by Troy Soos
Aubury introduced me to the big man in the chair. He was Oscar Charleston, “the best baseball player in the history of the world,” as Aubury put it. With a twinkle in his eye, the lawyer identified me as “an occasional infielder with the St. Louis Browns and a sucker for slow curveballs.”
After Charleston gave me a handshake that nearly turned me into a lefty, Aubury continued the introductions. In a couple of straight-backed chairs across from Charleston were two more of the ABCs, both of them dressed in finer suits than I had ever owned. One was Biz Mackey, a tall man with a serious face, and “the premier catcher in the Negro National League,” according to Aubury. The other was second baseman Crush Holloway, a bony-cheeked fellow with wide, innocent eyes.
While the guitarist played a mournful tune, making the strings actually moan by sliding his razor, Aubury said to the ballplayers, “I’m sorry we missed the game. How did it go?”
“Don’t get them started.” The barber sighed. “These boys been braggin’ on that game for an hour.”
They happily proceeded to give us the highlights. Since Aubury and I had already heard about the game from some fans, I assumed Aubury had asked the question primarily to get the conversation rolling. Nothing makes a ballplayer more talkative than asking him to recount his successes.
Biz Mackey said, “You should have seen the catch Oscar made. Tully McAdoo hit a fly to center field that had ‘triple’ written all over it. But old Oscar jus’ started running back, never even turnin’ around to look for the ball. At the last second, he reaches up and catches it like he knew where that baseball was gonna come down.”
“Wasn’t nothing to it,” said Charleston. “I could tell by the sound of the bat where the ball was going’.”
The barber gave Charleston a friendly swat with the newspaper. “This boy was born to play ball. I’ve known him since he was eight years old, and he always had a glove or bat in his hand. He was such a regular at the ABCs games, they made him their batboy—and even back then, he could hit as good as some of the players!”
Charleston basked in the praise. He was obviously accustomed to receiving such compliments, but that didn’t appear to diminish his enjoyment at hearing them.
Crush Holloway said, “Hey, Oscar, finish that story about the time you got arrested.” To Aubury and me, he explained, “He just started tellin’ it when you came in.”
The center fielder obliged, recounting a 1915 game against a white semipro team. When the umpire made a string of blatantly biased calls against the ABCs, Charleston objected. He punctuated his argument by decking the ump in front of five thousand fans, and was hauled off to jail. The incident prompted the Indianapolis chief of police to propose a ban on all ball games between white and colored teams.
Holloway chuckled. “Oscar, you just ain’t happy ‘less you’re having a scuffle with somebody. But you oughta know better than to punch out a umpire.”
I said to Charleston, “I heard you once had a run-in with some Klansmen in Florida.”
“Wasn’t much of a run-in,” he said. “They backed down quick.” The big man added emphatically, “Ain’t nobody gonna bully me—especially not some cowards hiding under bedsheets.”
Franklin Aubury, getting to the purpose of our visit, said, “Speaking of the Ku Klux Klan, we think they might be the ones who lynched Slip Crawford. Mickey’s looking into it.”
I eyed each of the players. “When Crawford played for the ABCs, did he have any trouble with anyone?”
“Like with the Klan?” Charleston asked.
“With anyone.”
All of them shook their heads, and commented on what a good guy Crawford had been.
“Except when he was pitching,” Holloway added. “The batter was the enemy to Slip, and he’d knock him down without a second thought. Got into some fights on the field, and Biz here had to stop more than one batter from taking a bat to Slip’s skull, but that’s just part of the game. Never heard about him having troubles off the field.”
Biz Mackey pointed to Holloway. “This man got the exact opposite approach as what Slip had. Crush is always friendly and smilin’ to the other team. The thing is, he’s about as deadly as they come when he’s running the bases—makes Ty Cobb look like a ballet dancer. Crush’ll cut a second baseman to shreds or knock a shortstop clean out to left field. But he’ll give him a big ol’ smile, and say, ‘Hey, man, sorry I came in so hard. You all right? Let me help you up.’ ”
Holloway mugged for us, demonstrating the apologetic grin Mackey described, and we all laughed.
The catcher went on. “Slip Crawford, though, never had no apology for knocking down a batter. He figured home plate was his—if you got too close, he’d back you off or stick it in your ear.”
Oscar Charleston asked me, “This your way of finding out who killed Slip—by talking to his friends? Talk to his enemies—talk to the Klan.”
“I intend to,” I said. “I’m just trying to be thorough.”
“Mickey has been working hard on this,” Aubury said. “And he is covering all possibilities, the same as I would.”
“Why?” asked Charleston. “Why are you so interested in who killed Slip?”
Aubury said, “We are trying to prevent any further violence.”
Charleston gestured at me. “I’m asking him.”
My impulse was to give the same answer the lawyer had. But I opted to give a more personal reason instead. “I got to play in only one game against Slip Crawford. He struck me out three times, and I didn’t get on base once. I wanted another chance at him, to see if I could hit that damned curveball of his. Whoever killed him took that chance away from me. I’m never gonna get a hit off him now, and I’m mad as hell about that.”
There were nods of approval and understanding at my answer.
Charleston leaned toward me. “Last year, I was with St. Louis, and Slip was pitching for the ABCs. I faced him maybe twenty or thirty times, and didn’t get but a handful of hits off him either.” He chuckled. “So don’t feel too bad.”
The barber climbed off his chair and swatted the leather cushion a couple of times with a towel. “You need a trim,” he said to me. “Sit down, and I’ll give you one—just don’t tell nobody.”
I hung up my jacket and took the seat.
As he wrapped the linen cloth around me, the barber called to the old men by the window. “You fellas let me know if you see a cop.”
“Why?” I asked.
“This barbershop’s for colored only. Can’t cut a white man’s hair in here.”
“But you can at the hotel you mentioned?”
“Of course. The Capital’s a white hotel. In there, I can’t cut a colored man’s hair.”
“But you can work in either place?”
“Goes by the color of the customer, not the barber.” He fastened the cloth around my throat. “I don’t make the laws, I jus’ try to survive ’em.”
I tried to clear my head. I was never going to understand the convoluted logic of segregation laws, nor the people who conceived them.
As the barber began snipping at my hair, I returned to the reason Aubury and I had come. “We were told,” I said, “that Slip Crawford was getting pressured to jump to the Eastern Colored League. Any of you heard anything about that?”
They all said they’d heard nothing about Crawford being recruited. Mackey added, “He was gone from our team by the time the ECL was getting started.”
“Have any of you been contacted by them?”
Oscar Charleston answered, “A new league is gonna want the best players they can get, and we are the best.”
“So Rosie Sumner’s been to see you?”
“You know about Sumner?” Charleston sounded surprised.
“Yeah, he works for somebody in Harlem, right?”
“Alex Pompez,” Charleston said. “He’s a numbers king who also owns a ball club—the New York Cuban Stars. And, yeah, Sumner’s been to see me. Dizzy Dismukes, too, I know. Sumner came to o
ur spring-training camp in French Lick; he was talking up the new league, saying how we’d get out from under Rube Foster’s thumb if we jump.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him no.” Charleston looked thoughtful. “When I played for Rube in Chicago, I didn’t much like him as a manager. He’s too damn strict—even tells his players how to dress off the field. And now that he’s president of the league, he moves me from team to team, wherever a club needs a star to attract the fans.” Charleston stated this as simple fact, not bragging. “But the thing is, even though I don’t like all his rules, I figure Rube Foster made this league, and he can run it however he wants. I’m satisfied with the Negro National League, at least for now.”
I asked Holloway and Mackey, “How about you guys?”
Both said Sumner had approached them, and their answers had been that they’d think about it.
“Did he push you?”
“Not then, he didn’t,” said Mackey.
“What do you mean ‘not then’?”
Mackey answered, “Rosie Sumner called me again after Slip Crawford got killed. He suggested I should go east, where I’d be safe from the Klan.”
Jeez. Sumner was using Crawford’s lynching as a selling point for the ECL.
Crush Holloway said, “He told me the same thing. What I told him was to go to hell.” He added, “Me and Biz come up here from San Antonio, where we played with the Black Aces. In Texas, the Klan hangs or whips a colored man every week. We survived there; we can sure as hell survive here.”
“Sumner tried that line on me a couple weeks ago, too,” Charleston said. “I told him if I ever saw him again, he’d be the one to have to worry about staying alive.”
The barber brushed the loose clippings from around my neck and removed the cloth.
I dug into my pocket. “What do I owe you?”
“Not a thing. But if you do find out what happened to Slip Crawford, you let us know, okay?”
I promised that I would.
CHAPTER 21
Over the weekend, Franklin Aubury and I went to both games at Washington Park. The St. Louis Stars had left for the next city on their two-month road trip, but an even better team had arrived in Indianapolis: the Kansas City Monarchs, whose outstanding pitching staff included Bullet Joe Rogan and Jose Mendez. I almost forgot about my suspension and thoroughly enjoyed being able to take it easy and simply be a fan for a few days. I saw some spectacular plays, gorged myself with hot dogs and peanuts, and talked baseball endlessly with Aubury.
After Sunday’s contest, I told the lawyer that I would attend the Klan picnic in Evansville. Probably neither of us had much doubt that I would reach that decision, but he sounded delighted to hear it. I also jokingly asked him if he wanted to accompany me, but Aubury said he preferred to sleep on bed linen, not wear it.
Monday afternoon, I was alone on a southbound train, dozing off and on, and sporadically catching up with the sports pages to see what had been happening in the world of Caucasian baseball while I’d been immersed in the Negro League game.
I read with mixed feelings of the Browns’ recent fortunes. My teammates had lost two of three games to the Yankees, and had continued to struggle thereafter. At the time I was suspended, we were in a tie for first place; as of this morning, St. Louis had fallen three games behind New York. Petty though it was, I couldn’t help but feel a bit smug that the team was faring poorly without me. On the other hand, I didn’t want them to continue losing—I still hoped that the Browns would take me to my first World Series.
The Yankees were riding so high on their success, according to another story, that they were going to leave the Giants’ Polo Grounds and build a ballpark of their own in the Bronx. They had already broken ground at the site, and were planning to spend more than two million dollars on a stadium to open next spring. I did some arithmetic, and found that at my current salary I would have to play baseball for more than five hundred years to earn that sum of money.
The latest baseball news, though, wasn’t about anything that took place between the foul lines. The United States Supreme Court, through some tortured logic, had just ruled that Organized Baseball was a sport, not a business, and therefore exempt from antitrust laws. Among other things, the court determined that the reserve clause, which bound players to teams in perpetuity, was perfectly legal. I carefully read the reasoning given by the court, but try as I might, it made no more sense to me than segregation laws which specified where a man could and could not get a haircut. So I wadded my jacket into a pillow and took another nap.
So many people had flocked in from nearby towns for the holiday festivities, that I had to try four hotels on Main Street until I found one with a vacancy. When I entered my room, I saw on the washstand a handbill for the Klan gathering, which noted: All White Gentile Protestant People of Indiana and the Tri-State Territory Are Cordially Invited. I muttered aloud, “What the hell is this?” The colored bellboy who’d carried my bags answered that the hotel was distributing the leaflets to all its guests.
With more than an hour until sunset, I took a walk around downtown Evansville, Indiana. Although less than 150 miles from the state capital, the two cities were vastly different.
Indianapolis, with its central location and numerous railroad tracks and highways passing through it, billed itself as the Crossroads of America. It was a modern city with a thriving automobile industry, pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Eli Lilly, and a couple of universities.
Evansville, surrounded by coal country, was less prosperous and more isolated. It was tucked in the southwest corner of the state, on a bend of the Ohio River so sharp that a finger of Kentucky poked into the middle of town. The remote location might have been one reason why entertainment options were limited. I saw plenty of churches, but few movie theaters, only one vaudeville house, and no dance clubs. Judging by the posters plastered all over town, there was only one event worth attending in the city of Evansville: the Decoration Day picnic sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan.
Evansville Klan No. 1 was blessed with perfect weather for its festivities. Late Tuesday morning, soft sunshine bathed the city in warmth and light, and gentle breezes carried the scent of greenery from the surrounding hillsides.
There was no need for me to ask directions when I left the hotel. I merely had to follow all the other people walking toward the river. Many families were making the trek; children talked excitedly about seeing the fireworks, and women chatted about what kind of food might be served. From all outward appearances, these people could easily have been on their way to a Sunday church picnic or a Fourth of July celebration. There was nothing to suggest that they were going to a rally in support of terrorism and bigotry.
Once I arrived at the park, near the riverbank, it became apparent that there was something different about this event. Although most people were dressed in ordinary summer clothes, quite a few proudly wore the white robes and pointed hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. On the breast of each robe was embroidered a stylized cross in a circle, with what looked like a red blood drop at the center of the cross. Not many of the Klansmen worried about hiding their identities; the mask of almost every hood was kept rolled up above the face like a little window shade. The outfit wasn’t worn only by men. Women and children also wore the hoods and robes, and one family even had a Labrador retriever draped in a white sheet.
I began to stroll through the park and saw that the more traditional costume for Decoration Day was in evidence as well. Veterans of the nation’s wars proudly wore their snug old uniforms, adorned with medals and ribbons. Most were younger men who’d survived the Great War, some were middle-aged veterans from the “Splendid Little War” with Spain, and a few white-haired old men sported the ancient blue uniforms that they’d worn during the War Between the States. I wondered how these men who’d fought for the preservation of the Union felt about all the Confederate flags on display.
As I wandered around, I noticed nothing out of the ordi
nary but the Klan attire. The only fires were in the barbecue pits, and the only ropes were those twirled by the rodeo riders performing tricks in a small arena. Everything was normal holiday recreation; kids ran sack races and played games of tag, a brass band filled the air with patriotic tunes—as well as occasional renditions of “Dixie”—and frankfurters and ice cream were being consumed in enormous quantities.
Around lunchtime, I got a hot dog and lemonade for myself. While I ate, I watched a photographer set up a picture of four men standing in a row. Three of his subjects wore the uniforms from each of the last three wars; the fourth was in Klan regalia, with his mask down. The men were arranged with the Civil War soldier on the left, then the Spanish-American and Great War veterans, and the Klansman on the right. From the sequence, it looked like a prediction that Klan robes would be the uniform of the next war to come.
Unlike many of the veterans in the park, I had never felt the urge to don my army uniform again for the holiday—I’d been too relieved to get out of it. Besides, until this year, I’d never had occasion to wear it, since I’d always spent Decoration Day in the uniform of a major-league baseball team. I wished that I was in my wool flannels now, helping the Browns in their doubleheader against Boston.
My thoughts turning to baseball, I drifted over to the park’s diamond, where an informal game was in progress. I wasn’t learning anything about the Klan anyway, other than that it could put on a perfectly normal, all-American picnic.
I sat down in the small, wooden bleachers to watch for a while. There wasn’t much skill in evidence—to players in these games, the most important thing is usually to avoid spilling their drinks—but at least it was baseball.
I’d barely settled on the pine board when a man behind me reached out with an open paper bag. “Peanut?” he offered.
“No, thanks. Just ate.”
Pointing to the batter’s box, he said in a weak, tremulous voice, “Look at that fool. How is he gonna run in that outfit?”