Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  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.

  “Oh you rode that one!” Jones said, shaking my hand as I crossed home plate. “They got their money’s worth, honey, coming out to see you today.”

  Each of my teammates came to see me in the dugout, congratulating me—and Kinnard said what they must all have been thinking: �
��Didn’t think you had that kind of power in you. You must be all leather and bones.”

  I was breathing more easily now; my fingers and palms tingled, alive in a way they had never been before. “She ain’t come down yet,” Jones said, standing outside the dugout and peering off into the distance, into the pale light beyond the center field fence.

  I did not get to hit again that day, but the next afternoon, in Cleveland, I found that—before the game had begun—I was thinking only of my batting, of holding the wood in my hands; I was imagining the feeling that would flow through me when I would drive the ball far and straight, and I was wondering how it could be that I had not, through all the years I had played baseball, concerned myself much with hitting. I had always been, throughout my childhood—on the fields near our home, and at Dexter Park—a good batsman: a line drive hitter who could be depended upon in the clutch. But like everything else that occurred between those moments when I was alone on the mound, hitting seemed unreal somehow—something which filled the time, as it were, between those moments in which I was alive. I took my stance, I studied the pitchers, I tried my hardest, and I was good enough—on days I did not pitch—to be used occasionally as a pinch hitter. I had good reflexes, strong wrists, and—the quality which, in the end, was most important—exceptional vision. I could see the ball longer than others did, and I could time the break in a curve ball, and even a spitter, so that I was rarely off balance when I swung. Still, I had never found within myself what was suddenly there: a desire which can be expressed most simply in the commonplace players’ phrase which had long been familiar to me: I wanted to murder the ball.

  When I took my turn in batting practice and found that, instead of hitting solid line drives over the infield, I was driving the ball to the far corners of the outfield, my wonder increased. My teammates watched me, but they neither praised my hitting nor commented upon it, and when Jack Henry told Johnson that he would be pitching, so as to give me a day’s rest, I resented the decision. I sat on the bench all afternoon—we won handily, 5 to 2, and I was never needed, as a relief pitcher or pinch hitter—and each time the ball spun toward home plate, I was there, timing my swing.

  When, the following afternoon, Jack Henry gave me another day’s rest, pitching Jacknife Tompkins, the kind of pitcher we called, for what reason I cannot say, a sockamayock—meaning a pitcher you kept on your roster as a utility ballplayer, but one you would never have used in an important league game—I grew angrier. In practice, moreover, batting against Tompkins, who admittedly did not put much on the ball, I supplied my own power and consistently drilled the ball into the stands, thus angering Jack Henry and Aaron Baussy, the manager of the Elites, for there was always the danger that some young boy would keep the ball and run off with it. The Elites defeated us that afternoon, 7 to 1, and again Jack Henry did not use me.

  On the third day of our series with the Elites, I was the pitcher. I set them down in order during the first two innings, hurrying my pitches so that my own turn at bat—I was, as usual, ninth in the order—would come sooner. The Elite pitcher that day was a man named Harcourt Simmons, a crossfire pitcher with good speed and fine control. In our half of the third, I came to bat. Simmons wound up for the first pitch, stepped to his right, and whipped his arm across his body, waist high, so that the ball sped at me as if it were coming from third base, rising slightly, as if it intended to bury itself in my ear. I could not restrain myself. I stepped forward and met the ball, inside, in front of the plate, my hands vibrating from the shock. I heard the third baseman grunt, and, from the corner of my eye—I had just had time to drop the bat—I saw him, sitting in the dirt, hold up his glove, the ball wedged in the pocket. I returned to the dugout, cursing myself silently. I expected Johnson, or Jack Henry, to say something, but they did not—nor did Jones tease me, as he usually did.

  Their silence irritated me; and my irritation increased when, in my second and third at-bats of the day, I was deprived of the opportunity to swing away, receiving a base on balls one time up and being required to make a sacrifice bunt the other. When I came to bat in our half of the eighth inning, we were already leading 5 to 0 (I had allowed the Elites but three hits), and Simmons had been replaced by a young southpaw, a sixteen-year-old stringbean of a player named Tennessee Bray, who was as wild as the wind. He had already soaked Henry and Rouillard, and on his first pitch to me I had to drop my bat and fall to the ground to avoid catching the ball in my cheek. His second pitch hit the dirt some twenty-five feet in front of home plate and bounced past the catcher, allowing Jones, who was at second, to move to third. The third pitch came toward the plate, below the knees. I forced myself to wait an instant—in order not to be ahead of the ball, as I had been my first time at bat. I could hear the ball whistling and knew that, as I stepped forward—a longer stride to compensate for the lowness of the pitch—I was smiling. My body strained and I felt the pressure which had been building in me for three days release itself with my swing: my anger flowed into my hands and shoulders, and from them into the bat. I drove the ball straight at the pitcher—who threw up a gloved hand in self-defense and then fell sideways from the mound—and the ball continued on a line, directly over second base, at eye-level; the center fielder began to set himself for it, but the ball continued to rise, whistling through the air as the pitch had whistled toward the plate, and the centerfielder had a look of pure stupefaction on his face as his neck dropped and he watched the ball, some twenty feet above his head, sail past.

  I was, as I rounded the bases, happy; I felt satisfied in a way I had never felt from any pitching success, and I saw—as I expected I would—an image of the man whose slugging prowess I knew I could now challenge: it waited for me as I rounded third base, and it smiled at me as I crossed home plate. I could breathe again.

  I took my place on the bench, beside my teammates, and accepted their congratulations. Though I had only jogged in rounding the bases, I was panting. I looked right and left, willing to hear more—to have my teammates go on, as they always did with one another when a home run had been hit, but they addressed their remarks to the Elite pitcher, advising him of the benefits a cold shower could bring. They said nothing to me, and I scanned their faces, as hurt as I was surprised. Surely they were aware of the power I had suddenly unleashed, and surely they were happy for me!—and yet, as soon as these thoughts had crossed my mind, I realized my error. What I saw in their faces was suspicion, and something more than suspicion—I had, I knew, hurt them in some way; I had again, by my success—by making myself more whole as a player and us more powerful as a team—only repeated the old pattern; I had only succeeded in separating myself that much more from them.

  They were—I saw this clearly in the weeks which followed, when I continued to hit well, and for distance—wary. They did not, I am certain, connect the change in me to the conversation that had taken place during our game against the Ethiopian Clowns, but they were not pleased that, like the white star they so admired, who had been a pitcher first and a slugger later, I too was changing. In a series against the Dayton Marcos, I blasted four home runs in three games; in a double-header against the Indianapolis ABC’s, I went six for nine, including two doubles and a triple; and against the Kansas City Monarchs, while pitching my second no-hitter of the season, I hit my longest home run, far beyond the four-forty mark of their left-center field wall, thereby winning my own game 1 to 0.

  Although I found that I was—at least in the minutes which immediately followed—happy after I had delivered a long blow, I did not, as when pitching, feel in any way transported—rather the opposite: hearing the crack of bat against ball, and seeing the white sphere rocket across the infield, I felt as if I had never been more firmly rooted to earth. My spirits soared, yet my body seemed more substantial than ever.

  That my teammates remained suspicious is understandable. Previously, it would not have occurred to any of them, as it had not occurred to me, to have asked why it was that I was a great pitcher yet
an ordinary hitter. Still, it occurs to me now that, until then, my want of excellence at the plate must have been something which had made me acceptable to them, something, that is, which had made them assume that I was what one part of me wanted to believe: merely an imperfect man, like any of them.

  Once, however, I had tasted the thrill that could come from hitting, I could not, as with all things in my life, get enough. I wanted still to be with them, one of them—yet I knew that my desire to surpass them, in that which had previously been their domain, ensured that I would again move farther from them. Outwardly, nothing changed. Jack Henry played me as before—pitching me as often as he had to, and my teammates left me alone—appreciating my contributions to our efforts (we had, before the end of August, clinched the eastern circuit championship, thus ensuring ourselves a place in the World Series and a share of the money that that would bring in), respecting my silence, but acting—off the field—as if I were what I had, in truth, done everything to encourage them to believe. I was, simply, a man apart—and, except for the ritual laughter which accompanied Johnson’s barbs, there was nothing they showed which indicated that they wished things to be otherwise.