Sam's Legacy (28 page)

“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, though, 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.

At the last minute, they changed into their playing uniforms, and, before a good crowd of some twelve thousand—including, I would estimate, some four to five thousand whites—I took the mound and mowed down those unfortunate sons of Africa 3 to 0 and 8 to 1, allowing them a total of seven hits in the two games. Their second baseman, I recall, was a muscular man with quick hands and tremendous speed. He was called “Tarzan” and was required to cry mightily from his throat whenever the Clowns scored a run. That I limited his opportunities to one made him, in the late innings of the second game, when many of the fans had already left and my fast ball seemed, in the dusk, faster than ever, approach me menacingly on several occasions, so that my own teammates—coached by his—would, as part of the act, hurry to the mound to protect me. In his eyes, though, I saw something which told me that he was not merely acting—and the laughter of the fans only inflamed his murderous intent. While he allowed himself to be bullied from the field by my teammates, his mouth hung open—soundlessly—and, forced as he was to keep his cry locked inside him, he seemed to me to be in physical pain.

“You hear what they call that crazy man?” Rose Kinnard asked, as we sat on the bench between innings.

“Sure,” Johnson said from the corner of the dugout. He spat tobacco juice. “They call him nigger.”

“Hey—” Rose said, objecting—piping his reply as our teammates laughed.

Johnson spat again and patted Rose on the back. “That's okay,” he said. “They call the big boy that too—Ruth—back in Baltimore everyone calls him nigger.”

My heart stopped. It was only when I found that Johnson was staring at me—his own puzzled frown bringing me back to life—that I realized I had been gaping. I closed my mouth and leaned back, rubbing my right shoulder with my left hand, to keep it warm. “Sure,” Johnson continued. “Ruth ain't no Tarzan, but he's probably more of a nigger than our golden boy here.” His dull eyes laughed as he stood to take his place in the on-deck circle. “Everybody knows that,” he added, for my benefit.

“Oh, yeah,” Rose piped. “I heard of that a lot. I seen him in the summer too—this time of year—and he's blacker than me, that man is. He loves the sun, that man.”

My head swirled, and Johnson, swinging three bats in the on-deck circle, kept his eyes on me, not accusingly—he did not act as if he had discovered any secret about me—but mockingly, as if he did not believe that any man could be so young and ignorant.

I kept my eyes on Rose, and I found myself hating him too. He had, after myself, the fairest skin of my teammates—a pale high yellow complexion which, even in summer, made him seem slightly jaundiced. The skin on his left cheek and the left side of his lips was rose colored, as if he had been burned when a child, but his name, he insisted, had been given to him at birth. “He's darker than you and me, fair ass, the Babe is!” Rose cried (trying to please Johnson, whom he fawned after, despite the fact that he himself, a six-foot two-hundred-pound boy of nineteen, was the finest all around player on our team), and could not contain his laughter. My teammates talked on, elaborating on Johnson's news, trading anecdotes, but I did not listen to what they said.

When I took the mound in the Clowns' half of the inning, my stomach was unsettled. I bent over to pick up the rosin bag in order to dry my fingertips, and the earth rose to meet me, my head spinning wildly; the world tipped first to one side and then to the other. I saw, in my mind's eye, photos of George Herman “Babe” Ruth, and I felt—despite the fact that dusk was upon us and the heat of the day had already given way to an evening chill—as if I needed air, as if the earth which had risen to meet my face was now moving in upon me from all sides. I could do nothing but hurry—I reared back and fired the ball, and as always this made things right. “They ain't got no time,” Jones yelled from third base. “You're too fast, too fast, honey.”

But I could not catch my breath. I saw, between pitches, only those features, so familiar and beloved to millions of American schoolboys, so evident in a thousand photos: the moon face, the broad flat nose and wide nostrils, the almond-shaped eyes that turned down at the outside corners, the heavy lower lip. I felt as if, between pitches, my only chance for survival—for not fainting—lay, and the very thought made my heart sicken even more, in embracing that man whose image was the cause of my sickness. I needed to support my body upon his, to have that moon face tell me that everything would be all right. “You feelin' badly, son?” Jack Henry asked, taking a place next to me in the dugout. “You've gone sixteen innings straight—Johnson can finish up for you, if you want. It doesn't matter now.”

I shook my head. To either side of me my teammates were still talking about him, although Johnson no longer joined in the conversation. They sang his praises, telling one another what a great pitcher he had been for the Red Sox before he had switched to the outfield. I heard Jack Henry say that he would not have been as great a home run hitter as Oscar Charleston or Christobel Torrienti if he had played in our league, but this opinion was disputed by Kelly. Nobody would claim that he actually had colored blood in him, but there were rumors….

I let their remarks, their debates, flow through me and around me, and I closed my eyes—pretending to rest—and prayed that my strength would last until it was time again to take the mound. I heard Rap Dixon say that he had seen him play in Yankee Stadium—already called “The House That Ruth Built,” though but two years old—and Dixon sneered at the short right field line, only two hundred and ninety-six feet from home plate. I myself recalled when he had pitched twenty-nine and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings in the 1916 World Series against the (white) Brooklyn Dodgers—a fact that my brothers had, in their enthusiasm, impressed upon me, and a record which, coming first, was to endure longer than his more famed one of sixty home runs.

“You want to ride that ball now, fair ass,” Johnson said, poking me in the side to tell me that it was my turn at bat. “Give yourself some insurance.”

There were two men on base—Barton and Kelly dancing off first and third. I had not—pitcher's courtesy—had to wait my turn in the on-deck circle. I tapped some dirt from my spikes, trying to steady myself, and stepped into the batter's box. Ruth's smiling face hung before me, suspended in the air halfway to the pitcher's mound. I was afraid that I might faint but the opposite happened: as I raised my bat to my shoulder I felt my weakness begin to disappear, to slip from my body. I tightened my fingers on the handle of the bat, and unexpected power surged through me, winding itself tight, like a spring coiling. Dixon, coaching at third now (Jack Henry rested in the dugout, before his turn at bat), hollered that I was on my own, and I filled my lungs with air and cocked the bat behind my shoulder, tightening my grip on its handle. The pitcher threw two balls and I did not move. I kept my eyes on him, on the spot above his right shoulder from which the ball would come. The third pitch was a fast curve, starting for my left shoulder, but I watched it carefully—as if my eyes, by fixing intently enough upon the ball, could stop it—and when, twenty or so feet from the plate, it began to break, to fall off the table, as we put it, I lunged forward—striding a half-foot with my left leg and delivering the full weight of my lean body against the bat: the crack of bat against ball was deep and solid and I did not, as I snapped my wrists, turned them over, and followed through, need to look. The sound—of the bat against ball, and then, a split-second later, of the crowd's gasp—its intake of breath and then its cheer—told me that the ball was gone. My body uncoiled, as strong as it had been, and I saw the infielders turning around, their hands on their hips, to watch the ball travel in a line, disappearing—while still rising—beyond the left-center field fence and into the pastures beyond.