Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (23 page)

John Dollard of Yale spent five months in Indianola. Hortense Powdermaker, also of Yale, spent nine months there in the 1932–33 school year and another three months in 1934.

Dollard’s 1937 book,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town,
was the first of the three major works to be published. It received wide acclaim and defined the emerging field. Dollard was hailed as a pioneer while the Davises and the Gardners were still analyzing their volumes of data. Dollard acknowledged the limits of his work, conceded that, as a white Yankee in the southern caste system, he ran headlong into caste taboos that restricted his access to African-Americans. The local whites he needed to rely on couldn’t understand why he would be interested in black residents. When he told some white residents of his plan to visit a black woman’s home, he said he was “
ostracized from the town.”

Hortense Powdermaker’s
After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South
was published next, in 1939. Both Dollard’s and Powdermaker’s books were met with spirited reviews and came to dominate the field of southern caste scholarship. Even decades later, the journal
American Anthropologist,
in 2004, described the two books as “
canonical” “landmark studies,” consigning the Davis and Gardner book to the footnotes.

Deep South
was published in 1941 and has long been overshadowed by the two earlier works produced by scholars from the dominant caste. The Davis and Gardner project seemed to meet the same fate of marginalization as the subordinate caste that they had studied.

Neither Davis nor Gardner made the claim that the Indian caste system and the American one were identical. Yet, criticism of the idea of caste in America followed a pattern in caste relations that the team documented in Mississippi. They found that African-American workers, trained in the subordinated behavior and perspective necessary to survive in a caste system, were more likely to show respect for people in the dominant caste and to disregard or feel freer to criticize those from their own subordinated caste.

For a range of complex reasons, some leading African-American social scientists of the early to mid-twentieth century objected to Davis and others applying the notion of caste to the plight of African-Americans, even as they were living under one of the purest forms of it in American history. Restricted as they were, locked behind the walls of caste with no end in sight, they did not want to give credence to the possibility that the system might indeed be closed forever. If their status was seen as a fixed one, there might be no hope of rising above it.

They were deep in a caste wilderness, before
Brown v. Board of Education,
before the Montgomery bus boycott, before the 1963 March on Washington and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s that would formally prohibit the caste restrictions they were then living under. In the middle of the twentieth century, no one could have dreamt of a member of the subordinate caste sitting on the Supreme Court, becoming secretary of state, being in the Oval Office as president rather than as a butler.

The lowest caste had yet to break free and disprove the assumptions of group inferiority that were the justification of the caste system, show that its members were as capable as anyone else in any endeavor, from singing Verdi at the Metropolitan to orbiting space to winning Nobel Prizes. These things were inconceivable because the caste system had disallowed any possibility of them. Thus there was an understandable fear that invoking the fixed and formal, millennia-long caste system of India could forestall the few hard-earned gains they had managed to achieve.

Any success that Davis might see was itself a challenge to the caste system. And as one of the few African-Americans given the chance to conduct this kind of research, he walked a narrower path, had put his life on the line in a way others had not, and was in line for more criticism than dominant-caste researchers might receive. The white researchers who were published before
Deep South
had the chance to seize on the novelty of the idea were more readily embraced by the mainstream and accorded more authority due in part to their position in the dominant caste.

Despite their immersion and mastery of the subject, Davis and Gardner fell under greater scrutiny and faced more obstacles just to complete their book. Publication was delayed in part because a leading black sociologist, Charles Johnson, trained in a different discipline, raised lengthy questions about the manuscript, which required Davis and Gardner to embark upon a significant revision. Davis, as lead researcher, was an easier target for criticism, particularly from peers in the subordinated caste who were under pressure to uphold the hierarchy if they wished to succeed and who would have been wary of calling into question the work of dominant-caste scholars. The resistance to Davis’s work inadvertently proved the very theories Davis had devoted his life to exposing.

The concept of caste grew only more contentious as it was applied to the United States at midcentury. One leading sociologist, the Caribbean-born Oliver Cromwell Cox, assembled a cantankerous critique of this school of thought in his landmark 1948 book,
Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics
. He devoted a hundred pages to his reading of the Indian caste system and later chapters to the differences between the hierarchies of the two countries.

An underlying argument of his contrarian view was that the caste system in India was singular because it was considered stable and unquestioned, because even the lowest castes embraced their degraded lot as the fate of the gods. The fact that black Americans resisted their condition, both in slavery and afterward, and aspired to equality was evidence, to Cox, that the term
caste
could not be applied to this country. “If, for instance, the Negro-white relationship were a caste relationship,” he wrote, “Negroes would not be aspiring toward the upper social position occupied by whites. “

In India, however, “caste barriers in the caste system are never challenged,” he wrote in a bafflingly misguided observation. From his perspective, up and down the Indian caste system, “
regardless of his position in the society, a man’s caste is sacred to him; and one caste does not dominate the other.”

Despite his brilliance,
he disregarded both the injustices inflicted upon Dalits by castes that most certainly dominated them and the basic human will to be free. And he overlooked the fiery resistance and leadership of Bhimrao Ambedkar and other Dalits who were challenging the caste system at the very moment of his writing.

Before Cox’s excoriation of the notion of caste, the findings of Davis and the Gardners got reinforcement from perhaps the most ambitious work ever attempted on race in America, the monumental two-volume
American Dilemma,
published in 1944. It was based on the research of a team of scholars, including Davis and his contemporary Johnson, and was overseen by the Swedish social economist Gunnar Myrdal. In this analysis of race, Myrdal described intergroup relations in the United States as a caste system, a term he returned to time and again.

“The caste system,” Myrdal wrote, “is upheld by its own inertia and by the superior caste’s interest in upholding it.”

Davis would go on to get a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and join the faculty there, thus becoming the first black tenured professor at a major white American university. But he would suffer additional indignities. Faculty colleagues openly debated whether he should be allowed to teach white students, and he was prohibited from eating in the faculty dining room for a time.

Of the major scholars of the American South in the first half of the twentieth century, he and his wife were among the only field researchers who labored under the cloud of caste subordination themselves. Their work would end up inspiring St. Clair Drake, Stokely Carmichael, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, all of whom read his work as undergraduates and saw themselves in his analysis.

Allison Davis was nearly lost to history, but he has become a champion to current-day researchers who seek to understand the infrastructure of our divisions. He brought a singular depth of commitment to understanding the caste system in hopes of defeating it. He had taken on the challenge as if his life had depended upon it, because in a very real way, it did.

His fastball shot toward home plate like a pistol bullet, once was clocked at 103 miles an hour, fast enough to “
tear the glove off the catcher,” in the words of the sportswriter Robert Smith. LeRoy “Satchel” Paige was one of the greatest baseball pitchers ever to step onto a mound. Yet, coming of age in the early twentieth century, when Jim Crow was at its cruelest, he never had the chance to become all that he could have been. And the world of baseball forwent a talent that surely would have changed the fate of matchups and pennant races, perhaps entire teams, and the sport itself.

Here was a man who threw so hard and so fast that “
catchers had to cushion their gloves with beefsteak so that their hands wouldn’t be burning after the game,” his biographer Larry Tye told National Public Radio.

Here was a man so confident that he told whoever was paying him that he would strike out the first nine batters with
a money-back guarantee and told the outfielders to just take a seat.

The beloved Yankee center fielder Joe DiMaggio, who went to bat against Paige at exhibition games before Paige was hired by the majors, called him the best pitcher he had ever faced. In his day, Paige “
may well have been the fastest pitcher in the nation,” wrote Smith in
Pioneers of Baseball,
“or even in history.”

He didn’t get the chance to make the most of it. The distorting lens of caste can cloud the senses, make the dominant group willing to deprive itself of the benefit of talent outside its ranks, allow the gifts of those from groups deemed inferior to languish, as it did with Satchel Paige, to keep the castes separate or to uphold the fiction that all talent resides within one favored group.

It happened that Paige was not only fast but threw with such precision that teammates let him practice knocking lit cigarettes out of their mouths with his fastballs. “
That we know of, he never knocked out a ballplayer,” Tye told NPR. “He knocked out one cigarette after another, and that was extraordinary faith.”

For more than half a century, America’s pastime was rigidly segregated, the very best players of either caste rarely getting to meet on the field and never in an official game. Paige got into baseball in the late 1920s and thus spent most of his career playing on all-black teams that were every bit as talented but lacking in the resources and infrastructure of the all-white majors. The full measure of his and his teammates’ talents cannot truly be known because of the incomplete record-keeping and scant media coverage in the devalued world of the Negro Leagues.

Paige was widely considered superior not solely because of his innate talent and ingenuity but because he worked so long and hard at it—a work ethic that had him barnstorming the country, pitching for the Negro Leagues and then for whoever else was willing to pay him. He pitched nearly every day, all year long, not just during the traditional baseball season and without the luxury of the relief pitchers in the majors. He gave his pitches names like the bat dodger and the midnight crawler and the hesitation pitch, where he would pause after planting his left foot, psyching the batter into swinging prematurely.

Though he was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, the limits of the caste system reduced him at one point to picking up spare change by pitching batting practice for white players in the minor leagues. By the time major league baseball opened up to African-Americans in 1946, when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Satchel Paige was already forty and considered too old for the game.

But two years later, the Cleveland Indians were in the midst of one of the tightest pennant races in American League history, and the owner thought Paige might put them over the top now that the color bar had been lifted. The owner, Bill Veeck, approached Paige in the middle of the 1948 season and
signed him as a free agent.

Paige was well past his peak when he finally got his shot at the majors. At forty-two, he was the oldest rookie in baseball, old enough to be his teammates’ father. Still, at one of his first starting games in the big league, fans stormed the turnstiles to see him play at Comiskey Park. There, he pitched a 5–0 shutout for Cleveland over the Chicago White Sox, helping Cleveland make it to the playoff, and ultimately to the World Series, just as the team owner had hoped.

That year, Paige would become the first African-American to pitch in the World Series, though given the assumptions about his age and the politics of a championship season, he was assigned as a relief pitcher. When it was his turn at the mound, he pitched for two-thirds of an inning while the Indians were trailing the Boston Braves and did not allow a hit.
The Cleveland Indians won the World Series that year.

He would go on to pitch in the majors for a few more seasons, but his best years were behind him, the career he should have had in a fairer world deprived of him, and there was nothing that anyone could do to make up for what had been withheld. The majors turned to him one more time, in the fall of 1965, to pitch at the age of fifty-nine. By then he was older than most of the managers. The Kansas City Athletics were last in the standings, and attendance had plummeted. The owner got the idea to recruit Paige, who had always been a showman, to pitch for the A’s to fill the stands as a publicity stunt.

The fans turned out. They loaded onto the stands for the spectacle. But Paige came to play. The oldest pitcher in baseball history threw three scoreless innings that day against the Red Sox. Paige left the field with his team in the lead, a lead that the Athletics blew after he returned to the dugout, losing the game in the end. He had salvaged the team momentarily and was serenaded by the audience, who had come out mostly to see him pitch one last time.

Afterward, reporters asked him how it felt to pitch at nearly sixty years old to batters who could be his grandsons. “
It was no big deal for me to come back up here,” he said, “because I had no business being out. Now folks can see that I must have had a lot more going for me, and I deserved to be in the big leagues when I was in my prime.”

Satchel Paige was cheated by a caste system at the height of its injustice and absurdity. But he was not the only loser to the illogic of caste. “
Many critics agree that it was actually American baseball that was the loser in the Paige saga,” wrote the sportswriter Mark Kram. “Any number of major league teams would have done better with Paige in their ranks when he was in his prime. Marginal teams might have won pennants; championship teams might have extended their domination.”

Under the spell of caste, the majors, like society itself, were willing to forgo their own advancement and glory, and resulting profits, if these came at the hands of someone seen as subordinate.