Sam's Legacy (29 page)

“Oh you rode that one!” Jones said, shaking my hand as I crossed home plate. “They got their money's worth, honey, coming out to see you today.”

Each of my teammates came to see me in the dugout, congratulating me—and Kinnard said what they must all have been thinking: “Didn't think you had that kind of power in you. You must be all leather and bones.”

I was breathing more easily now; my fingers and palms tingled, alive in a way they had never been before. “She ain't come down yet,” Jones said, standing outside the dugout and peering off into the distance, into the pale light beyond the center field fence.

I did not get to hit again that day, but the next afternoon, in Cleveland, I found that—before the game had begun—I was thinking only of my batting, of holding the wood in my hands; I was imagining the feeling that would flow through me when I would drive the ball far and straight, and I was wondering how it could be that I had not, through all the years I had played baseball, concerned myself much with hitting. I had always been, throughout my childhood—on the fields near our home, and at Dexter Park—a good batsman: a line drive hitter who could be depended upon in the clutch. But like everything else that occurred between those moments when I was alone on the mound, hitting seemed unreal somehow—something which filled the time, as it were, between those moments in which I was alive. I took my stance, I studied the pitchers, I tried my hardest, and I was good enough—on days I did not pitch—to be used occasionally as a pinch hitter. I had good reflexes, strong wrists, and—the quality which, in the end, was most important—exceptional vision. I could see the ball longer than others did, and I could time the break in a curve ball, and even a spitter, so that I was rarely off balance when I swung. Still, I had never found within myself what was suddenly there: a desire which can be expressed most simply in the commonplace players' phrase which had long been familiar to me: I wanted to murder the ball.

When I took my turn in batting practice and found that, instead of hitting solid line drives over the infield, I was driving the ball to the far corners of the outfield, my wonder increased. My teammates watched me, but they neither praised my hitting nor commented upon it, and when Jack Henry told Johnson that he would be pitching, so as to give me a day's rest, I resented the decision. I sat on the bench all afternoon—we won handily, 5 to 2, and I was never needed, as a relief pitcher or pinch hitter—and each time the ball spun toward home plate, I was there, timing my swing.

When, the following afternoon, Jack Henry gave me another day's rest, pitching Jacknife Tompkins, the kind of pitcher we called, for what reason I cannot say, a sockamayock—meaning a pitcher you kept on your roster as a utility ballplayer, but one you would never have used in an important league game—I grew angrier. In practice, moreover, batting against Tompkins, who admittedly did not put much on the ball, I supplied my own power and consistently drilled the ball into the stands, thus angering Jack Henry and Aaron Baussy, the manager of the Elites, for there was always the danger that some young boy would keep the ball and run off with it. The Elites defeated us that afternoon, 7 to 1, and again Jack Henry did not use me.

On the third day of our series with the Elites, I was the pitcher. I set them down in order during the first two innings, hurrying my pitches so that my own turn at bat—I was, as usual, ninth in the order—would come sooner. The Elite pitcher that day was a man named Harcourt Simmons, a crossfire pitcher with good speed and fine control. In our half of the third, I came to bat. Simmons wound up for the first pitch, stepped to his right, and whipped his arm across his body, waist high, so that the ball sped at me as if it were coming from third base, rising slightly, as if it intended to bury itself in my ear. I could not restrain myself. I stepped forward and met the ball, inside, in front of the plate, my hands vibrating from the shock. I heard the third baseman grunt, and, from the corner of my eye—I had just had time to drop the bat—I saw him, sitting in the dirt, hold up his glove, the ball wedged in the pocket. I returned to the dugout, cursing myself silently. I expected Johnson, or Jack Henry, to say something, but they did not—nor did Jones tease me, as he usually did.

Their silence irritated me; and my irritation increased when, in my second and third at-bats of the day, I was deprived of the opportunity to swing away, receiving a base on balls one time up and being required to make a sacrifice bunt the other. When I came to bat in our half of the eighth inning, we were already leading 5 to 0 (I had allowed the Elites but three hits), and Simmons had been replaced by a young southpaw, a sixteen-year-old stringbean of a player named Tennessee Bray, who was as wild as the wind. He had already soaked Henry and Rouillard, and on his first pitch to me I had to drop my bat and fall to the ground to avoid catching the ball in my cheek. His second pitch hit the dirt some twenty-five feet in front of home plate and bounced past the catcher, allowing Jones, who was at second, to move to third. The third pitch came toward the plate, below the knees. I forced myself to wait an instant—in order not to be ahead of the ball, as I had been my first time at bat. I could hear the ball whistling and knew that, as I stepped forward—a longer stride to compensate for the lowness of the pitch—I was smiling. My body strained and I felt the pressure which had been building in me for three days release itself with my swing: my anger flowed into my hands and shoulders, and from them into the bat. I drove the ball straight at the pitcher—who threw up a gloved hand in self-defense and then fell sideways from the mound—and the ball continued on a line, directly over second base, at eye-level; the center fielder began to set himself for it, but the ball continued to rise, whistling through the air as the pitch had whistled toward the plate, and the centerfielder had a look of pure stupefaction on his face as his neck dropped and he watched the ball, some twenty feet above his head, sail past.

I was, as I rounded the bases, happy; I felt satisfied in a way I had never felt from any pitching success, and I saw—as I expected I would—an image of the man whose slugging prowess I knew I could now challenge: it waited for me as I rounded third base, and it smiled at me as I crossed home plate. I could breathe again.

I took my place on the bench, beside my teammates, and accepted their congratulations. Though I had only jogged in rounding the bases, I was panting. I looked right and left, willing to hear more—to have my teammates go on, as they always did with one another when a home run had been hit, but they addressed their remarks to the Elite pitcher, advising him of the benefits a cold shower could bring. They said nothing to me, and I scanned their faces, as hurt as I was surprised. Surely they were aware of the power I had suddenly unleashed, and surely they were happy for me!—and yet, as soon as these thoughts had crossed my mind, I realized my error. What I saw in their faces was suspicion, and something more than suspicion—I had, I knew, hurt them in some way; I had again, by my success—by making myself more whole as a player and us more powerful as a team—only repeated the old pattern; I had only succeeded in separating myself that much more from them.

They were—I saw this clearly in the weeks which followed, when I continued to hit well, and for distance—wary. They did not, I am certain, connect the change in me to the conversation that had taken place during our game against the Ethiopian Clowns, but they were not pleased that, like the white star they so admired, who had been a pitcher first and a slugger later, I too was changing. In a series against the Dayton Marcos, I blasted four home runs in three games; in a double-header against the Indianapolis ABC's, I went six for nine, including two doubles and a triple; and against the Kansas City Monarchs, while pitching my second no-hitter of the season, I hit my longest home run, far beyond the four-forty mark of their left-center field wall, thereby winning my own game 1 to 0.

Although I found that I was—at least in the minutes which immediately followed—happy after I had delivered a long blow, I did not, as when pitching, feel in any way transported—rather the opposite: hearing the crack of bat against ball, and seeing the white sphere rocket across the infield, I felt as if I had never been more firmly rooted to earth. My spirits soared, yet my body seemed more substantial than ever.

That my teammates remained suspicious is understandable. Previously, it would not have occurred to any of them, as it had not occurred to me, to have asked why it was that I was a great pitcher yet an ordinary hitter. Still, it occurs to me now that, until then, my want of excellence at the plate must have been something which had made me acceptable to them, something, that is, which had made them assume that I was what one part of me wanted to believe: merely an imperfect man, like any of them.

Once, however, I had tasted the thrill that could come from hitting, I could not, as with all things in my life, get enough. I wanted still to be with them, one of them—yet I knew that my desire to surpass them, in that which had previously been their domain, ensured that I would again move farther from them. Outwardly, nothing changed. Jack Henry played me as before—pitching me as often as he had to, and my teammates left me alone—appreciating my contributions to our efforts (we had, before the end of August, clinched the eastern circuit championship, thus ensuring ourselves a place in the World Series and a share of the money that that would bring in), respecting my silence, but acting—off the field—as if I were what I had, in truth, done everything to encourage them to believe. I was, simply, a man apart—and, except for the ritual laughter which accompanied Johnson's barbs, there was nothing they showed which indicated that they wished things to be otherwise.

I was to my team, then, what Booker T. Washington—in a statement my father had regarded with the same piety he reserved for the Bible—had claimed my race should be to the white race. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” Washington had said in 1895, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” The words still seem, residing with me as they have through some fifty years, to carry force, to signify my particular condition with the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers during the years 1923 to 1928. Although I did not try to be but what I was—although I continued to drive myself, to pursue perfection with a rabid passion in that league which had no white men—it must be clear that, far from releasing me from any bondage, my efforts were the truest evidence that (aware even then that I may never have had choice in any of these matters) I did have choice in my feelings about them, and I did, with every act, sustain that slavery which was mine, and which, alas, I must have loved. (“Slavery holds but few,” says Seneca. “Many hold fast to slavery.”)

How else can I explain my decision, made before the end of the season, to accompany our team on their post-season barnstorming tour? For I knew, even as I informed Jack Henry, that my reasons had little to do with pleasing him or my teammates, and less to do with anything concerning my mother and family. I was thinking of one thing only: of the possibility that our team would, while on tour, come up against—as they had the winter before—a team composed largely of members of the New York Yankees.

Jack Henry did not question my decision, nor did he, as I had hoped he would, greet it with enthusiasm. “That's good,” was all he said. “You'll help bring in the money.”

My hand moved then, involuntarily, to my thigh, as if to hide what was there: for, though I had no basis for believing so, I felt that he knew that I carried, concealed in my wallet, a piece of folded newspaper which was the source of my decision, bearing as it did a photo of that man I dreamt of meeting, and of defeating. I had gazed at it often—the body twisted in a follow-through, the bat straight up and down but tipped back slightly above the right shoulder, the narrow eyes and bulbous nose shaded by the visor of his cap, the mouth parted in a half-smile—and I had, concentrating on the image, seen it come to life; I had watched the man swing and miss again and again and again as I threw the ball past him with such speed that he was forced—mystified and broken—to admit that I had taken from him those alliterative titles, King of Clout and Sultan of Swat, an ignorant public had bestowed upon him. I did not, of course, care about having such foolish titles applied to myself. I knew that, even if I should defeat him as a pitcher and outhit him as a batter, the word would go out among baseball men only that we had met and that I had carried the day; so that when I thought of playing against him, I did not, in truth, think of the acclaim a victory would bring; I thought—and this was, facing Jack Henry, what made me lower my eyes and cover my sidepocket—only of the way the man's eyes might look at me when he had faced me and lost.

Sometimes I believe that that image of him—ripped from a newspaper one morning in what I thought was a fit of jealousy—was, during those months which preceded our first meeting, more real to me than the man would ever become. For if I did not want to take from him those banal titles, and if I had resigned myself to the fact that my first decision had been irrevocable (as, with my first game of the previous season, it had become), why was I so jealous of his fame?—and if I knew that I could not, by defeating him on the playing field, put on his power and his glory—and if I believed that I had no need to—why, in the privacy of my room at home and in hotel rooms on the road, did I continue to fix my eyes upon his image?

As my first complete season with the Dodgers wore on through late August and September, I continued to win as a pitcher and to excel as a hitter. By the end of September, when we were preparing to meet Rube Foster's Giants, winner of the western circuit crown, for the World Series, I had hit twenty-four home runs; I had won thirty-nine games while losing seven, had pitched three no-hitters (though no perfect game), four one-hitters, and an even dozen shutouts; I had also begun—on the days Johnson or Tompkins or Kelly (coming in from left field—born in Cinq Hommes, Louisiana, he was called “Gunboat” from the fact that his father had been a gun runner to Cuba during the Spanish-American War) were pitching—to play in the outfield. During the month of September, with the pennant already clinched, I pitched only every third or fourth day, and I knew that my presence in the outfield on the days I did not pitch, and the length of my home runs, though they did not yet draw the fans to the ballpark, had begun to be talked about.