At the Whitehall Street center near the lower tip of Manhattan, draftees and recruits were asked to strip down to their drawers. Walking up and down halls with nothing on but your shorts was nothing new for Sugar. But he was eventually asked to pull them all the way down for a full inspection. Even more disconcerting than the invasion of his privacy was the call to attention by his original name. “Walker Smith,” a drill sergeant barked, and Sugar fell into the ranks with the other raw troops, then boarded an olive-drab bus that was bound for the Holland Tunnel and on to Fort Dix, New Jersey.
Fort Dix was a sprawling place where the numerous barracks blended with the greenish uniforms. From this location, a soldier was usually deployed to Europe, if overseas orders were cut. Between each row of plain buildings were exercise grounds that Sugar would become well acquainted with in due time. Making reveille was never a problem for a boxer used to getting up at the crack of dawn. Nor was he that unnerved by the early morning calisthenics. He thought of Greenwood Lake and trotting through clumps of pine trees, sometimes trailing Joe Louis, sometimes leading the way. Sugar discovered immediately that he was in far better physical shape than his fellow soldiers. They would be exhausted after a quarter mile of jogging, while he was breezing along way out front, still breathing comfortably through his mouth. Excelling at basic training, however, didn’t mask the ceaseless boredom of the camp. What was missing were his trainer Gainford, his cornermen Soldier Jones and Harry Wiley, and the sparring partners who kept the training camp abuzz with chatter and laughter.
After basic training, Sugar’s orders were cut and he was assigned to the Army Air Corps at Mitchell Field in Hempstead, Long Island, about fifteen miles east of New York City, closer than Fort Dix, close enough for him to make quick trips to the city to see his beloved Edna Mae. When Edna Mae agreed to go to Chicago to dance at the Rhumboogie, a nightclub owned by Joe Louis, Sugar was plenty salty. Louis had bought the club, located on Garfield Boulevard, for forty thousand dollars and put Leonard Reed, a comedian and later his stage partner, in charge. Edna Mae, who had given up dancing at Sugar’s request, missed performing and didn’t think Sugar would mind since she was doing it as a favor to his friend. Plus, Sugar was off completing his basic training, and she was getting bored sitting around waiting for him to get a leave. This was an opportunity to jump-start her career, she thought, and might lead to her landing a dancing role in a Hollywood film. She was banking on Louis’s contacts with film moguls and wealthy producers, since he had made a movie in Hollywood.
Sugar was furious. Some of his fury may have been the result of discovering that Edna Mae might have been one of Louis’s many lovers, a roster of beauties that included the actress and dancer Acquanetta, vocalists Damita Jo and Lena Horne, and a bevy of blondes. A brief romance between Edna Mae and Louis was often rumored, but never confirmed. Neither Sugar nor Edna Mae ever mentioned it, nor did she address another persistent rumor of an earlier marriage to Willie Bryant, disc jockey and bandleader.
Sugar’s objections notwithstanding, she packed her bags and left for the Windy City. The next day, practically on the train behind her, Sugar was in Chicago. Unable to secure a pass on such short notice, he left the barracks anyway and was absent without leave. He had called Edna Mae and told her he was on his way with intentions of marrying her and taking her back to New York. She thought he was bluffing, but Sugar was never one to bluff. They were married on May 29, 1943, at the home of one of Edna Mae’s friends. One account asserts that Sugar was AWOL; another says he had secured a three-day pass. Dates were never Sugar’s strong point, and he recorded the marriage year as 1944. Sugar was twenty-one and Edna Mae was twenty-seven. “There was gossip that Sugar’s family, especially his mother, didn’t want him to marry Edna Mae because she was so much older than he was,” said Harlem chronicler Delilah Jackson.
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 in 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.