Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  There remain, then, only facts. I met George Herman “Babe” Ruth some six weeks after the close of the 1924 World Series, and we became lovers. I saw him for the first time on the afternoon of November 26, 1924, when we played his team, the Touring Yankee All-Stars, in Charlotte, North Carolina. When I emerged from the dugout at the city baseball park and glanced, as I always did, toward the outfield to see which way the wind was blowing any flag which might be there, he was at the plate, striding forward with his right foot, his back to me. I tried not to see him. There were no flags, which I must have already known, since the outfield had no fence behind it, but ran to pasture. There were ample stands along the first and third base lines, for whites; ropes had been strung up along the left and right field lines, behind which our own fans stood. Boys—white and colored—had, as always, ducked under the ropes and roamed in the pastures behind the Yankee outfielders, hoping for long drives.

  He seemed as real, standing there, as he had been in my mind. I was carrying the photo, now broken along its folds. Bingo called to me, telling me to begin my warm-ups, but I stood and stared, and saw, as Ruth followed through and his profile was, for the first time, revealed to me, just how black his skin was. His turn at bat completed, he picked up his glove and walked in my direction, along the first base line.

  “Hiya, kid,” he said easily. I looked away. The greeting was, of course, the one he was famous for—the one he gave to the world: to fans, children, friends, teammates, sportswriters. His voice was young and thin—lighter than my own. Though I had known his age (he was ten years older than I was, and had been playing in the major leagues since 1914), it surprised me to see with my eyes that he too was a young man. His skin, though burnt from the sun, seemed especially smooth, and his round features made him appear more boyish than his photographs had indicated. His smile, sincere and vapid, revealed the dumbness my teammates had enjoyed mocking. (“Once,” Bingo had told us, “when the fans got on him during an exhibition game—this was in Montreal—they say that they started yelling ‘Nigger’ at him, and that Ruth, who never did have rabbit ears, only smiled back at them, pleased, remarking to a teammate, ‘See—they know me up here too.’”)

  I wound up, kicked high, and fired the ball at Bingo; it left my hand too soon, though, from far back of my ear, and I saw at once that it would be wild. I felt faint. Bingo leapt, but the ball sailed above his head and Ruth laughed as his teammates, at the plate, hearing Bingo’s cry of “Heads up!” ducked and cowered, covering their ears, unaware of the direction from which danger approached. The ball hit no one, however, but skipped in among the fans. Ruth jogged off in his bandylegged way, without looking at me again. He tipped his hat to the crowd along the right field line, behind the ropes, and they cheered him.

  I saw Johnson then, leaning with one arm on the top of the dugout, some ten steps from me. “Sure now, fair ass,” he said, picking at his teeth with a fingernail and smiling in a way which made me burn. “You want to pace yourself.”

  His voice revived me. I glared at him—at the purple blackness of his skin—and fired the ball at Bingo, stinging him in his glove hand. My weakness was gone as quickly as it had come. I thought of Johnson’s age: his perforated face told no lies. In every city in which we played, throughout the southeastern United States, I and not Johnson had been the central attraction. I was the man who, in the Negro press, was already being called “the Black Babe,” though my ignorant public could not know that the young man so heralded bore the likeness of one they would refer to, when they had seen him, as “an all gone”—the term deriving from their belief that any Negro of my color would have to have passed through three generations in which white and black had mingled—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon—until, in the fourth, the dark pigment would have been all gone.

  I was also, then, a curiosity. After games, young boys would wait outside the ballparks to look closely at me. The brave ones would touch me. I remember none of them—not a single face—though I do recall the voice of one boy who, following me from the park to our hotel, in Savannah, kept begging me to tell him what he had to do to make his skin white. “Oh cap’n,” he whined, dancing around me, bowing his head, his hat in hand. “I’d give anything to have skin like yours. What I got to do—tell me please, cap ‘n. Oh what I got to do to make my skin white.”

  “For what is this love of friendship?” Cicero asks. “Why does no one love either an ugly youth, or a handsome old man?” I did not, for once, believe that I envied Johnson those things which enabled him to hate me with such an indifferent scorn. I did not listen to Bingo, telling me to take my time. I knew that the Yankee players had stopped around home plate to watch the fast ball they had heard so much about, and I sensed that his eyes were, from behind, even while he joked with his fans, watching my every move, gauging my speed.

  I had nothing to hide. I threw with all I had, yet easily. I set down the Yankees—Dugan, “Witt, Meusel—in order in the first inning, and my teammates did not need to tell me how good I was. My ears were ringing, yet I heard nothing. Jones’s banter was for the pleasure of the white fans, behind our dugout. I burned with pride and did not believe that any man could touch me.

  Ruth was the first to face me in the second inning, and as I watched him smile at me from his moon face, I thought that his eyes were playful, that he thought he could toy with me. But it was probably, as always, only his beloved fans he was thinking of; he would have done anything to please a crowd. I reared back and, wasting nothing, fired two strikes across the heart of the plate while he stood, amazed, with bat on shoulder. He hitched his belt then, resolutely—as was always the case in the off-season, and sometimes during the season, he had grown thick around the middle, from too much eating and drinking. As others often remarked, his shape was, incongruously enough for a man of such grace, like that of a pregnant woman. The fans, excited by the confrontation, were silent. I kicked high and threw again, whipping my arm downward and snapping the ball off the tips of my fingers. The ball flew—a brilliant white line, low, toward the knees. He stepped forward and lunged, his bloated torso twisting in vain, for the ball was already cracking the pocket of Bingo’s glove even as Ruth was bringing the bat around. I had never thrown faster. The crowd roared; I felt the blood pounding in my ears. Bingo rifled the ball to third base, and my teammates flipped it around the infield. I could not have done other than what I did, but I wondered nonetheless, and it was a moment before I allowed myself to look toward the plate again. He was still there, as if contemplating what had happened to him. His eyes met mine. They showed puzzlement for an instant only, and then he smiled and returned to the bench, clucking to himself: I had pleased him.

  In our half of the third inning, I took my first turn at bat and, standing in against Waite Hoyt (himself a native of Brooklyn, as all our fans, receiving reports of the game back north, would have known), I did not hesitate. The first pitch was letter-high and outside and I moved into it with an ease that belied the energy released: I met the ball solidly and drove it high and far toward right field—Ruth took one step back and then stopped. He turned and watched the ball soar—far beyond him, where the crowd of young boys had also turned and were already giving chase.

  I gave all I had. In his second at bat, Ruth set himself for me, and after swinging and missing at the first two pitches, and taking the third pitch for a ball, he timed a low fast ball perfectly and drilled it to right field—straight at Johnson, however, who took it easily. In his third at-bat of the day I took Bingo’s instruction and sent the first pitch for his chin, to keep him from crowding the plate the way he loved to. He fell down and sat there laughing, even though the pitch had nearly hit him—a pitch like the one with which, four years earlier, his teammate Carl Mays had killed Ray Chapman. He got up and took his stance, swinging at the air several times, slowly, giving away no ground. I felt nothing and thought of nothing except, as always, of what I was doing. I threw hard, to the inside again. He swung—on time—but the ball, snapped o
ff and breaking, rose in the last twenty feet and passed above the bat. “Oh I feel the breeze,” Jones called. I pitched again—a called strike, low on the outside corner—but Ruth continued to regard me with a smile. His shoulders were broad and though one could feel, as he took his practice swings, the power they contained, the great power, as I myself knew, came not from size or strength, but from the energy generated in that moment when bat and ball met and the wrists circled one another, snapping across—breaking was the word the players used—as if straining against an impossibly fierce wind. I felt no fear, though, and with two strikes on him gave him my best—a bullet across the middle, waist-high; he swung, his wrists snapped swiftly, but his bat only grazed the ball—so slightly that the ball did not alter its course. It smacked into Bingo’s glove for the third strike. “You own that man!” Jones called. “Oh you own that man now, honey!”

  I was thrilled, but not surprised. When the game was over Ruth lingered near his bench and beckoned to me with his hand. I had expected that I would have been able now to stare him down—to disdain, in myself, that very passion which had made me desire, so dearly, to defeat him. In his presence, however, with the game over, I could barely look at him; I was aware of my age, and of how young I must have seemed. “Hey kid,” he said. “You really took care of me out there to day. How ‘bout me standin’ ya to a drink?” I nodded, my eyes fixed to the ground in front of his feet.” You come by my hotel later, okay? Any kid who throws the way you do—I got to stand ya to a drink.”

  He punched me playfully on the shoulder of my right arm—the way he would have done to one of his own teammates. “See ya later, kid,” he said, and walked off.

  In my hotel room, I took his photo from my wallet and tore it into little pieces. Yet I could not deceive myself. Although I had proven myself his master as a pitcher and hitter, if only for one day, I grew weak when I thought of our conversation, when I pictured him at the plate or in the outfield, when I remembered each detail of our confrontation.

  He was, when I arrived, sitting in the lobby of his hotel, sprawled across an easy chair, entertaining a crowd—a red-headed girl in a low-cut sequined dress was on one arm of the chair, and Dugan sat on the other. Ruth was smoking a cigar and laughing boisterously. I recognized some of his teammates and assumed, correctly, that the other men were newspaper reporters. I stood in the doorway, watching his large hand—as he laughed—caress the thigh of the girl. She had a hand on his neck, her fingers inside the collar of his shirt. “Oh Babe!” she screamed, delighted. I felt an enormous revulsion, but I would not leave. I waited until, roaring with laughter and looking around the circle of men who were playing court to him, he spotted me. “C ’mere!” he yelled, gesturing with the hand that held the cigar. I obeyed and walked across the lobby. I was wearing a suit and tie, and realized how out of place I must have appeared.

  “This here’s the greatest pitcher I ever faced,” he said at once, as the crowd parted and I entered the circle of men around his chair. He pointed his cigar at one of the newspapermen. “You jackasses can quote me on that. You tell ’em the Babe says that the greatest pitcher in baseball is a nigger, and that includes Walter Johnson.” He sat up then, as if worried about something. “Hey listen,” he said. “You drink, don’t ya?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Occasionally.”

  He mimicked me. “Occasionally,” he repeated, and laughed. “That’s pretty good. You jackasses hear that? Old stuffed shirt Johnson, he’s so clean—” He pulled the girl’s head down to his mouth and whispered in her ear so that she howled with laughter. He stroked her thigh. “He ain’t the Big Train,” Ruth went on. “He’s the Milk Train!”

  When the others had stopped laughing, Ruth shoved the girl off the arm of the sofa. “You get lost now. Me and the boys want to go have ourselves a good time. I’ll call ya when I need ya, okay?” He stood up and put his arm around my shoulder. “This here’s the greatest pitcher I ever faced. You jackasses can tell ’em that the Babe said so. He hits ’em pretty long too—not as long as me, but he whacked it pretty good today. “He put his cheek next to mine then.” But who’s blacker, huh? Tell me that. Who’s blacker?”

  “You got him beat a country mile, Babe,” Meusel said.

  “You really a colored?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I replied, trying to keep myself erect under the force of his arm, which was pushing me downward. “Yes I am.”

  “Okay,” he said to the others. “It’s the truth. I seen guys even whiter than him in Baltimore and they were niggers. We had a kid at St. Mary’s was a white nigger.” He nodded his head up and down, vigorously, as if he were lecturing his friends. His stomach bulged, touching my right side. “Color ain’t what counts. It’s blood that does it, ain’t that so, kid?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s blood.”

  “See?” he said. “Didn’t I tell ya?” He laughed again, and the others, for no reason that I could discern, joined him. “I can get even blacker than this, though—ask any guy. You should’ve seen me in August. Tell ’em, Bob.”

  “Like the ace of spades,” Meusel said.

  “Tell ’em, Tony.”

  “Black as the devil’s ass at midnight,” Lazzeri said.

  “Tony, my baby!” Ruth cried, hugging Lazzeri. I felt myself shudder and could tell, from the way Ruth’s other arm lifted slightly from my shoulder, that he had felt it also. “Any guy who strikes out the Babe twice in one day, I got to stand him to a drink, ain’t that so?” He paused, then whispered to me in his high boy’s voice, “You drink, don’t ya?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He pounded me on the back then, and roared with laughter. “But not like the Babe, I’ll bet. C ’mon—”

  One arm around my shoulder, the other around Lazzeri’s, he led us from the hotel—his cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, pointed upward. The smoke trailed into my face, tickling my throat when I breathed in. Bob Meusel, Herb Pennock, Joe Dugan, Aaron Ward, and George Pipgrass were in the crowd behind us, along with some sports writers. At the first corner, a group of young colored boys were sitting in front of their shoe shine stands. “I love kids,” Ruth said to me, his hand squeezing my shoulder. We waited while he had his shoes shined. He threw a dollar down on the sidewalk. “That’s from the Babe,” he said, taking me around again as we walked off.

  On the next block we entered a small bar. “This here’s for whites only,” he whispered to me, loud enough for all his friends to hear. “But if you don’t say nothing, I won’t either, okay, kid?” He laughed out loud and pressed his cheek to mine again. “I mean, how they gonna tell who ya are, unless you tell ’em.” He moved away from me and called loudly, “The drinks are on the Babe—and I want everyone to have a good time!”

  When his own mug and mine had been filled with beer, he toasted me. “Here’s to the greatest pitcher I ever faced,” he said. “Even if he is a…”

  He sputtered, laughing, into his beer, so that the foam rolled over the edge and down across his fist. He drank, then switched hands and sucked on his knuckles. He pulled me to a table at the side. The men who had been in the bar when we arrived would, when he looked their way, all raise their glasses to him. He smiled and raised his mug to them, each time. “Listen,” he said in my ear, “anything you want, you come to me. If that jackass bartender says anything—I’ll tell him you’re a friend of mine. Any friend of the Babe’s—” He broke off, turning his eyes to the men around us. “What’re you guys all staring at—I ain’t gonna give a show.” He pounded his fist on the wooden table. “Okay. This is what we’re all gonna do. Lazzeri, over here—”

  Lazzeri, the Yankees’ second baseman, came to him. “Watch this,” he said to me. He pulled Lazzeri’s head to him and began whispering in his ear. Lazzeri giggled, his eyes wide. “Tony’s gonna get a woman tonight,” Ruth declared, “so I’m givin’ him some pointers—” He pressed Lazzeri’s head to him, his hand cupped around the back of Lazzeri’s skull.

  Pennock spok
e: “Lay off, Babe. You know what’s gonna happen if—”

  Ruth let Lazzeri’s head go and he snarled at Pennock. “You gonna do somethin’ about it—?”

  Lazzeri lay his head on the wooden table. Tears rolled from his eyes, he was laughing so hard. “Sure, Babe,” one of the newspapermen said. “Go easy.”

  “Ain’t I doin’ just that?” he asked, and I believed him. “I like to see a happy Italian, that’s all. It don’t do no harm, you guys. It’s practice—with us all around anyway to help him out—it’s practice so he can learn to—” Ruth leaned over then and said something else into Lazzeri’s ear, while Lazzeri’s head lay on the table. I tried not to hear the words, which referred to the things Lazzeri was going to do to the whore that Babe would supply him with. “How ‘bout you, kid?” he asked, leaning against me. “They got some of the best black cathouses I ever seen right here, just a block away—they got a gal there, she does somethin’ called tyin’ the knot, you’ll think you’re goin’ through the roof, ain’t that so, Tony?” He closed his eyes and drew breath in, through his nostrils. “Mmm—I can smell it from here—”

  Lazzeri moaned and then grew limp: his head rolled once, to its other side, and then I heard a gurgling sound. “Do something, you jackasses!” Ruth commanded angrily, but he was already holding Lazzeri’s head between his hands. Lazzeri’s body twitched and Dugan got him from behind, holding him steady, so he would not fall. Ruth shoved his hand into Lazzeri’s mouth and kept it wedged there. Pennock handed him a spoon—light flashed from it as if it were silver—and Ruth inserted it where his hand had been. “C ’mon, sweetheart,‘” he whispered to Lazzeri. “It ain’t nothing. You’ll be all right now. You’ll be okay.” He shoved me backward, to give himself more room, and then, giving commands to the others to get Lazzeri from the top, he lifted his feet and laid the man out across several chairs. He covered him with his jacket and knelt beside him, caressing the face. There were tears in Ruth’s eyes. “It ain’t nothing, kid. I didn’t mean to excite ya this far. Honest I didn’t. We don’t have to go to that cathouse if you don’t want, okay?” He pressed his cheek to the man’s face. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, sweetheart, you believe me, don’t ya? I just want to see ya get rid of this thing someday. But I didn’t mean to excite ya this far.” He turned to the rest of us and his eyes were defiant. “Ain’t there nobody strong enough to try to stop me? Can’t ya see when I let things get carried away?” He spat. “You guys ain’t men.” He turned his eyes from us. “We don’t got to do nothing to no women, my Tony baby, okay? It’s whatever you say.” Lazzeri’s eyes rolled so that, his lids half-open, I saw only the whites. The bartender and the local customers peered over the shoulders of our group. “It’s whatever you say, sweetheart.” He glanced at us and whispered, “He’s comin’ around already—I can tell.” Looking at the crowd, he began to stand. “Hey, what are you, a regular bunch of goons? C’mon, can’t ya see the guy don’t feel good—give him air.”