Book Review: Althea

Title: Althea 

Author: Sally H. Jacobs

Date: 2023

Publisher: St Martin's

ISBN: 978-1-250-24656-1

Quote: "When Venus and Serena published a Black History Month newsletter in their high school years it was Althea who they put on the back cover,"

All tennis stars' biographies have one plot: Once upon a time there was a young person who played tennis better than all per friends did. Person was sponsored and encouraged, and per game got better. Person grew older and more interested in more adult pursuits; person retired and, if the story is written long enough after the person's birth, person died. The End. I find in this book much more than a tennis star's biography. For one thing it may shed some light on today's concerns about atrazine-damaged boys wanting to play girls' sports as "trans-women"...but read on.

Althea Gibson's story gains some additional drama from the extraordinary amount of bigotry she had to deal with. She caught hate on at least six different levels: as a Black athlete, as a woman athlete, as an underprivileged athlete, as the child of a dysfunctional family, as an introvert, and as a person who may have been genuinely gender-confused, though the few people who seem to have seen her wearing less than she wore in the photo above seem to have accepted her as female. 

She had a few other nicknames besides the predictable "Gib" and "Gipper," explained in the book, but the one that seems to have lasted longest was "Big Al." In a generation where the average woman's height was 5'2", Gibson was 5'10". At birth she was described as a boy, a "big fat one" though she wasn't fat for long, and was called Alger. Before she was a year old this had been dismissed as a mistake, and the name was changed to Althea. Her lanky build, low voice, and athletic carriage were often perceived as mannish. College dorm mates thought she was a lesbian, though no suspected girlfriends were ever named. As a teenager she was told by a doctor that she'd never have children. She had boyfriends; apparently there was the one on whom she had a crush, the one who was a lifelong good friend, the one she married later on for practical reasons, and possibly more. Jacobs seems to accept the claim that she was a lesbian while presenting evidence that seems more supportive of a claim that she was physically gender-confused. A female roommate said she talked about sex, presumably with men, though women of their vintage often tried to be so indirect and use so many euphemisms that it was hard to be sure. At least, neither the man with whom she reportedly spent days locked in a room, nor either of the men to whom she was married, reported any surprises or complaints. Some people who have male, or partly male ("chimeric"), DNA develop superficially complete but sterile female parts; Gibson might have been one of them.

 As a teenager she was more of a mess than average. Reports of her learning to fight by hitting her abusive father back, spending weeks on end on the streets, brawling and stealing and so on, may leave local readers with one really burning question: "She wasn't one of our Gibsons was she?" Apparently not. "Gibson" was a fairly common English name. Althea's family traced it to an English slavemaster in South Carolina, not the English freethinker from whom our Gibsons descend. Anyway tennis "saved" her from a life of crime, but she was seen as a wild child, a neglected brat from the ghetto, with neither manners nor morals, for a long time. 

But she was good at tennis. She went to FAMC, Florida's all-Black college, on a tennis scholarship and coached as her student labor job. She did well enough in the all-Black tennis league to be invited to play in the White league. The expectation apparently was that the presumed inferiority of the Black mind would keep a girl like Gibson from actually beating the likes of Margaret Dupont or Louise Brough. Gibson trounced them--and, luckily for her, they enjoyed the novelty of being challenged. The image of big, often Black, challengers mopping the floor with cute, naive rich kids who thought they were athletes was a thoroughly worn-out stereotype before it started being used against the Williams sisters; Gibson did more than anyone else to create it.

Her career may even have owed its peaks of success to a horse. In the early 1950s Maureen Connolly was the brightest star in the sky of women's tennis. Big Al had a five-inch height advantage, but Little Mo was Irish. As Jacob tells it, both athletes had actually been longing to meet someone who could give them a real game, so they liked and respected each other. Connolly won a good two-thirds of the time and looked adorable while doing it. Then she had that tiresome injury, riding her horse, and retired, leaving a clear path for her only real competitor to become the Queen of Tennis.

All through the 1950s and 1960s Gibson smashed one prestigious "amateur" title after another. She was sent on world tours to show the world how successful it was possible for Black Americans to be. She won Wimbledon. She curtsied to the Queen of England. She was given a ticker tape parade in New York City. She was barred by league rules from ever earning more than $75 per month from tennis, barred by her tennis schedule from having a better paid job, and, when she'd established that she owned the sport, barred from cashing in as a tennis "professional" by sponsors' reluctance to invest in promoting women's games. Her fellow athletes, some of whom were close friends, married and had children. Gibson didn't have children and didn't stay married long, and after reaching retirement age she felt "broke." 

For the next generation of tennis stars, the game was much more profitable. Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors, Billie Jean King, and their colleagues didn't have their incomes capped to maintain "amateur" status, and were free to earn what their talents were worth on the market while still being eligible for events like Wimbledon. Gibson seemed carefully to avoid directing resentment toward the young stars who admired her. When Chris Evert beat her, Gibson laughed. When invited to appear in public with Ashe, making some sort of public-spirited statement--apparently it happened often--Gibson did; she seemed partial to Ashe in a motherly way, more than resentful of the "class" difference. She blamed the "system," not the young athletes. She was, nevertheless, bitter about the fact that this younger generation of tennis stars were getting so much more money with so much less effort than she ever had. 

It wasn't only the income cap, or the stricter rules about dress codes and other aspects of "ladylike" conduct, Jacobs shows. Gibson was always given clearly to understand that her breaks and her sponsorship depended on her being a good sport about the state of race relations--in other words, her ability to deny that, at the time, the state of race relations was a sort of undeclared war. She was ghetto girl enough to look people in the eye and deny, deny, deny that she'd encountered any particular difficulties because she was Black. In historical fact, Jacobs documents, she had. Gibson did encounter friendly, supportive White people--probably more often than the other kind--and her early life in the ghetto had been so wretched that the close friends of her middle-class adult life were a mixed group, mostly White. Still, there were occasions when her affirmations of interracial good will must have felt like efforts to persuade herself, or like outright lies. If some White people made very large gestures of good will and respect for her, and they did, she still had to shrug off plenty of petty, tacky little gestures of White hostility.

By way of reward for denying large parts of her reality, after whippersnappers like Evert started beating her Gibson was employed by the federal government to deliver public-spirited messages to the world. She addressed, for example, seniors groups on the topic of exercise. Her wages were low, and her Social Security pension, when she qualified for one, unlivable. At one point she threatened suicide. Her better paid friends rallied around to set up a fund that raised her income to what she and they agreed would be modest comfort, in which she spent the rest of her life (1927-2003).

One way this book could have been improved would have been a recognition that. even if her way of communicating it was a product of her ghetto experience, Gibson's introvert personality was as much a permanent physical part of her as her height and color were. She was remarkably free from any need for "mental health care," heroically levelheaded about reality, even the reality that after reaching a certain level of age and illness she wasn't able to live on her income. No matter how many people, in the twentieth century, bought into Sigmund Freud's erroneous belief that all people suffered from extroversion, the medical fact is that many of us don't. What introverts need is respect. In Gibson's lifetime, respect for the personality that made it possible for a juvenile delinquent from the ghetto to mature into a gracious and lovable "self-made" adult, though obviously deserved, was as rare as appreciation for Gibson's kind of face and hair. (At least a similar historical coincidence allowed Gibson's shape to be described in the media as a "rangy" and "supple" "gazelle," in the 1950s, rather than the sort of "You're ugly!" reaction Alice Walker showed a thin young woman getting in the 1920s.) Gibson was wired to understand how much better it was to become a responsible, law-abiding adult, even if she had to lean heavily on denial to do that, rather than to flame out as the sort of "wild child" she'd been. 

Every year we seem to read another news story about another ghetto youth whose athletic or musical ability may be as promising as hers was, but who doesn't seem to understand what he (most of them are male) needs to give up in order to get the benefit of his talents. Getting Althea Gibson from the streets into a teacher training course required the school to cut her some slack (Gibson apparently romped over several college rules) and also required her to give up brawling and stealing, and she did. At the time social support for "Judeo-Christian morality" provided reinforcement for the improvement in teen Althea's behavior, even though popular culture blamed and hated her insistence on privacy and adherence to her contractual obligation not to become the sort of civil rights activist some wanted her to be. Today, with people in the school system openly preaching atheism and challenging our culture's "traditional morality," we badly need support for the physical structure in Gibson's brain that supplied that crucial sense that becoming a law-abiding adult would be better than remaining a delinquent. We badly need to understand that Gibson's insistence on privacy was a valuable aspect of that vital part of her brain, even more valuable than her talents for music and tennis.

Some of us may not yet be capable of recognizing that depression (a symptom more often than a separate disease) and thrill-seeking "suicidality," as discussed by Clancy Martin (probably a distinct disease) and a clearheaded, rational rather than emotional, sense of conditions with which we are and are not willing to live, are three separate things. Even if we want to focus on preventing suicide as an end in itself, we need to realize that when people think and talk about ending their lives because they're not willing to live with certain levels of illness, poverty, dependency, etc., handing them serotonin boosters for a quick emotional "high" is likely to make them feel happier and more decisive about suicide. Althea Gibson would not have lived nearly as long as she did if she'd suffered much from depression or thought of suicide as a response to depression/ She seems much more like the type of person who is, by nature, cheerful and confident enough to be able to feel, acknowledge, and recover from the unpleasant emotions that come and go. When Gibson called an old friend to say she'd decided to end her life, she was expressing a mature, detached consideration of her medical condition, her finances, and the value her presence had for other people. Fortunately for her (and, I believe, for her friend's prospects in the hereafter!), the people Gibson knew were intelligent enough to recognize that the only possible way to improve her situation was to demonstrate the value her presence had for them, specifically, by improving her finances. 

So, if young readers of this book don't want to pay their debts and live within their means, should they read this book as encouragement to threaten suicide whenever they could use some money? Of course not. No doubt it was helpful for Gibson's friends that, by the time Gibson decided her situation was unlivable, she'd been coping with reality quite well for at least the last fifty years, and her income was much lower and her medical expenses were higher than her friends'. What they should take away from this book is that her friends had enough sense not to leap to conclusions about her suffering from depression as a separate disease (she didn't) or needing to be punished with a clumsy, misguided, utterly irrelevant approach to "mental health." Gibson's mental health was fine. Even her physical health was better than many of her generation's. She just plain didn't have enough money to live on. In that case, and not in the cases of depressive or thrill-seeking suicide threateners, the one correct solution to her problem was a cash infusion. She got that, and lived fairly happily until some additional disease factor ended her life with a brief physical illness, diagnosed as blood poisoning, in her late seventies.

What I'd like to see older readers take away from this book is an appreciation of the fact that Gibson's friends also knew better than to babble about "help" coming from the federal government. In the late twentieth century, federal funding was allocated to "supplemental security" for retirees who couldn't live on their Social Security pensions. Bureaucrats prefered to subsidize various unhelpful boondoggles that promised direct relief of their agreed-upon "needs," such as slum "housing" and horrific nursing homes to address rent, mortgage, and housekeeping expenses, but in some cases, recognizing the morale-boosting benefits of making one's own budgetary decisions, they actually sent these retirees supplementary checks. This was not what Gibson wanted or needed, and her friends had enough sense to recognize the fact. There are retirees, like Carolyn Heilbrun, who--rationally, not emotionally--choose to end their lives rather than depend on large-scale handout "programs" for anything. Gibson fortunately didn't have to make that additional decision, because her friends knew that a big part of her decision was based on their affirmation of the value her individual life and work had for them. 

Telling people "There's a program that might meet your need for..." is, in fact, telling them "You have no worth; you are only a bundle of needs; your existence has no value to me." If you are concerned about someone you know, even if you feel tempted to rationalize that as long as what the person needs can be expressed in dollars and cents and the federal government just collected several dollars and cents from you last month, be very sure you don't mention handout programs or "needs." Never let that kind of thought cross your mind! If the people of concern to you are, like Gibson or Heilbrun, responsible competent adults whose reality problems involve money, bear in mind at all times that money becomes a reality problem for people to whom money represents the value other people set on their worth. They have no "needs." They have only worth--if you want to be heard as telling them anything other than "Choose suicide now." (They probably will not choose suicide now just because they hear you telling them to, but they will most certainly revise their opinions of you.) If these people wanted cash alone, they could be exploiting their credibility, as active and competent seniors, to set up all kinds of frauds and scams. If you want this type of person to be able to live with any level of disability, be sure you use the word "need" only in reference to yourself, as in "I need to show my appreciation of what you do and have done."