Sam's Legacy (12 page)

Whatever else may have nagged at me—my brothers, my sister, my work at school, my chores at home, my mother's state of being, my battle not to ruin permanently what Tucker had taught me was “the temple of the body,” my broodings concerning my color—these were gone, not in any ecstasy, but in the simple act of playing, in the attention required to see through every seemingly leisurely detail of any game, short or long. I remember specific feelings, of course—and can see myself now, as if I am one of the old men who would stand in the high grass, on the third base side of our makeshift playing field, clucking over us: I was tall for my age—six feet by the age of thirteen—and though everyone in our section (which was all black by this time) knew me and never thought but that I was one of them, still there must have been something striking in watching this slender, fair-skinned boy, in overalls and flannel shirt (the sleeve slit into strips with a razor blade, as Tucker's teammate Bill Stacey had taught me, so that, in the follow-through, the ball would fly at the batter from a background of fluttering white), rearing back, striding forward, and firing bullets.

I had, from this age, a natural hop to my fast ball, so that it seemed to be a fiery white line moving from my hand to the plate, heading downward, breaking some fifteen or twenty feet from the plate, soaring toward the catcher's glove at an angle identical to that at which it had been moving down. That is to say, I picture it now not as a ball in flight, but as one long hard white line, and when I threw it, if I thought at all, I thought of it this way also: as if there were a transparent piece of tubing (narrowly larger than a baseball) on a line from my hand to the plate, through which, without touching the sides, my ball would spin. I threw no curves, no sinkers, no changes of pace, and did not—a source of pride at the time—have need to throw the various kinds of spitballs that others relied on (the most popular being the cut-ball spitball, in which the ball, where the spit was to be applied, would be nicked with a bottle cap). Unlike most fastball pitchers, I had also—my greatest strength ultimately, and the talent which would have seen me through for the long pull—little trouble with control; I was able, from the beginning, to tell the ball where I wanted it to go.

In 1919, at the age of fourteen, I pitched my first game for the Brooklyn Remsens, defeating the Brooklyn Atlantics 6 to 2, with my brother Paul catching me. The enthusiasm of my brothers for my pitching performance was infectious, and I soon found myself something of a hero in our neighborhood, to the children and the old men; my mother fussed over me also—had she not told me that I was her White Star, her Hope and Deliverance?

I started games every Sunday after that, from March through October, and during the years 1919 through 1923 I rarely lost. By that time Paul was working with Tucker (they opened their own store in the Bushwick section, featuring custom-made furniture); George was attending Columbia, on his way to the New England Conservatory, and it was agreed upon by all that I too would attend a university; thus I stayed in school and did not accompany the Remsens when they traveled away from Brooklyn. Even during July and August, when school was out, I did not go against my family's wishes; I stayed home, reading books, giving piano lessons (thereby making my contribution to the family's expenses), helping Tucker and Paul in their store, and waiting for Sundays.

Despite my brothers' pride in my reputation (for I was known throughout Brooklyn), and their knowledge of exactly how good I was, my family began, I know, to fear my abilities, for the idea that I might want to make a career of baseball was odious and impossible. Riding around in broken-down cars, playing in games that were preceded and followed by minstrel shows, being teammates with men who were generally of little or no education—this was not, in brief, the life that had been envisioned for me, the life of a gentleman.

As for myself, I did not think much about it one way or the other. Traveling around the country—seeing far-off cities and living the life that Tucker's teammates had described so graphically for me—this held no particular appeal. I was happy at home, in Brooklyn, pitching on Sundays; what I wanted, simply, was to be able to play more often and (I admitted this at the time) to play in front of larger crowds. More than this, I began, after the first time Mr. McGraw came to Dexter Park to watch me play (in 1923), to nurture the most foolish of my private dreams: that I would, one day, play in Yankee Stadium (which had opened that year), for a team of blacks, before a crowd of whites and blacks, and that I would, in the name of my people, defeat the enemy.

The vision lacked specifics: I do not recall if I saw myself pitching for a team that was all black, yet part of the Major Leagues; if my team were part of a separate league which played in an annual World Series against the white champions; or if I saw the team as, somehow, of mixed races—like the All Nations Club (but with the blacks as regulars and the whites as substitutes). I knew only that I wanted to be there, proving to the public what all baseball men knew in private. What I dreamt of, then, was that I might someday have the best of both worlds: to be the champion of my own people, loved and honored as one of them (as the best of them)—and, at the same time, to have my abilities (and thus, the abilities of all my brothers) acknowledged as superior by those whose color skin I possessed.

I did not, however, think things through in this manner. I knew only, when Mr. McGraw came up to me after the game, and when he shook my hand and told me that he wished to speak with me in private, that—though I gave him my coldest manner, my most indifferent air—I saw, not the dream that was soon to burn in my own head, but the light in the eyes of my teammates, the slight breathing in of satisfaction by Paul and Tucker and George, the deferential way in which all those friends and fans who had come down from the stands to shake my hand began to back away; so that I was left alone with Mr. McGraw at a time when, truly, I wanted the warmth of those other bodies around me. I must have known, of course, that I would say no to whatever offer he might have made, and if, as I accepted his praise and his good wishes, as I watched his ruddy hands gesticulate, I sensed what was to come, then I must have sensed also where this left me—I sensed, that is, not only that I could never have the best of that world I was about to begin dreaming of, but that I would no longer be able to have, unthinkingly and fully, the world which had until then given me such pleasure.

The alternatives were clearer then, though I can perhaps
name
them more convincingly now; no matter which road I chose, I saw that I would lose. Therefore, I chose no road, but stayed where I was. “I grew up in a fighting baseball school, young man,” McGraw told me. “And I will fight for you, if you're willing. You're well-known in Brooklyn, but you're only seventeen years old. Your body will change—if you drop from sight for one or two seasons, people will forget. I'd like to have you play for the New York Giants, and I believe, taking on a new name at the age of, say, nineteen, that this can be. I've seen the best of the best, and you can be one of them. “I said nothing.” It has long been my hope, as you may know, to bring people of your race into the Major Leagues, and I believe—if you will play the ballgame as I have outlined it—that, after you are established, we will be able to reveal your true identity. Once the breaking of the color bar is a fact, I know that we will have no trouble. Judge Landis, the Commissioner of Baseball, will support me in this—he already knows, in fact, why I have come here today. If you say yes, you will be doing a fine thing, for yourself, for baseball, and for your race.”

I did not, of course, hesitate—nor did I give him any reasons; what reasons, after all, even to myself—and more, to all my teammates, my brothers, the fans who loved me—would have seemed adequate? I would, to be sure, have been a fool, by their lights, to have refused, and yet, if I had accepted, I would have proven to them the very thing I longed to disprove—that I was one of them. If I had been the instrument for the success of Mr. McGraw's plot, I would have only cast greater doubt on who I was; I would have succeeded, that is, not for those things which made me one with my brothers, but for those very things which set me apart from them, and this included, not merely my outward appearance, but those God-given skills which made me special, and which were destined, over and above the reality of my origins, to give my life its special providence.

This then must be something like what entered into the sentence I gave Mr. McGraw without prethought, with a shrug of my lean shoulders, and with a smile which must have shown some kind of embarrassed appreciation for his having gone to the trouble of approaching me: “I'm a colored boy, Mr. McGraw,” I said, and I said it without any particular pride, without deference or shame, and without the rage which would come later.

Was I being merely selfish?

This is, of course, the question which came to haunt me when it was all over—and it is a question for which I have never had an adequate reply. I had to choose, and to choose irrevocably, and I have never doubted the choice I made, since I have never believed that I had a choice. What I have doubted, though—and the distinction may, to one who has not lived with it, seem more foolish than fine—is my belief, my faith
in
that decision. I have not considered that interview with McGraw to be one of the high points of my life for the very reason that I do not—and did not—feel it to be a moment of decision; yet all of my life, and its events, have clearly flowed from what passed on that day.

I knew, first of all, that I could not have accepted his offer and have remained the player he courted; to put it most simply, how could I, disguising myself as a white man, have retained the speed of my fast ball, and the superb control I had of that speed? I knew, as soon as he had presented the possibility of another life to me, that I could only, during games in such a life, have become, literally, a self-conscious man. And if, on the mound, I had begun thinking at all, then I surely would have been lost.

Still, though I could not have done otherwise, I must wonder, now more than then, if an opposite decision would not have led to early opportunities for others, and if, despite the (to me) deceptive foundation these opportunities would have been based upon, they would have been, nonetheless, opportunities. If I reflect, however, and see that my excessive pride may have kept me from doing what Mr. McGraw thought I could do for my people, then I must also see that it was this very pride which had made me who I was; if I had lacked an ounce of it, I would not have been the man Mr. McGraw would have chosen to approach. What the world calls selfishness or self-interest was necessarily a part of that pride, and it made me the man and player I was; and yet, if I could not have done otherwise, and if I do not, after all the years which have passed, doubt my decision, why is it that my faith in that decision seems always so weak, crumbling now more than ever?

That summer I went on the road with the Remsens—as far west as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and as far south as Washington, D.C.—and when the fall came, I had to tell my mother what her fears had already confirmed: that I had decided to try to make my way as a ballplayer in the Negro Leagues. I sat at her feet, my head on her lap, and, as I had expected, she did not protest; my brothers, for their part, tried to persuade me to go to college first, to play baseball on Sundays and during summers, but I think they were—certainly this was so with Paul and George—secretly glad of my decision; they assured me that they would, as always, see to my mother's needs; I vowed that I would be home as often as possible during the season, and would continue to live at home during the winter months. Listening to my mother humming, I dreamt of her standing in the crowd at Yankee Stadium, in a box behind third base, wearing an orchid corsage. I tried—swelling with my own pride—to imagine the mother's pride she would feel in my moment of glory, and I thought, at the time, that there was no other gift I could have given her which would have made her life as full. My imagination, clearly, was even more foolish and self-serving than my life could possibly have been.

There had been, up to this time, and not counting the days before the color bar, some half-dozen major attempts to organize a successful Negro League, but they had all, for one reason or another, ended in failure. I had heard the stories and the reasons: dishonest booking agents, the competition of the white leagues, failures in leadership, the lack of capital and backing (genteel Negroes looked down, of course, on educated men who played in these leagues)—it would not take a genius, surely, to imagine what, given the general conditions in which we lived during the early years of this century, the problems would have been. Still, by 1920, when Rube Foster had taken the Negro American Baseball League in hand, and had fought and defeated the power of Nat Strong, the major New York booking agent, we were holding our own. The cooperative plan, as it was called (this meant, simply, that players lived from game to game, dividing the percentage of the gate receipts their team was given) had been replaced, in 1920, by a guaranteed annual salary; and though this salary was generally small, a man could—with the additional money earned from barnstorming against white teams after the regular season ended, get by. The big stars, of course, always did well, and even under Foster they were allowed to hire themselves out to teams other than their own for major games and exhibitions. Men such as Foster and Buck O'Neal and Bullet Rogan and Rap Dixon earned as much, some years, as any of the white stars.

Several teams made me offers, and in the summer of 1923, shortly after a second visit from Mr. McGraw, I left the Brooklyn Remsens for the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers. My salary was to be six thousand dollars for my first full season, plus bonuses which were to depend upon gate receipts and the number of my victories. The offer was not the best I received (this came from the Pittsburgh Crawfords), but it was close enough so that I could see my way to accepting it. I was happy, thus, to be able to remain in Brooklyn.