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Now that the world has brightened for her, Harlem's harsh outlines occasionally soften for the reminiscent tournament traveler. "I remember you could get fish and chips for 15¢ and soda at 5¢ a quart. And there were sweet potatoes—we called 'em 'mickeys'—that we cooked at a fire over milk crates. We'd climb over the fence to a playground and we'd swing way up, two on a swing. And we'd sneak in the movies. If there was any poverty, I wasn't aware of it. How could you think of it when you could get soda for five cents?"
Chock Full o' Guts. By 1941, when she was 13, Althea was ready to graduate from paddle tennis. The PAL instructor that year was an unemployed musician named Buddy Walker, and Buddy was impressed with the gangly youngster's ferocious skill. He went to a friend named Van Houton (a tennis buff who liked to boast that he was the only self-employed racket stringer in Harlem), bought Althea a pair of secondhand rackets, and put her to work practicing against the wall of a handball court. A few weeks later he took her uptown to some public courts, and her performance was phenomenal. The other players quit their games to watch. In her first time on a tennis court, Althea learned the pleasure of playing to a gallery.
By midsummer, Althea was taking lessons from Fred Johnson, a one-armed pro at the now defunct biracial Cosmopolitan tennis club. Her game, which had been an exercise in sheer power, began to show signs of sophistication. Now all her life was focused on tennis. She quit school and went to work. She was a counter girl in a Chock Full o' Nuts shop in lower Manhattan, a chicken cleaner on Long Island ("I used to have to take out the guts and everything, but I still like chicken"), an elevator operator in the midtown Dixie Hotel, a packer in a button factory, a mechanic in a machine shop ("It was puttin' screws in somethin', I don't remember what"). Any time work interfered with tennis, she quit her job.
Says Althea's father: "I didn't know nothin' about tennis, and that's all she was interested in. I got her some boxing gloves once," he adds wistfully. "I wanted her to be a lady boxer." Althea almost flattened her father in a practice bout, then hung up her gloves. But ever since, she has been driving ahead with a boxer's toughness and will to win.
"She Could Be Something." Althea had been playing tennis for only a year when she entered, and won, her first tournament: the girls' championship of the Negro American Tennis Association's New York State Open. That same summer (1942) she got to the semifinals of the A.T.A.'s national championship for girls. She lost to a buxom teenager named Nana Davis (now Nana Davis Vaughan), and Mrs. Vaughan still remembers her appalling manners: "She was a very crude creature. She had the idea she was better than anyone. She said, 'Who's this Nana Davis? Let me at her.' When I beat her, she headed right for the grandstand. Some kid had been laughing at her and she was going to throw him out."