Annie Satterwhite didn’t raise her first son, but she was still part of his life. While news stories about Willie’s childhood usually overlooked his mother or mistook her for Aunt Sarah, she had a significant impact on the player, and the man, that he became.
Cat Mays apparently wanted to marry Annie, but she wasn’t interested. If Annie ever felt awkward or guilty about asking her two younger sisters to care for Willie, she never told him. Annie ultimately had plenty of practice in motherhood.
Her marriage to Frank McMorris produced ten children, eight girls and two boys. She had two sets of fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, though in each case the boy was stillborn. The family settled in the Powderly section of Birmingham, about five miles from Fairfield. Cat and Annie remained friends, allowing Willie to visit his mother easily by walking, biking, or catching a ride.
Like Cat, Annie was a talented athlete. In the early 1930s, when Willie was a baby, Annie starred on her high school basketball team, which won three consecutive state championships. But while Cat was carefree and soothing, Annie was fiery and intense. According to her son Charlie McMorris, “Both my mother and my father had tempers, but my mother more so.” She was a tough, resourceful country woman, he says. “She could cook most anything, and she would walk outside and say, ‘Give me one of those chickens.’ And every day was Thanksgiving.” She also brooked no dissent from any child. “We had a wood-burning stove,” McMorris says, “and she would take that piece of wood and knock your behind with it. Not one of the kids talked back to her.”
Her husband was also strong-willed, leading to a combustible relationship. Altercations were not uncommon, and their furies, against each other or strangers, sometimes spilled into the open. Frank was a plumber and Annie a laundress, but they also sold whiskey—“kind of like bootleggers,” according to McMorris. On one occasion, at one of Willie’s baseball games, Annie had a bottle of moonshine in her apron pocket. A patron wanted to buy it, but an argument ensued over the payment, leading to a brawl. “Daddy jumped in, others jumped him, and my mom took that bottle and hit the man in the head,” McMorris recalls.
Willie describes his mother as a “good lady” who, whenever he visited, would feed him and give him money. He played basketball and other games with his half-siblings but was never part of that family. He says he did not feel abandoned or neglected by his mother, and Herman Boykin, who drove him on some of his visits, saw Annie’s tenderness toward him. “Willie never felt disconnected to her,” he says. “Love overshadowed everything.”
Annie was also one of his biggest fans. When Willie reached the Birmingham Black Barons, she would sit behind home plate in a white hat and red blouse and cheer boisterously for her son. When he became a major leaguer in 1951, she pinned a Giants pennant on her wall and followed the games on radio. When a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American wanted to interview Willie Mays’s mother, Annie called Sarah and asked if she wanted to present herself as Willie’s mother. Sarah said no. The reporter did interview Annie, and the story, published on October 9, 1951, described a mother’s love for her now-famous son. Annie said her three biggest days were when Willie signed with the Giants, when he played in his first big league game, and when the Giants won the pennant. “We were lucky to beat the Dodgers,” she said, “but I thought we’d win all the time.”
Willie knew about the tensions between his mother and stepfather and tried to stay clear of them. But one day when he was a teenager, Annie and Frank visited his house, and an argument broke out between them. “My mom had a mouth, and she didn’t back up,” Willie says. The hostilities escalated, and Frank raised his fist and started punching his wife. Frank was about the same size as Willie but not nearly as strong. Willie jumped in, grabbed his stepfather, and threw him against the wall.
“If you ever come into this house again, you sit in that chair and don’t move,” Willie told him, “because if you do, I’ll whip your goddamn ass.” In retrospect, Willie says, he may have thrown his stepfather too hard, but “from that day on, when they came over, my mother would run around the house, and he would sit in that chair.”
On April 15, 1953, Annie gave birth to her eleventh child, Diane, but she hemorrhaged badly and died on the way to a hospital. She was thirty-seven. Her death stunned her children, who had come to believe that giving birth, at least for her, was routine. Mays learned of her death while he was in the army, stationed at Fort Eustis in Virginia, and he was granted a leave to attend her funeral.
Mays almost never talks about his mother—friends of his for more than fifty years say they’ve never heard him mention her—perhaps because he doesn’t like to talk about, or even consider, sad events or unpleasant memories. “It don’t pay to dig up the past,” he once said. “Let it rest.” But there is little doubt that his mother—and her raising of a large family that did not include her firstborn—played an important role in shaping Mays, who many years later would use ANNIE as a computer password. “It contributed to his insecurity and drove him to overcome it,” says one close friend. “He thought, ‘My mom might have left me, but I am something and I’m going to prove it.’ I think that is part of what makes Willie tick. I don’t think it’s something that a child lives through and is not affected by.”
On Mother’s Day in 1954, a year after Annie’s death, Mays described his feelings in an as-told-to story for the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper.[3] He saluted Annie as someone who supported him unconditionally in his career (preparing chicken tenders, sweet potatoes, and chocolate layer cake for his road trips as a teenage ballplayer) and who contributed generously to her church (which sometimes meant sending her children out to solicit funds). Willie also said that his mother had prepared him for her own death. “One of the things she told me constantly was how uncertain life was and how futile it was to grieve over the loss of someone you love.... If she died and I broke down because of it, it would be just as bad as both of us dying.”
That steely temperament, forged as a young athlete to overcome any adversity, defined Mays’s career as well as his life. He did not let his own pain or suffering deter him from his goals. The essay’s most telling section was its conclusion. “Someone once asked me if I carry a picture of her,” he said. “I don’t. A picture would take me back to the past, might aggravate the hurt of knowing she is gone—physically. I’d rather carry her image in my heart and that’s the way she’d want it.”
Willie Mays never looked back, on anything, and what he brought with him he rarely shared with others but carried silently in his heart.