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  They quickly returned to Harlem, where Edna Mae was sequestered at the Theresa Hotel. After a few days of celebration, Sugar went back to Mitchell Field and was restricted to quarters. She was soon able to obtain an apartment at 276 St. Nicholas Avenue and 124th Street, right across from Sydenham Hospital. “This would be our little love nest,” Edna Mae noted. But for the better part of July and August, Sugar was out of the nest, missing a most newsworthy event that summer: a riot that ripped Harlem apart. According to an article in the New York Post on August 2, 1943, “The trouble started at 7:30…last night in the dingy lobby of the Hotel Braddock at 126th Street and Eighth Avenue. Sometime ago the police raided the hotel, and since then policemen have been stationed in the lobby twenty-four hours a day. Patrolman James Collins, of the 135th Street station, on duty last evening, tried to arrest a thirty-three-year-old woman for disorderly conduct. As he seized her a crowd began to collect, and Collins said that a Negro military policeman, Private Robert Bandy, of the 730th Regiment, stationed in Jersey City, attacked him. Bandy, the policeman said, wrested his night stick from him and hit him on the head with it, knocking him to the floor. As the soldier turned and ran Collins fired a shot after him, hitting him in the back. Collins got up and arrested the soldier, and in a few minutes other police arrived to help him.”

  But rumor outraced the facts, and soon there were people assembled in various sectors of Harlem, incensed by an erroneous report that a white cop had killed an unarmed black man. Pleading for calm, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said, “This is not a race riot.” By the time the melee was finally subdued hours later, six black men, shot by police officers, had been mortally wounded. Forty policemen and 155 civilians were listed by police as injured, and, according to one account, many more casualties of the wild and lawless night received minor injuries.

  Edna Mae was perched high above the street disturbance, watching the chaos from the window of her suite. Meanwhile, Sugar was busy teaching boxing at the base or getting in shape for a series of exhibition fights to supplement his meager fifty-dollar-a-month allotment. The suite at the Theresa was costly. Mike Jacobs got him two fights in Boston in the spring, but then failed to pay him all the money he promised. Jacobs was notorious for shortchanging and underpaying his fighters. Sugar was about to wring his neck, but the quick-thinking Jacobs told him a sad story about one of Sugar’s idols, Henry Armstrong. He convinced Sugar that a fight between them would be a lucrative payday for both of them, particularly for the destitute Armstrong. Always a sucker for a sob story, Sugar bit, and Jacobs went about staging the fight. Jacobs, known for his shrewdness, had no idea that Sugar was taking the fight with plans not to hurt his aging idol, but to hit him just enough to win the bout. When asked by sportswriters if his sentimental attachment to the warrior would affect him during the fight, Sugar said it wouldn’t. There was no way he could reveal his plan, lest the New York State Athletic Commission strip him of his license to fight. This was his secret; not even Gainford would know.

  Since it didn’t appear it would be much of a fight, Sugar took it easy during training at Greenwood Lake, even taking time out to pose for pictures with members of his increasingly large fan base. In one photo, his long arms are embracing a bunch of kids who just happened to be passing near the camp, while their father looks on beaming. Sugar’s pants are pulled way up on his torso, consistent with the zoot suit style of the period, his knit cap tight on his head. It’s a relaxed and calm Sugar—an extremely confident Sugar. He was ready to rumble.

  “When the bell rang in the Garden,” Sugar remembered, “I tested Henry with a few left jabs that snapped his head back. Then I threw a couple of right hands to the body, and I could feel him sag. He really was an old man.”1 And a fading facsimile of the legendary “Homicide” or “Hammering Hank” who, in his prime, was considered one of the greatest fighters of all time.

  Winning a ten-round decision, Sugar carried his idol, though he explained it otherwise to his cornermen, swearing he did all he could to take the old man out. Armstrong told reporters after the fight that even on his best night he never could have beaten Sugar. “He was too fast for me,” Armstrong told Dan Burley of the Amsterdam News. (Apparently the arm and ankle weights invented by Langley Waller, which helped Armstrong in previous fights, were no longer effective.) This would be among Armstrong’s last fights, but one of the best paydays of his long and glorious career. They drew 15,371 people, and the gross at the gate was $67,789. His boxing days over, Armstrong could only hope another stab at show business would provide some revenue, as it had for other pugs who’d hung up their gloves. In 1939, he had produced and starred in a film based on his life called Keep Punching. But other than a world premiere at the Apollo and a cast that included Canada Lee; Dooley Wilson, the piano player in Casablanca; Alvin Childress, who would later portray Amos on the television version of Amos ’n’ Andy; and disc jockey/bandleader Willie Bryant, nothing distinguished this effort.

  For his part, Sugar pocketed more than twenty thousand dollars, and gave Edna Mae five thousand of it. The take from the fight was a sizable addition to Sugar’s meager military allotment, which was already a source of irritation to his wife, especially as he had to set aside a portion of it for his son from his first marriage. Edna Mae received fifty dollars a month; Ronnie, the child, a little less; and Sugar’s mother an even smaller check.

  To keep Edna Mae company while he was away, Sugar bought her a puppy, a pedigree boxer. Another entry into their lives at this time was a man named, according to Edna Mae’s notes, Col. Hubert Julian Black, who shouldn’t be confused with a man of the same name who, with John Roxborough, comanaged Joe Louis. “He was a commissioned colonel in the U.S. Army,” she wrote, “and he was a good friend to us during Ray’s Army stretch.” That he was licensed to sell munitions, according to another note in Edna Mae’s files, is a further clue that the “Black” had been tacked on and this was in reality the flamboyant Hubert Julian, who would have been about fifty years old then, but hardly a colonel, since he had been bounced from the Army in 1943 as a buck private. Still, Julian was as well known for his derring-do adventures as he was for masquerading and impersonating. He was called “The Black Eagle” for his aerial exploits in the 1920s, having twice parachuted from a plane to land on rooftops in the heart of Harlem. Such daredevil feats were standard practice for this soldier of fortune, who ran Haile Selassie’s imperial air force in Ethiopia in the 1930s and later sold weapons and munitions to the highest bidders in the international market.2

  Colonel Black, or Private Julian, or whoever, volunteered to look in on Edna Mae from time to time while her husband was in the service and entertaining troops as a member of the Special Services unit. But he wasn’t there to check on her the day a Latin boxer talked his way into her apartment under the pretext that he was going to be meeting Sugar there. “He pulled a weapon on me and told me he was going to do terrible vulgar things to me to hurt my husband for not giving him proper respect,” Edna Mae recalled. “I threw fruit juice in his face and ran out of the apartment to the super’s apartment. We rushed back but he was gone. Sugar had a fight a few days away but I did not go. The Latin fighter was on the card. He was knocked out in his bout and died from the blow. Sugar was never told of the incident.”

  After the fight with Armstrong, Sugar was earning a monthly check touring with Joe Louis, during which they conducted boxing exhibitions at military camps. Having first met in Detroit when Joe was seventeen and Sugar ten, they had maintained a very close friendship, each attending the other’s fights, leading the cheering section. They had much in common. Both were Taureans: Louis’s birthday was May 13, Sugar’s May 3. They were sons of the South, with little or no sustained relationship with their biological fathers, whose families migrated to Detroit and the city’s Black Bottom. Neither fought under the name he was born with. Both became boxing immortals. And they would die on the same date, April 12, and at about the same age: Louis in 1981 when he was sixty-six, Sugar i
n 1989 when he was sixty-seven. So, it made sense that they would be in the Army together, exhibiting their manly skills in and out of the arenas. Virile and handsome, Sugar and Louis not only attracted the usual idol worshipers, but flocks of available women. Neither Sugar nor Louis ever demonstrated much self-control when it came to a beautiful woman—and in Louis’s company, the temptations became even more unavoidable for Sugar. Not even his love of Edna Mae could stem his unfaithful ways.

  On one occasion, Sugar invited Edna Mae to join him in Washington, D.C., but advised her not to come until that Saturday because he and Louis would be busy until then. To Sugar’s misfortune, she showed up a day early and caught him in his room with another woman. Sugar was able to shift the blame to Louis, telling Edna Mae that the woman was really Louis’s date. When he was caught a few weeks later with another woman, no excuse sufficed, and Edna Mae packed her bags and headed back to Harlem. It was the first of many separations.

  Sugar’s indiscretions while married to Edna Mae had begun—and they would multiply. Philandering was risky, but at least it wasn’t as bad as some of the other trouble that dogged Sugar and Louis’s tracks. In their day, when two black, Northern city slickers ventured to the land of Jim Crow, they usually observed the expected etiquette. Unless, of course, they were Sugar and the Brown Bomber.

  Trouble tipped up on them at Camp Sibert, Alabama, on March 22, 1944. The camp, only two years old, was established as a basic training facility and for training in chemical weapons and decontamination procedures. Eleven days before Staff Sergeant Louis and Sergeant Robinson had arrived at the camp, there had been an incident in nearby Gasden in which a black soldier, Private Raymond McMurray of Chicago, was brutally murdered. Police alleged that he had raped a white woman. Later, a white man confessed to the crime.

  Sugar and Louis went to the mainly white post depot to get transportation to nearby Birmingham. Because the bus for the colored soldiers was slow in arriving and there was a long line in front of them, the two boxers decided to call a cab. Louis headed to a phone booth where a group of white soldiers were waiting for a bus. When Louis came out of the booth he was accosted by an MP. Sugar later recalled the incident: “‘Say, soldier,’ he said to Joe, ‘get over in the other bus station.’ From Joe’s puzzled expression, I knew that he hadn’t understood what the guard meant, so he asked, ‘What you talkin’ about?’ ‘Soldier,’ the MP snapped, ‘your color belongs in the other bus station.’

  “‘What’s my color got to do with it?’ Joe said. ‘I’m wearing a uniform like you.’

  “‘Down here,’ the guard said in his ’Bama drawl, ‘you do as you’re told.’

  “I never saw Joe so angry. His big body looked as if it would explode at the MP. But knowing Joe, I realized that he was trying to control himself. Then the MP made a mistake. He flicked his billy club and poked Joe in the ribs.

  “‘Don’t touch me with that stick,’ Joe growled.

  “‘I’ll do more than touch you,’ the MP snapped.

  “He drew back the billy club as if to swing it at Joe. When I saw that, I leaped on the MP. I was choking him, biting him, anything to keep him away from Joe. I wrestled him into the grass. But before Joe had a chance to get at him, a few more MPs ran up and separated us.”3

  At the jailhouse where they were taken, a ranking officer intervened, heard the story, and reprimanded the MPs. If the military police didn’t know who they were, the colonel did, and to offset a possible riot at the camp, he had Sugar and Louis ride around in a jeep to show they had not been beaten up. A few years later, when Jackie Robinson would make a similar stand against Jim Crow injustices, he would attribute his boldness to what Sugar and Louis had done.4

  Soon, Sugar was in deeper trouble. According to his account, he tripped and hit his head in the barracks and blacked out. A week later he was in a hospital bed at Halloran Hospital on Staten Island. The hospital report said he had suffered a bad case of amnesia, so bad that he didn’t recognize Edna Mae or Gainford when they came to visit him. “He was transferred to this hospital on 4 April, 1944,” the neuropsychiatric report read, “and on admission he was described by the nurse as ‘very confused, repeating questions over and over.’” Sugar was given sodium amytal, or truth serum, in order to discover what had happened to him, but it proved ineffective, though there was some speculation that he might have faked it all to avoid going overseas. On June 3, 1944, Sugar was honorably discharged from the Army. Three days later, D-day, the invasion of Normandy, was launched.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAMPION AT LAST!

  Out of uniform and back in civilian life, Sugar had to redeem his standing both as a citizen and as a top contender for the welterweight title. He was being branded a deserter and less than patriotic in some newspaper columns because of his failure to stay with his unit when it was shipped abroad. It would take years before the jeers on this matter subsided, though he had been honorably discharged. The path was equally difficult in his pursuit of a title shot. Jacobs and other major promoters were not impressed by his six consecutive victories. Each time he requested a title fight he was told that he could make more money without the crown because he’d get more fights. But Sugar insisted that it was no longer about the money so much as it was about fame, glory, and international acclaim. He wanted to be known, like Louis, all over the world.

  Promoters used a number of excuses as to why they couldn’t arrange a championship fight for Sugar, often citing how difficult he was at the bargaining table. They felt that he was hard enough to bargain with while a challenger. “Just think what he’d be like if he were the champ,” they asserted. It was a proposition that few promoters, including Jacobs, were interested in encountering. Plead as he might, there was no title shot in the foreseeable future, Sugar was told repeatedly. Rather there were journeymen pugs such as the likable George Costner, whom Sugar kayoed in the first round February 14, 1945, in Chicago. “We attended a large celebration after the fight that was held in the cabaret room of one of the large hotels,” Edna Mae recalled. “Costner and his handlers were invited guests also. Costner, whose nickname was also Sugar, came over to our table and congratulated Sugar on his victory and asked if Sugar would allow him to dance with me. Sugar then asked, ‘Honey, will you dance with this fellow so that we both can teach him some lessons in the same night.’”

  Althea Gibson was another apt student of their so-called lessons. She was a teenage string bean of a tennis player when she became associated with Edna Mae and Sugar just after World War II. Both strongly encouraged her to pursue her development on the court by studying with a reputable coach down South. They also helped Althea in her musical aspirations, which she would pursue professionally after vanquishing whatever opponent was unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of one of her sizzling serves. “Edna Mae and Ray were kind to me in lots of ways. They seemed to understand that I needed a whole lot of help,” Althea recounted in her memoir. “I used to love to be with them. They had such nice things. Sometimes they would even let me practice driving one of their fancy cars, even though I didn’t have a license. I think it gave Ray a kick to see how much fun I got out of it.” Once, when Althea wanted to buy a saxophone, Sugar told her to seek the advice of a musician friend before she bought one. She found one at a pawnshop for a hundred and twenty-five dollars, and Sugar gave her the money to purchase it. “I’ve never forgotten it,” she enthused. “I still have the sax, although I haven’t tried to play it in a long time—which is a break for the neighbors. They’re better off when I sing. I hope.”1

  Edna Mae recalls how Sugar became aware of Gibson’s all-around athletic skills. There was a time in the early forties when Sugar used to take groups of children to the bowling lanes in the Bronx. “They swarmed all over Sugar when the word got out that he was on his way to the bowling alleys,” she recorded in her notes. “Some of them were pretty good, and when they beat Sugar he had to pay for the game and refreshments. One of the young women that we met there
was relentless in her efforts to beat Sugar, and he became fascinated by her skill and dedication. She really endeared herself to him and he became concerned about her being in the bowling alley at any hour that he’d show up and he finally asked her if she attended school. She told him that she’d lost interest in school. He worried her so much about continuing her education that she told him that she’d be willing to go back if he bought her a saxophone.

  “Sugar shopped around the music stores with a musician friend of his and they selected a horn for her, and per their agreement, she was shipped off to school. She was a good student and kept Sugar and me abreast of her progress.”

  Looming before Sugar was another major hurdle—another certain, bloody showdown with the Bronx Bull, slated for February 23, 1945, in New York City. But this “showdown,” like their second one later that year on September 26 in Chicago, turned out to be more illusion than real, as Sugar easily beat LaMotta on both dates.

  Meanwhile, Edna Mae and Sugar, who had by now changed his hairstyle from the high-peaked pompadour to the signature conk, had, at least temporarily, patched up their marriage and were breezing along with the postwar euphoria, settling comfortably once more into the fabric of Harlem. As per Bing Crosby’s top song of the year, the two were “accentuating the positive” things between them, enjoying the good life with close friends and smooching at the Alhambra Theater on Seventh Avenue, especially when a Charles Boyer or Ray Milland film was featured. They were both hopeless romantics, and all of the dreams they shared were gradually coming true.

  Things were also relatively smooth for Sugar’s partner, Joe Louis, and his ex-wife, Marva. Louis owed her $25,000 in back alimony, but rather than settling outright, she agreed to a contractual arrangement that made her one of his comanagers. Given Louis’s indebtedness, she believed the payoff would be far better that way. When the Brown Bomber knocked out Billy Conn at Yankee Stadium in June 1946, his purse was $625,000. After paying his obligations, he was able to bank $70,000. Of course, Marva got her percentage as well. Their amity was of such magnitude that they decided to remarry in July. “Marva rationalized her decision by explaining that during their divorce she had not met any man as interesting as her ex-husband. Unfortunately, their second marriage was destined to be an instant replay of their first.”2