Sam's Legacy (11 page)

Tidewater stood suddenly. “There is more, but you will read what I have written.” The man filled his chest with air, reached out with his long arm, and opened the door. “You'll forgive me, of course. I'm grateful for your time.” He picked up his bucket. “I had wanted to tell your father what I have just told you, but there is more—the story has had, here, a new ending, and Ben will not know what it is.” The man's eyes shone, happier than at any moment since the day Sam had first seen him meet Ben. Sure. Sam had to give himself credit. He was replacing his father already. Sam moved into the doorway. The line of Tidewater's frail back curved slightly, and Sam was reminded again of the man's age. “I know,” Tidewater said, very gently, and he sighed, sounding like Ben. “You're worried about him also. Who would not see it, after all—that you care. I'm grateful.”

Muriel had not moved from her position between the wooden posts. She stared at the two men; then, her hands gripping the posts, she pulled herself to a standing position and leaned over the railing to watch Tidewater descend. Sam did not hear the man's shoes. On the ground floor, Tidewater disappeared around the bend, under the staircase. Muriel looked at Sam. “How's tricks, kid?” he asked. She said nothing, stuck her middle finger into her mouth, at the side, so that Sam could see it wiggling against the inside of her cheek. In another ten years, would she, he wondered, have breasts like her mother's? There was a streak of something dark—dirt? chocolate?—under her chin. The color of her lips seemed paler than the color of her cheeks. Her hair fell in sandy-colored curls, to her shoulders.

Sam pulled the pages from the envelope, riffled their edges with his thumb. He thought of his account with Sabatini, and reminded himself to tear up the sheet of paper on which he'd been figuring his finances, so that Ben wouldn't find it. Don't bet what you don't have—the first rule, and he'd gone against it. It showed you how smart he was getting. Ben knew what he was doing, giving him away now.

Sam didn't smile at his own joke. He didn't mind letting Tidewater think he'd replaced his own father; but that, in some way, Tidewater felt that he was going to take care of Sam now, that he too was taking Ben's place—it didn't make any sense. The door to Muriel's apartment creaked. “Sure,” he said, and turned to walk back into his apartment before the grandmother could see him. “Never take candy from a stranger, you hear?”

MY LIFE AND DEATH IN THE NEGRO AMERICAN BASEBALL LEAGUE

A SLAVE NARRATIVE

C
HAPTER
O
NE

I consider the high point of my life to have been that moment on the fifteenth day of February, 1928, in the city of Havana, Cuba, when, after I had pitched and hit my team, the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers, to a 1 to 0 triumph over a team composed of players from the New York Yankees, George Herman “Babe” Ruth mocked me again for having chosen the life that was mine, calling me a “make-believe nigger,” whereupon I slammed my fist into the pasty flesh of his dark face and struck him down; it was a blow I should have struck long before that day, and one which, filling me momentarily with joy, would lead, on that same afternoon, to my own death as a player in the Negro American Baseball League.

I was known by another name then, and was often called, for my abilities (though never to my face), “the Black Babe”; if things had been otherwise, however, he might have been named for me, and he often admitted as much in the privacy of our friendship. He called me a fool on that day, though, for he knew what was common knowledge at the time—that if I had chosen to hide my origins (as, I should note, others did, including two—an outfielder and a second baseman—whose bronze busts reside in the Cooperstown, New York, Hall of Fame), I could easily have done so, and I could thereby, as he put it, have had it all.

But what will seem now to have been a then unfashionable pride in my origins, and what might seem here a too fashionable retelling of history, is really neither. The facts of the time, and of my life, were simpler. As anyone could know who would bother to investigate, it was common, in post-season games, for teams of blacks—raggedy and illtrained and part-time as we often were—to defeat the best of the white major leaguers. In after-season barnstorming, men like Bruce Petway threw out Ty Cobb regularly; pitchers such as José Méndez and Smokey Joe Williams beat Plank, Coombs, and Mathewson, Alexander, Mar-quard, and Bush; and teams such as the Indianapolis ABC's, the Birmingham Black Barons, the Bacharach Giants, and the All Nations regularly defeated those men popularly called World Champions. It was often our pleasure, against white teams, when the game was put away, to whip the ball around the infield before getting the batter out at first base.

I was “the Black Babe”; they called John Henry Lloyd “the Black Wagner”; the great Andrew “Rube” Foster received his nickname for defeating Rube Waddell 2 to 1 in a nineteen-inning pitcher's duel. And yet, I wonder if the irony of stealing the names of those players who (though defeated by us) remained synonymous with greatness to the general public did not, even then, turn ultimately in our favor. Would it have changed what we were, and what they knew they were, had they been forced to take on our names, had Ty Cobb been named for “Cool Papa” Bell, or Lou Gehrig for “Rap” Dixon? Would it change the feel of the hardball in my hand, or the earth under my spikes, or the endless conversations (in which I did not join) that went on in the back seat of Jack Henry's old Buick, as we made our way from town to town, making four games on a good Sunday, during the years 1923 to 1928.

We were called the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers then, yet I was the only player who had been born and raised in Brooklyn, and of my birth and parentage I will say a few words, for riding in the back seat of Jack Henry's car, I was, as I had been since my earliest memory, a pale face among dark faces.

My father, whose family name I give here as Tidewater, was exceptionally intelligent and talented, a light cocoa-colored man born in 1856, who had been a house servant on a large plantation in Garley, South Carolina, and who, in 1882, upon the death of his master (with whom he had stayed, even after the war), was given passage money, references, and sent north with an introduction to a man in Brooklyn, Mr. Christopher Tanner, who found employment for him as a carpenter and furniture maker.

Mr. Tanner lived in a large wood house, in the section of Brooklyn now known as East Flatbush, but known to me when I was a boy as the Dutch Highlands, and I recall with great vividness the soft velvets and brilliant leathers of his sitting room, where several times a year we would be invited for tea, after which my father—who had a fine voice, and could read Latin with ease—would recite the poems of Horace, Ovid, and Catullus, and each of us, my father's children, would recite a poem we had learned by rote. I can still, if required, recite the simpler love poems of Catullus, and, in the slowest of cadences, that poem of Ovid's (stolen by Marlowe and embellished by him with unnecessary repetition) which contains the slow and beautiful line
O lente curritc noctis equi
.

My father was, like myself, a tall man in his time, standing straight at what must have been six feet two inches. His head was long, his hair, which I inherited, soft and straight, and his lips (again my inheritance), wide and narrow—a gift through his mother, of his master's father, from whom I received my original name.

My mother, whom my father met during his second week in Brooklyn (she was a cook for the first family to which he was referred for work), came originally from the West Indies, and could, except for the deep black oiliness of her hair, have passed for white. She played the piano beautifully, and, reading music herself, taught all of us to play, and also gave lessons in our house to whites and blacks alike. In our presence she always called my father “Mister Tidewater.”

If you were to see a photo of my family, while we were all together, you would notice at once my white boy's face, long and narrow, staring at you from among brown and mulatto faces, and it was, I now believe, this lack of color which endeared me to my mother, and which, at the same time, made me alien to my father. I was the youngest of his sons (though not the youngest child, having had a sister, Elizabeth, born two and one half years after me). Thus, what I have indicated may seem to have been a then unfashionable pride in my racial origins, had, as I have said, a simple—a literally childlike explanation: my family was my world in those years, and though my father did not attempt to teach us either to be proud or ashamed of our birthright, I wanted, as a child would, to be like the others, and I resented whatever unseen force it was that had removed from my skin the pigment that my father had given, through his blood, to my brothers and sister. I believed, as a child, that he did not consider me his son, and though I see now that this was untrue (he could be as cruel to my brothers as he was to my mother and to me), it was a reality I lived with. We construct our universe on the model of our immediate world; mine was black, and I, dependent on it, felt as if I were its white victim. It was, I believed, for this reason that my mother singled me out for extra affection, calling me her “White Star,” her “Hope and Deliverance,” and though I willingly accepted her physical attentions to me, it must—to judge from what I know today—have been my father's love that I coveted.

“For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” This, from the Book of James (2:10), was my father's guiding light, repeated to us countless times, and holding for me always an obviously special meaning. For my mother too, whom my father accused of an attraction to Mr. Tanner, the adjuration contained a deadly force, and it amazes me to think that, before I was nine, I realized fully not only that we were, my mother and I, allies against him (our love made strong by what we understood as his condemnation of us), but that we found in each other the love which, since he was too cold a man to possess, he could not really have given to us even if we had not felt ourselves cut off from him.

But my childhood within this family, myself among my brothers and my sister, our family among our neighbors, and all of us (on two sides of us there were white families) living in an area of Dutch estates which had, sometime in the seventies, been broken up into small farms, and which was, during my childhood, being further divided into lots for one- and two-family dwellings such as our own—our life there, our friends, our schooling, our play, our churchgoing, our leaving home are not, here, my subject, for if I began to slide down the trail of memories which leads to and from that house, I would certainly become lost forever, and though I might, after some time, give shape and particularity to my own timeless childhood, I would not, I believe, find the end of the trail, and I would not—the important thing—have the time to set down what I have vowed now that I will set down.

I cannot remember a time when I was not, as a boy, playing baseball, though I retain no specific memory of the first time I held a bat, or of the first time I played in a game. I do recall that my older brothers were proud to take me with them to their games, and to have me show off my skills to their friends—and I was immensely happy to be able to please my brothers. My eldest brother, Tucker, played on Sundays for the Brooklyn Remsens, a semi-professional team which could, on a given day, hold its own with any team in the Negro Leagues, and I accompanied him, thus, as the team's mascot and bat boy, enjoying my first taste of fame. I was seven years old at the time, but I could, already, play in games with boys of ten and eleven. I became part of the pre-game entertainment, standing at home-plate in a baggy Remsens uniform, and taking a turn in batting practice.

Professional baseball was prohibited on Sundays in New York during those years, so the crowd would be admitted free, and after the game had begun I would go around the stands with some of the players (who were waiting their turns at bat) and collect money for the programs we sold: fifty cents for programs in the grandstand, and twenty-five cents in the bleachers. Tucker's team played their games in Dexter Park, and some of the players filled my ears, in the dugout, with stories of the places they had been to, and the things they had seen. They were forever debating the merits of various players, and bragging of their exploits with women. The player whose name I recall most from those years was Oliver Marcelle, a man of Creole origin who had been nicknamed “The Ghost,” and who, by the time I had begun playing in games for money (at the age of fourteen) had already disappeared, although he would still have been a young man himself. What had driven him from baseball was the fact that, in a fight he and Frank Warfield had during a game somewhere in Cuba, Warfield had bit Marcelle's nose off. Marcelle had been, according to my brother's teammates, tall and handsome, and had fancied himself a lady's man; after the fight, he tried wearing a black patch across his nose, but within a year became so distraught that he could not play baseball anymore.

I told the story to my mother, but the result was for her to chastise my brother for allowing me to hear such stories. She seemed to feel that I was, somehow, afraid for my own face, and though I protested, she insisted on comforting me, and on telling me how handsome I would be. She did not, however, dispute the truth of the story.

When my father died in 1914, Tucker stopped playing on Sundays since he could not earn as much money from the game as he could from carpentry, a trade he had learned from my father. My brother Paul, who was still in high school, took Tucker's place, however, and I continued to spend my Sundays in Dexter Park. By the age of twelve I was pitching batting practice and was occasionally being sent in as a pinch runner. In the games I played with friends from school, in the the fields already mentioned, I was miles ahead of the others. I remember nothing in particular about any game during these years, except that, while they were in progress, I thought of nothing except the games themselves.