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

3 - “If You Were Only White”

37 3 “If You Were Only White” What awaited Leroy Page was the impenetrable color line of an unchanged Jim Crow South that he would either surrender to or find a way to circumnavigate . When he was discharged from Mount Meigs on December 23, 1923, two days before Christmas, his possessions consisted of a set of brand-new clothes—which was a tradition at the Mount—a couple of shirts, an extra pair of trousers, underwear, socks, a good pair of almost new shoes, two dollars, and a baseball and glove. He might say that he did not leave the Mount with very much after five and a half years, but it was far more than he had when he arrived in terms of not only physical possessions but also self-discipline, an emerging positive self-identity, and grounding in baseball fundamentals. The same mode of transportation that brought him to the Mount would now take him back to Mobile. While the cloth satchel given him was only partially full with his belongings, his mind was fully occupied during the L&N train ride home with anxieties and uncertainties about what he would do next. He was only seventeen and a half years old yet fully an adult by the standards of the day. Leroy would later say that he did not remember how he traveled back home from the Mount. Perhaps the anxiety of coming home was in some ways reminiscent of the trepidation he experienced when traveling to the Mount from Mobile years earlier. What would await him in Mobile? His father, John Page, had died a few months earlier, and Leroy was unable to gain release to attend the funeral. Unbeknownst to him, however, his father’s death was the reason for his release 38 “If You Were Only White” from the Mount seven months before his eighteenth birthday. Lula Page needed the able hands of all of her children more than ever now for the family to survive . The State of Alabama often commuted a juvenile’s sentence under such circumstances. Leroy was required at home. He felt good about being released from the Mount, but he was terribly worried about the future. Where would he find work? What would he do? There was no reason to expect the family’s situation had improved during his absence. There was every reason to believe that the family’s situation had deteriorated further, if that were possible. After her husband’s death, Lula Page changed the spelling of the family name from Page to Paige. That change in the spelling of the name, the adding of the i, may have been both symbolic and substantive. There could be no denying who the father was and the history of their past relationship and the ten children that documented that history together. The children were a likely reason that the now Lula “Paige” did not readopt her maiden name of Coleman. That small but powerfully symbolic change in the spelling of the name, she surely hoped, might give her some relief or distance, if not complete liberation , from her husband’s debts and associations, as a later generation of the Paige family surmised was the case. There may also have been a desire on her part to help her son Leroy get a fresh start with a fresh new name that might somehow assist in distancing him from his delinquent past. Whatever the reason or reasons for the change in spelling of the family name, everyone needed to pitch in more than ever now with the passing of John Page.1 After being home for a few weeks and having a brief sabbatical of sorts, Leroy, who quickly embraced the name alteration of Page to Paige, began seeking work in earnest. The problem was what to do. There were precious few opportunities for a decent job for an African American male in Mobile or for that matter most of Alabama beyond the typical Negro work of common laborer, picker or sharecropper, domestic, handyman or gardener, or dockworker , loading and unloading ships or freight trains. He was not about to return to the L&N station and tote satchels or scrounge for discarded bottles around town. The little education he received on the Mount was not preparation for a serious skilled position in industry. That kind of work at any rate was deemed as a white man’s job. What he was finally able to find was, what he rightly called, a little piece of...