Curveball (9 page)

What she did not like was the journey to and from West Virginia. Riding a train through the Jim Crow South was a new experience for Tomboy—an encounter with a more aggressive racism than she had ever known. Her friend Evelyn Edwards worried for weeks before she traveled with her mother to Georgia. Evelyn had heard so much about “the conditions” that going south terrified her. “I knew what slavery and lynching and tarring and feathering were,” she said, “but I didn’t know what ‘conditions’ were.” She expected “conditions” to be worse than anything she could imagine.
²⁷
To travel to West Virginia, Tomboy boarded the train in Saint Paul and rode through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and on over the Ohio River into Kentucky. While she could sit anywhere she wanted to as the train passed through the Midwestern states, the minute it crossed into Kentucky, she had to move. Porters would nudge colored riders who were in the “wrong” car and point to the signs at the door. “Whites Only.” Tomboy’s friend Jimmy Griffin traveled the same route when he went from Rondo to West Virginia for college. A porter came up to him and said that if he didn’t move to the Jim Crow car, the conductor would put him off the train. Griffin moved. As he walked with his bulky luggage into the black car, he noticed the train seats had not been cleaned. He had only one suit and he was wearing it. Wanting to keep his clothes presentable for college, he took pages from a newspaper and spread them over the seat. A black woman noticed and approached the nineteen-year-old. “Son, where are you from?” she asked sympathetically. “You must be from up North somewhere. I’ve been watching you.” After an hour or so, the porter came back to the car and tapped Griffin on the shoulder, informing the young man that he could return to his previous car. “We just passed into Kenova, West Virginia,” he said. “In West Virginia there’s no Jim Crow laws on the railroad.” It was lucky for young adults from Saint Paul that the porters were helpful. “I don’t know how far you’re going,” a porter told Griffin, “but if you’re gonna eat in the diner, you’ve gotta eat before you get to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, ’cause then you cross into Virginia and then the Jim Crow goes back into effect.”
²⁸
For Tomboy, Evelyn, and Jimmy, riding Jim Crow trains was not an education they wanted.

After the summer of 1940, when she turned nineteen, Tomboy officially dropped out of high school. She did not earn her diploma. She spent her days working small jobs and playing baseball as often as she could.
²⁹
There were so many teams that played for only a half season and then disbanded that Tomboy could not keep track of all the teams she had been on. “I think I played for the House of David,” she said.
³⁰

Tomboy was not the only one who could not keep straight all the many black baseball teams. Black ball was a lively jumble of subdivisions, playing levels, and schedules. There were local recreational teams that played on Sundays and statewide barnstorming teams that traveled on weekends. There also were semi-pro teams that played throughout the week for meager money and across a regional area, California, Oregon, and Washington state, for example. In addition, there were independent national and regional barnstorming teams, such as the Negro House of David. Some geographic areas also had semi-pro leagues, such as the Negro Southern League, with organized schedules, promotion, and league championships. Athletes, many of whom played baseball without a contract, were apt to “jump” from team to team when they were offered better pay, a longer season, or greater visibility for moving up. Playing schedules also were idiosyncratic and hastily organized, with semi-pro teams occasionally playing regional barnstorming teams or any other black team that was passing through the area. Team owners were more concerned about filling up a ballpark with paying fans than they were playing another team in their specific league or region. As varied and at times disorganized as local, semi-pro, regional, and independent black baseball was, all ambitious black ballplayers during the Jim Crow era aspired to one goal: the Negro League. The Negro League offered black players the highest level of play, equivalent to the white major leagues.

Even though baseball players had moved from playing for regional teams such as the Twin City Colored Giants to the Negro League, Boykin Stone was not pleased with what he saw as his daughter’s floundering in baseball. A person has to “have a purpose,” he declared. In his eyes, the spare change that Tomboy earned barnstorming did not amount to anything. He could see no future for her in the sport. By 1943, as she moved into her twenties, Tomboy continued to drift. With the drifting came some problems. One problem was William Gillespie, an acquaintance and forty-five-year-old troublemaker who saw himself as Tomboy’s suitor. For several months, Gillespie harassed her with telephone calls and telegrams, even after Tomboy said she had no romantic interest in him. One night in March, Gillespie attacked Tomboy. He jumped her, knocked her to the pavement, and kicked her in the face. He was arrested, and when the judge asked why he had attacked Tomboy Stone, Gillespie replied, “Because there were no witnesses.” He was sentenced to sixty days in the workhouse, and Tomboy got to thinking.
³¹
Everyone was moving on. Her older sister, Blanche, was a student at St. Catherine’s College studying music. Her younger sister, Bernous, or “Bunny” as the family called her, had joined the army and was engaged to be married. Brother Quinten helped out at his parents’ barber and beauty shops and showed an interest in going into business with them. Even Tomboy’s friends had plans. Janabelle Murphy attended “the U,” hoping to graduate from the University of Minnesota with a degree in physical education. Evelyn Edwards enrolled in Globe Business College to study accounting. Even Father Keefe had accepted a new challenge. He became the new priest at the Church of St. Anne in Le Sueur, Minnesota, an hour away.

“When you finish high school, they tell a boy to go out and see the world,” Tomboy later said. “What do they tell a girl? They tell her to go next door and marry the boy that their family’s picked out.” It wasn’t right, she thought. “A woman has her dreams, too,” she said.
³²
The army shipped Bunny to San Francisco, and before too long she sent letters home saying she could use some company. Willa gave Tomboy the money, and with little more than a plan to meet her sister “somewhere” in San Francisco—she didn’t even know exactly where Bunny was stationed—Tomboy boarded a bus for California. “I had to see what was over there,” she said, “on the other side of the fence.”
³³

T
omboy’s first sight of San Francisco took her breath away. About the same time she reached the city, author John Dos Passos arrived to write a profile of San Francisco in wartime for
Harper’s
magazine. Whoever designed the city’s streets didn’t have the “slightest regard for the laws of gravity,” he wrote. The city was a jumble of steep slopes and precipitous curves, and the result was thrilling. “Whenever you step out on the street there’s a hilltop in one direction or other. From the top of each hill you get a view and the sight of more hills to the right and left and ahead that offer the prospect of still broader views. The process goes on indefinitely. You can’t help making your way painfully to the top of each hill just to see what you can see.”
²

As captivating as the view was, Tomboy was on a mission and wasted little time. She needed to find her sister. In May 1943, Bunny Stone married Steward Louis Bell. The couple shipped out to separate military assignments. The army sent Bunny to the Bay Area and the navy returned Bell to his Pearl Harbor fleet.
³
The marriage was rocky. For many years Bunny and Louis quarreled and made up and began the cycle again. Bunny needed some comfort from home, and Tomboy was happy to supply it.
⁴
As she disembarked at the San Francisco Transit Depot on Mission Street, Tomboy was immediately engulfed in a big city wartime crush of humanity. Soldiers with duffle bags dashed toward idling buses; women with a child on each hip kicked heavy suitcases through a maze of moving legs; young people like Tomboy stepped off buses from Arkansas and Texas and wondered where they’d find one of the good defense jobs everyone was talking about.

In 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 8802, which required federal industries to end discriminatory hiring practices based on race, color, or national origin. Hopeful workers read leaflets tacked on post office bulletin boards around the country exhorting the wonders of California: good jobs, beautiful weather, palm trees! The Kaiser and Moore Dry Dock shipyards in Richmond and Oakland were hiring tens of thousands of workers to build nearly fifteen hundred vessels to support the war effort.
^*
“A ship a day” was being produced by men and women, blacks and whites, Mexicans, Portuguese, and Italian workers laboring side by side in integrated divisions. Within the span of three years, the population of Richmond, California, swelled from 23,000 to nearly 125,000. The docks needed painters, welders, riveters, forklift drivers, and crane operators for their six-days-a-week, round-the-clock schedule.
⁵
If you stood still in the bus terminal for just a moment as Tomboy did, it seemed that everyone in the country was rushing to San Francisco to find a future.

Tomboy’s first few days in the Bay Area were so bizarre and improbable that her odyssey later became the stuff of Stone family legend. From the money her mother gave her, Tomboy ended up in California with fifty-three cents—no, sixty-seven cents—no, seven dollars—she said at other times. Surely it wasn’t much. She did not have an exact address for Bunny, didn’t know the area, and had no prospects for employment. She didn’t even have much luggage, just some dungarees, pressed slacks, and clean shirts. She also carried her old baseball glove from the Goodwill and the baseball shoes Gabby Street had given her. Tomboy had eaten all the food her mother had packed for the trip and was hungry and tired, but she knew she had to fend for herself. Although she noticed prostitutes walking around the area, making what seemed like easy money, Tomboy never for a moment considered such a desperate idea. “It was easy to go into street walking,” she said. But she believed no woman needed to prostitute herself if she was willing to work. “That was out. I couldn’t see that. That was like … doing dirty dishes.”
⁶
Within a matter of days, the ever-resourceful Tomboy found a place to live and a job. Even more incredible, Tomboy was walking down a street when Bunny just happened to look out a nearby window. The two Stone sisters found each other. Whether it was luck, coincidence, divine providence, or foolishness—everything Tomboy needed, she said, fell right into her lap.
⁷

In truth, Tomboy’s beginnings in San Francisco were more intentional. When she arrived at the terminal, Toni approached an attendant in the Travelers’ Aid station for help. The station supervisor told her to return later for an official appointment regarding job possibilities and lodging. Tomboy spent the first few nights alone in the bus station, but by the time came for Tomboy’s appointment with the Travelers’ Aid, she already had found a job and a room. The day she first arrived at the terminal, she spotted a black man in the station and asked for help. “Where would you find our kind of folks?” she asked. The stranger laughed and directed her to the Fillmore. As she passed Foster’s Cafeteria on the corner of Sutter, she noticed a help wanted sign in the window. Foster’s was a bustling warren of mirror-top tables where drifters and neighborhood residents converged over lumps of warm meatloaf and bowls of chili.
^*
The cafeteria was looking for all kinds of help—waitresses, salad makers, dishwashers. “I knew something about salads,” Tomboy said. She got the job: fourteen dollars a week and one eat-in meal a day. “That boosted me,” she said.
⁸