A man can endure a lot if he still has hope.
—Clyde T. Ellis,
as quoted by Studs Terkel in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
“Oh, dear Lord. Baby…”
Jim met Mae at the front door. As the scarred plywood creaked open, he glimpsed the tender, attentive expression on his wife’s face and knew in an instant how much he was going to miss seeing her look at him this way—like he was some kind of returning soldier who’d been in harm’s way, a fighting man who, win or lose, would always come home to steadfast devotion. With his boxing career over, Jim realized, Mae would never have cause to look at him like this again, and he was more than a little uneasy what failing her would do to him. To them.
“I haven’t got the money,” he told her straight. He was too tired and in too much pain to break it any easier. “They wouldn’t pay me. Called it a no contest. Said the fight was an embarrassment.”
Mae’s fretful gaze went from the blue and purple bruises on Jim’s battered face to his golden right hand, now caged in a fresh white cast. Her small fist reached out, unfurled like a flower. Soft fingers brushed the hardening surface.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Mr. Johnston made a decision…” He shrugged. “They decommissioned me.”
Fear in Mae’s eyes flared to anger. What did she care about boxing commissioners’ edicts or violated fight rules? She cared only about her husband. “Jimmy, what happened to your hand!?”
Jim sighed. “It’s broke in three places.”
With one blink, Mae’s face went blank. Her gaze lost focus. “Mercy…I’m so sorry.”
Jim stared at his wife. Her words had come out strangely distant, like she’d read them off a Western Union telegram. Deciding she must not have understood what he’d just told her, he tried again—
“Said I’m through, is what they said. Said I’m not a boxer anymore.”
But Mae Braddock had moved past this already. Chewing the edge of her thumbnail, she began to pace the small front room. “Well, okay,” she said, “if you can’t work, we ain’t gonna be able to pay the electric or the heat—”
With the gas and electric already overdue, Mae had taken to keeping the heat and all the lights off, save a small lamp in the corner. As she walked back and forth, a shadow flickered across the dingy wall, haunting her every step.
“—and we’re out of credit at the grocery,” she added, “so we need to pack the kids, they can stay at my sister’s temporary, I’ll take in more sewing—”
“Mae—”
“Then that way we can make two or three breadlines a day and then—”
“I’ll get doubles, triple shifts where I can find them,” Jim told her. “I’ll get work wherever I can.”
“Jim, you can’t work, your hand’s broken—”
She was pacing faster now, her steps going nowhere, just trapped in a repetitive activity in their confined space. Jim could see she was still fretting, her eyes still refusing to look at him.
“Mae!”
The strength in Jim’s voice finally broke through. She stopped.
“I can still work,” he told her.
Mae swallowed hard, said nothing.
“Get the shoe polish out of the cabinet,” he told his wife, clear and firm. “Go on. If they see me lugging this around, they won’t pick me will they?”
Mae stifled her response and did as he asked.
“So, we’ll cover it up with the shoe polish,” Jim continued as he sat down at the table and extended his hard, white liability. Mae sat next to him and looked down at the cast.
“Baby, it’s going to be okay,” he said, then, for a long minute, he waited. But Mae didn’t say a word, and she refused to look at him. Jim sighed. His left hand still worked, didn’t it? So he took a deep breath, reached down, and used it to lift her small, pointed chin. He forced himself to see the fear reflected in his wife’s eyes, forced his wife to see the truth in his own.
“We still haven’t seen anything we can’t face down,” he reminded her. Tonight, people had told Jim that he was through as a boxer, but he’d be damned if he let anyone tell him he was done fighting.
Finally, Mae saw it, right there in her husband’s eyes—Jim’s resolve as a man to never give up, never let himself be beaten, and her hard doubts began to soften. The world fell away then. Nothing existed, not Mae’s bills or Jim’s bruises, not the anger or the dread—nothing but Jim and Mae and the one look between them that held their new vow to each other. A vow to stay steady, a pledge to hold fast.
“I’ll cut the hem out of your coat sleeve. Fabric will help cover it,” Mae finally said, turning her attention to the black shoe polish. She opened the tin and began to spread it over the white.
Jim kissed her head, and she nearly found a laugh.
“All we need now is a nice piece of steak for your face, Jim Braddock, fix you right up.”
“That’s a good idea.” Jim pounded the table with his good hand. “Steak. Get me a steak out of the ice box. Porterhouse!”
Peeking around the hanging blanket’s threadbare fabric, a curious pair of eyes widened. While her older brothers Jay and Howard remained asleep on the kids’ shared mattress, six-year-old Rose Marie watched her parents with inquisitive interest.
Jim winked at his spying daughter, then touched his wife’s cheek, deciding, not for the first time, that having Mae Theresa Fox as his wife made him about the luckiest man there ever was.
Elevated on a landfill, the road Jim walked to the Newark docks before dawn every morning took a straight course through a congested industrial area. Along the route were some of the city’s poorer residential districts. Running parallel were the freight tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and on both sides of the road was an old dumping ground that destitute families had taken over.
Homemade huts, built of materials salvaged from junk piles, served as shelters for men, women, and children. Neatly tended garden patches sat beside them. In summer, the huts were brightly decorated with flowers, flags, and latticework. With the cold mist of fall came oil drum fires and a dependence on breadlines and root vegetables.
Jim moved through the salvage-yard neighborhood and toward the once desolate marsh that had become the complex of warehouses and docks called Port Newark. A chilly wind whipped across the murky water of Newark Bay and Jim braced himself against it as he strode across the gravel lot toward the familiar locked gate.
Doctors had pronounced his right hand useless for many months, and he had no illusions what the fate of his family would be if he got no work today. Keeping the blackened cast low and slightly behind his back, Jim approached the huddling group of sleepy, stone-faced men with rock-hard resolve.
This morning’s dawn seemed brighter than days’ past. As rays of red-stained gold broke through the horizon’s low clouds, Jake, the gaunt-faced, middle-aged foreman, approached the gate from the other side. Jim shoved his shattered hand farther behind him and pushed forward, holding onto hope.
“One, two, three…”
Jake walked along the group, looking over the men, moving his finger one way then another. Half steps and half inches, thought Jim, just like the ring, nerve and chance determining life-changing outcomes.
“…five, six, seven…”
Jim straightened his boxer’s built-up shoulders, focused on Jake with a fighter’s eyes, willing himself to be seen.
“…eight…”
Jake’s appraising gaze fell on Jim. Braddock moved a half step closer. The foreman’s finger moved a half inch. He pointed directly at Jim.
“Nine.”
A win. With profound relief, Jim’s eyes closed, his lungs expelled the air they’d been holding. For a split-second, he almost heard the crazy roar of the crowd, felt the jolt of little Joe Gould jumping on his back.
Behind him, the huddle of men began to break up. Dissipating like ghosts into the gloom, they moved away from the docks, murmuring to each other about where to go next. Jim moved east, toward the rising light of the breaking dawn and the hard physical labor of shift work, counting himself one of the lucky few.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Jim’s work partner eyed the black-and-blue bruises on Jim’s face with a mixture of curiosity and wariness.
“I got into a fight,” Jim told the man.
“What would you go and do that for?”
“Good question.”
Jim could easily see why his partner had been chosen for shift work today. The man’s handsome face was young and clean-shaven, his bright eyes displayed enough alertness to assure the foreman his orders would be understood and followed, and his lanky body appeared to have the kind of longitudinal strength that could bear a lot of stress before tearing apart.
“Mike Wilson.”
“Jim Braddock.”
The two had just started moving a mountain of flour sacks from a docked steamer’s immense loading net to a line of waiting shipping pallets. The flour sacks had the weight and bulkiness of body bags, and one man alone couldn’t lift them. It took two, one on each side, wielding large bailing hooks, to complete the job. It was difficult, awkward labor.
Jim had never before employed his left hand to do much of anything. Trying to operate the hook with it was a struggle, especially while attempting to keep the blackened cast on his broken right hidden behind his back. Sweat broke out on his forehead as he willed his muscles into achieving some kind of workable balance.
“Jim Braddock,” Mike repeated. “Used to follow a fighter with that name on the radio.”
Jim simply nodded, continuing to manage his clumsy left. He nervously glanced at Jake, hoping the man would keep his distance.
“There’s another guy going around using that name now,” Mike continued. “Can’t fight for shit. A gambling man could lose a lot of money on him. Twice.”
Jim wasn’t sure how to take that last comment until he saw the amused expression on Mike’s face. The man’s smile was so infectious, Jim almost laughed. Suddenly the bag of flour they were carrying slipped from his hook. Jim’s end dropped to the weathered planks of the dock and the jolt of it caused Mike to lose his grip, too. As Jim bent quickly toward his end, he forgot about his right coming forward.
“Jesus,” said Mike, spying the cast. “This ain’t gonna work. You’re a cripple. You can’t slow me down. I need this job.”
“Look,” said Jim, spearing Mike with an expression sharper than the iron bailing hook. “I can hold up my end.”
Before Mike could respond, another voice interrupted. “What the hell is this?” The foreman had come up behind them. Now he stood glowering at Jim’s casted hand.
Jim didn’t bother explaining. What good were words anyway, when actions got the job done? With a sweeping arc, his left hand sunk the heavy hook into the flour sack. Jim stilled and waited. His gesture was meaningless unless his partner did the same.
Mike Wilson glanced from the foreman to Jim. After a terrible few seconds, Mike followed Jim’s lead, sinking his own hook into his end of the sack. With a determined heave, the two men lifted the dead weight together.
They carried the bulk across the dock and pitched it onto the pallet, then they moved to the loading net for another. Working together the two quickly speared and moved a second sack.
“You see us falling behind, Jake?” asked Mike. They hoisted a third and a fourth onto the pallet. “He’s all right.”
They continued hooking and hauling, bag after bag. Jake stood there with arms crossed, watching every move. Finally, the foreman uncrossed his arms, shook his head, and walked away.
Sweat burning his eyes, Braddock lifted his face to Mike.
“Appreciate it.”
Two simple words. A life span of gratitude.
The bright dawn didn’t last. By midday, clouds had moved in to drench the city of Newark in sheets of stinging rain. Five years ago, Mae Braddock would have run squealing from the wet, holding her pocketbook over her head as she sought shelter in a corner drugstore, where she’d sit at the counter and warm up with a nice, hot cup of tea.
But this wasn’t five years ago, and her place on the endless, snaking soup line was too precious. Her children were hungry and they had no food. So Mae wasn’t moving for anything, least of all a little water.
At the head of the line, women in raincoats ladled soup and handed out soaked bread from the open back of a truck. Ahead of Mae were hundreds of men, women, and children. Some were sad, some embarrassed, some just hollowed-out shells, emptied by the relentless years of numbing loss.
While the rain fell, Mae held her six-year-old daughter close to her body. She tried her best to curl around the little girl and keep her dry, but it did no good. Rose Marie ended up as soaking wet as all of them.
After the downpour finally subsided, Mae continued to cradle her daughter in her exhausted arms. Her two boys, bored with all the waiting, began to race around her, shooting finger guns.
“Got you!” shouted Jay.
“No, you don’t! Got you!” cried Howard.
For the life of her, Mae didn’t know where they got the energy. “Boys, settle down please.” Mae’s voice sounded as drained as she felt.
The boys listened and stopped shooting, but less than a minute later they found a pair of puddles—and a whole new form of ammunition.
“Got you!” shouted Jay, splashing his brother.
“No, you don’t! Got you!”
“Lady, watch your kids!” complained a man behind them after Jay splashed him with a reckless volley.
“Boys, come here now!” Mae cried. She turned to the man. “I’m so sorry.” Then she looked down at the six-year-old in her arms. “You need to stand for a little while, honey.”
Mae lowered Rosy to the street’s cracked concrete. She hated to do it, but her arms were about to fall off.
“I don’t want to,” cried Rosy. Her shoes were old, with holes, and as they hit the pavement, the dampness seeped through her socks. “It’s wet.”
Mae sighed. “Are you a big girl or a little girl?”
“Little!”
Not the answer Mae wanted. “Rosy—”
But Rose Marie was too cold, wet, and tired to listen to any form of parental reasoning. With a scowling face, she began to yowl.
“Who’s making all that racket? Sounds like a trombone.”
Instantly, the tantrum stopped. Rosy’s father had appeared beside her, big and strong and making strange sounds with his lips as he moved one hand out and back from his face.
Rosy blinked wide eyes. “What’s a turmone?”
“Trombone, honey,” said Jim, smiling down. “It’s a musical instrument.”
As the little girl’s arms stretched toward her daddy, Mae’s eyes questioned her husband.
“I got a shift,” said Jim, lifting Rosy into his arms. “Foreman says tomorrow maybe a double.”
As Jim adjusted his daughter’s weight in his arms Mae noticed her husband moving something from inside his coat to his casted hand.
His boxing shoes.
Mae wasn’t surprised. Jim had been boxing too long to let a couple of big suits keep him from the ring.
“Are you training today?” she asked.
“I was thinking of selling them.”
Jim word’s hung between them. Mae didn’t know what to feel, what to say.
“Oh,” she finally replied.
“I figure the three shifts and what I get for these, by the end of the week, we can pay off the grocer.”
Mae looked at the shoes: long laces to support the ankles, leather soles still sturdy. They’d carried her husband across countless rings, buoyed him against every kind of opponent. They’d taken him up the ladder and down again, but always en route to a dream.
Mae swallowed with difficulty. She wanted to say a dozen things to her husband, but all that came out was, “Don’t take less than a dollar, Jim.”
Jim Braddock saw the tears pooling in his wife’s gaze. He gave her a weak smile. “You go home now. I’ll stand.”
Mae gestured to Jay and Howard in their soggy clothes, her fingers brushing Rosy’s damp hair. “I got to turn on the heat, Jimmy,” she whispered. “They’re chilled through.”
He nodded.
“Got ya!”
Howard had jumped in another puddle, launching a giant splash at his older brother. As Mae sighed, Jim put Rosy down then spun and grabbed Howard, lifting the eight-year-old high in the air.
“You know what happens to little monkeys who don’t listen to their mother?”
Howard squealed.
“They get…the boot!”
As Jim dangled one of his boxing shoes into Howard’s face, Jay pointed and shrieked with laughter. Howard stuck his tongue out at his older brother, then Jim set the little boy down.
“Go on, now,” Jim told his family.
Mae handed her husband the empty soup pot. She gathered the children together and towed them along, heading toward home.
Jim’s gaze followed his wife and children, and then he turned forward again. The back end of the truck seemed as far away as anything in his life, but since the Crash, Jim had mastered the frustrating art of waiting.
Snapping up his collar against the biting wind, he watched the endless line, impossible in number, move forward. Silently, slowly, by half steps and half inches.
Hours later, Jim entered the building on Summit Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, an area once called West Hoboken but now part of Union City. He walked past the garage and through the narrow hallway. As he ascended the creaking wooden steps, the sounds from above flowed over him: the slip-slap of rope against wood, the smack of bag gloves against punch mitts, the grunting exhales that accompanied right-left-rights as taped-up fists dented heavy bags.
Alone on the staircase, Jim stopped for a minute to lean on the banister and compose himself. He was tired and frozen, and his back was sore as hell from the torturous dock work and the long soup line. Still, the exhaustion couldn’t stop the old adrenaline from rising, or the inveterate craving to pull out the boxing shoes tucked in his coat, slip between the ropes, and begin to throw.
It was the perfect moment for Jim to feel sorry for himself. But he didn’t have that luxury, not with his family depending on him, and not with his trainer, Joe Jeannette, just a stone’s throw away. After all, Braddock lectured himself, what do I have to complain about? I got my day at the stadium, didn’t I? I got my shot at a title. More than Jeannette ever got.
Joe Jeannette had never been a champion, but he’d always been a hero to Jim. The former coal truck driver and son of a blacksmith had started boxing before Jim had even been born. In his day, Jeanette had displayed extraordinary endurance in the ring. His forty-nine-round fight against Sam McVey in 1909 was the stuff of legends. Jeanette had overcome twenty-two knockdowns in three hours and twelve minutes to win on technical knockout when McVey simply went to his corner and collapsed, exhausted, on his stool.
On offense, Jeanette had displayed quicksilver hand speed and dangerous inside punches. On defense, he’d been slippery and elusive. Nobody could catch him. Within two years of turning pro, back in 1904, the sculpted, strikingly handsome Jeanette had become one of the best heavyweights in the nation.
If Joe had been white, he would have been given a shot at the heavyweight title. But Jeanette was a black boxer. Few white fighters would consent to enter the ring with him. Even Jack Johnson, a white opponent whom Joe had fought seven times before, drew the color line after he’d won the heavyweight title.
Jeannette never got over Jack Johnson’s denying him a shot at the championship, but he sure as hell didn’t quit. Instead, Jeannette took on the other great black heavyweights of his time, and in his long career fought, officially and unofficially, more than four hundred bouts—from Paris, London, and Montreal to Baltimore, Philly, and New York.
By 1919, at the age of forty, Joe Jeannette had made the decision to retire without ever getting his shot at being the heavyweight champion of the world, but even now, fourteen years later, Joe was far from out of the fight game. A respected New Jersey referee, Jeannette had made his Summit Avenue boxing gym one of the most popular around. The man was never too busy to give pointers to a young boxer, and Jim had relished the hours he’d spent here. It was a place where he’d always felt a genuine camaraderie. It was the gym where’d he’d first met Joe Gould.
As Jim crested the narrow staircase, the familiar smell of leather and sweat hit him, along with that slight whiff of motor oil from the garage below. Jim stood unmoving at the gym’s entrance, his eyes skimming the main floor, taking in the shadowboxers and sparring partners, the slick shoulders working heavy bags. At the far end of the room, a scrawny rookie was dancing around a muscled veteran. The rookie’s moves were lightning quick, and the kid landed more than a few jabs on his heavier, more experienced opponent. The scene looked so familiar, Jim could almost hear his old friend asking…
“You got a manager, kid?”
“No. My brother does my business. He’s a plumber. Hey, aren’t you Joe Gould?”
“Yeah, and if your brother agrees, maybe I can take over the job…”
“Jimmy Braddock, what’s going on? You come to spar?”
Across the room, Joe Jeannette tossed a friendly wave. Jim tried to return the man’s smile, but he couldn’t quite manage it. Woodenly, he walked toward the practice ring. He set his soup pot on the floor, set the wet bread on the soup pot, then reached into his coat with his casted hand. It took a moment’s struggling to pull his boxing shoes free.
Joe Gould stepped out of the bathroom and into the corridor. Checking his watch, he headed toward the gym floor. Jeannette had promised him a look at a young comer, and Gould didn’t have all night. But when he reached the main doorway, he suddenly stopped.
Jim Braddock was here. He was standing beside Jeannette. Next to them stood a young, leanly muscled black boxer. As Gould watched, Jim handed his boxing shoes to the younger man, who paid Jim two bits.
Few words were exchanged, and whatever they’d said, Gould couldn’t hear. He simply watched Jim stiffly bend down, pick up his soup pot and bread, then turn toward the front entrance.
That’s when Joe Jeannette’s gaze lifted and he spotted Gould standing in the rear doorway. Jeannette’s eyes met Gould’s expectantly, but Gould shook his head and stepped back, behind the door.
Better for us both if Jim doesn’t see me, Gould decided. Better for us both if I just let him go.