Hanging Curve (23 page)

“
D
on’t tell me you’re planning on going somewhere,” Margie said.

“Got a game today.” I continued to rummage through the dresser drawer. “I have to go.”

“After what happened last night, you’re going to the
ballpark
? You can’t play
baseball.
”

She was right about that. If I even tried to swing a bat or throw a ball, my back would split wide open. But I had to show up and let the team trainer make his evaluation. I explained that to Margie as I slipped a gauze undershirt over the fresh bandages she’d put on. She then helped me into a loose-fitting silk shirt.

I continued to dress with her assistance. Although my skin was still on fire, the shooting pains up my spine had ceased, and I was able to walk without much difficulty. Once I was fully clothed, the only visible reminders of the previous night were an ugly bump on my forehead, a split lip, and a scraped cheek.

I asked Margie, “Why don’t you stay here, and maybe take a nap? It was a hard night for you, too.” The lack of sleep was apparent in her eyes.

“I want to do some shopping first. The doctor gave me a list of some things we’ll need. And I thought I’d pick up a few groceries.” She kissed me on my good cheek. “Not all of us can live on coffee and cookies.”

 

Although the trolley was less than half-occupied, I remained standing during the ride to avoid pressing my back against a seat. Except for a few times when other passengers brushed against me, the trip was relatively pain-free.

I was the first to arrive at the Browns’ clubhouse, as I’d intended. I wanted a chance to suit up alone, before the other players could see my mutilated body.

First I went to the trainer’s room, where old Doc Quinn was stretched out on the rubbing table, snoring loudly.

I shook him awake. “Doc?”

“Yeah, what?” He rubbed his unshaven jowls.

“Can’t play today.”

He slowly swung his legs around, and slid off the table to examine me. Like most baseball “Doc”s, he had no actual medical training, and prescribed liniment for almost any ailment. He took a look at my face, then I showed him my bandaged back.

Fortunately, he didn’t suggest liniment; he simply deemed me unfit to play, then climbed back on the table to resume his nap.

I went to my locker and began to remove my street clothes. Although excused from playing, I would still have to watch the game from the bench. By the time Lee Fohl and my teammates arrived, I was in uniform. As I tied the laces of my spikes, I saw Fohl stop in the trainer’s room.

Doc Quinn must have failed to convince the Browns’ manager that I didn’t belong in the lineup, because Fohl soon stormed out of Quinn’s office and came up to me. “What’s the problem?” he demanded. “I’m tryin’ to win a pennant here, and I can’t have somebody sittin’ out a game unless he can’t move.” Fohl eyed my bruised face, and shook his head. “That’s not enough to give you the day off.”

“My back’s bad, too.”

He appeared unconvinced. “If you can bend it, you can play.”

I removed my jersey, and lifted my undershirt to reveal the bandages.

“Goddamn! What the hell happened?”

“Some guys jumped me.”

Other players gathered around. I was embarrassed at being the center of attention—especially for something like this.

Fohl asked, “Can I see?”

“Go ‘head.”

He pulled away a corner of the bandage. Judging by the stunned gasps of my teammates, it was probably a good thing that I couldn’t see for myself what was underneath.

Urban Shocker asked, “What did they jump you
with?
”

I turned around and saw my teammates all staring at me. They looked sympathetic, but I still didn’t want to admit what had happened. Partly I was embarrassed at losing a fight, even if it hadn’t been a fair fight. But my reluctance to speak was mostly because there was something so emasculating about having been whipped. I drew up my courage and said as matter-of-factly as I could, “A week ago, I went over to East St. Louis to help rebuild Cubs Park—that’s the colored ballpark the Klan burned down. Last night, after we got back in town, a bunch of Klansmen grabbed me outside my house. They took me to Forest Park, tied me to a tree, and tried to take the skin off my back with a bullwhip.”

There was shocked silence for half a minute, then my teammates let loose, cursing the Klan with some spectacular combinations of profanity.

Baby Doll Jacobson said, “You find out who did this, you let us know. We’ll take care of them for you.” Marty McManus seconded his offer, as did several others.

I nodded my thanks, too choked up to speak.

Lee Fohl said, “You go on home and take care of yourself. Just give me a call when you’re ready to come back.”

I gladly accepted Fohl’s suggestion and began changing back into street clothes, taking comfort in the knowledge that at least I wasn’t going to have to take care of myself alone. Margie had told me that morning that she was moving back in.

After wishing my teammates well in the game, I left the ballpark. On the way home, I made only one stop—to pick up a dozen yellow roses for Margie.

 

The doctor had suggested that I sleep on the sofa for a while, instead of on a bed, because there was less likelihood that I would roll over onto my back. I was following his advice, dozing on the sofa, when the telephone rang.

I heard Margie run to pick it up before a second ring could wake me, but it was too late.

“I don’t know if he can come to the phone,” she whispered to the caller.

“I’m awake,” I said. “Who is it?”

“Tater Greene.”

I went over to the phone stand and took the receiver from her. As she handed it to me, Margie told me softly, “He sounds drunk.”

“Mickey!” Greene said, enunciating my name as if it was a hiccup. “I had to call.”

“Why the hell didn’t you call me sooner—in time to warn me?”

“I didn’t know what they was gonna do. Honest, I didn’t.”

“You knew everything else they’ve been doing.”

“Not this,” he insisted. “They proly knew I wouldn’t go along with it, on account of you and me bein’ friends.”

I was tempted to correct him by pointing out that we had never been friends. “All right,” I said, “then tell me what they have planned
next
.”

I could hear Greene take a sip of something that probably wasn’t going to make his slurred speech any clearer. “They don’t let me in on nothin’ no more. I don’t think they trust me—they know I don’t like what’s been going on lately.”

I pressed him anyway. “There is something that I
have
to know: Who whipped me?”

“Dunno,” he moaned. “Like I said, they didn’t tell me.”

“Then how do you know it happened? You didn’t hear it from me, so you must have heard it from one of them.”

“Some guys at Enoch’s were talkin’ about it.”

“
Who
was talking about it?”

Greene hesitated. “Brian Padgett. But he didn’t say nothin’ about being there. He was just tellin’ it like it was a funny story he heard someplace.”

Funny?
Only to a Knight of the Invisible Empire, I thought. “Okay, Tater, do me a favor: If you hear who
was
there, let me know, will you?”

“Yeah, okay.” He coughed. “Anyway, I just wanted you to know
I
had nothing to do with it. You hurt bad?”

In case he should pass my answer on to anyone, I said, “Nah. I’ve gotten worse raspberries from sliding into base.”

“I’m glad of that, at least.” Before hanging up, Greene added, “I
am
sorry, Mick. About everything.”

After we got off the phone, I thought that Greene certainly sounded like he was feeling no pain—a condition I wished I was in. So I prescribed myself a couple of shots of “medicinal” brandy that Margie had picked up, before lying down again.

 

By the second day of my confinement to the sofa, doing little but listening to scabs form on my back, I was getting as itchy inside as my skin was underneath the bandages.

I tried to pass the time by reading—newspapers, the latest movie magazines, and Mark Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi
—but I didn’t get more than a couple of pages into any of them. Margie made numerous attempts to cheer me, but she couldn’t hold my attention either. I kept thinking about what had happened to me in Forest Park. Every painful twinge in my back was like another lash of the whip, keeping the memory of that night vivid in my mind. I was determined to get back at whoever was responsible—if I could only determine how to do so.

Sunday night, Margie tried again. “I was thinking,” she said. “Why don’t we have Karl to dinner? And Franklin Aubury, too.”

I was torn; I didn’t want them to see me like this, but I did like the idea of Margie and me having dinner guests—it would be nice to show that we were together again. “Sure,” I said. “But I don’t know when we’d ever get them here on the same night. They’re both always working on some cause or other.”

“Let me call and see,” she said.

I told her where I had their phone numbers, and she first called Karl. “He’s free anytime,” she reported to me. “How about tomorrow?”

“Fine by me. How about Aubury?”

Margie got through to the lawyer at home. After talking briefly, she called to me, “Tomorrow’s okay for him, too. What time should we make it?”

“Anytime.” I’d certainly be here, lying in the same spot. “Oh! Could you ask him to bring any books or articles he might have on the Klan?”

She relayed the message.

“And on the 1917 riot,” I added.

Margie passed that on, too.

“And on colored baseball.”

She spoke briefly to him again, then hung up before the poor fellow ended up agreeing to bring me his entire law library.

As it was, Aubury had his hands full when he and Karl showed up Monday evening. In addition to the reading materials I’d requested, he’d brought a peach pie that his wife Ethel had baked and a small bouquet of flowers. Karl, bless his heart, brought beer.

Neither of them asked for details about what had happened to me. Karl’s only comment came when he saw my bruised face. He said, “I suppose that’s one bad thing about being white: The black-and-blue really shows.”

The four of us sat down to dinner, with me using a stool instead of a chair.

Margie made sure the conversation was kept light. No mention was made of the Klan or the antilynching bill or even of politics—an impossibility, I’d have thought, with Karl Landfors there.

That didn’t mean none of us were thinking about those things, though. I certainly was. Looking at Aubury, I remembered when the two of us were talking in Indianapolis. He’d said that there would always be things we wouldn’t understand about each other because of our different races. There was one less difference, between us now, I realized. I’d had a fear put in me Friday night that Aubury had lived with all his life. And I doubted that I would ever entirely lose it.

After dinner, we retired to the parlor. Margie, Aubury, and I drank beers while Karl ate the last piece of pie, his third.

The lawyer pointed to the literature he’d brought, which was piled on the coffee table. “Why did you want all of this?”

I leaned over and picked up
Sol White’s History of Colored Baseball.
“This is because I’m interested. After our trip, I wanted to learn more about colored baseball.” I then tapped a stack of papers about the Klan. “And this,” I said, “is because I intend to find some way of getting back at the guys who whipped me.”

O
ver the next few days, my back improved to the point where I asked Margie to stop applying the poultices. It was a week earlier than the doctor suggested, but the pain of having bandages peeled off my tender skin was worse than leaving it untreated.

While I continued to rest at home, I delved into the reading materials that Franklin Aubury had brought me.

I started with some official Ku Klux Klan publications that Aubury had managed to acquire. One of them was a fifty-four-page booklet called the
Kloran,
written by Klan founder William J. Simmons. This, the Klan Bible, included dire warnings that its “sacred contents” were never to be revealed to anyone outside of the Invisible Empire. I’d hoped the
Kloran
would contain information on the Klan’s true nature and goals, but it proved a disappointment. Like the pamphlets I’d already seen, this one also presented the KKK as a benevolent fraternal organization. The only secrets in the
Kloran
were regarding their strange vocabulary and elaborate rituals, called Klankraft. The booklet also laid out the structure of the Klan’s national organization; the Invisible Empire was divided into eight domains, which were further broken down into realms, provinces, and, finally, local klaverns. Leadership flowed down from the Imperial Wizard to Grand Goblin, Grand Dragon, Great Titan, and Exalted Cyclops. The grandiose organizational scheme and funny names would have been amusing had I not known firsthand that the Ku Klux Klan was no laughing matter.

I then turned to material on the Klan published by the NAACP and in the St.
Louis Argus.
These gave a perspective on the Klan much closer to the one I’d encountered in Forest Park, but didn’t provide much new or useful information.

Next, I read more about the East St. Louis riot of 1917. The hostilities still flaring this year seemed to have gotten their initial spark back then. As Ed Moss had told me in the Bond Avenue station house, “You got to look at all sides of what happened.” I believed that I needed to look at what happened five years ago.

Much of what Aubury had brought me about the riot was newspaper clippings, which I read thoroughly. Then I opened a few ponderous official reports that resulted from several government investigations. One of the reports was from the Military Board of Inquiry, which had held hearings on the conduct of the National Guard. Aubury must have gone to some lengths to obtain a copy, because according to an attached letter, it was considered too “inflammatory” ever to be released publicly. Since the report concluded that numerous militiamen had actually aided in the killing of Negroes, I could see why the board didn’t want that information to become public knowledge.

The congressional report that I read next
was
a public document. It included testimony regarding the actions—and inaction—of local law enforcement during the riot. According to one eyewitness:

It was passages like that one that kept me from reading the material for any length of time. When I needed a break from the accounts of tragedy and turmoil, I picked up the Sol White book Franklin Aubury had brought and read instead about the rich history of colored baseball.

 

On Saturday, in the company of Margie, Franklin Aubury, and Karl Landfors, I got to witness a new chapter in that history: the grand opening of Stars Park, the first Negro League ballpark owned entirely by colored people.

Although my back wasn’t quite healed enough for me to be up and around, it was important for me to be there—both to support the Stars and to show that the Klan wasn’t going to scare me off. My only regret was that I wouldn’t be able to stay for the game, because I’d have to leave for Sportsman’s Park immediately after the pregame festivities. Lee Fohl, I knew, would expect me to attend the Browns game if I was well enough to be at Stars Park.

The Negro National League’s newest stadium, at the corner of Compton and Market Streets, wasn’t entirely completed yet—tarpaulins were being used as a temporary grandstand roof, and there was no fence in left field—but it was clearly going to be a splendid ballpark. It was filled with more than five thousand fans, of both races, and a stellar array of dignitaries that included St. Louis mayor Henry Kiel and Missouri governor Arthur Hyde. Thousands more had cheered the team during a morning parade through the neighborhood.

When Mayor Kiel began to give a speech at home plate, I noticed there was no segregation in the park’s seating, and wondered if that was due to the presence of the mayor and the governor. It wouldn’t have looked good to have the white and Negro dignitaries sitting on opposite sides of a rope.

As the mayor droned on, Franklin Aubury leaned toward me, and whispered, “You were interested in Rosie Sumner, the fellow who’s recruiting for the Eastern Colored League.”

“Yeah, what about him?”

“I have made some inquiries. I assumed that since he was in the Midwest, there was a strong likelihood he might come here.”

“And?”

Aubury pointed to a beefy, light-skinned colored man sitting in a box seat not far from our section. “That is Sumner. In the white-linen suit.”

I checked my pocket watch. I had to leave for Sportsman’s Park in ten minutes at the latest. Then I looked again at Sumner. I didn’t want to miss a chance to talk to him, even briefly.

“I better go,” I said to my companions. “I’m just gonna talk to Sumner a minute, then I gotta get to the park.”

“Want me to come with you?” Margie asked.

I shook my head and got to my feet. “No, you stay here. I’ll just be riding the bench today anyway.”

Margie seemed content to remain with Karl and Aubury, and I didn’t blame her. She would be getting to see the visiting Indianapolis ABCs face Cool Papa Bell, who was slated to pitch the first home game in St. Louis Stars’ history.

I edged toward Rosie Sumner, who appeared to be alone. He was fanning himself with a scorecard and studying the players who stood along the foul lines. As I drew near him, I saw that Sumner had the fashion sense of a riverboat gambler and the face and body of a prizefighter.

Leaning on the railing next to his arm, I said to him, “I hear you’re recruiting for the Eastern Colored League.”

Sumner looked up at me, and I noticed the ugly scars on his squat face. If he
had
been a boxer, I thought, he must have ended up on the losing end of most of his bouts. “Don’t think we can use you,” he replied in a voice so high and reedy that it sounded like he must have taken quite a few punches below the belt, too.

“You
could
have used Slip Crawford,” I said. “You wanted to sign him.”

“Of course I did.” Sumner had an amused glint in his cold eyes. “Crawford was a top-notch pitcher.”

“But he wouldn’t sign with you.”

“No, he wouldn’t. What’s it to you, anyway?”

I ignored the question. “Did you try to force him?”

“Convince, not force. What are you, a cop?”

I stared at Sumner for a moment, hoping he might interpret my silence as a yes. “When you couldn’t convince him, did you decide he wasn’t going to play for anyone else then?”

When he realized what I was implying, Sumner squawked, “Hey, you can’t—”

“I know you threatened some other players—told them they better sign with you before they ended up like Crawford.”

“Hey, that was just talk.”

“And I know you work as muscle for a gangster in New York—Alex Pompez.”

Sumner slumped back in his seat and worked the scorecard more vigorously. “Let me tell you, I’m a
scout,
not a hoodlum. And Mr. Pompez is a baseball fan first and foremost. If he thought I hurt a ballplayer,
I’d
be the one getting hurt.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “Yeah, I used Crawford getting killed as part of my sales pitch, but that’s all I did.”

“All right,” I said, trying to sound official. “If I have any more questions, I’ll be in touch.”

 

My prediction proved wrong. Lee Fohl did decide to use me in the ball game. Although he’d let me skip practice, when he needed a pinch-runner for Frank Ellerbe in the seventh inning, he asked me if I was up to it.

My answer was automatic: yes. I went in, and broke open the scabs on my back sliding into third base on a single by Hank Severeid.

Soon after the game, I was back at home, belly-down on the sofa again. And, once again, I returned to reading about the events of 1917.

What bothered me was the five-year gap between the riot and the violence of this year. I couldn’t fill in the time span in a way that made sense.

I could grasp what happened
in
1917, I thought. Franklin Aubury and Ed Moss had both told me about whites losing their jobs and resenting the Negroes who had taken them.

I could also understand tensions continuing in the aftermath of the riot. Even the anger of Enoch’s workers over one of their salesmen being killed by Negroes, which I assumed was why the Elcars and Cubs didn’t play a game for the next two years.

But two years ago, the series resumed. That was a sign that the rift was mending. So why would the Elcars wait five years to get back for one of their fellow employees being killed in the riot? That didn’t make sense. Certainly it wasn’t to build up the klavern—the mobs had managed to kill quite effectively without any formal organization in 1917.

And what about Slip Crawford? He hadn’t been in East St. Louis since the riot, and last year he’d played in Indianapolis. So why was he the target of the Elcars or the Klan? Because he’d won a ball game? The Elcars had lost each of the last two games, and no one was killed because of it.

The problems seem to have started with the riot, but there was no continuity from 1917 to 1922.

I went back to the reports to see what followed in the months after the riot. There were indictments against eighty-two whites and twenty-three Negroes for crimes committed during the riot. Of the white men indicted, however, only nine went to jail, and the first of those was convicted of beating another white who had attempted to save a Negro.

As for those in law enforcement who’d abetted the rioters, three police officers were indicted for the murder of Negroes, and four others for rioting and conspiracy. They made a deal with the attorney general, however. Instead of facing the murder charges, three of the officers, chosen by lot, agreed to plead guilty to the misdemeanor crime of rioting. They were each fined fifty-dollars as their total punishment, and the fines were paid by the other policemen.

The trials of the Negroes went on into 1919. Most of the charges were related to the killing of the two police officers the night before the riot. The theory which served as the basis of the case was that there had been some kind of colored army being supplied with weapons by gunrunners from St. Louis.

There were extensive investigations of all “known” colored criminals, including a St. Louis numbers racketeer named Ronald Parker. Like most of the others, no evidence was found against him and no charges filed. But what was interesting to me was that his attorney was Franklin Aubury.