Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  He talked on and on, and I was not intelligent enough to realize that he would have stood there forever, excusing himself for the thoughts he claimed he did not have, had I not, at last, found my voice and thanked him for coming. He sighed with relief then, and without saying good night, like a boy dismissed from school, he let loose an involuntary cry of happiness and raced off.

  I was careful, of course, and Johnson, though he continued to ride me for as long as we were to play together, never did say anything directly to me. He seemed to gather in as much pleasure as he required by asking me why I did not yet have children. “Foster,” he would add, “he got kids.” I said nothing, and yet—I know it now more than then—his question did matter, for though I may have spent much of my life thinking that I believed in a higher form of love than that which begets children, I would, now, have the children also. I would see something of myself, despite my life and despite the world, remain after me—something which, unlike the memory some may hold of me, could be touched.

  I saw Ruth at intervals through the 1925, 1926, and 1927 seasons. Our teams would meet in post-season exhibitions, and during the season, when we were both in New York, he would sometimes send for me. He liked taking me with him to nightclubs, and he could, in the way in which he showed me off—calling me “the best white-black pitcher I ever faced”—be as cruel as, when we were alone, he could be kind. He was mean and he was dumb, and I must, for him, have been only a diversion—he took from me little more than the physical pleasure he could not do without; still, I did love him—I remained, until the end, in awe of him, and of who, in his world, he was—and, in his way, he returned this love. He derided me for my inability to enjoy myself when, with his teammates, he would go out on the town, eating and drinking and whoring, and yet he never wanted to throw me away. There were things about me—my youth, my abilities as a pitcher and hitter, my fairness—which drew him to me.

  My attraction for him came also, I sensed, from things concerning his own origins. He delighted in comparing our skin color, in asking me when I would change my name and play in his league, and yet, even when he would tell me proudly about how they called him Nigger, I remained silent, refusing to question him about those origins which I must have wanted to have remain mysterious. Thus, in the perverse tumblings of my mind, I could consider in infinite ways, and in the language of the game we both played, what, really, was fair, what foul.

  Oh but my mind was lovely! If it was not only his glory which drew me, but the possibility that this glory derived from origins which, if verified, would have been the source for his fall—then it was also true that, in loving him, I was only pursuing that same self-love which had always consumed and driven me.

  And yet to remember my very capacity for such thoughts is only to realize that I was, despite my fame and abilities, merely another young man whose experience in love followed a familiar and classic pattern. Like many before me, it was the image of my love which I desired—and this image, entering through my eyes, journeyed downward to my heart, where it was ravaged by those very passions which had been created from the darkness of my own origins and the rage which was born of the gifts these origins had brought with them. It is, we know, because she is blind, that love enters through the eyes.

  Even now, remembering what I felt when I was with him, his image—the famous smile and dark skin, the graceful stride and powerful swing—makes me grow dizzy. Am I the same man? Was it, in fact, the very mystery of his origins, and not the man himself, which I loved? Did I, in short, remain silent because I wanted to remain in darkness, because I wanted to go on forever being able to ask myself the simple question, did I love a white man or a black man?

  “When a man is tempted,” we learn in James (1:15), “it is his own passions that carry him away and serve as bait. Then the passion con ceives and becomes the parent of sin; and sin, when fully matured, gives birth to death.” So it was, alas, with me. My life, during the years 1925,1926, and 1927, was proof of the Bible’s claim.

  During the 1925 season I won thirty-seven games while losing eight and, playing in the outfield on the days I did not pitch, I hit 54 home runs. In October we won our second World Series in a row, in five games, from the Pittsburgh Crawfords. But I was not satisfied. I felt—and the ache was inexhaustible—as if nothing ever would satisfy me but to return to that time before that first batsman had hit that first ball over the wall in Ebbets Field. I thought less of the dream I had forsworn, and yet I must have felt in some part of me that I could still, if only I were good enough, make the world know. But know what? That I was the best player in black baseball? That our league was superior to theirs? That I was better than the man for whom, in the press, I was being named?

  In 1926 I won forty-one games while losing ten, and pitched four no-hitters and thirteen shutouts in the process. I hit 58 home runs. Rube Foster became seriously ill that year, and due to mix-ups—he had refused to let anybody else handle the league’s business—there was no World Series. Our team played a longer barnstorming tour—going as far as Santo Domingo, and playing without a break up to the start of the 1927 season. By this time there had been some changes in our lineup. Jack Henry had retired as a player, though he remained our manager. Rap Dixon had left the team, to sign with the Indianapolis Clowns—and he would leave them later in the same year, to play in Japan. Jeannot Massaguen, a strong and beautiful eighteen year old, so striking that I often believed him to be descended from the slaves of Falcon-hurst, took Jack Henry’s place at second, and “Nip” Dell, twenty-six, a first baseman acquired from the New Orleans Pinchbacks—hard-hitting, but not in Dixon’s class—now played first.

  Jones, Barton, Kinnard, Kelly, and Johnson remained—along with me—the heart of the team, and we were, in a good league, the best. The high point was 1927: our league, with the addition of the Baltimore Black Sox in the Eastern Division, and the St. Louis Giants in the Western Division, was stronger than ever. Our schedule was more regular, attendance was good, and in a one hundred and thirty-two game season, I won forty-five while losing only six. I batted .426 and hit 64 home runs—a figure which was, that year, second to Christobel Tor rienti’s 67. We won our division title for the fourth consecutive year, and defeated the Indianapolis ABC’s in the “World Series, four games to one.

  Rube Foster, as an indication of his confidence in us, forbade teams while playing to engage in any acts which, in his words, “would demean us as players or men, especially those forms of clowning which the public has long associated with our race.” This meant that the standard jokes—presenting bouquets of weeds to the umpire, running around the bases backward, and—the favorite trick of all outfielders—lying down in the outfield and reading a newspaper (the paper would have a hole in it, so that the outfielder would, when he saw the ball coming his way, drop the paper and give chase)—disappeared from our play, to the disappointment of most players and fans.

  1927 was also the year in which, from mid-season on, every sports-writer and sportsfan in America—other than our own most loyal followers—believed that the New York Yankee team was the greatest group of baseball players ever assembled, and that he, in the finest form of his thirteen-season career, was proving himself the greatest player of all time. The middle of their lineup—Meusel, Ruth, Gehrig, Combs, and Lazzeri—was called Murderer’s Row, and the world could not stop marveling at their power; it could not, then or after, stop recounting the fact known to even that fan who had the mildest interest in the game—that, in his league that year, while his team set a record of one hundred and ten victories, he hit a total of 60 home runs.

  What, even when the history of our league will be made known, could ever wipe away the glory that came to surround that team and that number? Even when the season had ended—when Ruth and Gehrig and the others had been (after their World Series victory in four games against the Pittsburgh Pirates) bombarded with ticker tape on the streets of New York—I still found that, except when I played against him and dreamt of
his dark face, I relished defeating other teams of black men more than I enjoyed defeating teams composed of whites. Against the most amateur of small town colored teams, I gave away nothing. Against the men who played for the teams I had been defeating all season long—against Buck Leonard and Oscar Charleston and Christobel Torrienti and Mule Suttles and Jelly Gardner and Pete Spackman and Fats Jenkins and Turkey Stearns and Chino Smith and Biz Mackey and Bullet Rogan—I threw harder than I had ever thrown, I hit balls farther than I had ever hit them, and I hated with a relent lessness which, as it seeps through me again, fills me now as then with the same sharp passion, a passion which was, at its heart, murderous. I hated the men I had condemned myself to playing against, precisely because I knew they were the better players; I hated them for not being the men who, inferior to them, I thought I wanted to destroy, but against whom victory would, in the actual playing of the game, mean less.

  I wanted, then, as I had for the three previous years, to defeat him—and to defeat him so utterly that he would cease to exist; and yet, even as I desired and acknowledged my desire, I knew how foolish and unreal it was. He would survive any single defeat. Other men had struck him out; other men had outhit him on given days; other men had taken headlines away from him from time to time; I had mastered him before, and the more convincing my victories had been on the playing field, the more shameful my submission had been away from it.

  I was now twenty-one years old. I had what I thought I had wanted to have from life—I was the best pitcher and hitter in baseball, and yet, as I read and heard about his team and his feats, I could only despise the man I knew I had become. I longed for our next meeting—a meeting which would come, according to the schedule that winter, in Havana, Cuba—and I longed to beat him, to crush him as I never had before, so that, having done so, I might yet be free of him, and of the feelings for myself which my relationship with him had engendered.

  I wanted to defeat him for ordinary reasons: because I had loved him and wanted now to destroy that love; because I had loved him and had not had that love returned; because I had been hurt and wanted him to be hurt. I wanted to defeat him because in so doing I must have believed I could thereby put on what I had thought I did not want—his power and his glory. I wanted—oh so dearly—to defeat him, not, that is, because he had what I wanted, but because he had what I hated myself for wanting.

  We arrived in Havana in early February, at the end of our winter barnstorming tour, when we were on our way back to the states from Santo Domingo. We played and defeated the Havana Reds in a five-game series (four games to one), and a team called the National All Stars, composed of members of the (white) Brooklyn Dodgers, Philadelphia Phillies, and Boston Braves (three games to none). The New

  York Yankees—called the Touring Yankee All Stars—arrived in Havana on February 13, the day of our final game against the National All Stars, and Ruth himself—to the delight of the Cuban and American fans—came to the game, along with Lazzeri, Dugan, Koenig, and Benny Bengough. I was not pitching that day—being held out so I would be fresh on the following afternoon, when we were to meet the Yankees—and the game was, despite a good pitching performance from Johnson and a barrage of home runs from our bats, dull. We were ahead 8 to 1 by the fourth inning, and the fans eased their boredom by chanting, every few innings “Bam-bi-no! Bam-bi-no!” whereupon he would rise from his seat behind third base and, fat and dark-skinned, wave to the crowd. He had only to tip his hat—a straw porkpie with a bright red sash—to have them roar and stamp their feet, and when I, in the fifth inning, hit my second home run, a line drive over the right field wall, he made a special point of standing and swinging his hat above his head, so that, within seconds, the fifteen thousand or so fans were—with hats and scarves and handkerchiefs—twirling their arms furiously above their heads as I, in shame and anger, rounded the bases and made my way to the dugout. Leaning on Lazzeri and Dugan, and laughing wildly, he collapsed in his seat.

  I resolved, when I left the ballpark that afternoon, to refuse to see him. I went to my hotel, ate supper, and then I stayed in my room, waiting for the message I expected to receive, so that I could send one back, telling him that I would see him only at the ballpark. I sat in the darkness and fixed my mind on the game that would take place the next day: I was taller than I had ever been, and I made the ball sing as it flew from my hand and stung Bingo’s glove hand. The Yankee players stood there, unable to move their bats from their shoulders, and I pleased myself by noting that, had their faces been dark and their lips full, they would have looked like the plaster statues of faithful house niggers one saw on front lawns. I imagined him with an iron ring in his piglike nose. His smile was fixed in enamel, his form cold to the touch. The skin of paint on his cheeks was peeling, and the white plaster underneath, as I threw the ball past him, slipped like sand down his face.

  I was already in bed when somebody pounded on the door. I looked at my watch, on the table beside the bed: it was eleven-thirty. The pounding was insistent and I found that. I was frightened. I knew that I wanted to see him and touch him. I knew that he would laugh away my efforts to refuse him. I wanted to call out to him to go away, and yet I was afraid to speak, knowing that my voice would surely have given me away. I felt faint. A fist struck the door again, twice, and I prayed for forgiveness. I could not think. I was sitting up and putting on my robe and slippers; then, like an old man who was fatigued by the least effort, I slid my feet across the hotel room floor and, standing at the door, my fingers on the metal key, I prayed for the impossible—that I would find the strength to stand straight and to say no—and yet, I was wondering at the same instant of what use, being so weak and broken, I could be to him.

  I pulled the door open and took one step back, and then I felt as if somebody had struck me in the small of the back with an ice-cold sledgehammer. Johnson’s black face moved close to mine and he roared with laughter. He held something massive under one arm and I saw, as he came toward me, that that something was Kelly, who hung forward, unconscious. I smelled the foul odor of liquor and vomit. As Johnson’s free hand moved toward my face, I stumbled back against the bed. Johnson was, in the frame of the doorway, a silhouette, and the only light came from his gold teeth and his outstretched hand—the hallway light falling softly on the absurd pink color of his palm. He let Kelly fall to the floor and, swaying from side to side, moved toward me so that he blocked more and more of the light. I could see his face, the cracked skin. Kelly groaned and rolled onto his back. “Sure now, fair ass. I just wanted to see your face.” I heard Kelly choke, then retch. “You’re pretty, all right,” Johnson said, his nose almost touching mine. “But I was once faster than you. Nobody’ll tell you the truth, being who you are now, but I was faster.” He was no longer laughing. “It don’t matter, though. I seen your face at the door, looking out for that other nigger.”

  He staggered backward, grabbing the back of a chair in order to keep from falling. “Me and Gunboat here been having a good time, but he don’t pace himself neither.” He reached a long arm to the floor and jerked Kelly upward from the waist, dragging him to the door. “It don’t matter.” He stopped and shifted, letting Kelly’s body slide downward so that he was grasping him under the armpits. His exertions made his chest heave. “Sure now. I saw your face all right, fair ass. I saw your face when you opened that door.” Then he howled wildly and left, Kelly’s feet bumping down the hallway.

  Later, after I had fallen asleep, I awoke, the pillow wet against my face. I had been sweating heavily, and—curiously—I can remember how good I felt. I had been so deep in sleep that, waking, it was as if my body were not there. My arms, clutching the pillow under me, were numb, my shoulders seemed disconnected. There was nothing to decide. I let him in and returned to bed, watching him undress. “How come ya didn’t come to see me?” he asked, as if he were genuinely hurt. “I was waiting for ya.” I said nothing then, and did not, even as we embraced, feel any longer the things I had felt earlier in the eveni
ng. When we woke in the morning, I said what I had planned to say: “This was the last time.”

  He stood at the sink, naked to the waist. He sloshed water on his face and stared at me. “What for?” he asked.

  “No more,” I said, surprised at my calmness.

  He dried himself and seemed to be studying my words. I stood at the window, looking down at the street below, where, as the day’s business began, men and women crowded together, among wagons and mules and carts. “Are ya sure?” he asked, and then, as I was about to reply to what I believed was the sincere hurt in his tone, I felt a pain in my thigh which made me cry out. “Got ya!” he yelled, delighted, and he snapped the wet towel at me again. I covered myself with my my hands, and the end of the towel flicked forward and burned me just under the knuckles of my right hand. “Come on,” he said, dancing around me, flicking the towel at me. “Ya got to see if you can get me. Come on—”