Mo'ne Davis

by Mo'ne Davis

  Coach Steve and his wife, Miss Robin, were very nice, but I had really just met them and their family. I was a little nervous about the idea of staying overnight. But Scott and I played a board game, and that was fun. At bedtime, Miss Robin tucked me in with Stephanie, with Steph’s head at one end of her twin bed and my head at the other. After Miss Robin turned out the light, I started crying.

  “Are you scared of the dark?” Stephanie asked me.

  “Yes, and I want my mom to come get me,” I said.

  “I’ll get my mom,” Stephanie told me, and she climbed out of bed and went to get Miss Robin.

  “Steph came into our room and said, ‘Mo’ne’s crying,’” Miss Robin says. My mom says I cried so much when I was a baby that it was hard to find anyone to help her take care of me. “I went into their room and she was whimpering. I told her, ‘Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry you feel so uncomfortable. Let me call your mom so you can talk to her.’”

  Miss Robin called my mom. My mom was pretty matter-of-fact about the whole situation. She told me that she had to work, so she wasn’t coming to get me. But it was important for me to visit the school for another day. I had to stick it out.

  The next morning, Coach took me back to Springside and I spent another day there. I really liked it. About two weeks later my mother told me that I had been accepted and that they wanted me to start right away and finish second grade there, even though there were only six weeks left in the school year.

  I was happy about going to Springside. And my mom was really glad I was going to get a great education. But I was also kind of nervous about starting my new school.

  “I feel kind of bad about it, but when she first got here, people were like, ‘Oh, snap! Somebody just came here in the middle of the school year. You can’t come in the middle of the school year! That’s not fair! Where did she come from? She can’t do that!’” my friend Nahla remembers.

  I didn’t know it, but that had never happened before. All the other new kids had come at the beginning of the school year. But everyone was very nice to me, even though the year was almost over and everyone already had friends.

  I didn’t miss my old school at all, and I would still see my old friends around my neighborhood. But all of a sudden my mornings got kind of hard. For the last six weeks of second grade, I had to wake up super early and get in the car with my mom so that she could drive our silver Chevy Impala across the city to take me to school. Because it was rush hour, lots of times the ride would take almost an hour. After she dropped me off, my mom would drive all the way back to the house in rush hour traffic so she could pick up Qu’ran and take him to his school, and then take Maurice and Mahogany, who is six years younger than me, to day care. I know it wasn’t easy.

  I liked going to an all-girls school. One thing I liked was that the girls seemed to be very serious about their schoolwork, and I really liked to learn. I had been on the honor roll at Key, and I wanted to be on the honor roll at Springside. Also, we had this job chart in our classroom, and every week we had a responsibility—fun stuff like making sure the markers were sorted.

  “When Mo’ne was added, the list became uneven and someone had to take a week off,” says Nahla. “Nobody wanted a week off.”

  But they were nice, and I didn’t even know that there was a problem.

  “From the moment she got there, she fit right in,” my mom says.

  One minute I’d talk to this person and the next minute I’d talk to that one. Allegra was one of the nicest to me out of all of them, and she became the very first friend I made. She always stood right behind me in line because both of our last names start with a D. Every day at lunch we would sit together, and I would eat my turkey and cheese sandwich. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’d bring a dollar so I could buy mint chocolate chip or chocolate ice cream from the cafeteria.

  “They became friends because they were both very sporty,” says Destiny.

  “One recess, I was walking around the field with my friend Grace, and Mo’ne was throwing a football with Allegra,” says Abby. “It was just them throwing the ball back and forth in the corner of the field, and that’s the first thing I think about when I think of her. Mo’ne’s always had a ball in her hand.”

  “Everything becomes sports,” says Nahla. “She’ll dribble a ball while she’s eating.”

  “She’ll toss a pencil case with you,” says Destiny.

  It’s funny to hear my friends talk about me.

  I did have to make some adjustments, though. Some of my new classmates told me they weren’t used to my accent. I didn’t think I had an accent. In fact, it kind of sounded to me like they had a little one. But I do remember thinking that I needed to improve my grammar. I kept listening to the proper way of speaking and practicing it over and over in my mind.

  From the beginning, going to Springside caused my life to change in many ways. But those six weeks of second grade were a good introduction to the rest of my school experience there.

  CHAPTER 5

  CLASSY AND CLASSIC

  THE KID TOOK A BIG RIP AT THE BALL AND HIT IT WAY OVER my head. I spun around on the pitcher’s mound to watch how far it would fly. Going . . . The kid rounded first, and headed for second. The ball flew over our left fielder’s head, then hit the ground and kept bouncing and rolling. Going . . . The kid rounded second and headed for third. At Parkwood Youth Organization in Northeast Philadelphia the field is open, and there isn’t a fence. The batter swung around third, and crossed home plate before our guy had even picked up the ball. Gone.

  It was 2008 and around the same time I started at Springside. This was my first time pitching in a real game. We were only seven, but were playing up an age group. Coach Steve always played his teams one age group older, so we would get better. The kid who had hit the ball was only eight, but he was huge. So was his twin brother. Plus, back then, I wasn’t throwing super hard. I didn’t have a fastball and didn’t know how to throw a curve. My main goal was just to get the ball over the plate.

  After the ball was thrown back to me, I just stared down into my glove.

  “I saw her head down and thought to myself, ‘Uh-oh, she’s crying,’” says Coach Steve. “I went out to the mound to talk to her.”

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard a soothing voice.

  “You okay, Mo?” Coach Steve asked me.

  “Yeah, I’m all right,” I said, looking at him.

  “When she looked up, she wasn’t upset like crying; she was angry that this kid had hit a home run off of her,” Coach Steve says.

  He told me, “Everybody gets a home run hit off of them, so don’t you let that get you down. Home runs are just part of what comes with being a pitcher.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, spinning the ball in my hand in my mitt.

  “Now just do what we’ve been practicing,” he said. Then he rubbed my head through my baseball cap and walked back to the bench.

  I didn’t care if the kid was older and much bigger than me. Right there on the pitcher’s mound, I made up my mind that the kid wasn’t going to hit off me like that again. The next time he came up, I struck him out.

  Coach was teaching us to be great competitors, but not to forget to have fun. What’s the point of spending all this time together and playing a sport if it isn’t fun? After the game was over, we all laughed about it.

  “That ball flew halfway to New York!”

  “You should have seen the look on Mo’s face while she watched it!”

  “The kid had scored, was in the dugout, and was drinking a Gatorade, and our outfielder was still out there in the weeds, looking for the ball!”

  A few weeks after I’d joined the team, but before the baseball season began, Coach Steve handed me a book.

  Jackie Robinson and the Story of All-Black Baseball.

  “All of the kids on the Monarchs have read this,” he told me. “I want you to read it, too.”

  On the cover, there was a picture of a black man, standing in f
ront of a stadium, ready to swing a baseball bat.

  “The book is about one of the greatest baseball players and greatest human beings who ever lived,” Coach told me. “The Anderson Monarchs are named after Jackie Robinson’s first baseball team, the Kansas City Monarchs. I want you to read this book, so you know what we stand for.”

  When I read about Jackie Robinson, I learned all sorts of new things. I learned that back around the time that my grandmother’s mom was born, only white players were allowed in baseball’s major leagues. But African American players wanted to play at that level, so they formed their own teams and played against each other in what they called Negro Leagues. (Negro is a word that people used to use to describe African Americans—it’s really not a word you would use today.) The Negro League teams would travel by bus to big cities, smaller towns, and country areas to play other teams. They called these trips “barnstorming tours.”

  Back in the day of the Negro Leagues, baseball used to be the sport in the African American community, whether they lived in the city, suburbs, or country. Philadelphia had its own Negro League team, called the Philadelphia Stars.

  After I read the book, Coach asked me to write a report about what I’d learned.

  Some of the Negro League players were better than players in the major leagues. A lot of people said that Jackie Robinson was among the greatest of them all. The general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers wanted to have a winning team, so he signed Jackie Robinson to play for the Dodgers. On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier and became the first African American player to compete in the major leagues. That year he became the National League’s Rookie of the Year. Two years later, he was the National League MVP and won the batting title with a .342 average. Since then, a lot of African American players have played Major League Baseball. In fact, some of them—old-timers like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, and new players like Matt Kemp—have become some of baseball’s biggest stars. Coach wanted to start a baseball league so the Anderson Monarchs could carry on this important legacy.

  He had us learn about Jackie Robinson to make the connection.

  Jackie Robinson was African American and I was African American. Jackie Robinson’s family was poor, and mine didn’t have much money, either. And Jackie was a leader, and I was learning to lead. For a while, Jackie Robinson was the only black person in the MLB, and most of the time when I played, I was the only girl.

  Jackie Robinson was also classy, even when people said and did mean things to him because he was black—and that happened a lot. So Coach taught us that we should be classy, too.

  Our uniform was classic. We always wore white shirts with navy blue pinstripes and the word Monarchs written on it in navy blue. In baseball we wore throwback white with navy blue pinstripe pants and high socks, like the New York Yankees used to wear.

  No matter what was going on, Coach Steve taught us how important it is to represent our team. We watch our behavior—we never want to do anything that would reflect badly on the Monarchs or our teammates. Like around Halloween, when some kids throw eggs at cars. Nobody on the Monarchs would like it if you did that. If you want to do something like that, you shouldn’t be a Monarch.

  One of the most important things Coach taught us was to not try to be fancy, but to learn the fundamentals of each sport. Like in baseball, we had to learn how to throw, how to catch, how to swing a bat, how to slide, how to pick a runner off a base, and how to turn a double play. Those are far more important than hitting a grand slam—a home run when there’s a runner on every base.

  In basketball, a lot of people really like it when a player slam-dunks. But that’s not the most important part of the game. You have to do things like learn how to dribble with your right hand, dribble with your left hand, and throw a bounce pass. In soccer, it’s the same thing—you need to know how to dribble and pass with both feet.

  And since we couldn’t afford fancy camps and specialized coaching like kids with more money could, Coach played us up an age group to give us better competition.

  “We kept raising the bar, putting kids up against really good competition and playing a lot of games,” he says.

  We were never the biggest or strongest team.

  And when he says we played a lot, he really means a lot. To give you an example, the Monarchs would play forty or fifty baseball games every year between April and the end of July, which is more than a lot of other teams play. Then we’d start fall baseball again in September and October and play another twenty games.

  “We were running here, running there, carpooling, and the kids were spending the night at each other’s houses,” my mom says.

  Another important thing Coach taught us was to develop a high sports IQ.

  In baseball, “Coach Steve taught us to play small ball,” Jahli says. “Bunting, stealing bases, making sacrifice flies, learning the pitcher and getting in his head. Playing Jackie Robinson’s style of game.”

  Some kids like to “swing for the bleachers”—to try to hit a lot of home runs—but they tend to strike out a lot. That’s not how we played. The point of our offense was to manufacture a run. We would do that at bat by at bat, pitch by pitch, hit by hit, play by play.

  Here’s an example of how it might go.

  Usually Scott was our leadoff hitter—he would go first. Sometimes he would bunt—block back a pitch to create a little soft hit down the first- or third-base line. If he got on base, lots of times he would steal second base when the pitcher wasn’t looking. Sometimes he would also steal third.

  I would usually bat second, right behind Scott. If I could get a hit, Scott could usually score from whatever base he had stolen.

  After I got on base, then I would try to steal second. If I made it all the way to third, I would take a lead off of third base, so I was closer to home plate.

  Since I run pretty fast, Demetrius, who was on our team when we were younger and usually hit third, might hit a bunt also. Then I would try to sprint as fast as I could and make it to home plate. Sometimes, I’d even have to slide.

  Safe!

  Then the fourth batter would try to hit Demetrius in. This is how small ball goes—nobody came to bat trying to hit a home run. If we chipped away at things one play at a time, by the end of the first inning, we might be winning three or four to nothing. That’s a good lead in baseball, since baseball is a hard game to score in. In soccer, scoring is also hard; in basketball, because the court is so small, it’s easy to run up a lot of points.

  But we didn’t showboat—fist pump, chest bump, give a lot of high fives—or any of that. If there’s one important thing to learn about sports, it’s that losing is part of playing, so you always want to remember what it feels like to be on the losing team—not very good. I always try to put myself on the other side of the court and think about how the kids on the other team are feeling. That’s one reason why, if we get a big lead, we don’t rub it in. We’ve been in that situation before and it feels lousy.

  In baseball, the main thing we wanted to do was to put the ball in play and keep it in play to put the pressure on our opponent’s defense. Don’t get yourself out by swinging at a pitch that you can’t hit or by doing something that isn’t smart, like getting picked off a base—thrown out because you’re not paying attention. At our age we only play for six innings, so don’t make any errors on defense while you’re on the field. Offense wins games but defense wins championships.

  Since we were spending so much time together playing sports, we were getting pretty good at working together, and at being a real team.

  CHAPTER 6

  FAMILY VALUES

  BEFORE LONG, ALL OF THE MONARCHS AND THEIR PARENTS and siblings became like one big ole happy family to me. So, in 2011, everyone celebrated with my family when my mother and Squirt got married.

  Mom and Squirt had been together for a while. When I started playing with the Monarchs, we already considered Squirt a part of our family. By then he and my mom had just h
ad my little sister, Mahogany. A little while after Mahogany was born we had all moved into a house near Seventeenth and Manton. About a year after that, we moved into a three-bedroom house on Oakford near Twenty-Fourth. Squirt, he also has a son and a daughter, who are the exact same ages as Qu’ran and me. His son spends a lot of time at our house. We have a big extended family.

  About a year after Mahogany was born, Mom and Squirt, they got married. It was raining on their wedding day. That morning, my mom took all of her bridesmaids out to Perkins for breakfast, and Squirt took all the groomsmen to the barbershop to get their hair cut. Later that day we all went to the Merion, the catering place where the wedding was held. Mom had six bridesmaids, and I was her junior bridesmaid, so we had to start getting dressed pretty early.

  I don’t remember the wedding ceremony, except that I walked down the aisle with Squirt’s son and my mom was late walking down the aisle. She walked down the aisle with Qu’ran.

  Mom has a really beautiful picture of the wedding party posing on a staircase. In it, the bridesmaids are wearing lavender and lilac. Squirt and the groomsmen are wearing cream. I stand at the front of the bridesmaids, wearing a long lavender dress and staring at my mom, who looks like a princess in her long white dress. Squirt stands on the other side of her, wearing a cream-colored tuxedo.

  I remember a lot about the reception, I think because there was so much food. I had never seen anything like it before.

  My mom and Squirt sat at a table at the front of the room, where all of us could see them. Maurice, Qu’ran, and I sat at the same table as Squirt’s cousins. And Coach and Miss Robin and all of the parents of my Monarch teammates had come.

  The food was really, really good. The waiters came around to ask what we wanted. First they brought us something to drink. Then they brought us a tiny scoop of sherbet ice cream. I had never seen anyone give you ice cream before dinner before!