by Gerald Duff
Praise for Gerald Duff’s Previous Books
Ironic and funny, with a finale that is as sad as it is hilarious, Indian Giver is a fine addition to the long shelf of coming-of-age novels.
– Christian Science Monitor
With his first novel, Duff creates an American Indian Catcher in the Rye. . . . Written with humor and irony, Indian Giver is a thought-provoking novel.
– Library Journal
Duff’s first novel [Indian Giver] is a rewarding debut.
– Publishers Weekly
Duff’s darkly witty novel That’s All Right, Mama diddles the language with the same rocking abandon as Elvis thrusting his pelvis. The tale is such a hunka, hunka burning hoot.
– Entertainment Weekly
A wildly funny, dead-on satire of the whole Presley phenomenon . . . a must for anyone who finds humor and absurdity in the Presley legacy . . . Gerald Duff has an unerring ear for Memphis dialect, and the book is worth reading for the dialogue alone.
– Washington Post
Fire Ants is a sterling example of the gifts the short story holds. Calling a short story writer a “Southern Writer” inevitably conjures up images of giants like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Duff’s Fire Ants is a fine addition to the genre, and readers from North and South alike will find much to engage them in this stimulating collection.
– BookPage
Duff writes with such passion about his native land—the Texas Gulf Coast—along with other cities such as Memphis and Baltimore. These may be the only fire ants you’ll ever love.
– Southern Living
For the Alligator Point Fighting Mullets infielders Cliff, Dan, Jim, Roy, and Vereen and our manager Bobby.
And in memory of my uncle, Roderick “Hookey” Irwin, RHP for the Rayne Rice Birds, who led the Evangeline League in 1934 with 21 wins against 9 losses.
Where are the departed?
Men whose lives glided on like rivers
Darkened by shadows of earth . . .
Reflecting an image of heaven.
Evangeline
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dirty rice is a spicy Cajun dish compounded from the king of grains and the rough-chopped innards of beast and fowl.
It is best eaten hot, eyes closed, no questions asked.
What to Eat in Louisiana
Cliff Probst
Preface
by Stewart Dipple
on special assignment for the Great American Pastime Foundation
I first met Gemar Batiste when I got the assignment to write a piece on the Evangeline League, a class D baseball organization that had its heyday in the 1930s. The teams were located in Louisiana, in small towns like Alexandria, Crowley, Jeanerette, Rayne, Lafayette, and the like. I figured I’d play up the local color and see if I could hunt down and interview a couple of old boys who’d played a season or two in the league.
The Louisiana connection meant Cajuns, alligators, gumbo, hurricanes, bad government, bayous, gambling, and corruption, and I figured if I could find one or two old fellows who played in the league, I might be able to punch up the story and give it legs. After studying accounts of Evangeline League games and box scores in newspapers of the day, I came up with one name in particular, Gemar Batiste, listed at times as a pitcher and as an outfielder. I discovered him still around in his nineties, living in a retirement home in Annette, Texas. His ethnicity is called Native American today, but he would have been just an Indian back in the 1930s. I managed to get him to talk to me on record at length, and what he had to say follows. Aside from his stats as a player, I can’t vouch for most of his story.
He was a little hard to deal with, but once he got started, he had a lot to say about his time in the Evangeline League and baseball the way it was played then. He had some off-the-wall notions about the origins of the game and the part Native Americans played in inventing it, he was committed to expressing things in terms of folklore and stories about animals, and he didn’t care a bit about his audience. He was colorful and opinionated, though, and he had a lot to say about playing for the Rayne Rice Birds in the Evangeline League, now dead and gone. To illustrate what I had to deal with, I’ll quote something he said to me when I asked how a batter ought to conduct himself when he comes to the plate. I think it shows what I faced in trying to hold Gemar Batiste to the point, that being his experiences as a Native American baseball player in Louisiana during the Great American Depression between Black Tuesday of 1929 and the Second World War. He would not stay focused on the subject of minority presence in the Evangeline League, and he never was able to see himself as a representative of any kind of larger idea. Gemar Batiste would not listen to a reasoned argument. Here’s his response to my simple question about a man stepping up to the plate. You be the judge.
“That’s an easy thing, coming to bat. You got to be ready, up on your toes. But you got to lay back and wait. You got to feel like your nerves is shot, but you got to be as easy in your mind as if you’re about to go to sleep at night after a hard day’s work. You got to hold the bat tight, but you got to let your fingers be real light on the handle. You got to want to make that pitcher pay for trying to get that ball by you, but you got to be like you don’t care a damn if he strikes you out. You got to expect the best fastball he can throw, but you got to be ready for the knuckler. You got to watch the ball so good when he lets it loose that you can see every thread on the seam, but you got to close your real eyes and see the ball with the ones behind your lids when the real ones are shut. Remember that, and act like that, and you’ll be able to make that trip to the next safe place every time you’re up.”
1
When I first heard about the Evangeline League, there wasn’t no easy way for anybody outside the Indian reservation to get word to a one of us. The U.S. Mail was delivered to the agent’s office in the Village most days, all right, at least it was when enough of it stacked up in the post office in the county seat in Annette. And there was only one phone on the reservation, and it belonged to the Indian Agent.
So I didn’t learn about the Evangeline Baseball League in Louisiana by telephone for sure, and not by a letter with my name Gemar Batiste and the name of the Alabama-Coushatta Reservation of Texas on it as the address.
I was out behind the house where I lived with my father and mother and my brothers and sisters. I wasn’t old enough yet to live anywhere else, according to the United States government, nor was I married. Whenever one of us did get married to another one of us, the government put us on the list to move into a house of our own just as soon as they got one built. That might take a while, though, and that was before that Depression happened to the white folks and made them cut back on what money and old clothes and canned goods and used lumber and such-like they were able to send to the Alabamas and Coushattas.
I was about eighteen or nineteen at the time, and I sure wasn’t studying about getting hooked up for good with some girl and start waiting for a different house to move into. What I was doing that morning was throwing rocks up and knocking them off into the woods behind my father’s house, and I had just got all of one and sent it over the tree line of loblolly pines behind my father’s place. That counted in my game as a home run, and it cleared the bases of two runners I had already put on with singles, one man on third because I figured he had taken the extra base when I sent the line drive into the ditch just in the front of the tree line, and that had allowed him to go into third standing up.
The bat I was using was a good one, one I had made from a piece of hardwood. I’d wanted it to be ash, but I’d had to settle for oak. I had spent a lot of time on it, first with the
axe, then knife, and finally by talking Felder Stump Water into letting me borrow that plane he used to make little bitty tomahawks to sell on Saturdays to folks in Annette.
But the bat was one of the best I’d ever made. It had good heft and balance, it was tough wood so it didn’t run much risk of splitting or shattering when I used it on creek bed rocks as close to the size of baseballs as I could find, and it was fairly new. It was still pretty smooth to the touch. It wasn’t all dented and beat up from my hitting rocks with it, like all of them finally turned out being.
I was feeling good after that homer. I shook my head back and forth, and thought I would sing out loud a little song I had made up about playing baseball all by myself. I looked around first to be sure none of my brothers and sisters were close enough to hear me sing it, and that’s when I saw that an automobile was coming down the dirt road that ran by our house, real slow like the driver was looking for somebody or some place in particular.
Everybody else in the house had heard it, too, and they were coming out to watch it go by, wonder who was in it and where they were going, how old the car was, who it belonged to, all them questions we asked when we’d see a car on the road. My brother Polk was the first one out of the door, and he came running up to stand beside me as the automobile moved real slow on that dirt road, the driver straddling the ruts left when the last big rain had come and softened that clay up.
“The make of that car there is a Diana,” Polk told me. “See that naked silver lady with the bow and arrow riding on the front of the hood. That’s her, Diana.” Watching cars go by on the Nation’s roads and the big highway that ran by it and knowing what each of them was by name and year was what Polk was most interested in. Today people would call giving that kind of full attention to something a hobby.
It was a lot more to Polk than what a hobby would be, though, knowing and understanding automobiles. It went way beyond that for him. It was serious to him to be able to know what each and every automobile was, where it came from, and what made it different from other ones. He was two brothers back from me in age, and I didn’t have any problem in listening to what he could tell when he would spot an automobile. He could talk to me as much as he wanted to about that, and I would let him.
I didn’t try to put away in my head the kinds of distinctions about automobiles that paralyzed Polk each and every time he saw one. Different people got different things bothering them, cluttering up their minds, filling their attention, making the time pass for them. Let them, I always figured. There’d come a time when it was their turn to listen to what I wanted to talk about, and so I’d build up a debt they owed me.
“It’s a black car,” I said to Polk, motioning for him to stand back so I could throw up another rock and see if I couldn’t keep the rally going in that inning I was working on. Some people think if you get way ahead in runs in a game early on, that you can relax and let the others just see if they can catch up with you. That’s a wrong way of thinking. I have seen that habit of mind too many times lead to you letting up and not putting the game away.
Think about it this way. Every run you score makes the other team have to score one more than that for them to beat you. It’s like two runs, that one run is, that they got to make up. If they match you run by run, you’re still going to win, if you got that one run lead. That’s why you can’t let up, and that’s why you got to keep every rally going as long as you can. You have got to stretch yourself every time, or you’re as foolish as a jay bird strutting around, trying to act like a crow.
“Almost every car is black,” Polk said. “That ain’t nothing to say. The Diana was made in St. Louis, Missouri, and it’s one of the biggest and best ones there is. It ain’t going to be around no more, though.”
“Why not, little brother? That car looks to be in good shape. I don’t see no rust on it. Look how pretty and bright that paint is.”
“I don’t mean that car there. I’m talking about the company that made them. It’s out of business, the Moon Motor Company is.”
“What’s that mean, little man?” I asked him. “You’re not making sense this morning.”
“Wasn’t enough people wanted something as good as a Diana. They want something cheap. That was the problem for the company making that brand of automobile. It was too good to last.”
“Don’t worry your head none about it. You ain’t ever going to have a car to ride in.”
“Yes, I am,” Polk said. “Look. He’s pulling off the road and is fixing to stop.”
“Do you suppose he’s lost? Took a wrong turn off the highway?”
The Diana automobile had stopped, and the driver turned off the engine. All you could hear was metal ticking in the sun. The door opened, and a man got out and started pulling and tugging at his clothes where they were binding him.
“Hidy,” the man said and walked around the front of the car, stopping beside the fender closest to us. “Can I come in your yard?”
I remember he was pretty short and a little fat, and he was wearing shoes like you would see on the white men going in and out of the courthouse in Annette on a weekday. “Yessir,” Polk said. “You can step up into the yard. Can’t he, Gemar?”
I nodded and the driver came up to us, sticking out his hand like the white man will do for you to shake it. Polk was glad to do that, but I just kept holding my oak bat.
“Did he just call you Gemar?” the white man said, pulling his hand back like he hadn’t offered it to me.
I nodded, and Polk spoke up. “He’s my brother, Gemar, and I’m Polk Batiste. Our old man’s of the River Otter Clan, so that’s what we are. I admire that car you’re driving. Gemar, he don’t care nothing about automobiles. All he wants to do is think about baseball.”
“I’m in the right place, then,” the white man said, taking his hat off and looking inside it like he had lost something.
“You say your name is Polk?” the man said to my little brother. “Well, my name is Leonard Piquet, and I was born and raised in Louisiana. Do you know where that is?”
“Yeah,” Polk said. “That’s where the Coushattas first come from. Nobody makes no cars in that state.”
“I believe you’re right about that, Polk. Would you like to go sit in that Diana, take a look at the gauges and the gearshift? Put your foot on the clutch and brake?”
Polk didn’t answer, just turned and trotted toward the shiny black car with a statue of a woman on the hood of it. Mr. Piquet and I watched Polk open the door to the car and get ready to get in by knocking his hand on the bottom of his feet to get the dirt off.
“He’s a careful young man,” Mr. Piquet said. “Look at that. Would you believe it?”
“Polk studies on automobiles all the time,” I said. “He’s respectful.”
“That’s the best word for it, Gemar. You have nailed it, I do believe.”
We both watched Polk ease into the automobile, and Leonard Piquet held out his hand toward me again. This time he was pointing at my bat, though.
“You made that, didn’t you? Real pretty work. But it’s near as pretty as what you did in Diboll last week. And in Corrigan the week before. And Leggett and Holly Springs.”
“You go to baseball games?” I said, moving my bat from my left to my right hand, so Mr. Piquet would know not to ask to hold it. “Why?”
“I do like baseball. Like to watch it played, but I really go to all these games the lumber companies run because of business reasons. Up in Missouri and Illinois, I go to the games the mining companies put on. Wherever there’s an industrial league, I will find some business to transact. Or at least I’ll try to.”
“Do you buy and sell bats?” I said.
“No, I’m not in the equipment end of things. Identifying personnel, that’s what I try to do. Not full-time, of course. It’s just a sideline with me. I represent Brown Shoes in St. L
ouis full-time, but I like to keep my hand in other possibilities that come up now and then. A man has got to be open to new opportunities in this day and age. Let me ask you something. How old are you?”
“Pretty old,” I said to this stranger, asking me a question nobody in the Nation would have answered.
“Are you old enough to leave home?”
“If I wanted to leave home, sure I am. Are you looking for somebody to do some work for you?”
“No, I’m not in a position to offer employment to anybody. But what I can offer is a chance for you to try out to get hired to play on a baseball team. Are you interested?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Where is this team? I never heard of a company team paying people to play.”
“It ain’t a company team. It’s a professional team. Minor league, of course, but it’s a Chicago White Sox farm team, and it’s in Louisiana. Have you ever heard of the Evangeline League?”
“No. What does it mean?”
“It means Class D, and it means if you can get yourself to Rayne, Louisiana, by two weeks from now, they’d like to give you a look-see. Dutch Bernson is the man you’ll want to talk to when you get there.”
“Is it his team?”
“He doesn’t own the Rayne Rice Birds, no. You don’t have to worry about that, though, who’s got the money and the legal title and all that business end of things. Dutch is the manager. He’s the man. You ever had a coach before? Because that’s what a manager is like.”
“I’ve had people talk to me about playing the game,” I said. “I heard them talking.”
“Tell me you’ll show and I’ll send a telegram to Dutch to be expecting you. I can’t help you on expenses now, you understand. Money’s tight these days. Everything is pay as you go. It’ll be up to you to get there.”
I told him I would, and let him shake my hand. I didn’t offer to let him handle my bat. I figured it had a few more hits left in it, and I didn’t want to risk somebody else touching it and maybe siphoning off some of what was still there. You’ve got to maintain respect for your tools, no matter what you’re asking them to do. That bat didn’t know it was just rocks it was driving off into the woods. It had a job to do, whoever was using it, and it’s not right to steal any of the hits that might be still in it.
