They talked some more, about this and that, and shook hands one more time. Dennison seemed oddly at ease. So was Murph. He smiled, then turned and walked away dutifully, his thoughts unfurling like a beautiful picture on a boundless scroll of paper.
APRIL 19, 1949
Lester Sledge lived above Elijah Finney’s lumber mill, a small, shingled structure just two towns over from Borchert Field. Lester was responsible for chopping, sawing, stacking and hauling lumber around from here to there; in exchange, Finney gave the young man a place to hang his hat. It wasn’t much to speak of, but the price was right.
When Lester wasn’t working the mill, he was throwing out base runners and hitting balls out of sight for the Milwaukee Bears of the Negro National League. The team had come into the league to fill one of the vacancies created in the NNL after the Cleveland Tate Stars and Pittsburgh Keystones had been dropped. But with limited financing and an inexperienced ownership, the team quickly dissolved and fell out of the running in the league. Most of the players, however, refused to let their dream of playing baseball die. With little more than just the shirts on their backs and some baseball gloves and bats, they formed a “pickup” squad that traveled around to neighboring cities playing against anyone who would have them. They had been very successful throughout the years, despite competition from minor league teams featuring all white rosters, particularly of late with the addition of players like Lester, who continued to open eyes each time he stepped on the field.
Dawn had arrived suddenly, with a medley of firebrick clouds pressed softly against a sky of sea foam green, when Murph and Mickey arrived at the mill. Splashes of the early light fell on a tiny black and white kitten who had come out from under one of the piles of wood and scampered through an unhinged gate, finally coming to rest right in front of them, his tiny paws close together. He arched his neck and purred loudly when Mickey kneeled down to scratch the convivial creature behind his ears.
“Don’t let him bother ya none now, ya hear? He’s just looking for some more petting.” Lester tossed the log he was carrying onto a pile and started for them. He was a lean yet muscular young man, with a thick nose, small eyes, and a sociable smile that belied all the hardship he had endured.
“Can I help you fellas?” he asked, his surprise at their presence largely diminished now.
“Morning, Mr. Sledge,” Murph said. “My name’s Arthur Murphy. From the Milwaukee Brewers? And this here is—”
The young man released a hearty laugh. “Are you kidding me?” Sledge said eyeballing the cap on Mickey’s head. “I ain’t living under no rock, Mr. Murphy. I know who he is.” The exchange held a trace of affection. But Murph stood there, like a suitor about to drop to one knee, the sickening qualms of doubt hammering his insides.
“We won’t take up too much of your time here, Lester,” Murph explained. “I just want to talk to you about an idea I have.”
Lester leaned for a while against the broken metal gate. He was remembering the words his mama taught him when he was just a child. God loves the black folks, Lester, but he helps the whites. Ya hear? You best be looking out for yourself now.
“How is it you know my name anyhow?” Lester asked. “We met somewhere before?”
“Murph thinks you’re a swell baseball player, Mr. Lester Sledge,” Mickey said, his eyes still fixed on the tiny cat, who he now cradled in his massive arms. “Swell.”
Lester looked all at once thoughtful, his eyes lit by some realization flickering behind them. He stood with arms folded, studying their faces. “Oh, I see now. And here I thought you just come ’round this mornin’ to play with Milo.”
Murph proceeded to unveil his plan, once or twice calling on Mickey, who was now wholly distracted by the whimsical antics of Milo, for assistance in selling the idea. Lester listened intently. He thought of himself and his place in the baseball world of 1949; skilled enough to be playing the nation’s favorite game, but not quite white enough to be considered a serious player. Sure, he could play with the Bears. No one said boo about that. “Monkey ball” they called it. It was harmless, and kept them all out of trouble. He also saw, stacked behind him like a row of weathered books, the myriad tragedies and failures that had befallen him in his twenty-two years. He often thought that he would, in years to come, look back on his life, and see nothing more than a painful succession of opportunities that were never really opportunities at all. Doors that were all ajar, just enough to let the light of hope through but nothing else. He hadn’t been at Rayfield Grammar School more than two weeks, not even long enough to know what a grammar school was, when his father was stricken with a deadly illness that claimed his life just two months later, leaving young Lester and his mama to fend for themselves.
She went to work cleaning in some of the wealthier homes around Rayfield and Lester pitched in as well, taking any odd job he could find just so they could put food on the table. It worked for a while, until his mother fell ill too, leaving Lester, at the tender age of thirteen, to a world unwilling to open its arms to someone like him. He tramped around from place to place but never really found a home. It was baseball—the hitting of chestnuts or bottle caps or anything else he could find to whack with the whittled wooden stick he had made—that kept him alive. No matter where he went, he always found two or three kids to play with. He was the best. Wowed everyone who had ever seen him with his raw ability. He found it was easy to win over a kid, white or black, when you could do the kinds of things he could. But it always ended the same way—with Lester having to move on in search of work that could fill his stomach.
“With all due respect, Mr. Murphy, there ain’t no colored folks playing in the American Association. This here’s still a white man’s world. You got your league, we got ours. I may not be educated, but I’m smart enough to know that’s the way people are happiest round here.”
“Are you?” Murph asked. “I mean, happy about that?”
“Don’t reckon I ever gave it much thought. And I don’t know why I would now. It ain’t like it’s gonna change anytime soon.”
They stood for a while silently, each overcome somewhat by the other’s presence, melting only when they both caught sight of Mickey, who had tied a machine bolt to the end of a piece of twine and was dragging it behind him, with Milo nipping playfully at his heels.
“Amazing,” Lester said smiling. “I bet he don’t even know what he’s done, on the field and all. And he has no idea on this earth what other great things that lie in front of him.”
“Yup, he sure is something. He’s getting better, Lester. Every day. Last year was quite an eye opener. But we all got to watch out for Mickey,” Murph explained. “He’s special. Pure, with a heart as big as that pile of lumber over there.”
“Yeah, and that boy sure can throw a baseball. Like nothin’ I’ve ever seen.” Lester explained that he and some of his teammates had caught a game or two last year, after Mickey joined the club. They were all amazed at the boy’s simplicity, and of course, his pitching prowess.
“We was at the game when he broke ’bout five bats,” Lester said chuckling. “Damn, it was sumpin’. And all my friends give me quite a ribbing too, saying the boy sawed more wood in two hours than I could in an entire day.” They both laughed. Murph was heartened that their exchange had reached such a pleasant level of conviviality.
“Well, that’s why I’m here, Lester. Because I see you two sort of the same way. Nobody thought they were ready for someone like Mickey on the ball diamond. Hell, most weren’t. And some still balk. But look at him now. He’s the darling of this entire town. He’s got it, Lester. I saw it right away. And I’m seeing it again. With you.”
Lester’s smile sagged. Murph looked hard into his eyes, for the first time that morning, saw deep inside the young man. His own gaze penetrated the gregarious veneer and revealed a profound wound, a bottomless hurt that made his heart quiver.
“Look, Mr. Murphy. I appreciate what you is trying to do. I do. But this boy a
in’t like me. I may not be no college boy, but I read the papers. Sure, he’s different from the rest. That is true. But you is forgettin’ something mighty important. He’s the right color. He may be off to some folks, but he’s still the right color.”
Murph shook his head with great agitation. “Come on now. Look around you, kid. You got nothing to lose here. Nothing. I’m giving you a chance, a real chance, to show off that talent of yours to some pretty powerful people. And if my hunch is correct, you just may find your black hind quarters squatting behind a white man’s dish, maybe one day gunning down another pretty darn good player from Brooklyn. I think they call him Jackie?”
“Oh, come on now, Mr. Murphy. Do you mean to say that—”
“What I’m saying here son, is that you got talent. Loads of it. And the time is right. It’s happening. Things are changing. Now. Screw these backward-ass country fools who still think only white is right. Robinson is the first. The first. But he sure as hell ain’t the last. You got a real shot here, son, if you’re smart enough to take it.”
Their engagement rendered Lester stupid for the moment. He had never before entertained such an idea. “I want to thank ya and all, Mr. Murphy. Really. But it ain’t no use. One man can’t fight against no army. I know they out there. Can’t see ‘em none. But they there. Heck, I don’t got much, but what I got, I’d like to keep. Don’t need no trouble like what that guy from Kentucky saw. I think I best leave it alone.”
The preposterousness of the plan suddenly revealed itself to Murph, who sadly, reluctantly, turned away. He lowered his head and kicked at some splintered shards of timber. The sense of energy and opportunity that had possessed him ever since his last conversation with Dennison drained from his face as if someone had just pulled a plug. “Come on, Mick,” he called. “We need to be leaving now.”
The two of them walked past the gate, with Mickey turning around after every other step to see if Milo was following. Murph’s legs seemed much heavier than before, and grew heavier still each time Mickey asked him why Lester was not coming with them.
“I don’t know, Mick,” he said, his face awash with inarticulate despair. “I told you already, three times, I don’t know.”
As they approached the road, the seemingly endless consequences of his failure unraveled in front of him, as did the phantom image of Dennison’s smirking face. He knew he needed to get home. He opened the car door for Mickey, but stopped suddenly before getting in himself.
“Do ya really think I’m good enough?” Lester called after him.
Murph smiled and stuck his right thumb in the air.
“I mean, not that I’m saying yes or nothin’,” Lester continued as he came closer, “but if this has any chance of workin’, I has got to be sure I’m good enough. Damn good.”
Murph smiled again. From several feet away, he saw that the boy was now completely exposed. There was no hidden meaning or innuendo in what he said. The words themselves were enough to tell the story brewing behind the young man’s eyes.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” he said, holding up a pearly white baseball he pulled from his jacket pocket. “Let’s see for ourselves.”
Murph fiddled around in the trunk of his car, then walked past the gate again and found a good spot. Then he proceeded to march off sixty feet, six inches. Just the thought of Mickey and Lester being teamed as a battery filled him with an excitement that the actual tossing back and forth raised to some ecstatic triumph. He watched from the side, and could not help but smile yet again with glorious satisfaction and anticipation as Mickey popped Lester’s glove with every delivery while Lester was more than happy to return the favor with each toss back. The rhythmic thumping was music to Murph’s ears.
“You guys were made for each other,” Murph gushed, his heart now fully dilated. “It’s beautiful. What a tandem!”
Lester smiled at the possibility of such a thought.
“Now what do ya say you hit a few for me too?” Murph asked. “I think Mickey’s loose.” In a mellow light, with only Mickey, Murph and a bevy of nature’s creatures for an audience, Lester proceeded to light up the morning sky with long, arching blasts that streaked the pale blue ceiling, each climbing higher and higher as if ascending an invisible ladder before landing unceremoniously in the woods some 400 feet beyond the mill.
“That’s four fastballs and four dingers, Lester,” Murph said from his crouch behind the fledgling slugger. “Of course, Mickey ain’t throwing his hardest, on account he’d probably kill me if he did. But not bad kid. Not bad at all.” The energized manager pounded his glove feverishly.
“Okay, Mick, just a couple more now,” he called out to the mound. “You’re game, Lester, right?”
“For sure,” he said. “Beats the heck out of cutting and stacking them logs.” With another baseball now safely in his hands, Mickey plotted his next pitch. Murph had told him before they began to take it easy—“not too hard; just move the ball around a little” were his exact words. Mickey had done just that, and was ruminating over what he should offer next when Murph put down two fingers in between his knees.
“But, Mr. Murphy, I thought you said to—”
“It’s okay, Mick,” Murph reassured. “No big deal. Just do as your told.”
Now, with the sunshine sprinkling through the slanted limbs of ancient oaks, Mickey turned the baseball in his glove, his fingers reading the laces as if they were stitched for the purpose of delivering some unknown story scribed in brail. Yellow hammer, he thought, his mind turning and feeling among his recent memory of baseball jargon he had been taught to describe things he scarcely understood. Murph wants a curveball. I can do that. Sure. But we had a plan. ‘Not too hard. Just move the ball around a little.’ He didn’t mention nothing about a yellow hammer. And why don’t he just say curveball? Why yellow hammer? Or Uncle Charlie or yacker? And why two fingers? Why is a fastball one finger and a curveball two? Hammers aren’t yellow anyway. Bananas are yellow. So are chicks and corn. But I’ve never seen a yellow hammer. Pa had a red one. And a green screwdriver. But never a yellow hammer. And even if they was yellow, what has a hammer got to do with pitching a baseball?
Mickey floated into an abyss of cerebration, his mind turning and roving in desultory circles from thought to thought until the insular meandering was shattered by Murph’s voice.
“Mickey, let’s go son! You know what to do now, right, kid?” His game sense now roused, Mickey returned and nodded in Murph’s direction. He gripped the ball, just as he had been taught, began his motion, and with the morning light falling heavily on his furrowed brow, he reached back, curled his wrist, and broke off a beautiful curveball that tumbled across the makeshift plate and into Murph’s glove like it had been dropped from an invisible ledge. Lester had watched the ball the entire way, his eyes two brown saucers wedded to the whirling white sphere, certain his bat was destined to strike the ball on the fleshy part. He swung virulently, with a trembling sense of expectation that engendered nothing but a sudden rush of air and an awkward buckling of the stunned batter’s knees.
“Now what in tarnation was that?’ Lester complained to Mickey. Then he turned to Murph with a sheepish smile.
“That ain’t fair.” All three figures flashed in the sunlight.
“Just keeping you honest, slugger,” Murph said winking. “Don’t want you thinking it’s that easy. But no worries. You ain’t the first to come up with nothing but air. Nobody can touch that pitch.”
“I sure am glad I won’t have to,” Lester said, shaking his head. “Am sure glad this here boy’s on our side.”
“We’re all on your side, Lester,” Murph said. “I’ll get the paperwork to you tonight—no windfall attached to it, but it’s more money that you are making now—and you can stay with us if you like as well. It’s closer to Borchert Field and it will give you and Mickey a chance to get to know each other really well.”
Two days later, before Murph introduced Lester to the team, he sat down i
n his tiny office with Boxcar. They sat for a while, inanimate as the row of trophies displayed behind Murph’s desk, just looking at each other, a tacit uneasiness hovering between them. Boxcar was pale and there were shadows under his eyes.
“I don’t know why you’re looking at me that way,” Boxcar said with modulations of pride. “I ain’t some charity case.”
“Come on, Box. You know me better than that. I have nothing but respect for you. Always have. But we need to—”
“Talk, right? Is that what you were gonna say?” “Look, Box, I don’t like this anymore than you do. Neither of us asked for this.”
“You don’t have to worry, Murph,” he said, leaning back and folding his arms tightly to his chest. “I know what’s happening here. Dennison’s riding you about me. I’m not stupid. Been around long enough to know you’re only as good as your last game.”
“Listen, nobody’s saying that you’re done here, Boxcar. Nobody. It’s just that maybe it would be better, for you too, if you just took it easy for a while. Just until you’re feeling strong again. You’re welcome to stay with the team. And when you’re ready to come back, your spot will be waiting for you.”
Boxcar laughed uncomfortably. He leaned forward and grabbed a picture frame off Murph’s desk, fingering a photograph with trembling hands of him and Mickey. Then he began to talk about Murph’s design.
“So you think Baker can handle the load? I mean, he’s still sort of green.”
Murph frowned. Something anomalous in the question arrested him.
“Baker ain’t the one I had in mind,” he replied.
Boxcar looked at him quizzically.
“I just signed a real stud. Plays for the Bears. You’d like him, Box. Tough kid who can knock the cover off the ball.”
A momentary flush passed over Boxcar’s face. “The Bears?” he asked incredulously. “From the Negro National League?”
“Yup. He’ll be with us for the next game.”
A veil of awe stole over the wounded backstop as he gazed blankly into Murph’s eyes. “You’re replacing me… with a negro? Are you kiddin’ me Murph? That’s what you think of me? Jesus Christ! After all we’ve been through. And what about the fans? Huh? Have you thought about that? Do you really believe this is going to fly with them?”
Sophomore Campaign Page 8
