If You Were Only White: The Life of Leroy "Satchel" Paige

1 - Without a Satchel

1 1 Without a Satchel Leroy Robert Page (the change in spelling of the last name is a story in itself ) was born on the wrong side of the tracks in a hostile South that had long ago defined him and his kind as just another “throwaway nigger.” There was little or no real expectation that he could rise much above that, except for the faint hope and prayers of those who loved him. The challenges of his environment and childhood forged in him an inner toughness and resiliency. It was either succumb or survive. He chose the latter, which would characterize his life and career. Being from the wrong side of the tracks was an ever-present reality for the Page family. For black folk in Alabama’s oldest city, Mobile, and throughout America in 1900, “the other side of the tracks” was an apt metaphor of the all too real racial divide that plagued the nation and segregated Greater Mobile’s rapidly growing population of 62,740, nearly half of whom were people of African descent. When you are from the wrong side, that side tainted as black, poor, lower class, unwanted, and unwelcome, your world is restricted, relegated , and in so many respects hopeless. The setting was becoming worse in Mobile with the passage of the new State Constitution of Alabama in 1901 that disfranchised the majority of African Americans and mandated the enforcement of the color line. The state capital in Montgomery was awash with Jim Crow legislation that made that city a bastion of segregation. Mobile, once considered more moderate in its race relations, passed new ordinances tightening the color line, as whites’ fear of blacks intensified with the increase in the African American population. 2 “If You Were Only White” This was the world of the Page family, the world that Leroy inherited. They were dirt-poor and, commensurate with their lowly status, lacked every conceivable amenity associated with a good life. The Page family lived at 754 South Franklin Street, down by Mobile Bay. They were on the so-called other side of Government Street, the well-known divide between North and South Mobile and white and black Mobilians. No signs were posted indicating that if your skin color was dark, you were restricted to live south of Government and near the railroad tracks down by Mobile Bay, but everyone knew it from long experience, and painful reminders, if you were caught where you did not belong.1 A new slavery of tenant farming, sharecropping, domestic service, convict lease, and common labor defined the role and place of black Mobilians like the Pages. John Page, the family patriarch, was born in 1877 in Albemarle, Virginia. He was the only son of Charles and Julia Page, two lifelong field hands who had both been born in slavery. As a young man John worked his way to Mobile on a tramp steamer, searching for a different and better way of life for himself. There he met Lula Coleman, a hardworking domestic. Lula was three years John’s senior, born in 1874 in Choctaw, Alabama. She was the second of three children to Osena Coleman, who had been born into slavery in North Carolina and widowed only a few years after Lula’s birth. Lula Coleman and John Page fell in love and were married. The actual date of their nuptials is uncertain. The results of their unison were not debatable. Their first child, Ellen, was born in 1896. They would have Ruth, John Jr., Julia, and Wilson, before their sixth child, Leroy, was born in 1906. There would be considerable controversy and media speculation years later about the actual date of Leroy Page’s birth. Census reports and family memory leave little doubt of the correctness of the year. The precise day and month of his birth remain open to speculation. Leroy was not born in a hospital, where the recording of birth would have been a routine matter. Mobile did have a small hospital facility, but it was a product of its times and the racial restrictions that whites mandated and blacks were obliged to obey. The hospital provided a modicum of service to those blacks so desperate and in need of care that they had no choice but to put up with the indignities of the Negro ward, which consisted of one room off the basement area. For something as “routine” as having babies, the black women of Mobile had them at home...