The Shadow of the Backboard
I always thought there was another story to my uncle Elam Hill. One sportswriter (The Fresno Bee’s Bruce Farris) said, “Hill might have been an early day Magic Johnson in the art of passing the basketball.” But the real story of my uncle went beyond basketball. One might have to go deep to find it, and then again, maybe not. Maybe it was always right there in Grandma Hill’s house, the one my father helped her and Grandpa Hill settle into when they began to bring the entire “outfit,” as he called his many siblings, to Fresno. All the way from Coal Hill, Arkansas, they came one and two at a time. Hear that lonesome whistle? It is the sound of the Great Depression passing outside the train’s window, ten-year-old Elam marking it as the end of his childhood.
It’s 1939, and I’m seven years old, starting to draw my own comic books, and create little stories in my head about the characters emerging in my young life. Tonight, is Christmas Eve at Grandma Hill’s house. To me, this is a warm-up to the main event tomorrow morning. Still, I feel that zing in the pit of my stomach, standing here on Grandma’s cement porch with Mom, Dad, and my sister, Regina.
The basketball hoop next to the house is barely visible in the December darkness. To my eye, it’s a strange sight. Basketball is an indoor sport, and I’ve yet to see it played. The net and backboard there against the moon appear to be way beyond my reach, beyond my childhood. I draw in my mind the image of my uncle Elam, playing on that small court of hardpan. He’s had his picture in the newspaper, wearing a Fresno High uniform, lots of people watching him in a cramped gymnasium. This from Regina, who is in junior high and knows about such things.
Inside, I remind myself that Grandma Hill’s brood of children totals fourteen. From Aunt Ruth, two years older than my father, to Uncle Bill, the same age as my sister, they are twenty-seven years apart from oldest to youngest, and seven each by sex. I do my best to identify all the extended uncles and aunts by marriage and the cousins, whose numbers keep rising. Even at my tender age, I’m aware it’s Grandma, her roving eyes lit silver by the Christmas tree lights, who keeps everybody in line.
Where is Grandpa Hill?
“Died years ago, from depression,” is what I’ve been told.
In the close air, I smell Grandma’s ever-living pot of Arkie beans and cast-iron cornbread. Liquor is not allowed, unless we count the Old Crow hidden in my father’s overcoat. And tobacco, other than Grandma’s Copenhagen, is off limits. Not once do I hear a word of blasphemy or meanness. No talk of frivolous idols either. Grandma has never seen a motion picture show nor flipped through a movie magazine. Reverence of any sort is limited to the family’s oversize bible, there next to the coffee can Grandma uses as a spittoon.
Aunt Orpah’s husband, a part-time Church of Christ preacher, leads everyone in prayer. Aunt Vern hums the key, and we all sing “Silent Night.” Lyrics for the song have been handed out, but most don’t need one. Oh, the glory alive in their rapt expressions, so earnest, so full of hope as they sing.
Grandma sweeps a glance across her prodigy that lands on me for a beat. Her lips turn up in a quick, sweet smile. With all that sibling harmony alive in the room, the distance between my big family and me begins to close. I steal a glance at Uncle Elam, standing there looking like a younger version of my father. In my mind, I draw a picture of him and that basketball hoop outside. I draw another of him in a packed gymnasium. I sketch him in the fashion of my favorite comic book artist, Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon. Regina has told me that social workers are trying to drag Grandma’s youngest children off to the city’s Nutritional Home. I add weaponry to a belt I draw around Elam’s waist. He looks like a hero who will defend his younger brothers and sisters from being snatched away from this small house.
I watched Elam play only once, when I was about fifteen and in my last year at Hamilton Junior High. He had just accepted his first teaching assignment after graduating from Fresno State. “At Edison,” he told me, not elaborating that he’d asked for the position to coach the Edison Tigers, the only basketball team in the entire San Juaquin Valley that drew primarily from an area populated by kids of color and poverty.
Riding in his beat-up Ford coupe, we rattled our way over to the Fresno High gymnasium. Still in his late twenties, Elam joked about escaping from his wife, Hope, and the task of changing his infant daughter Jane’s diapers.
“This is just a City League contest,” he told me, “for us guys past our prep and college playing days.”
We parked in the area outside the gymnasium and went inside. Immediately, I inhaled the narcotic mixture of varnished hardwood and locker room showers, and I felt a charge of fear. Next year I’d be entering this high school everyone said looked just like it came out of a movie.
Elam’s team was in blue. Both teams’ uniforms were wrinkled, and I knew the young men were there out of love. Love for the sport. Love for the chance to recreate a bit of glory they once earned when their world demanded less from them. Many were veterans of a war just fought, and some carried scars visible and hidden. It was plain to me that Elam, who’d spent three years in the Navy, was a leader. From the onset of the game, his ball-handling drew oohs and aahs from the small crowd. His quick hands stole the ball from an opposing player, and his behind-the-back pass met a teammate you’d swear was beyond his periphery. His shots at the basket were rare and unexpected. Most of them swished the net. All were delivered with one hand, except an underhand scoop attempt he tossed in after gliding high toward the basket.
He played only half the game, content to encourage his team from the sidelines. Without him, everything slowed down. The other players dared less and appeared to be mechanical in the way they tried to move the ball.
“Hank Luisetti,” a man sitting near me said to no one in particular. “Hill saved money from his newspaper route, somehow got to the Bay Area, and saw Luisetti play for Stanford when he was a kid. That’s where that one-handed stuff of his comes from.” That was the first time I heard of Luisetti, one of the great innovators of the sport, who developed the running one-handed shot, an early version of the jump shot.
As the game ended, I cheered the Blue Team’s victory. Elam would shower and be out soon. I sat and watched the dispersing crowd. The old bastion of altercation closed in on me. Elam had met its intimidation with a force, as if he knew well its every square foot and shadowed secret. I’d come to know later that he had made this space his chosen domain. He had, as a small boy, found a way into its main chamber not long after his father’s untimely death.
“The janitor thought I had a key and threatened to call the sheriff, but never did,” Elam told The Fresno Bee in a 1986 profile. “The big double doors were not chained tight, and I used to push my little brother through the opening, so he could unlatch a service door for me.”
That evening, while driving me back home, Elam told me that he’d help my dad put up a hoop in my backyard. “I’ll show you a few tricks with the ball,” he said.
I remember how I merely nodded my approval, so full was my throat.
During my own high school days, I saw Elam a few times. He personally brought Edison’s C team into the Fresno High gym to play our C team, the first game of the 1948 season. I happened to be starting the game for Fresno High, due more to practicing what Elam had taught me at home, in my own backyard, than anything I’d learned from a couple of varsity players assigned to ready us for the game. The talk among the few spectators centered on Hardy Gideon, a slender young African American ninth grader Elam was nurturing for a spot on his next year’s varsity.
I’d never played a full court game of basketball, and the first time I touched the ball, I passed it to a teammate behind me. The referee blew his whistle and gave the ball to an Edison player. I’d violated the over-and-back rule. That’s how green I was. From that point on, I watched most of the game from the bench. Hopelessly outscored, the coaches did insert me into the game, with instructions to try and stop Hardy Gideon from tossing in baskets. I tried and failed, thinking all the while how glad I was for my uncle that our uniforms were nameless. At least, the name Hill wasn’t emblazoned on my jersey.
The summer after graduation, I played in a tournament for high school graduates, some of whom were legends waiting to attend college on scholarships. Most were kids who’d lettered for their schools and wanted to keep playing basketball in any way possible. A few were like me, gym rats looking for a shot at an unfilled spot on one of the teams. I played well in those contests, and the team I was picked to play on went on to win the title. Elam, like other coaches hoping for some moonlit cash, officiated one game in which I stood out. After the game, I showed Elam my inflamed fingernail.
“Bruised this on the rim,” I said. “First time I ever got that high off the floor.”
Elam grinned. “That’s a good sign,” he said.
I didn’t tell him that I’d decided to enter Fresno State in the fall as a physical education major and that I hoped to be a basketball coach. Not even my throbbing fingertip warranted that announcement.
At Fresno State, I experienced a modest growth spurt and made the freshman team as a reserve. We practiced at Fresno High, that old chamber coming back into my life again. Our home games preceded the varsity contests played in the Roosevelt High gymnasium. Time passed by me like a movie in which I’d been refused a role of any importance. I even felt like an outsider in my art classes, the instructors unassertive and the assigned work unchallenging. Then in 1952, during my sophomore year, the Korean conflict morphed into a real war, and I began to fear the draft. My number would be coming up, and I’d heard that the Marines were likely to get me.
A friend told me about the Army Security Agency, the part this new group of enlistees played in military intelligence. There were four of us interested, including my best friend, Don Thomas. Three years. It would be a long time gone. I began my goodbyes. To basketball, where Varsity Coach “Dutch” Warmerdam had already chosen a transfer named Tarkanian over me to fill his roster. To my art classes, where I’d been assigned to help the Life Drawing instructor, a duty I enjoyed. To my Mom and Dad. To Regina, who’d recently married and moved out of the house. To my dog Corky. To my very first real girlfriend, who’d come onto campus from the East Coast, a wonderchild at sixteen to my dreadfully ignorant nineteen.
Before leaving for Fort Ord, I talked to Regina about our family. We discussed, in order of age, our aunts and uncles first, and then our cousins. I put faces to names and conjured up images of my relatives to refer to while being away from home.
“How about Grandpa Hill,” I asked her out of the blue. “How did he die?”
“Suicide.”
“Somehow I knew.”
“Thought so,” Regina said.
“Tell me more,” I said, thinking I might as well take one more vivid image along with me for the road.
Regina remained silent, so I made up one little scene of my own. It involved my father and my favorite uncle:
Uncle Elam huddled with my father, there in the kitchen of our Harvard Street home, the two of them lifting their dark brows from something shared as I walked in from the backyard, basketball in my hand. Their faces so much alike. Their hands identical in shape and movement, as together they knocked off shots of whiskey. Secrets, I thought. The bigger the family, the bigger the secrets.
From Fort Ord, we four Fresno friends were shipped by rail to Fort Riley, Kansas, where cadre sergeants, Gonzalez and Wynn, put us through sixteen weeks of basic training crammed into eight, and then, when our hearts were hardened to the point of hating them, they told us goodbye, their cheeks wet with tears against ours as they held us close to their chests for a moment before letting us go.
“Youse guys were the worse bunch of juvenile delink-ents I ever seen,” was Gonzalez’s loving adieu. “Don’t come back in a rubber kimono.”
The four of us all made it back after three years of army life that took us farther and farther from our Fresno homes. I look back at those years as my maturation, points in my life that formed what I am today. Some of my experiences and the actions they moved me to commit, I cherish. Some bring me to my knees in shame and are open season to me as a writer. I spent 18 months in Korea. All but a few weeks were after the truce. Toward the end of my tour, when I thought I might die from bad water, C rations, salt tablets, beer and cigarettes, and all that barbed wire keeping us from visiting the nearby village, I dug a hole outside our tent and, with the help of my tentmates, installed a basketball hoop.
Yeah, we formed a team, won the Soul City Championship, and missed going to Japan for the 8th Army Tournament by one point in overtime.
In 1958, while walking across a row of empty outdoor basketball courts at Tenaya Junior High, I spotted another lone figure in jeans and an athletic jacket, gazing up at one of the backboards. Stepping closer, I thought for a moment I’d broken the repose of a stranger, until I saw his grin.
It was Elam Hill, standing there, hands deep into the pockets of his jacket.
I pointed to the hoop above our heads. “It needs a net,” I said. “For that swish sound when you hit one dead center.”
“What are you doing out here,” he asked, “all dressed up like a preacher ready for Sunday School?”
“Just made it through my first day of student teaching,” I said. “Need the units before they give me a credential.”
“The hell you say.”
Standing in the shadow of that backboard, I cursed myself for not keeping a closer focus on Elam. My time in the army had caused me to miss three of those Christmas Eve Hill family reunions. I made one gathering held after Grandma Hill’s death in 1956, with JoAnn, my wife of three months, bravely facing many of my relatives. “I liked Elam and his wife, Hope, best,” she told me later. “And their four daughters all so shy like I felt.”
A bell rang, and Elam grinned again. “My gym class is starting,” he said.
I joked about, seeing him on campus, and turned to begin my walk toward my car. I had another class to teach at Roosevelt High School. What, I wondered, was Fresno’s most successful high school basketball coach doing teaching gym classes to junior high school kids? According to a Fresno Bee article I read later, he was “quietly ushered out of his job” when he thought he still had another ten or twenty years left.
When I saw Elam again at Sequoia Junior High, we exchanged only short greetings, never any discussion about why he had left Edison High School, where his decade of coaching had become legendary. By the early sixties, JoAnn and I had two sons, and I had quit a teaching job at Fresno High to work fulltime as a self-employed artist. Keeping track of all my uncles, aunts, and cousins was nearly impossible.
I did decide to call up a member of the Fresno Athletic Hall of Fame selection committee and ask him why Elam Hill had never been inducted.
“Don’t know,” the man on the phone replied. “His name’s been tossed into the ring lots of times, but it’s never stuck.”
I wrote a letter, listing everything I knew of Elam’s achievements and called a few people I thought could influence the board. I made his case in the local pubs whenever I found an opening among the sports crowd. I cited his accomplishments as a hoop star in high school: All-city, all-valley, winner of the Harry Coffee Blanket Award, a prized honor at that time in Fresno. Despite the war’s interrupting his college career, Hill made the Bulldogs interesting when he attended Fresno State, always drawing accolades for his innovative play. And, as a coach, he’d led the Tigers to seven league championships during his ten seasons at Edison High. Four of those years, his team won the Valley Championship, a record that still stands today.
When my father died in 1974, I opened my home to all the family with whom I could get in touch. The house was full. For the life of me, I can’t remember Elam attending. Could have been the drinks I put away that day, my mind full, my father, the man I’d taken so long to befriend, gone.
I do remember, after my mother’s death in 1983, seeing Elam and Hope at the memorial reception Regina and her husband, Tom Ashley, held in their home. I also recall talking with Elam at my son Darren’s wedding in 1986, my uncle in suit and tie, looking alarmingly ill, but determined to be present for the out-of-town ceremony.
I brought up the game of basketball and how it had changed so much over the years. “Of all the players you coached,” I asked him, “which one would be able to stand out today?”
Without hesitating, he said, “Hardy Gideon.” He took a deep breath and gazed at the empty sky. “Today, he would have advanced from Edison High into a professional contract worth millions. Back then, he went straight into the West Fresno streets and disappeared.
Elam Hill, himself, died fewer than four years later. Many remembered him as a spirited athlete and inventive coach. So, why was his coaching reign cut short? The best information I got was from his daughter, Jane Hill, a practicing psychotherapist in Central California.
“My father would have been diagnosed as being bipolar, had that been a term popularized back then,” she said.
Jane told me she remembered how much fun they’d have when her father brought his black basketball players home for dinner, often making room for them on the living room floor if they needed a place to sleep for a night or two.
“Then, on other occasions,” she went on in a lowered voice, “we would watch with caution as he sat alone in the kitchen, nursing a drink, cursing how unfairly life treated good people.”
Both Jane and her sister, Joan Colette, with whom I recently talked at length during her visit to my studio, mentioned a disagreement he had with the Edison High School administration in his final year at that school.
“Basically, my dad thought the athletic department had violated some rules,” Joan told me. “You know what a stickler he was for ethics.”
I smiled at her analysis. I’d used those exact words in an essay I had written, comparing my own father to Donald J. Trump.
“Daddy just couldn’t shake the fact that there was cheating going on in the eligibility of athletes,” Joan added. “He wanted everything to be on the up and up.”
Over time, I found my thoughts slipping back to that small, crowded house near Fresno High, the wooden garage nearby not much more than a shack. This scene must have differed drastically from my grandfather’s hickory-shaded residence on all that loamy property he’d once maintained near the Arkansas River. He had himself a real workshop back then, supplied mightily by Coal Hill’s General Store, an establishment he’d owned and operated for years.
I knew him only from the hushed memories brought up from family members well after his death. A shame, for I feel that Augustus Hill could have told me stories I’d have revered. Sadly, his son—my father—never put him in any memory within my earshot. So, I draw my grandfather up for this piece best I can from the whispered words I caught over the years, some true, some lies that, in my opinion, often shed light on the shadowed truth.
He steps out the back door and the sky looks like hammered sheet metal, the way it catches the dawn’s light on this cool day in May 1929. This self-made southern gentleman is dressed in the finest suit he owns. If you knew him well, the way in which he carries his slender frame, a bit labored, might give you pause. A stranger, should he be walking the neighborhood this early, might later tell of a man he spotted, looking fit as a fiddle, a man of obvious position, a man in the prime of his life, a man on a mission.
A sure-fire truth: he is fifty-five years old here, younger, as I write this, than my two sons, both of whom I consider incredibly young men.
His stride is uneven, and he looks to the sky again, the horizon behind a line of similar wood, stucco, and brick sided houses turning everything candlelit. He’d heard not a sound earlier, while spending time in the house’s only bathroom, shaving in the mirror, combing his thinning hair, his hands shaking noticeably to his accusing glance at their mirror images. For a moment, a fierce pain erupts behind his eyes and he staggers to a full stop. A few more steps and he will be at the garage, that workbench and bit of shelving where he keeps a few tools.
Could he be thinking he is homeward bound? Home, before the swindlers and cheating bankers took away the mineral rights to his land, his three coal mines, his vast apple orchards? But no. Once he enters the dirt-floored space and he smells the oil leak still there from the old heap he’d been driving—the loan sharks had come and got it just the other day—he realizes how far from home he really is. The last doctor had told him that a brain tumor was possible, and he’d used precious family money on an amount of opium he’d purchased under a restaurant in Fresno’s Chinatown. That’s how depraved his life has become. Almost blind with pain, his fingers find the rope, the hangman’s noose he’d prepared yesterday. As he tests the rope’s purchase on the rafter overhead, his mind races past scenes that appear and disappear like a series of awakened dreams.
There is his church back home, the one he’d watched go up against the sky, board by board, all purchased by his bankroll. There are the two colleges he’d helped to fund, especially Harding College, the one he himself had named. There is his eldest son, in his first store-bought suit of clothes, and yellow shoes. Just turned eighteen, he is standing in front of his birthday present, the first Ford V-8 Roadster ever sold to a Coal Hill registered owner.
Then his visions of the past leap into the here and now and his head jerks toward the house. Toward Jennie, the mother of his fourteen children. He’s thinking of her right now and hoping she and the kids still at home, the smaller ones with so much of their lives still ahead of them, are just as he’d left them: sound asleep.
The rub, as he might have called it. A favorite expression he used to illuminate the flip side of a notion. What in God’s name is Jennie and all those kids going to do when they find him lynched and lifeless as a madman’s choked puppet out here later today?
He’d left no note. Just couldn’t make himself write one. He’d come close to using his shotgun, but he chose not to, knowing the mess it could cause. He’d prayed. Prayed until he’d passed out last night. He was a man who believed in absolution. He believed in forgiveness. He believed he’d be crossing the River Jordon to an abiding crowd. Most of his brain had been busy now for days, chanting that timeworn theory in his ear. Like so many men whose fathers had made it through the Civil war wanting to preserve their antebellum roots, Gus Hill lived to a wounded but fervent ecclesiastical beat.
“Now then,” he commands himself, “say one final prayer before you jump off this here work bench and break your damned neck.”
His fourteen-year-old son, David, found him later that day. David raced back into the house and contacted his younger brother Elam. Only ten, Elam was known for his ability to take charge. David wasn’t making sense. Daddy had evidently hurt himself out in the garage. The two boys went outside and stood in front of the door David had opened. David stood mute, his mouth unable to make words, his eyes on his brother, watching him now as he walked toward his father’s hanging body, one hand out, almost touching a freshly shined high top shoe.
David began to sob, his shoulders shaking violently.
Elam pivoted to his older brother. He would carry him back into the house if he had to. Momma must be told.
My grandmother Jennie made sure Elam went back out and shut the garage door. No one would open it until her first-born son—my father—got there to cut her husband down.
Ultimately, Elam Hill was a boy who came west from Arkansas on the cusp of this country’s Great Depression. He was one of those boys who idolized his father, and because of his father’s last desperate act, found himself forever bound to a darkness that he’d never quite break free from.
Almost two decades later, Elam’s wife Hope told her daughter Jane, that she’d learned the truth about his father’s death months, maybe years after her marriage. She’d overheard someone talking about it at one of Elam’s games. “I asked Elam why he had been hiding the truth from me,” she explained to her daughter. “Elam told me that he could not speak to his father’s death., that Jennie had demanded they all never break their vow of silence. Never. The patriarch had become ill and died, and that was the end of that.”
All of the fourteen children are gone now. Their generation extended by their large number, came to an end in 2009, with my uncle Bill’s death. They were quite an impressive collection. All tried to be “good people,” and I’ve come to love certain ones even more, after they passed. Especially my father, who never broke free from that day when he was not yet thirty and faced such extreme responsibility.
My generation felt the rub. At last count four of my cousins have taken their own lives. All males: one a poet, one an artist, one an actor, and one an attorney.
And my uncle Elam?
I believe Elam thrived as a child in Coal Hill, Arkansas. There was plenty of space to roam and play. His five older sisters brushed his hair and kidded him about its dark color. The eldest, Ruth, watched over him lovingly when Momma was busy with her newest baby. And there was always, Bessie, their black washerwoman, the way she marched him to school, her starched affair of skirt and petticoats whirling around her ample hips, not a snot nosed kid in town dared harass him. He was convinced early on that the big, ever growing family he belonged to would serve him well. Momma was steady as a rock. Daddy found time to lift him up from the pack and make him feel special.
Then everything changed. He tried his best to understand the move to California. When all that space narrowed down to the small house, and his father did what he did, he promised his mother he wouldn’t break, that he could be counted on to help with the younger kids. Then one day, a neighbor man, Gerald Wenker, spotted him outside playing by himself. Evidently Wenker was impressed with his athleticism. Maybe too, he’d observed how shut in with household chores the kid seemed to be. Wasn’t long and Wenker had put up a basketball hoop for him between their yards.
It happens that way sometimes. A kid, a ball, some space, and the kid is saved. Elam grabbed a basketball, spread his hands on it day after day until he could pick it up off the ground with one hand. That was the start. He could breathe. He could free himself from his idolized father’s desperate act.
Well, he made it close, is how I look at it. I see Elam Hill soaring, on that small court outside his home, and in that big gymnasium not far down the road, and I’m sure there were times the sport of basketball lifted him about as high as one can fly.
“Your name is Hill?”
“Yeah,” I say.
The man walks across the court and hands me a basketball. I’ve seen him before here at the YMCA. He looks a dozen or more years older than my sixteen. Big Armenian guy, lifts weights in the small weight room. “Buck,” everyone calls him. To me, he typifies the type that can’t quite quit the pull of the gym, how he comes in off the streets for a break to be with others of his kind: city boys who have lost their youth to a world in which they never quite fit.
“You any relation to Elam Hill?” he asks.
“He’s my uncle.”
Buck leans in. There is a fire in his eyes. His breath smells foreign. I look around the gym. It is empty. I dribble the ball in place, just for the sound of it.
Buck lifts his hand, waits for me to stop bouncing the ball off the hardwood floor. “Well, let me say something here about your uncle,” he says, his voice loud enough to carry throughout the entire building. “Elam Hill,” he says, “in case you’re too young to know it, is God.”
End