“Him!… Him…him…” She seemed frozen. “From the camp—!” she blurted, and with this, her grip loosened. Sam pried one hand off, and when the woman tried to move forward again, he held her.
The butcher backed away, and Sam saw the red splotches on his apron. The man’s hands stayed across his eyes. “Are you all right, William?” one of the store managers asked. The old woman wailed, and when her friend threw her arms around her, Sam let go. The two women sobbed, their bodies pumping in great bursts.
“Thanks, mister,” a voice said to Sam.
The old woman’s friend tried to explain: “She says he was there, in an office, checking suitcases—”
The butcher walked off, led by one of the managers. Blood trickled from under his fingers. “She’s crazy—I didn’t do nothing. She’s crazy. I work hard.”
“It’s all a mistake, folks,” the manager said. “She must be mistaken. He’s been with us for years—a fine man, with—”
“It’s him…” the woman sobbed. “Oh! Him…him.” Then she broke down again, mumbling in Yiddish. Sam pushed through the crowd. Some of the women—black and white—were crying, handkerchiefs at their eyes. Above full shopping carts, old men nodded their heads sadly.
Sam looked for Ben, but he wasn’t in the meat department. He heard the manager saying that he could prove things, that he’d call for a doctor. “It’s him,” the woman repeated. Sam was breathing hard—he saw a hand, and realized that Ben was, at a checkout register, waving to him.
Sam stood at his father’s side while a boy rang their groceries up, then packed them in two shopping bags. “You take that one, sonny boy—with cans—and I’ll take the light one.” He smiled. “Everybody left to see what the excitement was.”
Outside, people were going the other way, through the entrance, to see what had happened. Ben patted his coat pockets. His voice was low, confident. “While the attention of the crowd was turned to the attack on Bel-Air’s ace butcher, Ben Berman saw his chance at once, and—”
“No,” Sam said, sharply. “No.”
“But I’ve explained,” Ben said. “And I did it more for you—how will I ever use all this up in a week? You bring me luck, Sam Junior. You—”
But Sam walked fast, the bag cradled in his arm, forgetting his father, thinking of the wish he’d made in Simon’s apartment: for his life to go more slowly. He crossed against the light, between cars, cans jiggling against his chest. When he arrived at the store, Flo opened the door for him. Sam saw women shopping, Tidewater pushing a piece of furniture across the back room. “She’s here,” Flo said, her cheeks flushed. Sam stepped inside, keeping the shopping bag in his arm. He looked out the window, but couldn’t see Ben. “I asked her to come while I was away.”
Sam looked down, saw Stella’s face, smiling at him. She sat in a regular chair—not a wheelchair—and her hands were resting on the checkout table. Sam wondered why he hadn’t seen her from outside, or when he’d come in. He felt the anger inside him rise again. “Somebody had to watch the store,” Flo said.
“Sure,” Sam said, and he nodded to Stella. “I mean, it’s good to see you again, but I got to get upstairs and—”
“Of course you do,” Flo said. “I see Ben coming now. You go on.”
Stella could, he knew, tell that he was confused, uncomfortable. He was glad at least that she said nothing—that she hadn’t been the one to give out the old line about somebody watching the store. But it didn’t mean that he was obliged to hang around, to have Ben start in on everything that had happened. “I’ll see that Stella gets home all right,” Flo said, “and then Mason and I will be up to—”
“We bought the food,” Sam said, and felt foolish. Flo led him to the door. He looked at Stella and smiled weakly, gesturing with his shoulders—as if explaining to her that there was nothing more to say.
“Sure,” she said, and laughed. “Good-bye and good luck, Sam.”
Her laugh made something in him relax. “Sure,” he repeated, without wondering about what was going on in Flo’s head. “Good-bye and good luck.”
The following morning, alone in the apartment, Sam thought of Stella. Outside, he knew, if he’d wanted to look, the line of shoppers probably stretched to the corner. She had been prettier than he’d remembered her. But it was, of course, easy to see himself with a girl like that: like trying to imagine what guys like Gehrig or Campanella or Stallworth had felt when things had been darkest. Tidewater too, Sam told himself, and as the man’s pale face—as pale as the Rabbi’s—fixed itself in his mind, he recognized the knock at the door.
“How’s tricks?” he asked, letting him in; it was almost as if, he thought, he had summoned the guy to him simply by thinking of him.
“Good,” Tidewater replied. He held a manila envelope in his right hand, and again he seemed shy and embarrassed. “I’m not interrupting anything, I hope. Things are going smoothly below and—”
“Sure,” Sam said, motioning Tidewater into the easy chair. “I was just getting ready to call my stock broker. Sit down and take a load off your mind.”
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Sure,” Sam said.
“You look flushed.”
Sam shrugged. “I take care of myself.”
“Perhaps all that walking yesterday, in the cold—”
Sam laughed, remembering, then spoke sharply: “What’s on your mind?”
“This,” Tidewater said. “I’d like you to read it sometime before your father leaves. It’s the second part. You needn’t say anything when you’re done—just that you’ve read it. I promised Ben…”
Sam heard the edge of bitterness slip into the man’s voice. “Just leave it,” he said. “I told you I’d read whatever you wanted me to, right?”
Tidewater placed the envelope on the kitchen table and backed to the door. His long face bothered Sam. “I mean, I told you that before.” He could tell that the guy needed him, that he had the upper hand, but the knowledge didn’t please him. The difference—between the guy now and the guy then—made Sam uncomfortable. When it came down to it, he didn’t really understand how a man could be just like any other man in every way—could be less than other men—and, in a uniform on a playing field, be so much more than other men. He didn’t doubt the guy’s story, but he wondered what the exact difference was: between the guy’s life and the story of his life. “I like sports stories,” he offered.
“Ah,” Tidewater said, breathing out and smiling. He stepped away from the door, back toward Sam. “If you have any questions—if there is something on your mind—” The whites of his eyes grew large. “They won’t harm you,” he stated. “I promise that.”
“There was a Negro kid I went to public school with named Barton,” Sam said. “But he wasn’t a good athlete.”
Tidewater held Sam’s hand in his long fingers. Sam’s head was blank. “It means a lot to me, your reading this—your taking over for your father.”
Sam winced, and walked to the sink. “You don’t have to watch over me, like—” Like Ben was what he was going to say, but he stopped himself. Tidewater too, he was certain, had made the connection: that if they were both taking Ben’s place, then somebody—to use the guy’s own words, about Brick Johnson—was getting into somebody else’s skin. “If you’re gonna run your mouth, how about some coffee?”
“No thank you,” Tidewater said. “My Barton was not a great athlete either—though he was the fastest man on the team, a superb fielder who could move equally well to his right and left.” Sam put water on to boil. “I used to think of Barton and Jones as twins, though Barton was short and dark, a deep nut brown color, while Jones was tall and light. But they both had scars, do you see?”
“Sure,” Sam said, and while Tidewater talked on, he thought of himself and Dutch, playing baseball together at the Parade Grounds.
“Jones was our talker. He had, perhaps, even less talent than Barton, but he loved the game more than any man I knew. His lanky body
was always moving, and his tongue, as he would have been the first to admit, was more restless than his body.” Tidewater’s finger moved swiftly across his forehead. “He had a scar three inches long—here, above his left eye—the result of sitting up too quickly one cold morning, having forgotten that, as was often the case, he and some teammates were sleeping for the night under their car.” Tidewater laughed bitterly. “He felt blessed to be with us after his experiences in the southern leagues, and he kept his bankbook with him at all times, even when playing.”
Sam sighed and sat down to listen. The guy’s voice did, at least, replace other things in his head. “Like Jones, Barton had played from the age of fifteen in the southern leagues—he was forever expressing his gratitude for the chance given to him to play with us. Off the field he stayed so close to Jones that Johnson called him ‘Little Johnny’s sister.’ His shins were covered with scars that seemed to fold in and reach to the bones, from what childhood illness, I never discovered.” Tidewater’s color in his cheeks faded, even as Sam watched him. “I never recall having had a conversation with him.”
“Look,” Sam said. “If you got things to take care of, I’ll take a look at the story you left. You don’t got to—”
Tidewater opened the door. “I’m grateful,” he said. “If you have any other questions—”
Sam thought of saying that he hadn’t asked one in the first place, but didn’t. “Hang loose,” he said, and closed the door behind the man, listened to the quiet footsteps disappear down the stairs. Sam supposed the guy was—the expression was rich—making book on him.
Sam laughed, took the sheaf of papers out of the envelope and sat in the corner of his couch, leaning his elbow on the arm rest. Sometimes, when he’d thought about being in deep with Sabatini’s henchmen, he’d been comforted by the picture of their astonished faces when Ben would say things to them: the big voice from the little man. While they were working him over, for as long as the pain would last (he had always imagined it taking place in the apartment), Ben would have been there, booming sentences at them. But Tidewater’s eyes were even better protection. If—Sam liked the way things balanced—the local guys had left him alone until now because they knew he’d be protected by Sabatini, maybe Sabatini would have to leave him alone now because he’d be protected by the local guys. He had nothing to worry about. Sure, he laughed, not fooling himself: he could still do what he wanted—watch TV, take in a movie, or a game at the Garden, or go for a walk in the neighborhood, talk with Steve or Flo, or, as he would do right now, he could afford to settle back and relax on a Saturday morning with a good book.
MY LIFE AND DEATH IN THE NEGRO AMERICAN BASEBALL LEAGUE
A SLAVE NARRATIVE
CHAPTER TWO
As maggots make their homes in the open wounds and sores of elephants, and with their deadly secretions cure these beasts, so Johnson’s remarks made their home in my skin, and gave strength to my young right arm. After my first game, and loss, I won my nine remaining starts during the 1923 season, and, through the spring and early summer of 1924, pitching three and sometimes four games in succession, and on occasion pitching both games of Sunday doubleheaders, I won twenty-six games while losing only two. I was now eighteen years old—the golden boy of our league—and my pitching feats had become so talked about on the Negro baseball circuit that, whenever we were to play in the big cities—Cleveland, Chicago, Washington, Pittsburgh—Jack Henry would have to promise, for the sake of the gate, that his young star would be on the mound. The people always love a star, and, for more reasons than I could ever recount or know, I was glad to be that star, I wanted to shine for them, to burn brighter than any man who had preceded me or would come after.
I might have been as good a pitcher as I was had Brick Johnson not been there—the fires within me were probably sufficient—but his presence made certain that these fires never diminished. His eyes and his voice found me often during that life I lived when I was not in motion on the mound, and, piercing me as they did, I must believe that they released within me those venomous juices which gave life to my passions and health to my body. And yet, remembering now how I felt then, and seeing the smallness of what it was that I was doing (I was only a boy throwing a ball), I fear that those passions which I believed were burning with such force may only, like thorns under a pot, have been crackling. For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so, the Bible reminds us, is the laughter of the fool; this also is vanity.
“You want to take a day off now and again,” Johnson would say, when I had pitched for the second or third day in a row. “You’ll burn yourself out before you get hair on your chin. You’ll melt that arm, fair ass.”
I had nothing to say to him, of course, and my victories—and growing fame—seemed still to make him speak to me as if I was not there. When it happened, then, in the summer of 1924, that he informed me of something about which I had previously been ignorant, what he said drove like a poisoned arrow straight into my heart, releasing within me a power at bat which, given my narrow body, I had never suspected was there. Although what he told me (in an off-hand manner), about George Herman “Babe” Ruth was common knowledge, and might have been told to me by any of a thousand players or fans, that it was he, and not another who did tell me, mattered.
The occasion was a non-league game we played in Rensselaer, New York (outside Albany), against a touring team known as the Ethiopian Clowns—a team which played most of its games in Canada and which, though it performed shameless pre-game exhibitions in grass skirts, was as good a team as most in our league, and had often defeated teams of white major leaguers.
During those years our teams would often mingle non-league opponents with league opponents: the trips between cities were long and difficult, and though we were playing for guaranteed annual salaries and had (some of our teams) our own ballparks, we did whatever we had to to earn our way. When (this was so in every major baseball city that had both white and black teams) it happened that the white major league team was in town, and idle, and that a black team was in town, and idle, the two teams would meet, and all would know it, though for legal reasons the white players would assume fictitious names and play as part of a semi-pro team already in existence. Thus, even before the end of my first season, in Dexter Park on a Tuesday afternoon in late fall, I had pitched against, and defeated, by a score of 9 to 1, a semi fact, was composed at seven of nine positions of members of the (white) Brooklyn Dodgers. Burleigh Grimes was my opponent on that afternoon, and my teammates made easy work of his famed spitter.
By the summer of 1924, and the day of which I am here speaking, we had already played some ten games against non-league teams—defeating white major league teams twice, losing to them once, and winning our other games against semi-pro white and black teams. The Ethiopian Clowns, due to their assorted exhibitions and tricks, could draw good crowds wherever they played, even against the weakest of local teams. Our own teams in the Negro American Baseball League, finding that our schedules put us in their vicinity, would sometimes vie with one another in order to get a game against them. In this way, the Clowns were often able to get our teams to accept less than our usual ten per cent of the gate. In our own team’s case, Jack Henry outbid the Pittsburgh Crawfords, who were on an eastern swing, not by agreeing to a smaller percentage of the gate, but by giving his word that I would—in both games of a doubleheader—be the pitcher.
“You can rest your arm next winter,” Jack Henry said to me, thereby referring to the fact that, at the end of the first season, I had not traveled south with the Dodgers on their post-season barnstorming tour. They had done well without me—Johnson defeating Pennock and Shawkey of the so-called World Champion Yankees—but when they could not get games against touring white stars, and had had to take what they could get playing against local teams and ragtag collections of other Negro barnstormers, Kinnard, Dixon, and Kelly had jumped the club and played the rest of the winter in Cuba. (If I had had to make the choice again, thoug
h, I would have done the same: my mother needed constant attention that winter, which attention none of my brothers, nor my sister Elizabeth, could give, since they all worked a full week—but it was not, as Jack Henry probably thought, from any feeling of guilt that I did not object to pitching as often as he asked me to. As tired as I might be immediately following a game—I sweated profusely and would, though all of me weighed but one hundred and sixty-five pounds, lose more than ten pounds when I pitched on a hot day—once I was in uniform and on the mound, and once my fingers gripped the seams of the ball, my fatigue disappeared and I could reach into myself for all the energy I needed.)
We arrived in Rensselaer early on the morning of July 23—after riding all night long in Jack’s Buick (seven of us cramped in his car while the six others rode in Rap Dixon’s Ford) from Darby, Pennsylvania, where I had been obliged to pitch league games on the two preceding days (defeating the Hilldale Club, our closest rival for the eastern championship, 3 to 0 and 6 to 2)—and we saw, from the signs pasted to buildings, that our coming, and my appearance, had been amply heralded.
In Colored Baseball at Its Best, The Ethiopian Clowns would, in addition to their World Famous African Repertoire, with Laughs and Chuckles for All, challenge, in two baseball contests on the same afternoon, The Brooklyn Royal Dodgers, of The Negro American Baseball League, which team featured its Young Golden Boy—myself—The New Sensation of the Colored Nation, who would pitch in both contests. The information was flanked by silhouettes of baboon-lipped men, wearing grass skirts and baseball caps, and wielding bats as if they were warclubs.
Because we were not going to stay in Rensselaer overnight, having to be on the road that evening in order to arrive in Cleveland on Monday for the start of a series against the Elites, we did not check in at a hotel. Instead, we found our way to the ballpark, and, since it was still empty, we lay down on the grass next to our dugout and slept. When, shortly before noon, the Clowns arrived, and with them the first fans, we changed into our uniforms, ate sandwiches, and began to warm up. Fortunately it was a hot day, and the sun helped as we shagged flies and ran through infield practice, to loosen our stiff muscles. While we were practicing, members of the Clowns, in their skirts, went around the stands, selling box lunches and pleasing their fans with various shrieks and calls they sent to one another across the park. I warmed up along the first base side, throwing to Bingo and trying to ignore them, but it was soon evident that this would be impossible: due to my featured role in the day’s activities—and not less, I would guess, to the fairness of my skin—I found at one point that they had installed a huge iron pot nearby, under which a fire had been lit, and that several of them were dancing in a circle around me—rolling their eyes and licking their lips. I stopped pitching, naturally, and saw that—as one of the Clowns lifted my right arm to examine its weight and tenderness—even my own teammates were laughing. I did not become angry; I do not believe that I felt much of anything, in fact, except, as always, a desire to be done with it, so that the game could begin and I could be pitching.
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