Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  There had been, up to this time, and not counting the days before the color bar, some half-dozen major attempts to organize a successful Negro League, but they had all, for one reason or another, ended in failure. I had heard the stories and the reasons: dishonest booking agents, the competition of the white leagues, failures in leadership, the lack of capital and backing (genteel Negroes looked down, of course, on educated men who played in these leagues)—it would not take a genius, surely, to imagine what, given the general conditions in which we lived during the early years of this century, the problems would have been. Still, by 1920, when Rube Foster had taken the Negro American Baseball League in hand, and had fought and defeated the power of Nat Strong, the major New York booking agent, we were holding our own. The cooperative plan, as it was called (this meant, simply, that players lived from game to game, dividing the percentage of the gate receipts their team was given) had been replaced, in 1920, by a guaranteed annual salary; and though this salary was generally small, a man could—with the additional money earned from barnstorming against white teams after the regular season ended, get by. The big stars, of course, always did well, and even under Foster they were allowed to hire themselves out to teams other than their own for major games and exhibitions. Men such as Foster and Buck O’Neal and Bullet Rogan and Rap Dixon earned as much, some years, as any of the white stars.

  Several teams made me offers, and in the summer of 1923, shortly after a second visit from Mr. McGraw, I left the Brooklyn Remsens for the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers. My salary was to be six thousand dollars for my first full season, plus bonuses which were to depend upon gate receipts and the number of my victories. The offer was not the best I received (this came from the Pittsburgh Crawfords), but it was close enough so that I could see my way to accepting it. I was happy, thus, to be able to remain in Brooklyn.

  I was seventeen and one-half years old, and though many men had sung my praises to me, I knew that I was not yet the best of the best, and this is what I vowed, putting on a Dodger uniform for the first time in late August, that I would become. Having chosen my path, having relinquished the opportunity that could not have led to the fulfillment of the dream that drove me, I developed—on and off the field—a special hatred for the men who were my daily opponents, and I set myself the task of defeating them as badly as I could, of outdoing their finest achievements, of driving myself to every possible success in their league; why I felt this way is by now clear, but that I might have wanted to be the best of the blacks in order, once again, that I might be a man set apart from them—this is a thought which did not occur to me, as self-evident as it is, until I had begun to set down this narrative.

  On August 28, 1923, a Sunday, at Ebbets Field, I took the mound for the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers for the first time, in a game against the Indianapolis ABC’s, and, pitching against the great Bullet Rogan, my brief career in the Negro American Baseball League began.

  If, haunted by a dream which I knew could never be realized, I drove myself to a hatred for other black men, it remains true that this hatred was, like the dream, intangible and general. It was, of course, my own self against whom I struggled most; it was my own self-hatred which needed an external object, and the turning outward of this passion enabled me to survive, and to survive by subduing those whose love I wanted most dearly, but wanted in a world which—thus my dream—had been ordered otherwise.

  I wanted to be the best of the best, and the intensity with which I wanted this was gone only during those actual moments of action, when, as I have indicated, the ball was in motion, the world was timeless, and my body moved, with strength and grace, of its own accord. I fought against opposing teams, and I fought against my own team: for I could only do so much—once I had put the ball where I wanted, if I did not strike out the batter, and if he hit the ball—even if he hit it where I had planned to have him hit it should he not swing and miss—I could not control what those behind me did when the ball came to them. To put it in simplest terms, it bothered me that my teammates where there, it bothered me—and I was aware of how unreal the grounds of my feeling were—that there had to be eight other men with me, that I could not do what had to be done alone. I did not, in truth, think of it at the time in the terms I give here. I knew only that I preferred to keep to myself, and to win. It was as if, at the age of seventeen and a half, from the time of my first game, I was already some older version of myself; or rather, as if, while I was in motion on the field, I was in fact that young man whom others cheered and admired and talked about, and, at the same time—and whenever the ball was not in flight, whenever I was obliged to be with others—I was a man who had already lived through it all and had passed to the other side; it was as if this other self were there, glaring at me, mercilessly judging my every action.

  But just as the dream which drove me had its counterpart in actuality (my brief career, here described), so my hatred had its counterpart, though not among the white men with whom, in the Major Leagues, I knew I would never play, nor among the white men who kept me from playing. The first man I hated after I had joined the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers, and the man who returned this hate with an easy scorn I was never to match, was the pitcher whose place I took, a mean and shrewd black man, then forty-three years old, named Amos “Brick” Johnson. For while it is true that all black men are brothers, yet some are less brotherly than others.

  I was young and fair; he was old and dark. I was not yet in my prime; he had seen his better years. I had been raised in the city and trained to be a gentleman; his origins lay in some anonymous country village, and he could not sign his name. The oppositions—in our history and nature—were endless, only our rivalry uniting us, and it must have appealed to me that the basis of our opposition had such classic proportions.

  Until my arrival Johnson had been, despite his age, the mainstay of the Dodgers’ pitching staff. During a career which spanned at least thirty years, he claimed to have won over eight hundred games, and to have lost fewer than two hundred. He had begun playing before the turn of the century, and had played with dozens of teams, including Rube Foster’s great Leland Giants (of 1910), the Birmingham Black Barons, the Nashville Elite Giants, the Celeron Chocolates, the Genuine Cuban Giants, and the Brooklyn Brown Bombers. He could still command fifty dollars for an important game when he rented himself out to a semi-pro team not in our league. He had never been considered the best of the black pitchers, but he had sometimes been called the fastest—and the meanest.

  I had, as a boy of ten or eleven, seen him pitch against the Brooklyn Remsens several times, and had tried to imitate his pitching motion—a high kick and big overarm delivery which had, as we said then, a lot of show on it. But the big motion, even when I first saw him, was already being used sparingly; by the time we became teammates, it had given way to a variety of less awesome pitches: an assortment of crossfires and sidearmers and submariners—a hesitation pitch and a quick pitch, an emery ball and a burred spitball. Like many before and after him, he had, for some years, been getting by on savvy. He saved what was left of his fast ball, most often, for soaking batters—and he did not, as lesser pitchers did, aim for the chin or the shoulder: he fired, using a submarine delivery, for the temple. Old Brick, the players said, he means to be mean.

  Before the day I first pitched for the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers, I did not, however, know how much I would hate him. When, shortly before game time, Jack Henry, our manager, informed me that I and not Johnson would be the pitcher against Bullet Rogan, I allowed the innocence I still carried with me to be exposed to the man. I went to him and informed him that I had seen him pitch when I was a boy and that I had once modeled myself after him.

  He studied my face, then laughed. “Hey then, you got real brains, fair ass,” he said. Our teammates did not hear the exchange between us, but they did hear his laughter—a rumbling and coughing growl that overpowered me, and though I set my eyes upon his, and vowed never to give him another chance at me, I could feel my heart sh
rink, and my body, like a twig, bend in humiliation, as if the weight of his barrel-chested torso were upon me, crushing me. I blushed and turned away. He had seen too much, of course: he had seen that the boy who had worshiped and imitated was still alive in me, and that, from his point of view, my superior abilities could, therefore, be dismissed. I was struck also—frozen to the spot, as it were—to sense something about him that I had never previously understood was possible: he did not care about baseball.

  Nor did he really care about me. Baseball was, quite simply, the way he earned a living, and my presence meant that he would, in time, have to be occupied with the bother of looking for another way to earn his keep. I was his enemy because I had taken his place, and though he found a special language to deal with me—one which amused him and—the expression is too accurate—got under my skin as nothing before had—I think now that he would have acted in a similar way toward any young pitcher joining the team.

  But I was not any young pitcher, and it was, I think, the indifferent quality of his hatred—his refusal to regard me as special—which most infuriated me. That, given my age and abilities, I would win was fore gone; that I would replace him and surpass him was apparent to both of us—yet there was, I saw at once, nothing in him capable of being touched by my victory—of acknowledging or understanding what it was in me that wanted so dearly to win. (“It is no victory,” says Claudian, “unless the vanquished foe admits your mastery.”) It was this diffidence, then, crueler than indifference, which I found unbearable, and against which I set myself.

  Or so it seems now. Why it is that the generality of the world’s injustice, as it came home to me at that time, should have been embodied for me in this particular man is not, of course, given the simple twistings of my young mind, difficult to understand. Would it have been easier for me to have refused McGraw, and later, to have left the Negro American Baseball League, if I had been able to wear Johnson’s dark skin, his indifferent scowl? Once, I recall, during that first summer with the Dodgers, Little Johnny Jones, our third baseman, asked him about his mother. I expected Johnson to laugh at Jones as he had laughed at me, but instead he grabbed Jones by the front of his uniform, slamming him against a locker. “You think any woman could give birth to Brick Johnson? You want to mind your business—you want to keep your damned questions up your ass, hear? Your life ain’t nothing to me.”

  At the time I suspected that he had said this for my benefit, that he watched my face, and not Jones’s, for a reaction. And yet, I knew that this could hardly be true, since the source of my own anger was not that he desired to provoke me, but that he did not. Was he so shrewd, then, that he could invent anger within himself, in my presence, so that I would wish the force of this anger directed against me? I cannot say. His black perforated face, in my mind, reveals no answers now, as it revealed none then.

  But such are, of course, the ruminations of an old man, and they do not correspond to the glory I did feel on that day almost fifty years ago when I took the field for the first time, wearing the uniform of the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers. It was a broiling August day, without wind, and in my hand the new ball felt as cool and hard as the sun overhead was hot and molten. There were no shadows across the green lawns when I warmed up, and when I threw there was no web of speculations in my head, nothing which could impede or diminish the speed of that fiery white line between myself and the dark hole in the catcher’s glove. If, before the game had begun, I wanted to win in order to ex tinguish what had passed between Johnson and myself, in order, in some way, to defeat him—to fire the ball with such speed that it would become an invisible white pellet—it remains true that, once I did wind up, kick, and stride toward home plate, his face and voice were gone, and the hatred which had inspired my determination was transformed into something resembling pure forgetfulness and joy. I might, fingering the red stitching on the ball, vow to show him—and the world—who I was, but once I had begun my motion, even while warming up, the truest thing is that I released all thought before I released the ball.

  Without wind, the flags above the grandstands and scoreboard were still. Despite the heat, the crowd was good: fourteen thousand fans, more than Wilbert Robinson’s white Dodgers would draw on an average Saturday when they were at home. My three brothers sat together behind the third base dugout, and Mr. Tanner, still alive and in his senses at ninety-two, was with them. I can feel again the fiery ball moving slowly and steadily above me in the heavens; I can see my brothers’ proud faces; I can feel the sweat washing down my neck and back and chest, soaking my uniform; I can see the spectators holding their paper fans, painted with tiny flowers, moving like inverted pendulums in the grandstands—cooling my admirers’ unmoving faces on that windless day; I can feel blood coursing through me as I moved, in a world that defied entrance, from action to waiting, from pride to anger, and back again; I can taste the ice that was hacked from the slabs, which, wrapped in burlap, vendors carried on their backs from row to row in the stands. But I knew that the only escape from the heat lay, not in fanning a small breeze, nor in sucking on chips of ice, but in playing hard—in heating the body through work, in trying to equal the day’s heat; and yet, though my body did defy the sun’s strength, my defiance seems now the most obvious instance of the futility of all that energy—how little, after all, it mattered that I rose on my right leg, kicked, whipped my arm over, and sent a round piece of white leather across some sixty feet of earth! I wonder, then: was it, on that broiling day, some flickering sense of my insignificance which was, after all, the truest inspiration for my fury and will?

  I was at the center, standing in the small circle of dirt at the mound; around the dirt was a diamond of emerald green-grass, ninety feet square, and around the grass was the basepath, another diamond—clay-colored, some fifteen feet deep, oval-shaped at its outer rim. Bingo Rouillard, my catcher, squatted behind home plate, in his own ring of dirt. The infield (Rap Dixon, Jack Henry, Olen “Junior” Barton, and Little Johnny Jones) was poised within the clay behind me, bent over low to the ground; beyond them, in the acres of grass which stretched away to the far corners of the field, my outfielders (Johnson, Galen “Gunboat” Kelly, Rose Kinnard) played straightaway, their hands on their thighs, bent over, but not so low as the infielders. At their backs, the fences rose, squaring off the field, and the rows of seats, one behind the other, capable of holding some thirty-one thousand fans, moved away and up at an easy angle, all around the park (except for right field and right-center, where there were no stands, and an eighty-foot wall containing the scoreboard separated us from Bedford Avenue). Within these stands, the fans sat immobile on the sloping steps, their eyes fixed on me—a thin and pale boy, tiny when seen from the height of the grandstands and bleachers and upper decks—trapped in the circle within the diamond, the diamond within the oval-shaped square, the square within the larger green diamond of the field, the field within the square of dirt that separated it from the people, the people themselves trapped in the steel and concrete stands. And yet, with the warm-ups completed, and the national anthem played, my players and fans ready, I felt, as I dug out a bit of dirt in front of the mound with the heel of my spikes, that things were somehow inverted—or is this memory speaking?—that, since I commanded it, I also contained, within my small ring of earth, the entire arena. I felt, in brief, as if I were untouchable. Then, since we were the home team, I wound up, and, in my glory at last, fired the first pitch of the game.

  It was a strike, knee-high, that whistled past the batter. Bingo returned the ball to me without rising from his haunches. I threw two more strikes, to the same spot, and the batter remained, like the fans, immobile. Only their mouths moved, letting loose a cheer which echoed from the steel girders and told me that I had pleased them. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, using the back of my glove, and fired three more times, striking out the second batter, and Bingo Rouillard, loud enough for those in the dugouts and in the boxes along the first and third base lines, asked me if I would
prefer to have him call in the outfield for the third batter. I smiled, wiped my fingers along my thighs to dry them, and watched the great Oscar Charleston bend over, rub some dirt into his palms, and step into the batter’s box. His fame and power, however, were nothing to me, and I reared back and let fly with my fast ball and it found the hole in Bingo’s glove before Oscar could move the bat from his shoulder. “You got ’em all, honey,” Little Johnny Jones called to me from third base. “Oscar’s posin’ for pictures there—you got ’em all, honey.” I fired again and Charleston swung, late, missing a low outside pitch. “I feel the breeze,” Jones called to the plate. “Oh I do feel the breeze.”

  Bingo showed me his glove, just outside the plate, and I threw it there, hoping to have Charleston swing and miss on a bad pitch, but he left his bat on his shoulder, and I was obliged to throw again. I threw inside this time, letter-high, where Bingo showed me, and Charleston stumbled away, on his heels, but did not fall. With the count two and two, Bingo showed me the heart of the plate, knee-high, and I sent the ball there, lower than the spot I was aiming for, so that, rising somewhat past the halfway point, it cut upward and Charleston—his bat stationary on his shoulder—muttered something and walked away, knowing he was out before the umpire had told him so.

  I walked from the mound, the roar of the crowd raining down on me, my own teammates running by, slapping me on the back. Johnson ambled in, the last to reach the dugout. “It’s hot today,” he said. “You want to pace yourself, boy.” I sat by myself at the end of the bench, wanting my own men, I realized, to make out quickly, so that I could return to the mound. Bullet Rogan, pitching against us, accommodated me. A man of average height for an athlete—perhaps five-foot-ten—and of average build, Rogan had begun his career as a catcher for the Pullman Colts of Kansas City and had first earned fame as a pitcher during the First World War with the Negro 25th Infantry team in Honolulu. He was very fast—not as fast as I was, nor as fast as Johnson had been, but he threw what we called a heavy fast ball. Coming at you, it seemed larger than it should have been, and you strained to try to hit it solidly. In addition, unlike most fast-ball pitchers then, he had a fine curve ball. I watched him work, getting Barton to hit out in front of a curve ball, thereby tapping it to second for an easy out. He blew two high hard ones past Rose Kinnard, then caught him looking with an easy inside curve. Johnson, batting in third position, swung on the first pitch—a low fast ball—and lined it to third. Rogan had thrown only six pitches, but that was all right too. I was back on the mound that much sooner.