Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League

by Martha Ackmann

  Keefe’s idea worked. After he spoke to the Stones and suggested their daughter try the Catholic boys’ league, they relented. He calmed Willa and assured her he would look out for Marcenia. Tomboy was thrilled. The Stones’ neighbor, Melvin—Father Keefe’s cigarette runner—thought there was a more subversive reason the thoughtful priest wanted Tomboy involved with the parish baseball team. “She had the most talent,” Melvin said.11 Folks in the neighborhood didn’t seem to mind that Tomboy Stone was an oddball girl playing baseball on a boys’ team as long as she helped St. Peter Claver win the game. It was settled. “I got a chance,” Tomboy said, and played outfield and infield.12

  Tomboy was fortunate to have Father Keefe intercede with her parents. She also was fortunate to live where she did. The Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul, named for the busy two-mile-long street that was its main artery, was heaven for a kid who loved baseball. Just blocks from Tomboy’s home was Dunning Field, next to Central High School, where she could always find kids playing catch. Next to Dunning was Saint Paul’s grand Lexington Park—the field Charlie Comiskey built before he took his name and his team to Chicago. The park was home to the Saint Paul Saints. Gabby Street, “the Old Sarge,” managed the team after being fired from the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals a few years earlier. If he could manage the Cardinals’ Gas House Gang with Dizzy Dean and Pepper Martin, “the wild horse of the Osage,” surely he could handle a team of twenty-year-old kids who hoped to make it to the big leagues. Tomboy loved Lexington Park, not only for the stray baseballs that she found there but especially for the days when Babe Ruth came to town. The Babe came to town on customary trips, when the Saints were an informal farm team for the Yankees.* He’d sign baseballs, pose for pictures, and chat up the locals. But the Saints weren’t the only game in town. A few miles to the west was Nicollet Park, home of the New York Giants’ farm club the Minneapolis Millers. Kids like Tomboy waited all summer long for the big Fourth of July weekend doubleheader. The day would start with a game in Saint Paul, then fans would hop on streetcars and ride across the Mississippi River bridge for an evening nightcap in Minneapolis. Players enjoyed the Twin City doubleheaders as much as the fans did. They made a lot of money when crowds filled the bleachers. They called the Saints and Millers holiday doubleheaders “Pay Days.”13

  On days when the Millers or the Saints were playing away games, Negro League teams would schedule games and rent the vacant stadiums. The great Satchel Paige, barnstorming through the Dakotas, stopped in Saint Paul and dazzled crowds with his one-of-a-kind pitches, as impossible to hit as their names were to forget: the bat dodger, the midnight creeper, the bee ball, Long Tom, Little Tom, the trouble ball, the two-hump blooper. After the games, Paige would stroll the midway around Rondo, duck into a restaurant, and revel in the attention of starstruck fans. Tomboy swore she met Satchel on one of his walks around the midway. They talked about baseball, and Paige later sent a letter encouraging her to stay in school. She said that Satch had heard from Rondo folks about her extraordinary play in the Catholic boys’ league and even spoke to her mother about the young girl’s future in baseball. Years later, Stone’s family said they never heard of the “Satchel story,” although one could never be sure. Tomboy Stone loved the limelight and seemed to have a knack for finding celebrity. Rondo’s vitality seemed to spark a child’s imagination. “You could dream your dreams there,” one resident said.14 It never occurred to anyone that a girl might dream about baseball.

  Tomboy’s family had settled in Rondo and Saint Paul during the Great Migration, the movement of nearly two million African Americans from the South to the industrial cities in the North, West, and Midwest beginning in 1910. Families searched for better jobs, better schools, and better treatment as far from the grip of racism as they could manage. Growing up in South Carolina, Boykin Stone decided that scratching out a living as a farmer was not for him. The land was unforgiving. Instead he left his home in Log Town and entered the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1908 to learn a trade—barbering.15 Booker T. Washington’s philosophy at Tuskegee made a deep impression on him. Stone believed blacks should learn a trade that could support a family. Even if it meant sweeping out a store or washing windows, a person needed work, he said. Stone viewed any kind of labor as dignified and could not stand loafers or people who drifted without a realistic goal. Stone served in the U.S. Army in World War I and later married Willa Maynard. The couple had four children in rapid succession after the war: daughters Blanche, Marcenia, and Bernous and a son, Quinten. All the children were born in West Virginia; Marcenia was born in Bluefield, near the Kentucky border, on July 17, 1921. When other members of the family headed to Saint Paul, Boykin and Willa joined them in 1931.* They found a house two blocks from relatives and established a family compound of sorts, with multiple generations all living within walking distance. For a Stone child who occasionally misbehaved, as Tomboy did, punishment was difficult to escape. Grandparents looked out kitchen windows as they ate peach cobbler, aunts talked over laundry lines to inquisitive neighbors, cousins sat on front porches, putting rags on smoking smudge pots to ward off the summer mosquitoes. They heard and saw everything. “They were good people,” a neighbor remembered, “hard working, strict with their children, friendly.”16 People passing by the family’s homes often could hear music floating from open windows. Willa and her sister, Aunt Johnnie, would each play one of two pianos in their mother’s living room. Tomboy’s brother, Quinten, played saxophone. Another relative brought a trumpet. “They had it going on for hours,” the family said.17 Tomboy would sometimes join the group and bang on a drum set, but in order to carry on with the musical Stone clan, “you had to be good” and Marcenia couldn’t keep up.

  Saint Paul, in the early 1930s, when the Stones arrived from West Virginia, had a small, cohesive black community. They made up only 1.5 percent of the city’s population, centering mainly around Rondo. Residents in the Twin Cities referred to the Rondo neighborhood as “colored.” Tomboy’s friend Evelyn Edwards remembered that, in the 1930s, “colored” meant integrated: blacks and whites lived on the same block, and white women dated and married black men.18 Even with a small population, blacks owned a significant percentage of homes in Saint Paul. Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Saint Paul had a larger percentage of black-owned homes than any other city in the country.19 Generally speaking, families with jobs that paid lower wages lived in Cornmeal Valley to the east of Dale Avenue; those with more money settled up on Oatmeal Hill to the west.* The Stones lived in Cornmeal Valley. Further up Oatmeal Hill, adjacent to Rondo, were the mansions of Summit Avenue, where wealthy white people lived. F. Scott Fitzgerald rented a unit of one of the mansions while reworking This Side of Paradise before heading to Hollywood to try his hand as a screenwriter. The fathers of some of Tomboy’s friends worked as waiters when the Summit families hired caterers. Status in Rondo was based more on who a person worked for than on what a worker did. To be employed by Summit Avenue families was a point of pride. To be one’s own boss, however, was a mark of even higher status.20

  Job opportunities brought most black families to Saint Paul. Some men moved from the South for “running on the road” jobs—porters and dining car waiters for the many railroads that crossed through the area. Others worked for tips as Redcaps out of Union Depot: hauling bags, cleaning toilets, and polishing endless sweeps of brass railings, a task many admitted was their least favorite.21 Women worked primarily as cooks or did “day work” around town for white families who needed help with cleaning or ironing. In 1929, black families in Saint Paul owned twenty-seven barbershops, five pool halls, seven restaurants, three shoeshine parlors, seven tailor shops, one picture-framing store, and one piano-polishing business.22 One of the barbershops was Boykin’s Barber and Beauty Shop in the busy Seven Corners area, just east of the State Capitol. “My parents were survivors,” Tomboy said, “and they opened a beauty shop in town.”23 Boykin and Willa opened the business together and served whi
te clientele only. Many black-owned barbershops in Saint Paul and elsewhere exclusively cut white hair and, according to one resident, “strongly discouraged Black patrons.”24

  But by the 1930s the long tradition of black barbers who earned financial rewards, status, and upward mobility by catering to white customers was beginning to give way.* Italian and German immigrants set up shops and drew white customers away. In addition, some people within the community began to ask if black barbers contributed to segregation by cutting only white hair: “color line barbers,” critics called them. Perhaps the community would do better, some argued, if segregation policies were challenged rather than maintained. While many black residents did not like the idea of segregated shops, they also could see other ways in which an individual barber contributed to the community. It was almost as if they said, “I hate what you’re doing, but you’re doing good things outside the shop.”25

  Although they did not outwardly speak of any conflict of conscience, Boykin and Willa may have felt ambivalent when the occasional black customer came into the shop looking for a haircut or a shave. How could they turn away a member of their own race? Many black barbers would silently escort a patron to the back of the shop for a quick cut; others would shake their heads and show the customer the door. Some would only cut black people’s hair at the customers’ homes, in the back yard. Willa’s sister said that her sibling couldn’t do black hair if she tried. After years of cutting white hair, Willa simply did not know how to cut and style hair for a black customer.26 Some barbers with a keen eye for the changing times took a cue from Madame C. J. Walker, who built a fortune creating grooming products for blacks. They opened new shops in segregated communities and expanded their business to a growing urban market. Whitney Young, who came to Saint Paul to work on a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota, recognized that the older generation of blacks faced a changing world and represented a time when segregation was accepted as a condition of life.* Young did not fault the generation of barbers like Boykin and Willa Stone. It was difficult balancing the need for self-respect against the obligation to make money. “In dealing with the opposing forces, [the older generation] were skillful diplomats,” Young wrote. “One might admit that at that time the strategic overtures of humility, servitude and inferiority were the best weapons for dealing with the powerful. Most of these Negro leaders’ techniques have changed with the times and those who are living today are still courageous fighters for Negro rights.”27

  Of course, following the stock market crash of 1929, every worker in the United States felt the strain of trying to earn a living. Businesses closed, church revenues dipped, social programs were cut, grocery stores stopped giving credit, storefronts around Rondo began to sag from lack of maintenance, and vagrants came to the back door looking for food.28 In 1930, unemployment among blacks stood at almost 50 percent in Saint Paul. Many hotels let go of black waiters and hired white waitresses instead.29 Families became ingenious in devising ways to pay the bills. One Rondo specialty was the “house-rent party.” A neighbor feeling the pinch would cook a big pot of food, buy a new deck of cards, and sell dinners and drinks by the shot to friends and family. “At the end of the night, we’d have the money for rent,” a neighbor remembered. “It seemed that almost every month, someone was giving a house-rent party, and it was always well attended.” 30 Tomboy’s parents kept Boykin’s Barber Shop and Beauty Salon running, and the family never lacked for the basics, although they did take in a German boarder to bring in additional money.31 Around the neighborhood, every household felt the squeeze of hard times. As a friend of Tomboy’s said, “Everything was taken in, let out, or made into quilts.”32

  Living in economically difficult times was one challenge, but living as blacks in Jim Crow America was quite another. To anyone who thought that the Upper Midwest was immune to racism, a person had to say just one word—“Duluth.” The legacy of the Duluth lynching served as a chilling reminder to all African Americans that racism stretched beyond the South. On a warm summer night in June 1920, rumors began to spread that a white Duluth girl had been raped at a traveling circus. Three black workers for the John Robinson Circus were rounded up immediately and held in jail. An angry crowd of nearly ten thousand stormed the jail with bricks and timbers and seized the men. After a hasty and spurious trial, the men were found guilty and strung up by their necks on a town light pole. There was never any evidence to convict the men of the crime. While some people expressed outrage at the lynching, others thought justice had been served. The Mankato Daily Free Press declared “mad dogs are shot dead without ceremony. Beasts in human shape are entitled to but scant consideration. The law gives them by far too much of an advantage.”33 A ghastly postcard of the lynching circulated for years.* The tragedy sparked instant reaction in the black community. Many residents left Duluth, fearful that their families might be harmed. Others stayed and established a chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). W. E. B. DuBois traveled to Duluth to speak at its initial meeting.* Nellie and W. T. Francis, prominent Saint Paul activists, pushed through the first anti-lynching legislation in the nation, signed into law a year after the Duluth lynching.

  Tomboy and every kid in Rondo knew about the Duluth lynching, and they also had stories of their own encounters with Minnesota racism. They could describe slurs yelled from passing gangs of white boys when they gathered to play baseball, or tell how frightened they felt when a white kid hurled a cantaloupe that hit a black friend on the head.34 The racist taunts were so commonplace that a black child developed a second sense about “which members of these groups could be insulted when I was alone and which ones required me to have a backup group.” After being called a nigger one too many times, one of Tomboy’s friends shot back with exasperation, “If your mother had married who she really wanted, you’d be a nigger too.”35

  Everyone knew that some stores would not serve black customers at lunch counters, and if they did—like the soda fountain at Walgreen’s—waiters were aloof and sometimes hostile.36 Even the sound of the organ music coming from the ice rink near Kent and Macku-bin reminded Tomboy that she was not welcomed at the segregated rink.37 When Tomboy’s black friend Janabelle Murphy was invited to join her neighbor—a tall Norwegian named Clemy Hetznecker—and a group of white girls for lunch one day, service at the restaurant was noticeably slow. “Is there a problem?” Clemy asked a nervous waiter. A manager suddenly appeared and declared that as long as a Negro girl was in their party, the group would not be served. Clemy rose to her full height, looked the waiter in the eye, and announced to the girls, “I don’t want a frown, not a tear, but because Jane cannot be served, none will be served.” And out the door they went.38 Meanness and hatred were bad enough, but pity was worse for the black children of Rondo. “I hated it when white people felt sorry for me,” Tomboy’s friend Evelyn said many years later. “As long as they were mean and belittling, my anger could protect me. But when they were sympathetic, my anger turned to shame and I was left defenseless.”39

  No one would ever call Tomboy defenseless. Her friends Janabelle Murphy and Evelyn Edwards would attest to that. To be fair, one really could not call Jane and Evelyn Tomboy’s close friends. Tomboy spent a lot of time by herself and was more comfortable around boys than with girls her age. But Jane and Evelyn certainly knew Tomboy well, and represented two distinct choices for what a Rondo girl could be. Evelyn, who didn’t enjoy sports, was always picked last for neighborhood games, preferring to play with paper dolls, listen to the black choir, “Wings Over Jordan,” on the radio, or perform as the “little soloist” at the Sanctified Church. She loved the church dinners after Sunday services where women would be judged on the quality of dishes brought in picnic baskets covered with their best bib aprons. Evelyn believed that “hair is a woman’s crown” and watched with fascination as the traveling corsetiere measured the women in her family for the latest girdles. She stood with Tomboy outside the chain-link fence
watching white girls at the skating rink and once asked her mother about the Mason-Dixon line. “You mean somebody drew a line on the ground all around the world?” she asked.40

  “Tomboy reminded me of me,” Janabelle Murphy declared. As the shortest and slightest kid on the block, Jane did not look like a fighter. But when neighborhood girls needed help with mean boys, they went looking for Jane. She’d stare down the bully, yell at him with her loud, deep voice, then run between his wide-spread legs, landing a powerful bare-knuckle punch right against his knees until he collapsed to the ground. She was by her own admission a “phys ed girl”—a girl who fell in love with physical education classes taught at the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center. Jane proudly accepted the description of herself as a “roughneck.” Roughnecks could take care of themselves, she said. She and Tomboy were confident, knew when to stand their ground, and did not take guff. “‘Don’t get caught’ was my 11th commandment,” Tomboy said.41 Jane’s mother begged her daughter to be more ladylike. “It’s OK for you to scare the boys,” her mother said. “But don’t BE a boy! You’re a girl!”42 Perhaps hoping that Jane’s “feistiness” could be transformed into something more productive, her mother also enrolled her in sports programs across the river at the Minneapolis Phyllis Wheatley Negro Community Center. 43 Jane went from being a neighborhood bully’s worst nightmare to organizing girls’ sports programs at Hallie Q. She even adopted the Q’s philosophy about goal-oriented activity: “you were either going someplace or going home.”44

  While she did not go looking for fights, Tomboy protected herself and could take someone down if she felt threatened. “Worst drubbing I ever got was from Tomboy Stone,” one of the neighborhood football players said. “It was right down here on a playground on Western Avenue. Field had rocks all over it and I come around with the ball and … man, I can still feel that spot where she hit me.45 When Willa Stone recommended a sport her daughter might try, her suggestion was more about transforming Tomboy into a feminine Marcenia than proposing a new activity. “Try figure skating,” her mother said, perhaps thinking of the “toast of Saint Paul”—a young white competitive skater who captivated crowds with her spins and twirls and her satin outfits trimmed in fur.46 Willa bought Tomboy a pair of skates, and her daughter promptly beat all competition to win the citywide competition at Como Park. “I took [the trophy] home, and gave it to my mother and picked up my glove and bat,” Tomboy said.47