spaces of Down the Bay. Herbert junior would toss bottle caps at him at top speed. Henry would watch the caps, flat and convex and erratic, whiz toward him and, unflinchingly, eyes steady and even, he would batter them with a stick. In Toulminville, his brothers and friends like Cornelius Giles would play baseball until the sun disappeared and it got so dark—streetlights were years away—that the kids couldn’t see their hands in front of them. So instead of going into the house, the boys would light rags on fire, toss them up into the dark sky, and hit the descending fireballs. These stories were true, and they would serve the legend.
    If there was a dominant memory of Henry during his boyhood days, it was that of a kid who perhaps more than anything else wanted to be left alone. When he was on the baseball field, he was dynamic, but the hard part often was getting him there. Henry was a loner. He would leave his house and venture alone through the tall brush to reach Three Mile Creek. There he would escape from the world and fish and think. He caught catfish and trout and would not be seen for hours at a time. Stella would always call him a loner and mentioned in interviews later in life that when he played baseball, it was not a social event, but his personal avocation. Unlike most kids, for whom sports was as much for camaraderie as for score keeping, Henry played for the game and not to make friends, she said. Many times, the kids with whom he played remained there on the diamond, cardboard cutouts for his ambition. Sports, in other words, did not transform him into a social creature. A female former classmate recalls Henry as certainly having been “interested in girls … but not as interested as he was in playing baseball.”
    When he wasn’t wandering along the riverbanks, Henry was playing baseball. His desire for solitude explained in part why he was so comfortable in the batter’s box, playing the game of baseball, the most individual of team sports. There, standing at the plate, he was alone, relying on his own ability to sustain him. No one could hit the ball for him, and no one else could take credit for what he did in the batter’s box. Hitting, it could be argued, represented the first meritocracy in Henry’s life. In a world where virtually everything could be qualified, hitting was the most unambiguous of