Hank Aaron (part four)

A children’s book, Brave in Every Way, written by Peter Golenbock and illustrated by Paul Lee, was published as a biography for the youth to read of Aaron’s life.

The background of the pages is colored in a tinge of golden dust, and the human flesh is not drawn cartoonish or incredibly realistic either but almost styled and informed from the paintings of great mythology.

Each drawing appears next to a page of biographical prose, beginning with his birth in Alabama during the Great Depression and his mother and father standing face to face and raising up young Henry toward the heavens, with each of them smiling and him looking back down at them in nothing but a diaper and smiling too, to him as a boy and watching his father with a hammer and a nail framing the interior boards of their house, to him sitting in school wearing a pressed collar button-down with an Aristotle pose—his chin on his fist and sitting at a desk right next to the window where the world beyond glows and shines of an aureate sky containing the vapors of milk and honey, to him still young and playing baseball in a dirt lot with friends underneath a sky harnessing on its wall a mural of Jackie Robinson, as though he were an American god and the heavens were manifested by the mind of young Henry, to him standing next to his kneeling mother with a glove in one hand and his other arm held by her hands—about the time when he was fourteen and would have been offered ten dollars a game to play for a semipro baseball team, with their games being held on Sundays, a day which his mother honored devoutly as Holy and the day made to give glory to the Lord, not the day to play baseball—and she is looking up to him appearing to almost cry as though deep down in her soul she knew already that she had given birth to a man that will honor the Lord through this game, that he himself had the potential to serve a saintly calling for the South, country and for the world, to him walking up to the batter’s box tall and lean like an oak sculpture carved by Michelangelo, the bat hanging out in front of his body and carried in his hands in the image of a warrior’s club.