This article is from the summer 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Virginia Kinnier | Photos by Courtney Mason
Even when local historian John Sledge was a child, he knew his future resided in the past.
“History was always present because of my dad, who was a great storyteller and ended up writing his own book on World War II,” Sledge says. “I studied history at Auburn, and later on my grandmother introduced me to the historic preservation program at Middle Tennessee State University, where I ended up getting my master’s. It was there that I learned to see history in an entirely different way, as a local through buildings and objects. That was what cracked it wide open for me, and I am so grateful for it.”
And the city of Mobile is grateful for it, too. For the past thirty-eight years, Sledge has spent each day of his present preserving our city’s past. Today he serves as the Maritime Historian-in-Residence for the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf, where he brings to life the rich history of our local waters.
Along with his current seat at the Maritime Museum, Sledge also sits atop an impressive stack of eight published books that cover every surface of our port city — both offshore and on dry land — and his most recent book, Mobile and Havana: Sisters Across the Gulf, travels even farther. Beginning at the infancy of Mobile and Havana’s shared history, the book is a collaborative effort of both American and Cuban writers and photographers that explores the somewhat forgotten but inextricable link between the two cities.
As the book highlights, there was once a time when Mobile and Havana embraced each other with open arms across the 557 nautical miles separating them. In the 19th century, you could hop on a steamship in Mobile for $20 and be in Havana in two days; a $25 roundtrip ticket would bring you back home. Trade boomed between the two coastal cities during that time, with supply ships racing back and forth across the Gulf unloading lumber and wood in Havana and reloading with cigars, fruit, and coffee for eager Mobilians upstream.
But proximity and trade were not the only things the two cities shared. As Sledge illuminates within the text, architecture, the Gulf Coast climate, and time spent under the command of various foreign flags were also things they held in common, as well as one sport that would become a beloved pastime in both cities.
As the story goes, in the mid-1800s many prominent families in Cuba sent their children to Spring Hill College in Mobile to receive their education. During the Civil War, these students found themselves stuck in a foreign country during wartime, but they were not stuck without entertainment. Yankee prisoners of war brought into Mobile, as well as the Southerners already there, introduced them to a new sport: “town ball,” or as we know it today, baseball.
When the students were finally granted passage home, they did not return empty-handed. They carried along baseballs, bats, gloves, and a game that would become an iconic piece of Cuban culture. In 2022, the Society Mobile-La Habana, which promotes the sister-city relationship, placed a plaque in a small park in Vedado (a Havana neighborhood) that pays homage to the boys who became the forefathers of Cuban baseball, a story that started on a small campus field right here in Mobile.
Despite the proximity and shared pages of history, many Mobilians are still unfamiliar with our city’s relationship with Havana. “Anyone going to Cuba from the Gulf Coast will notice an affinity, a commonality,” Sledge says. “It’s still part of that pan-Caribbean Gulf world and has been that way for hundreds of years. But beyond that, Cubans love Americans. You meet them and they hug you, and there’s a similar warmth that you get in the coastal South, an easy familiarity.”
For John, exploring the shared relationship of these cities felt like a chance to unveil something completely new to Mobilians and history readers alike who were unaware of its existence. Luckily for Sledge, he had a host of characters to help guide the way.
“I wanted to do it through people, personalities like lberville and the baseball guys, because when I was growing up my grandmother and my dad were such good storytellers, and they always highlighted the personalities,” Sledge says. “And those personalities were so much more colorful and interesting and exotic on the coast.”
Sledge’s unique writing style brings these characters to life and makes the text read more like a grand epic than a work of nonfiction. Lines such as “the men paraded beneath fluttering white, red, and gold banners backgrounded by dun buildings and a cerulean sky” echo his remembrance of his father as a storyteller first and foremost, and confirm that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Even the foundation of the book itself evolved from the creative subconscious that seems to work overtime in people as prolific and imaginative as Sledge. Two years after his first visit to Havana in 2019, he posted the following on his Facebook page:
I dreamt of Havana last night. This often happens at the beginning of a book project, when my head is full of the subject — word and image. In this case the book is an exploration of Havana and Mobile, our many linkages and commonalities dating back to the 16th-century Spaniard’s discovery of both our bays. When such a dream comes, it is an affirmation, and a guidepost to the way forward. I was cast into the Gulf, adrift and clinging to a spar, the sail’s remnants faintly illuminated below and around me by the moon’s slanting rays. I worried briefly about sharks … But I took heart in the strong current that pushed me toward the city. A high sea, the Malecón, a row of ancient buildings most dark, a few gaily lit. I worried about being dashed upon the rocky shore as the Gulf Stream hurtled me landward, but the waves carried me over the Malecón, into the city and among the buildings and streets. Then a railway station, where I was able to grab a railing and alight on a dry platform. People clapped. And then I was with my colleagues, Chip and Julio and Alicia, in a car, as we explored. Then it ended. But I could see the book in its entirety. There is research and travel yet, but fundamentally I have what I need. The rest is but labor, and time.
If this sounds like the type of inspiration only bestowed upon the likes of artists and musicians, Sledge agrees.
“There are people who argue whether history is an art or a science, but for me it’s very much an art,” Sledge says. “Yes, you’re guided by documents and facts and things like that, but read the work of the best historians, and they’re just good storytellers. They have a way of expressing themselves — language matters.”
Speaking of language, many would have found researching in two languages to be a bit of a challenge. For Sledge, it was a bonus.
“That was part of the joy for me,” Sledge says. “I’ve always loved the Spanish language. To me it’s much more elegant and romantic than English. Some say English is more expressive, but Spanish is just more poetic.”
During his research, Sledge left no stone unturned, traveling to Cuba five times to fully immerse himself in the culture, history, and people of Havana.
“At first I didn’t think there was enough material for a book,” Sledge admits. “But as I got into the research, I realized how extensive and deep and fascinating these ties are. One of my favorite illustrations was in an old magazine from the Munson Steamship Line, about 1907. It shows a woman standing over Mobile on a map in her Victorian dress with a croquet mallet tapping a steamship that’s making a beeline for Havana. It was an advertisement for these trips to Havana from Mobile, and I thought, ‘Wow, this was a routine thing.’ And it took off from there.”
After that Sledge found himself inundated with newspapers, records, and books that kept adding more pieces to the puzzle.
“The Cuban newspapers we found online were important, but there’s also so much good writing about Havana and Cuba, and of
course Mobile, too, and people who were at both places and wrote about both places, like Madama Levert,” Sledge explains. “So once I began to know a little more, then the patterns started to reveal themselves. And that clarity came from being immersed in the writing and the places and getting to know them, because with a subject this large it took a while. As my old friend, alas now deceased, Mobile archivist Jay Higginbotham, once said, ‘There was never a year when nothing happened.’”
While the research materials may have come easier than expected, other red tape got in the way.
“The whole political envelope — anything to do with the US and Cuba — disrupted progress,” Sledge says. “Once we were detained by US Customs, and our phones and passports were seized. Our Cuban photographer, Julio, was detained for eight hours. They took away his shoelaces — it was just insulting. He’s an artist for God’s sake. But we endured all of that, and then of course Covid hit while we were in the middle of the project, so then there were travel difficulties. It was challenging, but in the end all the more satisfying because we were able to persevere and make it happen. All of my book projects have been rewarding in their own ways, but this one especially so. The people that it brought into my life and their wonderful spirit are a gift, but I also feel such compassion for their plight.”
A mission to protect and preserve the connection between Mobile and Havana served as the motivator for Sledge and his co-authors.
“We wanted to celebrate it, celebrate both cities, what makes them distinctive and what they hold in common,” Sledge says. “To quote my friend Jay again, ‘Mobile, Alabama, and Havana, Cuba, have only three things in common: the past, the present, and the future.’
While he has successfully closed his own chapter on Havana, Sledge is already busy writing a new one.
“I’m working on a collection called Mobile in the Heart,” Sledge explains. “It’s going to be mostly pieces from Mobile Bay Magazine that I have written over the years, pieces that define this place for me. There are articles on Georgia Cottage, for example, where my grandmother lived and where I visited during holidays, on Spanish moss, ironwork, the air itself — that Mobile air — that has a certain feel to it, the humidity.
“When I think of Mobile, I think of all these things. And our local history has so many fascinating layers. To cite an incredible example, there was an archaeological discovery under the interstate recently, right where Mardi Gras City used to be with all the campers. Archaeologists found remnants of French colonial rice ditches from the 1740s. They could see where the sluice gates were with the footprints of black Senegalese slaves who’d worked these ditches so many hundreds of years ago. Today all memory of that has gone, and on top of that you have chert rock and Mardi Gras revelers who don’t have a clue that they’re on holy ground, and above that holy ground, the roaring interstate. To think about those layers and those lives, it’s really moving to me.”
When he speaks of the living history here in Mobile, it’s impossible to ignore the reverence in Sledge’s voice. It echoes a quote by Havana’s now-deceased city historian, Eusebio Leal Spengler, in the recent work:
“By ancient tradition, every old city in Latin America maintains the institution of ‘chronicler’ who is named for life to save the memory of the city.”
Mobile continues to be blessed by the work of our own chronicler, a man who has used his time and talents to preserve the memory of
our port city, whose lands and waters he has studied for years, pulling stories from the currents of time and adding them to our history before they slip downstream.
“I love that quote by Faulkner, ‘The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past,’” Sledge says. “We’re still steered by those currents, and life is fuller and richer and more interesting if we’re aware of some of those things. I think that’s why preservation resonates so much with so many people, even young people — they want to be part of that, part of the story.”
Thanks to the steadfast service of our local historian, Mobile’s story has been carefully preserved and proudly celebrated, and we all have a chance to be a part of it.
