It was a mineralogical oasis in the land of cotton and corn, a swath of hard, jagged terrain through central Alabama whose riches lay dormant for thousands of years. Jones Valley was bounded on one side by Red Mountain, packed with limestone and iron ore, and on the other by low ridges that covered precious veins of coal. Dolomite lay beneath the valley itself. These raw materials allowed the region’s largest city, Birmingham, founded in 1871, to become the industrial heart of the South. Its main product: steel.
The cornfields surrounding Birmingham gave way to a new pyrotechnic vision. Twenty-ton electronic locomotives hauled coal or iron, blasted from their ancient beds, to the sweltering mills, where hundred-foot-high blast furnaces coughed smoke and flame and sprawling open-hearth ovens converted molten iron to steel. By the late 1930s, the valley produced more than 4 million tons of ore and 13 million tons of coal each year. The largest company—Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad (TCI), a subsidiary of U.S. Steel Corporation—hailed “the adventure of steel making” for its wholesome conveniences: “the family automobile, the kitchen sink, your lawn mower, the bed springs that make possible a comfortable night’s rest.”
This great adventure would not have been possible without black miners and millworkers. Many were farmers who came to “the Pittsburgh of the South” believing that heavy industry would deliver them from agrarian poverty. In 1922, the novelist Clement Wood, describing a black family’s move from rural Alabama to Birmingham, captured the era’s promise in all its volcanic glory: “A spell had been laid over everything—a spell of hot beauty. The sky was washed with a flaming glow, brightest upon the bellies of the low-hovering clouds. A pillar of solid fire shone off to the left; then a long mound of red winking eyes; and in the building directly in front, ruddy gold flame... even the car tracks pulsed gold.”
Willie Mays grew up in the mill towns outside Birmingham, but for him the sky was not washed with a flaming glow and the car tracks did not pulse gold. He wanted nothing to do with steel, wire, or coal or with the other menial jobs that were then available to black men in the South. “I didn’t have any heroes,” he later said, “who folded underwear in a laundry.” While his success in baseball could be traced to his sublime natural skills, it was also driven by more pragmatic considerations. Willie Mays wanted a better life for himself and his family, and baseball was his ticket to that life. His father made sure of it.
Willie Howard Mays, Sr., was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1911, when most southern blacks were Republican, the party of Emancipation. So he was named after William Howard Taft, the Republican in the White House. The corpulent president was an ironic namesake: Willie Mays’s nickname was Kitty Cat or just Cat, a reference to his feline grace and explosive quickness. He did everything fast—talked fast, played cards fast, walked fast. But most of all, he was cat-quick on the baseball field. Small and muscular, he did not so much glide after a ball—he pounced. He had a bowlegged, pigeon-toed walk, a gait that his son would inherit. Cat Mays’s father, Walter Mays, was a sharecropper and a fine pitcher in his own right, and Cat Mays, describing his father’s talent, said, “It went from him to me and to the third generation, my own son.”
Exactly when Cat Mays arrived in the Birmingham area or with whom is unclear, but surely he or his family was lured by the mines, mills, and furnaces that produced the valuable metals. But Birmingham had something else—baseball.
Compared with the North, baseball and its precursors came slowly to the South. The game was rarely played there before the Civil War and did not take root until after Reconstruction, when railroads helped create small towns and trading villages. Typically an urban game, baseball gradually found a home in these southern communities, the teams themselves viewed as symbols of progress. Both whites and blacks played, though the sport had special meaning among freed slaves. In the postbellum South, baseball was the most popular event at the annual “Juneteenth” (Emancipation) celebrations; the contests, when combined with food, dancing, and music, were imbued with a holiday spirit that was later evident in the Negro Leagues.
In southern mining communities and steel plants, baseball was also designed to tighten the bonds between labor and management. Industrial jobs moved workers from the seasonal rhythms of farming to the uncompromising dictates of the clock. The “boss men” wanted faithful employees who would adhere to their grinding regimen; they also wanted their workers to shun the labor unions who sought footholds in these new outposts. That loyalty could not be bought by wages alone. The company towns had to provide schools, housing, health care, and recreation, and few activities stirred more passion than baseball. The hotly contested Industrial Leagues, in which each team was sponsored by an individual company, produced some of the game’s best early players, notably “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. The leagues were also a godsend for their sponsors—a collective enterprise that did not threaten management’s hegemony but did reinforce workers’ allegiance to their employers, who bought their uniforms, scheduled their games, and covered their expenses. It was a small price for labor peace.
While the South is often associated with football, it was no accident that both Cat Mays and his son embraced baseball, which was “the most important ritual in the industrial community,” according to the scholar Christopher Dean Fullerton.
That ritual was particularly spirited in Birmingham, whose Industrial League was considered the largest and most competitive in the South. It was created in 1905, with virtually every enterprise having its own team. The squads were segregated, the game’s appeal crossing racial lines. By 1928, there were thirty white teams and eight black, the latter group with names like ACIPCO (American Cast Iron & Pipe Company), Stockham Valve, and the Pratt City Nine. Some contests drew several thousand fans, many of whom had no place to sit, save an empty hillside. The games were covered by newspapers, presided over by company officials, and highlighted by marching bands and jubilee singers. In some cases, workers were hired strictly for their talents on the diamond and rewarded through higher wages and bonuses as well as lighter work schedules.
The best white players went on to play in organized baseball, and after 1920, the finest black athletes could graduate to the Negro Leagues. But even the professional black players didn’t necessarily make more money than their peers in the Industrial Leagues. The black professional teams typically received a percentage of the gate receipts, which were erratic at best, and earnings were also reduced by travel expenses.
The benefits of hitting and catching a baseball were not lost on Cat Mays. Most of the mining and mill jobs were dangerous, but starting as a young man, perhaps even before he was twenty, Mays swept floors in TCI’s wire mill in Fairfield, nine miles southwest of Birmingham, and played baseball for the Fairfield Wire Mill team. Sweeping floors was a reward for his athletic prowess, a benign task that allowed him to leave work at 2 P.M. and head for the ball field. The mill paid him $2.60 a day, but the work wasn’t steady. The Great Depression throttled Birmingham—the worst-hit city in the country, according to the Roosevelt administration. So Cat Mays scraped by as a kind of baseball free agent, selling himself to the highest bidder (to an Industrial League team or to one that barnstormed through the South). “I made it during the Depression,” he later said, by playing “for anybody who’d give you money. Because every time somebody come to get me to play baseball, I’d say, ‘I can’t go, man—I got something to do.’ And he’d say, ‘Come on, man, I’ll give you $2.50.’ Sometimes when things was bad, you’d have to go for ten cent a game. And for that money, you learned baseball.”
At some point as a teenager, Cat Mays met a slender young woman named Annie Satterwhite. Born in Randolph County in eastern Alabama (corn, wheat, cotton), Annie was one of seven children (one sibling had died young). The family moved to Westfield, an all-black village whose houses were owned by TCI and whose residents worked in the adjacent mills in Fairfield. Annie was an exceptional high school athlete in both track and basketball. The principal, E. J. Oliver, later said that Annie was “the type of young person you like to deal with, because she soon became knowledgeable about what the values were in life.”
Little is known of the relationship between Cat Mays and Annie Satterwhite, but on May 6, 1931, their son was born—Willie Howard Mays, Jr. Annie was very light, which gave the baby’s skin a cinnamon tint. According to one account, perhaps apocryphal, the doctor who delivered the boy exclaimed, “My God, look at those hands!” They seemed to extend directly from his forearms, with no tapering for his wrists.
Willie’s teenage parents—Annie was sixteen, Cat, nineteen—never married each other, so they faced the question of where the baby would live. Grandparents, often enlisted in such circumstances, were not an option. Annie’s mother had died several years earlier, and her father had abandoned the family; by one account, he rode out of town on a bicycle. What happened to Cat’s parents was also unknown, at least to Willie. In an employment form for the Pullman Company, Cat identified his mother as “Susie Smith,” but he never told Willie anything about his paternal grandparents. Like his maternal grandparents, they were presumably the children or grandchildren of freed slaves. Neither of Willie’s parents ever shared that particular history.
Willie Mays always recalled his childhood as a joyous, sunlit time surrounded by loving friends and family who encouraged his dreams and sheltered him from hardship. Those cheerful memories have been confirmed, decades later, by those who grew up with him. But it is also true that Willie’s childhood had many moving parts, with a large, shifting constellation of relatives, a fractured immediate family, the harrowing death of a loved one, a physical confrontation with his stepfather, and the specter of abandonment. Broken families, particularly during the Depression, were not unusual in the South for white families as well as black. Yet Willie’s childhood was in no way typical.
As a baby, he was given to his mother’s two younger sisters, thirteen-year-old Sarah and nine-year-old Ernestine, who were his principal caretakers and who called him Junior. They initially lived in Westfield, with Sarah as the most important female figure in the boy’s life, a role she played even after Willie left Alabama to play for the Giants. Cat was also a constant presence, providing for his son financially as well as emotionally. But he lived elsewhere, and his jobs—in the mill, on the baseball teams, and later on the railroad—meant long absences from home. The makeshift family expanded to include two more children born out of wedlock, one from Sarah and one from Ernestine. Both women also married. Sarah married Cat’s cousin Edgar May, who at some point lost the “s” on his last name. (Or perhaps Cat Mays’s family added the “s.”) Sarah May ended up raising her sister’s son while married to his father’s cousin.
The family struggled in the early years. While Cat Mays’s economic fortunes later improved, he had little money when Willie was a baby. Westfield was a typical company town, rigidly controlled by TCI, which paid employees in scrip for use at the company store. Willie was raised in a slumping frame house, with three bedrooms and a kitchen, a coal stove, a wood-burning fireplace, and a privy. The family was so desperate that it could not afford a can of milk for three cents. “We didn’t know what to do,” Ernestine recalled. “But a lady next door, she had a baby the age of Willie. We’d go over... and take Junior over and tell Mrs. Josephine, and she would let him nurse her breast. So that way he would get some fresh milk, sweet milk.”
Cat Mays claimed he never forced his son to play baseball. Look what happened to Joe Louis. Joe’s mother supposedly bought him a banjo, and he ended up in the boxing ring! So Cat did not compel Willie to play the game and did not buy him a glove until he asked for one. But make no mistake: Cat wanted his son to play baseball and to play it better than anyone else. He exposed Willie to the sport as early as possible, and the gravitational pull was irresistible.
Even before Willie could walk, Cat gave him a two-foot-long stick and a rubber ball, and the future home run champion, sitting on his diapered butt, whacked the ball and crawled after it. To get the child walking, Cat leaned him against a chair, rolled a ball across the floor, and yelled, “See the ball! See the ball!” He then turned Willie loose.
Cat later said, “I knew he was gonna be special as soon as he started walking, right around the time he got to be one year old. He’s one year old, and I bought him a big round ball. Willie would hold that big round ball and bounce and chase it. If it ever got away from him, he’d start to cry. You couldn’t believe how good Willie was, one year old, chasing down that big round ball. Little bit of a thing, but even then his hands were sure and strong. I’m telling you the truth. Right then, when he was one year old, I knew he’d be a great one.” He added, “I was pretty good, but my hands are regular size. Willie gets those big hands from his mother.”
By the time Willie was five, Cat was throwing the ball to him outside, yelling, “Catch it!” They lived near a cornfield and cow pasture, which was also used as a ball field. They went out in the afternoon, sometimes in the rain, the father taking his son to each position and showing him how to play it, then teaching him about hitting and throwing and baserunning. Cat told him that he had to be good at everything—all positions and all parts of the game. The more things you could do on the field, the more likely you would stay on the team. They used a rock and rags for their baseball and a stick for their bat, and Cat would smack ground balls across the rutted terrain, giving Willie some early lessons in bad hops.
The boy had initiative. As Cat recalled, “By the time Willie was six, I’d come home from work and catch him across the street on the diamond all alone, playing by himself. He’d throw the ball and hit it with the bat and then run and tag all the bases—first, second, and third—and then when he got home, he’d slide. He learned that from watching me.”
In time, father and son would play pepper, with real bats and balls, fifteen feet apart, Willie pitching and Cat hitting—liners, bunts, pop-ups—forcing Willie to make quick adjustments, Cat yelling encouragement: “Pick it up! You’re dug in like a potato! How can you go to the side? Bend those knees!”
According to Willie’s boyhood friend Herman Boykin, “Cat was an indoctrinator. On a daily basis, he kept saying to Willie, ‘You can do this!’ He wanted Willie to be self-sustaining so he wouldn’t have to work in the mills.”
Cat took his son to watch the Birmingham Black Barons, exposing him to Negro League players while also having fun in the stands. At one game, when Willie was five or six, Cat announced that he was a magician. “Stand up,” he said, and everyone in the crowd stood. “Sit down,” and they all sat. Several years passed before Willie learned about the seventh-inning stretch.
Sports at their most basic level—throwing, catching, running—were woven into his daily life. Each morning, on his way to elementary school, he walked to Charles Willis’s house, a rubber ball in his hand. As he waited, he bounced the ball against the ground, and when Charles appeared, they walked to school and played catch, which they continued after classes were out, when they walked to a field to play in a pickup game. “When I try to remember events as a kid,” Mays later said, “in my memories, somehow a ball always ends up in my hands.”
Willie’s baseball education intensified when he was ten and allowed to sit on the bench at his father’s Industrial League games. Suddenly, he was around hard-muscled men discussing the intricacies of the sport—how to play a right-handed pull hitter who was facing a pitcher with a slow curve, how big a lead to take from first base against a southpaw with a quick delivery. With fans cheering, Willie watched the drama unfold, always paying close attention to his father. The players were all good, but Cat’s breakneck speed was combined with a certain flair as well as a mastery of the game. On a close play on the bases, he would deftly slide on the opposite side of the tag. His son tried to copy the moves. Before Cat’s games, now on a real ball field, Willie would run to first and slide, then get up and run to second and slide, and then to third and slide, and then to home and slide again.
He soon asked for his own glove.
In 1938, Cat Mays’s mill wages and baseball earnings allowed him to move the family to adjacent Fairfield. A step up from Westfield, with better houses, neighborhoods, and schools, it proved to be an ideal setting for Willie. Like Westfield, the town was safely beyond the more racially charged Birmingham, but its origins as a “model industrial city” accounted for its relative stability.
When U.S. Steel bought TCI and its land holdings in 1907, it began developing wire mill and coke plants outside Birmingham. The city’s disease-ridden shacks and negligent services diminished the workers’ productivity, a concern of mill companies across the South. Seeking an alternative, U.S. Steel enlisted private investors to build a town that was patterned after “the Garden Cities of England,” an urban-planning effort at the turn of the century. The goal was a carefully planned community that would soften the harsh edges of industrial life. Ground was broken in 1910. The former president Theodore Roosevelt, visiting the next year, proclaimed the effort “simply extraordinary,” and even the social reformer Jane Addams commended the undertaking.
The town was originally named Corey, after W. E. Corey, the president of U.S. Steel. But scandal (an affair with a New York chorus girl) cost him his job, so U.S. Steel’s chairman, hoping to give his nascent community a clean start, asked the new president for another name. He didn’t have one, though he volunteered that he lived in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Fairfield seemed to be a perfectly fine name, suggesting that northern capitalists were creating a “fair field” for the workers. In 1914, Fairfield, Alabama, opened its first wire mill while it also aspired to set a new example. Across the country, congested cities were rightly seen as breeding grounds for crime, leading reformers to urge the development of pristine physical environments to improve human behavior. Fairfield’s town planners wanted to increase the residents’ exposure to the salutary benefits of nature: roads were laid gently up and around slopes; ten thousand shrubs and thousands of trees—chinaberry, pine, fig, pecan, walnut—were planted; ball fields provided pastoral recreation.
Like most model towns, however, Fairfield could not meet its lofty goals. It had plenty of greenery, but other plans—a major drainage system, sanitary outlets attached to every lot, the paving of more than twenty miles of streets—all fell short. Most streets remained dirt roads until at least the 1940s. Long two-foot ditches, carrying rainwater, ran down some streets into a larger ditch, where pigs raised in yards or fields would drink. The wind-blown soot from the mills fell on streets and porches. The many houses without plumbing relied on large wagons, driven by mules, to carry away human waste. Even the wisteria next to the tennis courts fell into neglect. According to the Birmingham historian Diane McWhorter, the steel industry’s boom-and-bust cycles, combined with U.S. Steel’s uneven commitment to its southern operations, turned Fairfield into “a mill town of perpetual promise and insolvency.”
But if Fairfield wasn’t a social utopia, it was still, for Willie Mays, a very good place to live, a biracial town of predictable rhythms and clear expectations. Unlike the company-owned houses in Westfield, many Fairfield residents owned their dwellings, reflected in freshly painted fences, well-tended yards, and blooming gardens. Some parents taught their children that Fairfield was not a suburb of Birmingham but Birmingham, a suburb of Fairfield. For many years, Fairfield was the home of one of the richest black men in the South, A. G. Gaston, whose businesses included a funeral home, so advertised on hand fans distributed at church.
The physical hazards of the mills and mines, combined with constant economic perils, sustained an ethic of self-help, discipline, and sharing, where the A&P Supermarket sold goods on credit, families shared garden vegetables with hungry neighbors, and everyone sacrificed.
Recalls[2] one of Willie’s peers: “Our parents took us to church on Sunday, sent us to school on Monday through Friday, and then sent us to the movies on Saturday and then to a baseball game after the movies. The men worked in those mills and mines while the ladies washed clothes over a scrub board, heated irons, and cooked over a wood-burning stove so that the men could come home and cut the grass, trim the hedges, water the plants, feed the chickens, and whip my bad backside for the trouble I got into before sitting down to eat a meal that was prepared by their lovely ladies.”
While the Depression made subsistence living the norm, the children still had fun. Whether riding their new roller skates down a hill on Christmas morning, fighting a stray turkey like a matador on a main thoroughfare, eating delicious ice cream from Dr. Parham’s Drug Store on a warm summer evening, or just playing ball, they were active, busy, and rigorously protected. “We were somewhat sheltered from the harsher realities,” says U. W. Clemon, who was born in Fairfield in 1943 and became Alabama’s first African American federal judge. “You could own your own house in Fairfield, and you could buy what you needed in private stores.”
While Fairfield’s racial divide was always clear, it was less dehumanizing than in other southern towns, certainly less so than in Birmingham. Blacks and whites had separate neighborhoods, schools, movie theaters, water fountains, and trolley seats. The northern industrialists who controlled the town had to abide by segregation, but they made some effort to treat blacks fairly; a hospital in Fairfield, for example, did attempt to provide separate but truly equal care.
The disparities were more evident beyond Fairfield. A streetcar ride to Birmingham would pass an amusement park and baseball field for whites only, as well as beautifully tended white neighborhoods of plush lawns, colorful flowers, and green pastures dotted with horses. The streetcar would then reach Birmingham, where city ordinances segregated the steps at the train station and barred blacks and whites from playing checkers with each other. Any downtown clothing store gladly welcomed Negroes, but if they wanted to try on the clothes and shoes, they had to pay for them first and do it at home.
Fairfield lacked the palpable racial tensions of Birmingham, probably because so many residents, black and white, worked together in the mills. The town’s superior overall condition—the newer houses, the more attractive neighborhoods—helped defuse hostilities as well. For the children of either race who just wanted to play sports, so much the better.
Willie Mays was happily insulated from racial concerns for much of his youth. He lived in the black Interurban Heights section, where every child knew the rules: you had to sit in the back of the streetcar, you had to address white adults as “Mister” or “Miss,” you could patronize only certain theaters or had to sit in the balcony of a racially mixed movie house.
But these restrictions didn’t bother Willie—they were part of life as he knew it or he found ways around them. To avoid sitting in the back of the streetcar, Willie and his friends would simply jump on an outer platform and ride for free. He kept a positive view. The balcony seats in the movie house didn’t disturb him, he recalls, “because we got the better view.”
Willie saw the superior yards in Fairfield’s white neighborhoods but never felt envy or anger. And why should he? The white kids were not just his friends but, more important, his teammates. Despite the laws that imposed segregation, black and white youths in Fairfield found one another on the diamond, basketball court, and football field, where Willie’s prowess was evident early. The white children—no surprise—wanted Willie on their team, and Willie couldn’t be bothered with skin color. Playing in this social bubble, his only concern was winning.
But Willie could not escape the outside world entirely. When adults saw the racially mixed teams, they would call the police, who would break up the games, or sometimes the police acted on their own. Just plain dumb and crazy, Willie thought. The teams would reconvene when the cops left.
Willie never forgot these episodes. As an adult, his generosity toward children was driven by many considerations, but his own experience as a youth was critical: if children were left alone, he believed, they would do the right thing. It was the adults who screwed things up.