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Louis learned his part so well he soon ceased to be a puppet. Today, after four years of monopolizing the world's heavyweight championship, he is not only the idol of his race but one of the most respectable prizefighters of all time. From the sorry pass to which a series of second-raters had brought it (Sharkey, Camera, Baer, Braddock), he restored the world's championship to the gate and almost the vigor that it had in Dempsey's day.
He did other notable things: he took on all comers, fought 20 times in four years, was never accused of a fixed fight, an unfair punch, a disparaging comment. "I want to fight honest," he has often told newsmen, "so that the next colored boy can get the same kinda break I got. If I 'cut the fool,' I'll let my people down."
All this did not make Joe Louis a dramatic figure but it stored up treasure in Heaven and on earth for Joe Louis and his people. Joe makes no pretense of being a leader of his race. He knows his limitations. He is a good and honest fighter and a simple-minded young man. But intelligent Negroes are grateful to him for remaining his own natural self and thereby doing much to bring about better racial understanding in the U.S.—doing more, some of them say, than all the Negro race-leaders combined.
The Good Lord. When he first took up boxing—and spent for his weekly lessons the 25¢ his married sister Emmarell gave him for scrubbing her floors every Saturday—Joe's churchgoing mother threw up her hands in horror. "I jes' gave him up in the hands of the good Lord," she says.
In the good Lord's hands, Joe Louis has earned close to $2,000,000 in purses (split 50-50 with his managers after all training expenses have been paid). He owns three apartment houses in Chicago, blue-ribbon saddle horses, a 477-acre farm 20 miles outside Detroit. Joe has bought himself an annuity which should bring him $11,000 a year, starting in 1944. He has put his baby sister Veunice through Howard University, supports 27 assorted kinfolk in Detroit alone. The good Lord has also seen to it that Joe's head be sculptured for posterity, like that of Booker T. Washington and other Negro idols.
Because of his deadpan, most white folks assume that Joe Louis is a lugubrious fellow. Actually, he is as mischievous as a child. "When he was a kid," his mother grins, "I near wore his backside out with a strap. He slept in the same bed with two of his brothers and it was worth my life to keep them out of devilment." Away from the spotlight, which he loathes, Joe still likes his simple fun. Early mornings at training camp, he often routs everyone out of bed by pulling off their blankets. Jogging along the country roads, his tongue runs as fast as his legs.
When Marva Trotter, a socially ambitious Chicago stenographer, married Joe six years ago, she hoped, like most wives, to make him over. But Joe Louis, still an unsophisticated, overgrown kid, steadfastly refused to go high-hat. He still won't go to the theater, read books, talk politics. But he can talk till the cows come home about swing bands, baseball, golf and his saddle horses, Flash and Annabelle White Star.