Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  “It happens all the time,” Ruth said to me some minutes later, when Lazzeri was sitting up, recovered. “It ain’t nothin’ to get excited about—ya get used to it after a while. What’s a guy supposed to do if he’s born with a thing like that—stop living?” He raised his beer mug, which was empty. “Hey, kid—you at the bar—let’s fill these things up again. We got to drink to our Italian friend’s health, don’t we?” He smiled lovingly at Lazzeri. “Ain’t that right, kid?”

  A short while later Pennock, with Ruth’s permission, took Lazzeri back to the hotel. The drinking continued. To my surprise, I found that my head remained clear. I did not laugh at Ruth’s supposed jokes, and I did not pay any attention to the compliments his friends paid to me, but I was, I knew, despite the man’s meanness and vulgarity, happy to be in his presence. “See the way the kid here holds his stuff,” he said several times to the others. “You guys take a lesson.” He pointed to the newspapermen. “You’re a lush, Ziegler. You ain’t an athlete. You’re just lush. You’re a lush, Novak. You’re a lush, too, Ellis. You’re a lush, Wofford, you asshole.” His right arm went around my neck, his beer mug in his right hand, so that he drank while pressing his forehead to me. He put his mug in front of my lips and I drank also.

  “I said the truth,” he told me, one hand on my leg, above the knee. “I never seen a guy had a fast ball like yours. I was a pitcher too, ya know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?” His narrow eyes widened. “You knew that?”

  “My brothers saw you pitch at Ebbets Field, in the 1916 World Series.”

  “Oh yeah?” He shook his head, wonderingly. “I couldn’t carry your suitcase, though. You got a fast ball like I never seen before.”

  We left shortly after midnight, his teammates walking behind us along the street, singing raucously. Ruth was very drunk, and in his drunkenness he became affectionate, leaning upon me for support and telling me how sweet I was, what a great pitcher I was, how much he would have liked to have done for a kid like me. “I love kids,” he told me. Helping him across the hotel lobby and up the stairs to his room, I felt as if I were, as I had been on the playing field that afternoon, the master of the situation—and yet, as soon as he had unlocked the door to his room and pushed me inside it, in front of him, my confidence vanished.

  “Get outa here, you goddamned bitch!” he cursed, seeing that the red-headed girl who had been with him earlier in the evening was lying across his bed, in her underwear. She was barely awake, yet he pulled her by her right leg, jerking her so that she scraped her stomach across the metal railing at the foot of the bed. She screamed. Ruth swung the door open. He ordered me to get her clothes, which were in a pile on a chair, and I did what he said. “Now get your fat ass outa here.” He kicked her, his foot thudding solidly against her backside. She tried to get up, but he had grabbed her by one arm and was dragging her into the hallway. “Sure, Babe,” she said. “I didn’t mean nothing.” He took her clothes from me and threw them at her, then tossed some money on the floor. “Here—buy yourself a new ass,” he laughed. “Yours is cracked!”

  He slammed the door and his anger disappeared at once. He came to me and I found myself backing away, afraid of him. “I ain’t so drunk,” he said, and smiled at me drowsily. I bumped into a chair and he laughed. “You don’t got to be scared of me, any kid got a fast ball like you got.” He pressed his body against mine, his arms around my back. “Just tell me if I ain’t got power, though?” He held me in a bear hug, his huge stomach pressing into me, his arms locked in the small of my back. “There ain’t any guy in baseball got more strength than the Babe, you hear that?” I could not breathe, and there was in me no desire to struggle. I heard him grunting. His head burrowed against my shoulder, he squeezed harder, until I gagged.

  He released me then and I fell backward, into the chair, knocking it over. “Hey, I didn’t hurt ya, did I?” His arm was around my shoulder. He led me to the bed and sat me down. “I don’t know my own strength sometimes, ya know? I didn’t mean to go so far.” I tried to catch my breath. “You lie down and take it easy for a few minutes.” He pushed me and I let my head fall backward so that I was, my stomach and chest heaving for air, staring into his face. He touched my forehead, gently.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I—I think I’ll be all right.”

  “Sure ya will,” he said, and then he roared. “Listen—I ain’t so drunk. The Babe can hold it.” He pinned my arms to the bed, his hands pressing my wrists down. “With a lightness that seemed impossible for a man of his size, he had moved on top of me and was straddling me. He watched my face for a while, smiling. “Ya like to wrestle?” he asked. I could not reply. “C’mon,” he coaxed. “Try to get yourself free. I’ll bet you’re real strong, a young kid like you.” He squeezed against my wrists so that I felt his nails digging into the skin. “C ’mon, don’t be scared—try to get yourself free. Let’s see who’s the strongest. Try to get yourself free from me.” His thighs pressed inward and the metal of his belt buckle cut against my stomach, above the navel.

  He saw then that I was crying. “I didn’t mean nothing,” he said, lying down beside me. “Honest. I didn’t mean to hurt ya so much.” I turned my head away from him so that he would not know, from my expression, the real reason for my tears. “I ain’t so smart,” he said then, very softly, “but I ain’t so dumb either.” He took my chin in his left hand and turned my head to him. In the dimly lit hotel room I believed that I could see my own reflection in his eyes. I did not resist. His hand went from my chin to the back of my neck; he lifted me slightly from the bed and, my eyes staring into his, and his into mine, he pressed his lips against my own.

  He let me go then, but his hand moved across my chest and downward, to my pants. He unbuckled my belt. I did not try to stop myself from crying. He sat up then. “No wonder,” he said, as if discovering something important. His smile was one of sheer delight, like the smile I had seen earlier that day, when I had struck him out for the first time. “Sure,” he said to himself. “You ain’t never done this before, have ya?” He slammed his fist into the palm of his right hand. “No wonder!” he said again. “Now I get the whole thing.” He punched me hard, in my right shoulder, and then, for the first time, his voice did not sound boyish. “We’re gonna have some fun now, you and me, ya hear that? The Babe is gonna have some fun, and you don’t got to be scared.” And then, close to me, his lips on my cheek, he was a child again. “My skin’s darker than yours,” he whispered.

  I pitched on the following afternoon, and tired as I was I could summon all my strength when he was at the plate. Although the Yankees beat me, 4 to 2, I struck him out in two of his four at-bats, and got him out easily the other two times, once on a pop-up in foul territory to Dixon, and once on a grounder to Jack Henry. He said nothing to me after the game, but I went to his hotel, when I had finished with my dinner, and he was waiting for me. He had a girl with him, and had selected a girl for me also—a white girl who was younger than I was—and we spent the evening with them, going from bar to bar. We returned to his room afterwards, the four of us, and, listening to him boast and laugh, we did what he asked us to. When we were alone, after he had sent the girls away, he seemed very pleased. “We showed them something, didn’t we, kid?” he said. He laughed then, in a way that made me quiver. “Ya see the face on yours when I told her she just done it with a nigger?” He drew me to him. “Ya don’t got to worry, though—they’d be scared to say anything ‘cause of who I am. It means somethin’, being who I am.”

  Johnson pitched in the third and final game of our series and Ruth had an easy time with him, giving the fans what they wanted: two long home runs, both to deep center field, far beyond Kinnard’s reach. I wanted to equal them, but was unable to. Hitting against Bob Shawkey, I found that I could not keep my mind from Ruth, waiting in right field, and that I swung too hard. I connected solidly only once all day, doubling down the left field line.

 
For the first time, alone after the game, I found that I was angry. Although it was taken for granted by my teammates and by the fans that I would have hitless days, still, I had not wanted to allow him, on the field, even a single victory. I sat on my bed in my hotel room, unable to move. His image was like a fire in my head, and I wished that fire to consume us both. I wanted, already, to be done with him, and yet I sensed that we had only begun, that, no matter how many times I proved myself his master on the playing field, I would, away from the playing field, forever submit myself to him. I wanted to laugh at the sheer clownishness of the situation—the great hero of America lying in bed, locked in that most absurd of positions with a fair-skinned nigger—and yet the humor, ultimately, turned upon me, for I brought him low only by making myself lower. What might have seemed a joke to the world, had it known, held no humor for me, for—I felt this more strongly in the few years of our friendship which were to follow—if anything, his willingness to meet me and to love me, even in his vulgar way, made him seem to me, given who he actually was, brave. And that I felt this way made me realize all the more that I was only another one of that multitude which worshiped him.

  Even the thought of simple revenge—of revealing to the world the knowledge that would normally have made it mock him—even this, the instant I had considered it, made me despise myself for having been capable of considering it. The only revenge which could satisfy me had to occur upon the playing field, and yet I had already forsworn the possibility that that playing field would be one that the large world could be witness to. Did I, then, in loving him, only desire to do what I had already learned was impossible—to gain, and sustain, that dream which I had already surrendered? Or is this merely my way now of trying to deny what seemed true enough then: that, despite all he was and no matter my devious reasons, I did love him.

  If I despised him for being vulgar, as I did, then I had to despise myself more for being fascinated by his vulgarity. I must have wanted the adulation of that world which had made him the most beloved man of his time, and so I felt sick in my heart to realize not only that I deserved, by my talents, that adulation, but that I could, had I not made my initial decision, have had it. And if I had, I wondered, what then? Would he have loved me more? Was I so vile that I merely wanted things reversed? Was I so vain and small that I regretted most that one decision upon which all else in my life had to stand?

  I vowed that I would have no more to do with him, and yet, late that evening, when a messenger came to my room with a note from him, I could do nothing in my shame but go to him. He was kinder to me than he had been the night before—he spoke of his home runs, and of what I had done wrong at the plate. He wished to instruct me. He told me again that I was the fastest pitcher he had ever faced, and that he had ordered the New York sportswriters who were traveling with him to say so in the stories they sent north. And he asked me, for the first time, what he would ask me almost every time we met. “How come ya didn’t change your name and play with us—nobody ever would’ve known, with your color.” His question held no malice in it, no sense of superiority, and I could find in me no words with which to reply or explain—for even if I could have explained the reasons to myself, I knew that he would never have understood the workings of my tumbling brain. “They call me nigger,” he said, as we lay in bed together, “and you ain’t half as nigger-looking as me. Nobody ever would’ve known.” He laughed. “They might’ve named me after you—that’s how come, when I think about it, I feel for ya, kid.”

  He sat up, leaning on his elbow, so that the bed creaked under his weight. “I’ll tell ya the truth, I wouldn’t’ve liked it, if you’d been me and things had got switched. I wouldn’t’ve liked it one bit. I mean—just look at me: I got everything I want from life—it’s just like they say in the papers—I got everything I want and I started out without even a real mother and father. They were there—my old lady didn’t kick off till I was seventeen, and my old man got killed just a couple years back, brawlin’ like he always did—but I never knew ’em.” He lay back down. “I wasn’t no orphan like they try to make out sometimes, but I spent a dozen years in goddamned St. Mary’s. They called me nigger every day of those twelve years and look at where I got—that’s why I’m sayin’ all this to ya, kid, so maybe ya can change things if it ain’t too late.”

  He seemed puzzled suddenly by the line his argument had taken. His dark brow furrowed, and he would not, as his mind tried to figure something out, touch me. “I’m never in shape after the season ends,” he explained then. “We’d be pretty big stuff against one another, if you could play in our league.” His voice was confident again and he turned to me. “But I guess, even with the press you get, it’s too late, ain’t it?” I felt nothing, and I think he was disappointed; he had, doubtless, expected to see tears in my eyes. “Like I said, though—they might’ve named me after you, if ya think about it. That’s how come I feel for ya. You could’ve had it all, just like me.”

  We did not see one another again that year. I stayed with my team all winter as we continued to barnstorm, through North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and across the Gulf to Cuba. I thought of him constantly, but did not write to him. I believed, as was probably the case, that as soon as we were apart and he had found somebody new, he had forgotten me. I pitched and hit well, delighting the fans who turned out throughout the South for our games. Even the smallest towns seemed to have their own semi-professional teams, and there was always a holiday atmosphere when we would arrive to play against the town’s team, or against another professional team. In some of the smaller towns, the black community would feed us and house us. In the larger cities we might drive down the main street, wearing our uniforms, and honking the horns of our cars. People waved to us, and they stared at me.

  I pitched in Birmingham, Memphis, Chattanooga, Columbia, Charleston, Charlotte, Orangeburg, Macon, Brunswick, Bogalusa, Jacksonville, and in lesser known towns whose names I still recall: Jasper, Gastonia, Magnolia, Lydia, Timmsboro, Moultrie, Sylacauga, Andalusia, Milledgeville, Prosperity, Chauvin, Langley, Sherry, Will, Johnston, Grand Coteau, Chataignier, Alexandria, and, unlikely enough, Charenton. I was exposed, for the first time in my life, to the ways in which southern blacks lived, but I remained, for the most part, like any of my teammates, indifferent to their condition. My head was full of other things. Jones, when we were going from one game to another, and would drive past a section of cottages that was particularly poor, would say as much as anybody ever did: “No more, honey. No more.”

  My teammates talked a good deal—to the members of the teams we played against, and among themselves—about how I had, in their words, handcuffed Ruth. Only Johnson remained, as always, unimpressed. The other players teased him about the two home runs he had given up to Ruth, but he only looked my way and sneered: “Two niggers in a swamp at night, that’s all.” My teammates laughed—at the implied confusions that took place in darkness, and at the joke this tag line referred to—but Johnson, losing games more frequently so that Tompkins was pitching as often as he did, found nothing funny. To the praise my teammates would give me, he would add, “Sure, fair ass got real brains.”

  He said nothing else, and yet, when he looked at me I felt that he knew, and that he said nothing only because he did not believe that what he knew was worth commenting on. I hated him more than ever, and not merely because he did not care about what I believed he knew, but because—my weakness was splendid—I had discovered that I wanted him to care.

  Only once, in the summer of 1925, did he do something which indicated interest, and even then, what he did—what, in actuality, Jones told me he had planned to do—was no more than he might have done to any other man. “Don’t ask me why,” Jones said, when he had come to my house and awakened me, before the sun had risen. “Old Brick would as soon cut Little Johnny’s throat as not, and he don’t need a reason. So don’t ask me why he been bragging on what he goin’ to do to you and the big
man, about what he once did before—” He stood on the porch of my house, refusing to enter, and held his hat in his hands, as if he were a shy caller. “But I asked myself that even if—just if is all I’m saying—something might come of it somehow, I wouldn’t be able to sleep nights after, knowing I could’ve said something before. “Even Barton did not know he was there, and he trusted me never to tell anybody that he had come. He spoke quickly then:” But old Brick, he been bragging about how he knew a man once used to—you know—he was a policeman, and he could get you into trouble if you didn’t do it, until Brick,” Jones gulped, “he put sand in the man’s jar of vaseline. That’s what he did, honey, please don’t ask me why—” He looked at me very briefly, and then looked down. He was shivering. “Oh please, you won’t ever tell that I come—don’t ask me more, I don’t know nothing except how you the best pitcher and hitter there is.” He regarded me then with a look of gratitude that, when I see it now, makes the sweat run cold on my thighs. “If not for your good arm, honey, I wouldn’t never have the money. I say that all the time. I pray for you. You’re the man who put the money in Little Johnny Jones’s bankbook. “Jones touched the scar on his forehead.” I don’t got to say no more—maybe you don’t got to be the one to be careful of him—I never said so, did I?—but he’s goin’ to do it to somebody, he been bragging on how he did it, with melting it all together and pouring it back, and with what you done for me, I got to tell you too. But I don’t think nothing, honey. You’re a good boy. Old Brick, he’s a mean man. He means to be mean. He’s a bad man, honey.…”