The Big Bout Read online

  “How could I have been so . . . stupid, so naive, so . . .”

  “You weren’t. You were a child. He saved you. Started working on you way back then.”

  “But––”

  “And it was only out of your incredible sense of guilt and obligation and loyalty––to your family as much as Harry––that he was able to exploit you the way he did.”

  “I just feel so foolish, like such a silly little school girl.”

  “You’re not. Sorry you feel that way. But you’re not. I was the fool.”

  “You?”

  “Sure. For what I believed about you. For how I betrayed you, what I did to you.”

  “You saved me. Then you saved my life. You––”

  “Dress it up however you like, sister. I was the fool. And one of my own making. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’”

  She turned slightly but suddenly, snatching her gaze away from the bay, looking directly at me with intent and intensity. “I love you,” she said. At that moment, her mouth was an organ of fire, her vocal chords vibrating flames, her three small words containing an infinite amount of passion and compassion, appreciation and affection. “And you didn’t falter when you thought I had.”

  “The things I believed about you, the way I hated . . .”

  “It wasn’t hate,” she said. “It was love. Wounded, suffering, hurting, bleeding love. Your love for me was still your ever-fixed mark.”

  “Fixated,” I said.

  She smiled.

  We passed by the ornate, opulent, and lushly landscaped Oak Cove and I thought of Gladys all alone in her hospital bed––the way her husband of over thirty years was in a different room in a different building across town, and it made me sad. Life is loss, I thought. We lose everything eventually, everything in the end.

  We found Gladys slumped in a rocking chair next to her bed in her small, mostly empty room.

  She wore a wrinkled housecoat over simple men’s cotton pajamas that must have belonged to Henry.

  Her white hair was shorter and thinner than I remembered, her skin more pale and wrinkled.

  She was dozing, her eyes moving beneath her closed lids, her soft breaths coming out in small airy sounds she’d be self-conscious of if she could hear them.

  As we stepped into the small cell-like room, I was overcome with a profound sadness––and not just for Gladys, but for us all.

  Unbidden, images of an elderly, lonely Lauren slumped in just such a chair in just such a room forced their way into my mind.

  It all comes to this, I thought. And that’s if we make it this far at all.

  Gladys blinked a few times, opened her eyes, and smiled up at us.

  As usual, she had a gentle, sweet, pleasant expression on her face––the kind only the truly good and guileless are capable of.

  “Jimmy,” she exclaimed.

  I smiled at her and took her hand.

  “Merry Christmas, Miss Gladys,” Lauren said, taking her other hand.

  “Christmas?” she asked, confused. “Is it really? But I haven’t done my shopping. I don’t––”

  “We did it for you,” Lauren said. “We took care of everything. Just like you wanted.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lauren.”

  “That’s right. Lauren. Oh Lauren, I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget things.”

  “It’s okay. We all do.”

  “And who is this handsome young man with you?” Gladys asked, looking back at me.

  “That’s Jimmy. He used to work with Henry.”

  “Who?”

  Lauren looked at me.

  “What happened to your arm?” Gladys asked.

  “Just a little accident,” I said. “It’s okay. We’re just so glad to be here with you today. We love you very much.”

  The mask of confusion left her face and she smiled up at me.

  Her blue eyes seemed sunken and faded somehow, and a little lost in the excessive fluid of their sockets, but warmth and genuine generosity could still be seen in them.

  “I love y’all too. I really do. Now . . . who were y’all again?”

  “Jimmy and Lauren,” I said.

  “Jimmy, that’s right. You’re . . . my . . . son. Is that right?”

  I nodded and smiled.

  “That’s right, darling,” Henry Folsom said as he haltingly walked into the room. “He’s the closest thing we’ve ever had to a son.”

  Her face brightened. “Henry,” she said with unguarded affection, her soft, misshapen mouth forming an unrestrained smile.

  I stiffened and stood upright, angry adrenaline arcing through me.

  Lauren took my hand.

  “Well,” she said, “we’ve got to go now but we sure hope you have a very merry Christmas.”

  “Is it Christmas?” Gladys asked.

  “It is,” Folsom said. “December twenty-fifth, nineteen-forty-three.”

  I leaned down, lifted the cold, bony hand I was holding, and kissed it gently. “Merry Christmas,” I said. “We’ll see you soon.”

  “Is it Christmas again already?” she asked.

  We said goodbye and turned to walk out, never even acknowledging Folsom’s presence as we did.

  “I’ll be right back, honey,” Folsom said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Let me just see them out. Won’t take but a minute.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right here. I’m Gladys by the way. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  We were several feet down the hallway when Henry Folsom emerged from his wife’s room and began slowly following us.

  “Jimmy,” he said.

  We kept walking.

  “Jimmy. Please. I can’t catch you. Please stop for a moment.”

  Lauren squeezed my hand and we stopped and turned toward him.

  It took a moment, but he finally caught up to us.

  “Lauren, it’s so good to see you up and about. You look like you’re doing good.”

  “Doing much better than I would be if you had had your way,” she said.

  “I owe you both an apology. Things got out of hand. I got caught up in something that I thought I could control, but . . . I was wrong and I’m so sorry. I’m so glad you’re both okay. I really, truly am. And it means, world to me that you came to see my Gladys today.”

  “Thought you were still in the hospital,” I said. “Thought she was alone.”

  “Just got out. Decided to disobey doctors’ orders and just leave. Couldn’t be away from her another minute. She doesn’t know who I am most of the time, but . . . it seems to help her . . . just not being alone.”

  “I’d be happy to come sit with her some when you can’t,” Lauren said.

  “You would? Really?”

  “She had nothing to do with what you did or tried to do to us.”

  She has everything to do with it, I thought. She’s the reason he did it.

  “That would be . . .” he began, but his voice broke and he began to cry. “Thank you so much. I’m so sorry. Please find it in your hearts to forgive me and let me find a way to make it up to you.”

  “Imprisonment and attempted rape and murder and selling someone into sexual slavery aren’t really things you can make up for,” I said.

  “No, I guess they aren’t,” he said. “When you say it like that . . . I guess . . . we never know what we’re actually capable of, do we?”

  I thought about what I had done to get Lauren back, what I had found I was capable of, and what it had cost me.

  “Some of us know what we’re not,” Lauren said.

  She was standing up to power. Her voice was strong and steady.

  We were all quiet a moment. It was the closest he had come to admitting his part in our nightmare.

  I recalled reading something Dostoyevsky wrote. Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult t
han to understand him.

  Could I understand Henry? Was I him?

  “Then why would you … help . . . me . . . with––”

  “I’m helping her,” Lauren said. “Got nothing to do with you.”

  He nodded, and we turned and walked away without another word.

  Chapter Four

  “Joe Louis ain’t gonna be champion forever,” Saul Behr said.

  “You sure?” I asked.

  It wasn’t just that Louis had been champion for going on six years. It was the way he had dominated the division, outclassing every challenger by margins so wide as to seem like something from the movies. His title defenses before the war had been so often and so one-sided, sports writers took to calling Joe’s challengers the Bum of the Month Club.

  He smiled. Something he did often and easily, as if he found nearly everything amusing.

  Saul Behr was a trim sixty-something man with dark, intelligent eyes that sparked with equal parts deviousness and delight. His olive skin was only a little lined and what gray hair he had was thin and wispy.

  “I’m pretty sure,” he said. “I’ll tell you something else too. The war ain’t gonna go on forever neither.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Of all the contenders I’ve seen . . . Freddy has the best chance to be the next world champion.”

  “Okay.”

  “I ain’t the only one who thinks it. He’s attracting attention.”

  “And getting death threats,” I said.

  “You know how many people would like Joe Louis dead? He’s as non-threatening as a Negro heavyweight could be. Always says and does the right thing in public. Follows the rules. Hell, he’s helpin’ win the war. Raising all kind of funds through charity bouts. Remember what he said when he enlisted and they asked him his occupation? He said, ‘Fighting, and let us at them Japs.’ Says things like ‘We’ll win, ’cause we’re on God’s side.’ And lots of people still want him dead.”

  I remembered reading how Joe’s management actually gave him a list of rules to follow. Things like never have his picture taken with a white woman, never gloat over a fallen opponent, never engage in fixed fights, live and fight clean. And as far as I could tell, Joe had followed them all.

  Boxing, a sport I had loved and followed since childhood, was blighted by betting, marred by corruption. Joe Louis, America’s first Negro hero, had not only avoided the taint of turpitude, but had restored the nation’s faith in the sport.

  Joe was a gracious and graceful champion, and carried himself with as much dignity as anyone in professional sports ever had.

  “You know why Joe’s so careful?” Saul asked. “Why his public image is so pristine?”

  I nodded. “In addition to all the other reasons,” I said, “Jack Johnson.”

  “Black Jack Johnson,” he said, smiling and nodding.

  Joe Louis was not the first Negro heavyweight champion of the world. That distinction belonged to the Gavelston Giant, Jack Johnson. Everything Louis was not––or would not let himself be in public––Johnson was. Flashy. Flamboyant. Unapologetic. Controversial. Notorious. He had held the title from December 1908 until April 1915 and been the most famous and hated Negro in the country at the time––maybe the world.

  During a time of racial segregation and second-class citizenship for Negroes, Jack Johnson was written about and photographed more than just about anybody in the country. He was vilified and demonized by whites and didn’t care––which bothered them all the more. At a time when it was not only illegal but deadly for a black man to be in a relationship with a white woman, Johnson defiantly dated and even married them.

  “Even with all Joe’s done, even with how quiet and polite and differential, he’s still hated and some people will always want him dead––or at least not champ.”

  I knew from my many close calls with Clip the extent to which white people misunderstood, feared, and hated black people in general and black men in particular. It was sad and sick, a national disease that was particularly acute in the South.

  In perhaps the most important sporting event in human history, Joe had fought for his country, had taken on Hitler and the Nazis not once but twice, when he stepped into the ring against Max Schmeling.

  Joe fought Schmeling the first time in June of '36. The fight, which was supposed to be more of a tune-up than anything else before Joe got his shot at the title, followed hard on the heels of his being named Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press. Schmeling, a former champion, had won his title on a technicality when Jack Sharkey had been disqualified for a low blow, and was not considered a threat to the number-one contender. Perhaps because of this, Joe didn’t train as hard as he might have, opting to spend more time on the golf course than in the gym.

  Not so with Max. He not only trained intensely, but prepared carefully, actually obtaining the film of Joe fighting Paulino Uzcudun and studying it so thoroughly that he found a weakness in Joe’s style. Joe had a habit of dropping his left hand after he jabbed––something Max exploited in the process of handing Joe his first professional loss by knocking him out in the twelfth round.

  Schmeling’s shocking victory over Louis was used by the Nazis as confirmation of their racial superiority and as part of their enormous propaganda machine––something Schmeling wanted no part of.

  After defeating Louis, Schmeling expected a title shot against James J. Braddock, who had also won a shocking upset by defeating Max Baer for the heavyweight title, but behind the scenes Joe and Jim’s managers worked out a deal that led to a Braddock-Louis matchup instead of a Braddock-Schmeling one.

  When Joe beat Braddock and became world champion, it set up possibly the most important prizefight in history––a rematch with Schmeling.

  Because the Nazi party had so successfully used Schmeling’s defeat of Louis as a symbol of Aryan superiority, the rematch took on significant political implications. When Joe visited the White House a few weeks before the bout, the President told him, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.”

  The political ramifications of the fight only intensified when Nazi party publicists accompanying Schmeling in New York for the rematch issued statements such as a black man could not defeat a German, and that Schmeling's winnings would be used to build tanks for Germany.

  In the fevered buildup for the rematch, Schmeling’s hotel was picketed by anti-Nazi protesters and the entire world was watching.

  The fight took place the night of June 22, 1938, in Yankee Stadium in front of a crowd of over seventy thousand. Millions more around the world tuned in by radio.

  Unlike the previous bout, Joe took the rematch seriously and trained intensely, later remarking, “I knew I had to get Schmeling good. I had my own personal reasons and the whole damned country was depending on me.”

  He came into the fight weighing just under 199 pounds––six more than Max.

  The fight only lasted two minutes.

  The Brown Bomber battered Schmeling from the beginning, forcing him to the ropes and finishing him with a devastating body blow.

  Joe knocked Schmeling down three times and allowed him to throw only two punches during the entire assault.

  After the third knockdown, Schmeling’s trainer threw in the towel and the referee called a halt to the fight.

  “The thing is,” Saul said, “Freddy . . . Freddy’s no Joe Louis. He’s cut from the same unapologetically dark cloth as Black Jack Johnson. He’s smart and angry and outspoken. And he scares the shit out of most whites. And someone wants him dead before he ever gets the chance to be champ.”

  “But is this bout that important?” I asked. “I thought it was just an exhibition match. More for fundraising than anything else.”

  “It was,” he said. “But Gentleman Jeff Bennett backed out and the number one contender in the world, Leonaldo Lights Out Linderman, has stepped in to take his place. If Freddy beats Leonaldo, he’ll get a shot at Joe.”

  Gentleman Jeff Benn
ett was known as the world’s only boxing war correspondent, and though he was a better reporter than boxer, he was a hell of a good boxer.

  “What happened to Bennett?” I asked.

  “He disappeared. Don’t know any details. I’m sure there will be those that say I had something to do with it, but I didn’t. And neither did Freddy. Truth is, I’d’a preferred he have a few more fights before facing Linderman, but . . . I’ll have him ready.”

  Chapter Five

  I wasn’t prepared for how much like Clip his half brother would look.

  Except for the two good eyes and extra weight and muscle, Fighting Freddy Freeman could be Clipper Jones’s doppelgänger.

  “Damn he a good-lookin’ nigger,” Clip said.

  We were standing in the gym of Bay High School watching Freddy spar in a ring that had been set up for that reason.

  The temporary training facility, consisting of a boxing ring, heavy and speed bags, weights, and other exercise equipment, was used by both fighters at different times––though Linderman wasn’t utilizing it nearly as often as Freddy.

  “Huh, what’d I tell you?” Saul Behr said coming up from behind us. “Kid has somethin’, don’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Clip said, “astonishing good looks.”

  “He’s quick, tough, smart,” Saul said. “Fights defensively. Hard as hell to hit, but he’s got one hell of a beard on him too. He might get beat but he ain’t gonna get beat up. Or knocked out. Just ain’t gonna happen.”

  I nodded and continued watching.

  Freddy was fast and though he was outclassing his opponent, I wasn’t sure he had the skills to beat anybody other than a sparring partner. At five feet ten inches and one hundred and eighty-five pounds, Freddy was smallish for the division ruled by the Brown Bomber, who stood two inches over six feet and weighed in at just under two hundred pounds.

  “But his real secret is his punchin’ power. Both hands too. He catches you with that overhand right or short left hook . . . and . . . it’ll be night-night for Lights Out.”

  “All that may be true,” Clip said, “but I just can’t get over how goddamn good lookin’ he be.”