I was to my team, then, what Booker T. Washington—in a statement my father had regarded with the same piety he reserved for the Bible—had claimed my race should be to the white race. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” Washington had said in 1895, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” The words still seem, residing with me as they have through some fifty years, to carry force, to signify my particular condition with the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers during the years 1923 to 1928. Although I did not try to be but what I was—although I continued to drive myself, to pursue perfection with a rabid passion in that league which had no white men—it must be clear that, far from releasing me from any bondage, my efforts were the truest evidence that (aware even then that I may never have had choice in any of these matters) I did have choice in my feelings about them, and I did, with every act, sustain that slavery which was mine, and which, alas, I must have loved. (“Slavery holds but few,” says Seneca. “Many hold fast to slavery.”)
How else can I explain my decision, made before the end of the season, to accompany our team on their post-season barnstorming tour? For I knew, even as I informed Jack Henry, that my reasons had little to do with pleasing him or my teammates, and less to do with anything concerning my mother and family. I was thinking of one thing only: of the possibility that our team would, while on tour, come up against—as they had the winter before—a team composed largely of members of the New York Yankees.
Jack Henry did not question my decision, nor did he, as I had hoped he would, greet it with enthusiasm. “That’s good,” was all he said. “You’ll help bring in the money.”
My hand moved then, involuntarily, to my thigh, as if to hide what was there: for, though I had no basis for believing so, I felt that he knew that I carried, concealed in my wallet, a piece of folded newspaper which was the source of my decision, bearing as it did a photo of that man I dreamt of meeting, and of defeating. I had gazed at it often—the body twisted in a follow-through, the bat straight up and down but tipped back slightly above the right shoulder, the narrow eyes and bulbous nose shaded by the visor of his cap, the mouth parted in a half-smile—and I had, concentrating on the image, seen it come to life; I had watched the man swing and miss again and again and again as I threw the ball past him with such speed that he was forced—mystified and broken—to admit that I had taken from him those alliterative titles, King of Clout and Sultan of Swat, an ignorant public had bestowed upon him. I did not, of course, care about having such foolish titles applied to myself. I knew that, even if I should defeat him as a pitcher and outhit him as a batter, the word would go out among baseball men only that we had met and that I had carried the day; so that when I thought of playing against him, I did not, in truth, think of the acclaim a victory would bring; I thought—and this was, facing Jack Henry, what made me lower my eyes and cover my sidepocket—only of the way the man’s eyes might look at me when he had faced me and lost.
Sometimes I believe that that image of him—ripped from a newspaper one morning in what I thought was a fit of jealousy—was, during those months which preceded our first meeting, more real to me than the man would ever become. For if I did not want to take from him those banal titles, and if I had resigned myself to the fact that my first decision had been irrevocable (as, with my first game of the previous season, it had become), why was I so jealous of his fame?—and if I knew that I could not, by defeating him on the playing field, put on his power and his glory—and if I believed that I had no need to—why, in the privacy of my room at home and in hotel rooms on the road, did I continue to fix my eyes upon his image?
As my first complete season with the Dodgers wore on through late August and September, I continued to win as a pitcher and to excel as a hitter. By the end of September, when we were preparing to meet Rube Foster’s Giants, winner of the western circuit crown, for the World Series, I had hit twenty-four home runs; I had won thirty-nine games while losing seven, had pitched three no-hitters (though no perfect game), four one-hitters, and an even dozen shutouts; I had also begun—on the days Johnson or Tompkins or Kelly (coming in from left field—born in Cinq Hommes, Louisiana, he was called “Gunboat” from the fact that his father had been a gun runner to Cuba during the Spanish-American War) were pitching—to play in the outfield. During the month of September, with the pennant already clinched, I pitched only every third or fourth day, and I knew that my presence in the outfield on the days I did not pitch, and the length of my home runs, though they did not yet draw the fans to the ballpark, had begun to be talked about.
Through August and September, I played as well and as hard as I ever had, yet I felt all the while as if I were merely going through the motions, as if this boy whom others claimed could throw like lightning and hit like thunder was somebody I myself was observing. Only when I would, at times for hours on end, take the photo from my wallet and gaze at it, did I seem to wake—I grew warmer, imagining the details of the encounter I hoped would come, and though the numbed feeling would leave me then, I knew, of course, that the essence of these moments was their very unreality, and they became, therefore, the most vivid example to me of how foolishly in dreams my life was led.
The first official World Series in our league took place in 1924, and since the (white) Brooklyn Dodgers had finished in second place in the National League, we were able to rent Ebbets Field for the opening three-game series against Foster’s Chicago American Giants. We held two days of workouts at Ebbets Field, and for the first time since late July, my teammates seemed to want to approach me, to offer me their friendship. The instant I left the pitching mound, one of them would run to me with a jacket, to cover my right arm and keep it warm; when I took my place in the batter’s box for the first time, I found that Rose Kinnard had climbed the left-center field wall and was playing for me in the bleachers; and when I drilled the ball consistently into the seats, the players wailed and moaned, mocking the fate of Rube Foster’s pitchers.
“You want to give them your purpose pitch,” Jones said. “You let Johnson learn it to you.”
“What’s a purpose pitch?” Barton asked.
“A purpose pitch,” Jones explained, “is where the purpose of the pitch is to separate the batter’s head from his shoulders.”
They were on edge, riding high, as excited as a bunch of schoolboys. I wanted to care about the series as they did—it should, I knew, have been the high point of my life until then—and I bore down and concentrated as hard as I could; still I felt, the instant I was not in motion, as if I were only half-there. When I see Jones’s skinny arms flapping away as he runs for Barton, to embrace him after Barton has made a superb diving catch of a low liner, or when I see the easy way Rose Kinnard would drape his long arm around Kelly’s shoulder, consoling him after I had struck him out, my heart stops: though I wish that I might have cared enough to have been one with my teammates during those autumn days, I know, now as then, that I wished for other things more.
Even when, on the afternoon of October 5 of that year, a Tuesday (the day after John McGraw’s Giants had opened their World Series in Washington, where Nehf defeated the great Walter Johnson, who, at the age of thirty-seven, was pitching in his first and only World Series), I took the mound before a crowd of over twenty thousand, and checked the flagpole atop the scoreboard to see if the wind had shifted, my mind was elsewhere. The roar of the crowd was for me, but when I raised my eyes and, squinting, looked into their happy faces so far from me, I found that I felt almost nothing.
I wanted to be pleased by their cheers, yet as I reared back and fired the first ball of the game at the Giants’ second baseman for a called strike, and thus made the crowd roar again, I found that the only thing I really felt was annoyance. I wanted to be done with it. I wanted to leave the ballpark as quickly as possible. I wanted the series to be over, and I tried in vain to stop myself from imagining what might happen when it was.
I pitched quickly, strik
ing out the first three men on eleven pitches, and all the while my teammates’ chattering filled my ears. “I feel the breeze,” Jones called, as he always did. “Oh I do feel the breeze!”
I returned to the bench, my teammates telling me how good I was, and I discovered that my hands itched terribly, wanting to hold a bat, to slam the ball low and hard at Johnson, at Jones, at the others—I leaned forward, controlling myself, as if studying the play on the field, and as I did I saw from the corner of my eye that Rube Foster, the Giants’ manager, was sitting at one end of his bench, watching me. I wondered if he suspected. He was dressed in a businessman’s gray pin-stripe suit, with vest, a wool cap set to one side of his large head. He was taller than me by two inches, weighed some two hundred and sixty pounds (thirty more than he had when a player), and his thick neck, bulging from his starched collar, made him seem even larger than he was. Less than a dozen years before, in his prime, he had been considered the greatest pitcher our leagues had ever known. He sucked on his pipe, one leg crossed over the other, and his eyes regarded me without expression. The “World Series, like the league itself, had been his idea, and it was difficult, sitting there with sweat pouring from me, to remember that I had, coming into the league but a year and a half before, wanted to model myself after him, wanted to be so good that my name would, someday, have replaced his when baseball men argued about who was the greatest of the black ballplayers.
I would not, I reminded myself, have been the first black man to outplay George Herman “Babe” Ruth in an exhibition game—Foster himself, among others, when he was long past his prime, had been able to handcuff the man on a given day and if I did it too, I knew that this would prove nothing, and change nothing. I watched the field half-dreaming; I felt Johnson’s eyes mocking me; I heard Jones chattering in my ear; I thought of the scars on Kelly’s back—three horizontal lines which, he claimed, came not from the time he had spent in prison for armed robbery, but from the brothers at St. Thomas Catholic orphanage in Baton Rouge, and then my teammates were running by me again, beginning to talk it up, to send their promises across the grass.
I opened the second inning by throwing three strikes past the fourth man in the Giants’ lineup, their leading home run hitter, Christobel Torrienti, a light-skinned Cuban who, the players said, could have been a star in the white leagues had his hair been slightly less kinky. (There were, in fact, two other Cubans, Armando Marsans and Rafael Almeida, who had played for the Cincinnati Reds in the white Major Leagues a decade before, but not counting those others, Spanish and black, who had made it by disguising their true identities, Marsans and Almeida had been the last.)
Their first baseman, “Mule” Suttles, second to bat in the second, flied out to Kinnard, and against their catcher and leading hitter, John Beckwith, Bingo held on to a foul-tipped third strike. Their half of the inning was over on eight pitches, and I was in our dugout again, listening to the fans rain their praise on me, trying not to hear my teammates’ words, trying to ignore Jones’s arm, which was around my shoulder as his sweet voice told me that he personally guaranteed me the runs I needed.
“We made out as quickly as the Giants had in the bottom of the second, yet the game seemed to me to be moving with excruciating slowness. Even now, remembering those innings, being able to see each movement of each play, my eyes begin to close, and drowsiness seeps through my body; I feel again as if I am perpetually on the verge of dropping away into a sweet and comforting sleep. Although nothing in my outward appearance would have indicated it, I felt as if I were in some kind of distracted trance, as if I were observing a sleepwalker who bore my likeness.
In their half of the third, “Cool Papa” Bell, not as fast any longer as his legend would have had him, but fast nonetheless, led off by beating out a grounder to third; he taunted me by taking a long lead. Bingo called for a pitchout, and then “Cool Papa” was flying behind me; Bingo’s throw was low, bouncing off Jack Henry’s chest, and Bell was safe at second. Annoyed that the game had thus been lengthened, I bore down and, shaking off Bingo’s signs and pitching only fast balls, retired the next three men on two strike outs and a pop-up to Jack Henry.
I came to bat in our half of the third with the bases empty and, on the second pitch, I hammered the ball high into the upper deck in left field, giving myself the only run I knew I would need. I took small pleasure from the hit, however, or from the crowd’s applause. I worked as hard and as quickly as I could, setting down the Giants in order for the next four innings, while, silently, I urged my own teammates to hurry, to swing at first pitches, to make out so that I could return to the mound.
When, in the top of the eighth, with Jones and Barton on base, Rose Kinnard hit a home run into the lower left-center field stands, putting us ahead 4 to 0, Jack Henry told Johnson that he would be the starting pitcher on the following day, and that he was, in order to give him some rest, removing him for a pinch hitter. Johnson left the dugout at once; he did not look my way but I believed that he was smiling, and I burned; for though in truth I thought that I cared about the outcome of the game as little as he did, I felt that he knew that I wished I could care.
In the last innings I remained as distracted between pitches as I had been at the outset, and when, at the game’s close, the fans poured down from the stands to the field and surrounded me, I felt still as if I were not there. They hugged me and kissed me, danced around me and tore swatches from my uniform, and though Jack Henry and some others intervened, escorting me to the dugout by pushing our way through the crowd of joyous faces, I felt nothing, neither fear nor elation. Now as then, I can feel their physical presence—the space around me dense with bodies, my own skin being touched by theirs, my sweat making their hands slide as some of them try to grip me, to show their gratitude—and yet I lift my eyes and search, among their black faces, for the face I know I will not see. I am not repulsed by their show of affection, yet neither am I thrilled. My body is tired, and I do not even draw my shoulders up protectively, as I see my teammates do in front of me.
In the locker room, they tease me about what has happened. Johnson has vanished. They tell me there will be girls waiting for me outside, and ask if I will share the fruits of my success with them. They do not throw water on me, as they do to one another, and they do not provoke me to harmless wrestling matches; but, in the flush of our victory, they seem, for the moment, to have abandoned their suspicion. I am, more than ever, in a trance, and yet, as they celebrate my greatness, and proclaim their own acts of heroism to one another, they see only my silence, and assume therefore that I am the same man I have always been.
If I could have danced with them, I would have. If I could have hugged them and wrestled with them and enjoyed—if but for the moment—the kind of happiness they were feeling then… Was there not one of them who would not now call me a fool—or worse—for wishing that I could have changed places with any of them, so that I might, for once in my life, have known what it was like to have felt this ordinary release grown men seem to feel when they have fought together and won.
It would never have occurred to me then, in my vanity, that to envy them was only, once again, to treat them as beings apart—to envy in them those things which have always been used to master them. Yet this was what I was doing, and it accounts for the fact that, in that year and the three which followed, I never did know each of them as they must have known one another.
III
Farewell! Farewell!
The rabbi of Kobryn said: “We paid no attention to the miracles our teachers worked, and when sometimes a miracle did not come to pass, he gained in our eyes.”
—Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, “The Later Masters”
9
The room was almost dark. Light flickered from two candles, removed to the window sill so that Flo could serve, but even in this atmosphere, Tidewater seemed harmless to Sam. The guy’s story was in his head, taking up space, it was true, but since Ben would be gone in less than twenty-four hou
rs, Sam figured he would have extra room there. Stella’s face and voice bothered him more—because, he had to admit, they made him feel easy about things, they made him feel that he was right not to believe in things such as his account with Sabatini—and he was glad that Flo had not invited her. He would have been the one who would have had to feed her, and he didn’t need to have Ben, on their last night together, see him in that position.
Flo asked him if he wanted another slice of roast beef, or some more potatoes, but he said no, that he was satisfied. He had been able, truly, to enjoy the meal. While he had been out during the afternoon, searching for a present for Ben, Flo had been in the apartment with Tidewater, cooking. Ben and Marion had taken care of the store. Marion, sitting next to Sam, had not opened her mouth since the meal had begun, but Sam saw that she was putting it away, glass by glass. They had all been drinking, slowly and steadily, since late afternoon. At the sink, Flo stacked dishes.
Sam could, with his eyes open, see her smiling at him just before she had covered her face with her hands to recite the prayer over the shabbos candles. It had been—her lighting the candles—Ben’s request, and Sam had looked straight back into his father’s eyes while Flo was praying. It was all the same to him. The tears that were in his father’s eyes when Ben had raised the glass of wine and recited the kiddush, the silence of the others, the picture Sam saw—the one he knew Ben wanted him to see—of Ben’s father doing the same in the apartment on Linden Boulevard: Sam could take it all in without having to believe in it, and he could even, seeing things this way, understand that it was—a word he liked—normal for Ben to feel this way at a time like this. Ben had passed the glass around and each of them had sipped from it. Then Ben had gone to the sink, washed his hands, returned to the table, motioned everyone into their seats, and, above the slices of challah on his plate, covered with a white cloth napkin, he had recited a prayer and made a cutting motion, three times, with the bread knife. Sam had smiled at him, taken the piece of soft yellowish bread that Ben gave to each of them, and Ben had misread the smile, and smiled himself.
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