Curveball (13 page)

When Toni first arrived in New Orleans, she might have considered for a moment a visit to stately St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square. She always made a point of learning as much as she could about a new town. If nothing else, the cavernous stone sanctuary offered relief from the sun, and the sweet, thick smell of incense would remind her of Father Keefe and St. Peter Claver back home. But the Cathedral, like Seabrook beach or the front seats of the streetcars rumbling down Canal Street, was like the rest of New Orleans: separate and unequal.

Toni dropped her belongings at the Page Hotel on Dryades Street in the city’s black section of town. “Everybody liked to come to New Orleans,” the Kansas City Monarchs’ Buck O’Neil said. “You could have a good time after the game.”
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There were other appeals to playing in New Orleans besides the nightlife. For most visiting players, rooms in black boarding houses were a treat compared to restless nights on the bus.
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But in New Orleans, Toni and the Creoles had the uncommon luxury of the Page Hotel. If their two-dollars-per-day meal money didn’t stretch far enough in the hotel dining room, they could always buy a good meal at the bus station. “They had black cooks and black waitresses and they got to know us and gave us special treatment when we hit town,” a Birmingham Black Barons player said.

People came and went at the Page Hotel all morning, as it also served as black baseball’s ticket office. Alan Page, who owned three hotels in the city, seemed to be at the center of everything in New Orleans: business, sporting events, even soft drinks. He also owned the Creoles baseball team, and watched the price of Coca-Cola like other business owners watched the stock market. When Cokes went from five cents to ten cents all over the country, Page raised the price of Creoles baseball tickets. Men were charged one dollar, women seventy-five cents, soldiers sixty cents, and children thirty-five cents.
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Toni knew the upcoming day would be a long one. She wouldn’t play all three games for the Sea Lions, but she would take all the innings that Yellowhorse offered her the chance to play. Toni’s goal was always to get more playing time. More time in the game meant a better chance to study pitchers, perfect her curveball hitting, and practice the quick pivot of double plays. She would be lucky if Yellowhorse gave her four innings, though.

But Alan Page predicted that Toni would bring in a good crowd at Pelican Stadium. Sunday, May 1, was Opening Day for the New Orleans team, and Page and his crew had been busy propping up baseball advertisements in store windows and taping handbills to street lamps. When a gust of wind blew, loose posters turned cartwheels down streets until fans stooped down and picked one up. More than one person did a double take of the player whose photograph was prominently featured on the broadside. Smiling confidently for the camera—hands on hips, legs wide apart, Toni Stone looked like any other ballplayer except for the bold headline beneath her name: “Sensational Girl Player.”
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Since the tripleheader was the official start of the Creoles’ Negro Southern League season, Toni joined other players in a motorcade parade from Shakespeare Park, a city recreation area for black players where the New Orleans team held spring training.
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Neighborhood kids made a practice of gathering at Shakespeare to watch the ballplayers. “What we felt for those players was almost worship,” one fan said.
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The previous year’s parade had been memorable for featuring “300 future Jackie Robinsons”—young boys who whooped and hollered, many sporting new Brooklyn Dodgers baseball caps. Advertisements for Jackie Robinson caps were everywhere: “Kids, Men, Women! Get in on this Great Three for One Offer. Plus 8 × 10 of your hero suitable for framing and his life story—all for only $1.69 from Sports Novelty Company of Joliet Illinois.”
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Toni knew that fans couldn’t get enough of Jackie Robinson; back in California she even heard talk of a motion picture about Jackie’s life. But players in the parade hoped that fans would remember other black baseball players too. Everyone’s pay for the day depended on good gate receipts, and a parade down Dryades Street was the best way to generate excitement and money. Over two hundred businesses stretched from one end of the street to the other, reminding Toni of the Fillmore in San Francisco with its music and swarm of activity. There were Dizzy Gillespie, Lollypop Jones, Dinah Washington, Ethel Waters, and Chubby “Hip Shakin’ Mama” Newson all appearing in New Orleans clubs within a span of a few weeks. Dr. Daddy O, the city’s first black DJ, played all the new LPs on his “Jivin’ with Jax” radio show and then promoted them the next week in his newspaper column.
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If you liked what you heard on the radio, Jiles Records on Rampart Street was only too happy to send a boy with records for purchase to your home.
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It was as though the whole city agreed that music was as essential to life as a quart of milk or a loaf of bread, and that sustenance could be delivered right to your doorstep.

Toni enjoyed the parade. While she earned less than two hundred dollars a month playing for the Sea Lions, the money was secondary to doing what she loved. “Salaries [in Negro baseball] don’t compare to Williams or DiMaggio,” Buck O’Neil acknowledged. “But it beats the hell out of loafing on Central Ave or Beale Street or Eighteen and Vine.”
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Fans along the parade route cheering and shaking Toni’s hand more than made up for modest wages. Barnstormers rarely enjoyed such notoriety, and Toni relished the attention. After winding their way through the black sections of the city and stopping at a few sponsoring taverns, Toni and the other players ended at Pelican Stadium. “Pel,” as the locals called it, was home to the New Orleans Pelicans, a white minor league affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The stadium stood on the corner of Tulane and South Carrollton, next to the rail line, and was available to the Creoles when the Pelicans were out of town, just like Seals Stadium in San Francisco. Back in 1914 when the stadium was built, mule teams brought over wooden bleachers from the old Sportsmen’s Park, in hopes of maintaining a tie to New Orleans sports past—its white past.
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Toni entered the park, as all black players did, from the “colored” entrance in center field, not the “whites only” gate in front. Once inside the dugout, she parted company with the rest of the Sea Lions. While her teammates headed to the visitors’ locker room, Toni looked around for the umpires. She had no issue to discuss with the officials; she was looking for their good will. Toni knew better than to dress in the players’ locker room: it was too small to offer any privacy from thirty men who were throwing off shirts or rubbing each others’ arms with medicinal-smelling liniment. She knocked on the umpires’ door and asked if they would mind vacating for a moment while she changed into her uniform. Toni wasn’t sure why, but umpires were sensitive to her situation and rarely denied her request. Perhaps they felt a kinship with Toni—they were outnumbered in the game, too. She changed quickly and made sure to fold her street clothes meticulously for the return to the hotel. Then she walked down the dark hall and onto the bright field for infield practice. “You don’t look like no ball player,” her teammates teased her. Toni was used to their ribbing and welcomed it. Joking made her feel part of the squad. Other players always thought her uniforms looked too clean, and they would playfully toss a handful of dirt at her as she took her position at second. “Most of the players didn’t know what a clean uniform was,” Toni said. They equated grime with good luck and had an irrational fear of freshly laundered clothing. To Toni, ballplayers “were the most superstitious people in the world.”
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Pel was a large stadium. Some players thought its horseshoe shape resembled the Polo Grounds in New York where the Brooklyn Dodgers played. The field had short foul lines, huge power alleys in right and left center, and a deep area behind home plate. It was a space so vast that a fast runner like Toni could advance from first to third on a wild pitch.
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Toni thought it strange that a 260-foot fly ball would be a “Chinese home run”—a foul ball into the stands—and a four-hundred-foot wallop to one of the deep alleys was an easy out.
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Pel was built for a new brand of sluggers—players who didn’t depend on bulk and power but who were trim and fast and had strong wrists.
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A hitter didn’t need strength for Pel as much as precision. Just ask Sam Lacy about using finesse—every kind of finesse—in that ballpark. Lacy, a black sportswriter for the Baltimore
Afro-American
, once staged a protest at Pel when some white writers wouldn’t let him in the press box to cover Jackie Robinson. Undeterred by the discrimination, Lacy took a chair and went up to the roof. “The next thing I know, several of them [white writers] came up to sit with me. I asked Dick Young, ‘What are you guys doing up here?’
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He said, ‘Well, we decided we need some sun, Sam.’”
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Young’s knowing comment was rare: most white people didn’t go out of their way to stand with blacks against Jim Crow. Most ballplayers, sportswriters, and fans gathering in the park obeyed Jim Crow restrictions. Negroes headed to black seating in the bleachers under the big Jax beer sign; whites filed into the box seats and grandstands along the third base line. Toni no longer was surprised to see whites at a black baseball game; sometimes as many as five hundred would show up on a Sunday. She never could be sure, however, if whites came to support black teams or make catcalls. “Left-handed compliments,” players called some of the remarks heard from the whites only stands. Take the fan in Shreveport who yelled that his city’s white team needed a few “niggers so we can win some ball games.” Veteran players advised newcomers to ignore the comments, even the offensive taunts of “watermelon,” “dice shooter,” and “cotton picker”—a phrase that always sent Toni reeling. “As long as they don’t touch you or put their hands on you, then you have no recourse.”
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At Pel there were other signs of racism that were more difficult to ignore—signs like the chicken wire in the stands.

In the Pelican Stadium grandstands, chicken wire separated white fans, who sat under a roof, from blacks, who sat in the sun. The same was true in Kansas City for black fans attending Blues games, the city’s white ball club.
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The sight of chicken wire caging the fans was an assault to every black athlete who played in those stadiums. Some players were able to push the infuriating image out of their minds. Others could not. Pitcher Wilmer Fields could never forget the chicken wire at Pel. Later, during the 1953 season, while Fields was on the mound warming up for the Homestead Grays, he scanned the crowd, trying to locate his wife in the stands.
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“I looked out there and saw my wife, smiling back at me and waving, penned in with chicken wire, like she and all the other blacks were just farm animals.” Seeing his wife behind the chicken wire made it difficult to summon control. “I got this sick feeling in my stomach, really sick. It was the only time the racism and segregation and all that really got to me. I took the ball and I slammed it into my glove as hard as I could, hurting my hand, and said, ‘Wilmer, just forget about it and pitch. Just pitch.’”
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Swallowing anger on the diamond was a learned response for black players. “You just went about your daily duty whether it was baseball or anything else,” Paul Lewis of the New Orleans Black Pelicans said.
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“It was just another thing you had to live with.”
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Players followed an unspoken motto: keep your head down, play well, and ride it out. Jackie Robinson knew he could not challenge an umpire’s call for fear he would be unfairly tagged as a hothead.
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Black players understood that if they lashed out at racist fans, owners would confront the players, not the fans. “I knew I had to keep my composure, never using profanity to respond to critics,” Toni said.
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But bottled-up anger could not be corked forever, as Satchel Paige had warned. Some players who did not explode found ways to use taunts to their advantage. Bill White remembered his difficult postwar summer in Danville, Virginia.
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“I was only 18 and immature,” he said. At times he yelled back at prejudiced fans, but then found a more effective target for his anger. He took it out on the ball. “The more fans gave it to me, the harder I hit the ball. They eventually decided to leave me alone.” It was a “victory over bigotry,” White said.
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Finding a way to beat racism was like staring down a knuckleball, one player said. “If a guy’s got a good knuckleball and you know he’s going to throw you knuckleballs, you learn to hit it. You know it’s hard, but you still have to do it because he’s not going to throw you anything else.”
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Hitting the ball was more than a batting average statistic to many black players.

With batting practice over at Pel, BeeBop Gordon of the Sea Lions went through his pregame ritual and tried to count heads. “There were college guys on our team,” he said, who could estimate the number of fans in the stands and quickly do the math to calculate how much money each player would earn from the day’s gate receipts. Sometimes it seemed to BeeBop that dollars were more on the minds of players than playing, but he understood their concern. Many players had families to support and were always debating whether playing baseball paid as much as factory work back home. In a few years, BeeBop would decide the pay and the time on the road were not worth it, and he moved to Detroit for a job at the Ford Motor Company.
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But looking out at the crowd on the 1949 Opening Day in New Orleans, BeeBop was happy. Alan Page had accurately predicted a good turnout. Nearly five thousand fans came through the gates at Pel. The Creoles smashed the Fort Worth Tigers 20–7 in the opener and fought a closely matched contest with the San Francisco Sea Lions until darkness forced the game to be called at 7–7.