Troy Maxson (1904-1965) was an African-American Negro League baseball player and trash collector from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1957, he became his city's first black garbage truck driver, having worked as a can lifter for several years beforehand. However, his family became estranged from him due to his infidelity, his alcoholism, and his bitterness, and he died of a heart attack in 1965.
Biography[]
Troy Maxson was born in Alabama in 1904, and he grew up in a working-class African-American family of eleven children; his mother left the home when Troy was seven. Troy left home at age 14 after beating up his abusive sharecropper father (who had beaten Troy and raped his thirteen-year-old girlfriend as Troy and the girl made love by the riverbank), and he walked 200 miles to Mobile in search of work; his only family member who he would keep in touch with was his brother Gabriel Maxson, who later moved in with the family after he was left mentally impaired due to World War II wounds.
Unfortunately, there were no jobs or houses available to blacks in the segregated city of Mobile, so Maxson became a robber to sustain himself. He got married and had a son, Lyons Maxson, but, as he had more mouths to feed, he had to rob even more people. During one robbery, he accidentally killed a man with a knife after the man shot him, and he served in prison for fifteen years, where he met his friend Jim Bono. The two best friends settled up north in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the Great Migration, and Troy started a family with his second wife, Rose Lee, having one son, Cory. He worked as a garbageman to provide for his family, and, in 1957, he became his city's first black garbage truck driver after complaining to his union that only whites were allowed to drive.
In the years following his move to Pittsburgh, he became a very talented baseball player, and he played for the professional Negro Leagues; he batted .432 with thirty-seven home runs. However, due to living in an era of widespread racism and segregation, he never made it to the MLB, which had no black players before 1947. In July 1941, he claimed to have wrestled with the Grim Reaper, and he did so while he was sick with pneumonia; he continued to believe that the Grim Reaper would be back, and he often talked about death. Maxson was left with a bitter view of the world due to the racism which he had experienced as a young person, and because of his poor lot in life, caused by the racist establishment. He also had an affair with Alberta, a Florida woman whom he had met at a bar, and she died during childbirth in 1957. That same year, Troy kicked Cory out of his house after arguing with him over Cory's insistence on playing football over working a real job (as Troy did not want his son to end up like him), and his wife agreed to take care of Alberta's baby daughter, although she said that Maxson no longer had a woman. The couple lived in the same family home, but they were now estranged, and Troy died six years later of a heart attack while swinging his baseball bat in his backyard. Ultimately, Rose admitted to loving Troy despite his flaws, as he had loved his family despite being hard-headed and even poor at demonstrating affection.