by Philip Roth
“Hey, whatcha doin’, Frenchman,” asked Jolly Cholly, “kel sort of joke is this anyway, chair ol’ pal? Ain’t today been rough enough? Aw Christ, somebody, what’s the French for knock it off?”
“Geem,” replied Frenchy, whose English was incomprehensible to his teammates, except occasionally to Chico, who would pass on to Big John, the other Spanish-speaking Mundy, what he believed to be the general drift of Frenchy’s zees and zoes—“geem zee wan, ooh zee was zow, zen ah geem zee, ah zee ull!” And he began to beat his skull against the door of his locker.
As best anyone could figure, coming back into the empty locker room from the shower, Frenchy had momentarily forgotten where he was, and begun to dress as though for the second game of a doubleheader back in Ruppert … “Crazy Canadian Frog,” said Big John, “he still thinks it’s on account of him not catchin’ that pop-up that they give us the old heave-ho. Hey, Ass-start, don’t lose your head over it,” chuckled Big John while Cholly and Bud Parusha struggled to keep the shortstop from destroying himself, “look what they done to my daddy. And he didn’t go around beatin’ his brains out. Hell, he just figured it all out—and then passed it on to me. The wisdom of the ages, Ass-start: it’s all shit. You jerk-offs take it too serious.”
Here there was a noise at the clubhouse door, the timid peck of a tender knuckle, and then the quivering voice of a little lady inquiring as to whether the Mundys were “decent” …
But before narrating what next took place in Kakoola on May 5, 1943—a day that seems in retrospect to stand as the dividing line between the Mundy past and the Mundy future, between the Patriot League as it once had been and the Patriot League as it was to become in the two seasons before its dissolution—it is necessary to point out that Frank Mazuma, the innovative owner of the Reapers, had declared that afternoon “Ladies Day,” hoping thus to beef up the skimpy crowd that would otherwise turn out to see the two lowliest P. League teams falling all over each other in their effort to lose. Play, in fact, had been interrupted in the top of the fifth when it was discovered that one of the ladies who had been admitted free of charge was in actuality a man. In a close-fitting dress of flamboyant design, all dolled up in a blond Hollywood wig, and swinging a gaudy handbag and hips, she had given herself away by making a brilliant one-handed stab on a near-miss home run lifted foul into the left-field seats by Big John, who, being perfectly sober, had swung late. At first the crowd got a bang out of the remarkable feat performed by the sexy gal, and stamped and hollered like a crowd at the burlesque show; then, in the next instant, realizing that no woman, no matter how proudly pronged her chest, could ever make a catch like that bare-handed, they began to converge upon the blond bombshell, piercing wolf whistles mixed with obscene threats. When police whistles joined in, the blond rushed down to the edge of the stands and with her dress parachuting up to her pink garters, leaped to the grass. Quickly she disposed of Rudra, the Kakoola left-fielder, with a stiff-arm block that sent him sprawling, and started for second. The Mundys, convinced by now that this was some sort of “half-time” entertainment cooked up by Frank Mazuma, had to join in laughing with the crowd when she sidestepped the charging Kakoola keystone combination (who wound up in one another’s arms) and made for the pitcher’s mound in those high-heeled, toeless shoes. Big John was still at the plate with his 0 and 2 count when the blond, swinging her purse at the Kakoola pitcher’s head, drove him from the hill with his arms around his ears. Then, the purse still in her right hand, and the foul ball she had caught still in her left, she reared back—whew-whew! those garters again!—and threw the Mundy power hitter the biggest damn curve he’d seen in a decade. Christ, did John get a boot out of that! “A big-titted slit in a little-bitty dress, and she just struck me out! Haw! Haw! With stuff like that, just think what the rest of her looks like!” Next the blond broke for the Mundy dugout, throwing the boys big kisses as she headed their way. Oh brother. The visiting players were shrugging and grinning at one another and so hardly took seriously the cops charging after her, shouting, “Mundys, stop her! She ain’t no lady! Stop her, boys—she’s under arrest for pretending to be what she ain’t!” Even when the police yanked their pistols from their holsters and drew a bead on the blond’s behind, the Mundys just shook their heads, and, pretending to be stroking their whiskers, hid their titters behind their hands. Then smack! The blond had planted a kisseroo on Mister Fairsmith’s mouth—and was down through the dugout and gone. They could hear her heels ringing on the concrete runway to the clubhouse. “Stop!” cried the cops, dashing right on after her. Then bang! Oh my God. They had opened fire on her fanny.
No one (except maybe Mazuma) knew what next to expect. Would the blond come back on out to take a bow, waving her wig at the crowd? Or would the cops come up out of the clubhouse dragging her “corpse” behind them? And what about her blood, would it be ketchup or real?
But all that happened next was that the game was resumed, an 0 and 2 count on Johnny Baal and the Mundys down by six … and the folks in the stands feverish with speculation. You should have heard the ideas they came up with. Some even began to wonder if maybe a real live homo hadn’t got loose on the ball field. “Yep,” said the old-timers out in the center-field bleachers, the boys with the green eyeshades who had been predicting the downfall of the game ever since the introduction of the lively ball, “I tole you—you start in foolin’ with this here thing, and you start in foolin’ with that one, and next thing you know, you got the cupcakes on your hands. You wait, you see—‘Ladies Day’ is only the beginnin’. They’ll be havin’ ‘Fairy Day’ around the league before this thing is over. Yessir, every la-dee-da window-dresser in town will be out here in his girdle, and they’ll be givin’ away free nail polish to them fellers, so-called, at the door. Oh, it’s acomin’, don’t worry about that. It’s all acomin’, every last damn thing you can think of that’s rotten and dumb, on accounta they just could not leave the damn ball alone like it was!”
Among the sportswriters, speculation took a less pessimistic if no less bizarre turn; but then they were dealing with Frank Mazuma, who could out-bizarre you any day of the week. Those who had gotten a good look at the blond’s sidearm delivery, and followed closely the course of that cruel curve, swore that the “lady” on the mound had been none other than Gil Gamesh done up in falsies and a dress—that’s right, the big bad boy of yore, hired for the day as a female impersonator by Frank M. But Frank, who wore a black eyepatch (over the right eye one day, over the left the next) so as to look even more like the pirate he was, only clapped himself on the knee and said, “Hell, now why didn’t I think of that!” “You mean, Frank, you are asking us to believe that you had nothing to do with those shameful shenanigans out there today?” “Smitty, I only wish I had. Whoever could stage a spectacle like that is just the kind of crowd-pleasing genius I would like to grow up to be. But in all honesty, I have to tell you that I think what happened there in the top of the fifth was something staged by the greatest crowd-pleaser of ’em all: fella name a’ God.”
Oh, there was little that Frank Mazuma would not say, or worse, do. Only the season before he had gotten the bright idea of turning the Reapers into the first colored team in Organized Baseball—yes, selling off all the white boys and bringing niggers in to replace them! As things stood in those days—days which must now seem as remote as the age of the Pharaohs to those who search in vain for a white face on the diamond when All-Star time comes around—the bigwigs of the national pastime understood that it was in the best interests of the game—and if of the game, the country; and if of the country, mankind itself—for the big leagues to be composed entirely of white men, with an occasional Indian, or Hawaiian, or Jew thrown in for the sake of color. Furthermore, the darkies had teams of their own, hundreds of them barnstorming around the country wherever colored folk were looking for a little Sunday entertainment; they even had their own “major” leagues, the Negro National, the Negro American, and the Negro Patriot League, composed of
teams who made their homes in the real major league cities, and who were allowed to play in the big league parks when the white teams were out of town. Oftentimes these colored teams performed for Sunday crowds substantially larger than those that paid to see the white major league team play ball, and that, of course, was what most intrigued Frank Mazuma, and encouraged him to think along the lines of becoming the Abe Lincoln of big league ball.
What fans those colored boys had! Why, they would travel hundreds of miles, make overnight journeys in wagons drawn by mules and nags, to get to the ball park for a Sunday doubleheader between the Kakoola Boll Weevils and their first division rivals, the Ruppert Rastuses, or the champs playing out of Aceldama, known affectionately as the Shiftless Nine. In patched overalls and no shoes, they’d just come straight on out of the fields Saturday at quitting time, along the dusty country roads and on to the highways, walking all night long so as to reach the bubbling asphalt of the city by high noon of the next day. Batting practice was usually just getting underway, when they emerged at last into those great coliseums raised by white men and white money and white might. Beneath their feet the cool concrete of the stadium runways was like soothing waters. (Yeah!) And that green pasture was greener than anything they knew, this side of the fields of heaven. (Yeah!) Oh, up, up went the sky-high stadium, up so high that those pennants seemed to be snappin’ around God’s very throne. (Yeah!) Oh them colorful flags, they might have been the fringes of His Robe! Yes suh, de Big Leagues! (Or, to be precise, a Negro facsimile of same.)
The owner of all eight teams in the Negro P. League was of course known to Americans primarily because of her picture on the flapjack box. With the fortune Aunt Jemima had amassed from the use of her name and her face on the pancake mix, she had managed to buy up one colored team after another in P. League towns, until she had organized the circuit and made it equal in status to the other two Negro “major” leagues. Of course, everywhere she went, she had that big smile full of white teeth shining out of her face, and she waxed her skin so it shone just as it did in her portrait on the box, and she was never without that checkered bandanna that made her look so cheery and sweet—but when it came to a business deal, she was a match for Mazuma himself; her name notwithstanding, she was nobody’s aunt.
Aunt Jemima was always up in Kakoola on Sundays to watch her favorites, the Boll Weevils, take on whichever colored club was visiting with them that week; invariably she was accompanied by her brother, the famed valet of radio and motion picture fame, Washington Deesey, who year in and year out tap-danced the National Anthem from atop a bass drum set down on home plate the day the colored World Series opened. Other famous Negroes of the time who were frequent visitors to Aunt Jemima’s box were the comedy duo “Teeth ’n Eyes,” who were always seeing g-g-g-ghosts in horror movies, and would amuse the crowd at the ball park with their famous blood-curdling howl when a d-d-d-dangerous hitter came to the p-p-p-plate; and Li’l Ruby, the twittering maid of the airwaves, who had won America’s heart with her ridiculous crying jags, and who arrived at the ball park riding sidesaddle on her great Dane, a strapping eighteen-year-old lad imported from Copenhagen, said to be something more than a means of transportation for the actress; “Now ain’t that a surprise!” the fans would exclaim, when they saw the diamonds roped around her wrists and her ankles, “I thought she was a little bitty thing!” Yet another Boll Weevil fan was the man rumored to be Aunt Jemima’s lover, the distinguished tragedian whose portrayal of the loyal old slave who saves his master’s drowning child and subsequently dies of pneumonia in the Civil War epic Look Away, Look Away had earned him an Academy Award for the best supporting actor, Mr. Mel E. F. Lewis. And then over the years there were the numerous boxing champions who were like sons to Aunt Jemima: those who come immediately to mind are Kid Licorice, Kid Bituminous, Kid Smoke, Kid Crow, Kid Hershey, Kid Midnight, Kid Ink and his twin Kid Quink, Kid Tophat, Kid Coffee, Kid Mud, and of course, the champ, Kid Gloves, whose twenty-year reign as middleweight champion of the world ended in 1948 when he disowned fame, fortune, and country to become a worker in an aluminum factory in the Soviet Union. A moody and solitary man, he had always disdained the glitter of Aunt Jemima’s box and instead preferred to sit on the bleacher benches in deep center, surrounded by barefoot children who clung to his powerful arms and to whom between innings he sang the songs of the Third International. In 1948, in a speech from the center of the prizefight ring in Madison Square Garden, he infuriated Americans of all hues by denouncing the country that had made him a hero, and the following day he left by steamer for Murmansk.
Only weeks after his departure, news leaked from behind the Iron Curtain (how, no one knew, given that the curtain was iron) that the great Gloves had been exiled to Siberia for murdering with one blow—ironically enough, said the gloating tabloids, a left—a Commie foreman, who, in his impatience with the new comrade unable to speak the mother tongue, had called him by the one English word he had picked up from the American G.I.s in the war. According to “highly authoritative” reports released some years later by the U.S. State Department, in the Siberian labor camp poor Kid Gloves had been cruelly teased and tormented by prisoners and guards alike, until finally, in that far-off land of blizzards and collectives, the broken-hearted boxer with the ravished utopian dream perished of homesickness, in his final days languishing for the American prizefight ring as did his forebears in Georgia for the jungle villages of the Ivory Coast.
Now, in order to scout the colored players he planned to poach from Aunt Jemima’s league, Frank Mazuma purchased from a pawnshop a frayed clerical collar and a second-hand black suit, painted himself with burnt cork, and, wearing beneath his derby a woolly gray wig, went out one Sunday in 1942 to see the Boll Weevils take on the Independence Field Hands in a doubleheader in his own Reaper stadium. Needless to say, Mazuma had no intention of “buying” these black boys like so many slaves—he would just dangle the big leagues before the best of them, and leave it to them to decide whether they wished to continue to play for peanuts for the colored version of the big leagues, or to run off to play for peanuts for the real thing. So as to be privy to the inside dope on the star colored players, Mazuma took a seat in a box directly behind Aunt Jemima. Clever operator that she was, she instantly penetrated his disguise, but said nothing, choosing rather to pass that scandalous information directly to General Oakhart the next day. Let him handle the thief—it wasn’t for Aunt Jemima to admonish a white man with Mazuma’s kind of money … “Well,” she said, welcoming the clergyman with her biggest, shiningest smile, “howdydo, Reverend! Ain’t we honored though!”
Mazuma bowed and presented her with a card from his tattered billfold. It read:
PARDON ME
I AM A NEGRO DEAF MUTE MINISTER
I SELL THIS CARD FOR A LIVING—MAY GOD
BLESS YOU
… But we stray from the story of the Mundys on the road. Suffice it to say that foolish and trivial as the events of that day may appear from the perspective of today, it nonetheless would appear that the death knell for the white man’s game—and if for the white man’s game, for a white man’s country; and if for a white country, for a white world—that death knell’s first faint tinkle was heard at the moment that Frank Mazuma, in that preposterous disguise, handed his outlandish business card to the famed “mammy” off the flapjack box at a doubleheader between the Boll Weevils and the Field Hands, with Teeth ’n Eyes, Li’l Ruby, and Washington Deesey looking on … Impossible, you may say. More than impossible—outrageous, to suggest that a greedy scoundrel like Mazuma in circumstances so ludicrous as these, initiated what was eventually to become the greatest advancement for the colored people to take place in America since the Emancipation Proclamation. But of course you must remember, fans, the turning points in our history are not always so grand as they are cracked up to be in the murals on your post office wall.
* * *
We return to that knock on the door of the visitors’ clubhouse, whe
re the dazed and troubled Mundys are still gathered, following the 14–3 “Ladies Day” loss to Kakoola, and all that had followed upon it. “Mundys? Ruppert Mundys?” A woman giggled. “Are—are you decent, boys?”
All but Frenchy were unclothed and dripping still from the shower, but Big John replied, “Oh sure, we’re decent all right. And what about you, honey? Or is your name ‘funny’?”
“That voice! It’s Big John!”
“Big John!”
“Big John!”
“My, my,” said Big John, his eyes darkening with desire, “there’s three of ’em … Hey, who all are you girls, whatcha after, or can I take a guess?”
Now the three spoke in unison: “We’re the Mundy Mommys!”
“The who?” asked John, laughing.
“The Mundy Mothers!”
“The Mundy Moms!”
“And,” asked Big John, “just how old would such a Momma happen to be? Twenty-one or twenty-two?”
They giggled with delight.
“Fifty-four years young, John!”
“Sixty-eight years young, John!”
“Seventy-one years young, John!”
Baal pushed the door open a crack—“If she’s fifty-four,” he whispered to his mates, “Wayne here is a infant. Thanks, ladies,” he called, “but we don’t need none.”
The other players had by now scrambled into their street clothes, and converging upon the door, peered out from behind the first-baseman at the three elderly ladies, wrinkled little walnuts in identical hats, shoes, and spectacles.