Larry Holmes : Against the Odds

CHAPTER

ONE
The sun was just coming up when the last of the Holmes family of Cuthbert, Georgia, climbed into Uncle Willie’s beat-up Chevy and headed north.
All our belongings were loaded into the trunk of the car, or strapped onto the roof. We were leaving the hard times of the sharecropper’s life for a better chance in a place called Easton, Pennsylvania.
At least that’s what my mother, Flossie, told me. And young as I was, I knew that what we had in Cuthbert was no bargain. So I wasn’t shook about leaving. I was six years old that Georgia morning in 1955 as the Chevy rolled past the fields where Mom and her older children had once picked cotton to add a few dollars to what my father, John Henry, made working the land. In that time and in that place, farming was a hard way to go. And eventually my father decided the hell with it—there had to be a better means of supporting a family. Up north in Easton were steel mills and iron foundries and paper mills and sewing factories. John Henry figured chances were likelier he’d find regular work, and better pay, in that smokestack city.
John Henry had gone up north first, before any of us. Then, a few at a time, some of my older brothers and sisters followed. Mom and I and my brothers Lee, Bob, and Jake would be the last of the Holmeses to leave Cuthbert.
My memories of Cuthbert were not exactly warm and fuzzy. We had lived by the railroad tracks in a shack that sat on stilts and had few of the conveniences that most folks took for granted. It was stifling hot in summer, and chilled your bones when the temperature fell in winter. Our house in Cuthbert was too small for a family our size, had no plumbing, and, with the trains going by, made sleep sometimes difficult, more so when rain fell on the corrugated metal roof. Some nights I’d lie there in bed listening to raindrops pinging off that roof . . . until, utterly exhausted, I dropped off to sleep.
That the lives my folks led were exhausting—and unsatisfying—was plain enough even to a little boy like me. You only had to look at their faces as they returned home at the end of the working day to know all there was to know about life in the cotton fields . . . or out there in John Henry’s hard damn acres.
I remember Mom and my brothers and sisters pulling prickles from cotton plants out of their clothes. If we had stayed in Cuthbert, I would have been expected to go into the cotton fields in a year or two.
I remember, too, the red clay roads of Georgia. That red clay got into everything—on the floor, in our clothes and towels, and even smudged the sheets we slept on. Now, as Uncle Willie drove north, I watched the red clay roads go by.
Because of the excitement of being on the longest trip of my life, I slept in little catnaps, waking up whenever we got to a big city. I’d never seen tall buildings before or so many people in one place. At night, I tipped my head back in the rear window of that Chevy and watched the moon and the stars. I thought the moon was following me.

Easton, population thirty thousand, is located at the fork of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, fifty miles north of Philadelphia. It had been founded in colonial times by sons of William Penn, who had named it after the English estate of some kin of theirs. With the building of canals, Easton came to be a water transportation hub in the 1800s for shipments to Philadelphia and eventually to New York.
Later came railroads and highways, and by the 1950s Easton was an established industrial city, doing business in textiles, finished products, paper, leather, paint, iron and steel foundries, and machinery.
That’s what had drawn us and other poor blacks from the South to Easton. Jobs. There was said to be plenty of work there. But by the time Mom and I turned up, the Delaware Valley was recovering from a hurricane that had done millions of dollars of damage . . . and from a recession that put a crimp in the job market. Bad timing, folks said.
For Mom, what John Henry had to tell her must have seemed bad timing too. My father watched us settle in and then told Flossie that while up north he had fallen in love with another woman. So after a few weeks, he up and left for Connecticut, where this other woman lived. It near broke my mother’s heart.
Every so often John Henry would come back and visit us in Easton, usually bringing the younger kids presents. I don’t know if he gave my mom any money or not, but we sure as heck needed it. Yet as hurt as Mom felt, and as much as she missed him, she never bad-mouthed him to us.
From time to time I’d spend a week or two with him in Connecticut. John Henry was a no-nonsense, hardworking man. In the morning, he’d go to his construction job, then come home for dinner and be off to do yard work for the rich folks. I’d help him out. I’d cut grass, rake it up, and do whatever else needed doing. I loved my father even though I didn’t really know him. I loved him because he was my father.
Our family ended up on the South Side of Easton, where mostly poor black folks lived. The address was 208 East Lincoln Street—one of the identical government-subsidized Delaware Terrace row houses. Ours came with four bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and a bathroom for a family that eventually would include twelve children—nine boys and three girls.
In Easton, our part of town was known as “the projects”—just another way of saying the poor part of town. That meant we lived with no air-conditioning in the summer and inadequate heating in the winter. The only comfort we got was from a store-bought fan.
It also meant going hungry some nights. Mom would do what she could to stretch a bag of rice, and beans . . . and she made her own bread because it was cheaper. But every day was a struggle, and to keep our bellies full it took the welfare checks we got and the government-surplus Spam, powdered milk, blocks of cheese, lard, beans, and rice that we stood in line for once a month. At the welfare office you signed for a card you showed when it came your turn to stock up.
That’s how it went. Folks from the South Side did what they had to in order to make it to the next day. For a family as large as ours, it meant watching what few pennies we had. Mom shopped for our clothes at the Salvation Army and at rummage sales, and was not too proud to accept help from Jack Paul, a local truant officer, a white man who made a habit of helping those who were poor. He was truly a decent man, who would take neighborhood kids into stores and get them clothes.
Jack Paul wasn’t the only one who looked out for those less fortunate than they were. Around Christmas, on Northampton Street, where all the fancy stores were, they’d be selling poppies to benefit the YMCA, which would then turn around and use the proceeds to take the kids from the projects shopping for Christmas gifts, five dollars a kid. It wasn’t much, but it was a gesture from the heart and we appreciated it.
Some of my brothers and sisters worked in the factories in and around Easton and would give a portion of their wages to Mom. But let’s face it: it was never enough. In fact, some of my siblings, when they were financially pinched, would scoop up my loose change—just out-and-out steal what was mine. That led me as a grade-schooler to start hiding what money I had under the bed, in pillowcases, and in flowerpots. But there were times when I’d see that my mother was in real need of money and I would raid the flowerpot to help her out.
As a grade-schooler I made money shining shoes. The routine went like this. When the school day ended, I’d grab my shoeshine kit and walk the Lehigh Valley railroad tracks from Easton, then cross the bridge over the...