Sam's Legacy (46 page)

When Tidewater returned and was preparing supper, Sam told him that he had decided—that he was ready to leave. He thanked him for what he had done. “If you could go upstairs and throw some clothes into a suitcase for me—and I'll tell you where I have a few bucks stashed.”

“You haven't heard the end of my story,” Tidewater stated. He stood at the stove, frying steaks for them.

“You can write to me,” Sam said. “I'll leave you an address.”

Sam saw the man's eyes bulge. Tidewater raised the frypan in his left hand, to turn the steaks. “Don't be like your father. Everything is not a joke.” Sam heard the sizzling, saw Tidewater wince, jerk his head back from hot grease that had splattered him. “You haven't heard the end of my story. You will stay for that. It is the least you can do.”

Sam wanted to concentrate on other things. “Whatever you say,” he said, and sat down at the table. Tidewater set Sam's plate in front of him—steak, peas, mashed potatoes—and sat across from him.

“Where will you go?” Tidewater asked.

“You know.”

“I wish you could have stayed longer.” Sam watched the man's fingers as he cut his steak. “It has meant a lot to me, you know, having you here since your father left—having somebody to share this time with.”

“Sure,” Sam said, hardly paying attention. “Everybody needs somebody, I guess.”

“Not at all,” Tidewater snapped. “That's your easy way out.” He smiled in a way that made Sam shiver. “The Lord chastiseth him whom He loveth.”

“Look,” Sam said, watching Tidewater's fork pierce a piece of steak, “if you got more for me to read, give it here. I don't have to rush right out. While you're getting my stuff together, I could take a look.”

While Sam was eating, Tidewater left for his room below, and a few minutes later he returned and gave Sam the pages. He was, Sam saw, dreaming—a thin smile curved upward in his cracked pale skin. “I remember what Ben said, when I had given him one of my usual speeches—citing those philosophers who have claimed that, given the suffering and injustice of this world, it is better not to have been born. ‘Better not to have been born?' he said to me. ‘Of course—but how many, after all, are fortunate enough to enjoy such an opportunity? Perhaps one in ten thousand…'”

Sam saw tears in the man's eyes. “I don't get it,” Sam said. “How can anyone not be born?”

“Ah Sam,” Tidewater said. “That's why I chose you to read my story.” He started to reach for Sam's hand, but stopped himself. “I was a baseball player,” he said. “All of what I have written is true, but that part is also true. I was a baseball player.”

“Sure,” Sam said. He dipped a piece of steak into gravy. “I never said I didn't believe it.”

“Oh I was splendid, Sam,” Tidewater went on. “If you could have seen me then, on the mound—oh if you could have seen me!”

“Flo told me about them taking the kid away,” Sam said. “It's why I'm not…”

“I understand that,” Tidewater said. “Things like that have their effect. They do not merely happen when they do.” Sam watched Tidewater's gray throat and stopped eating, to listen. “‘There is a certain providence in the fall of a sparrow. If…'” His voice trailed off, weak.

“Birds,” Sam said. “It's always birds.”

Tidewater laughed lightly, and Sam did too, though he was not sure why. “Oh if you could have seen me then, Sam!”

“You can tell me about Babe Ruth too, if you want,” Sam offered. “Like I said, I got some time—as long as I get out before the morning comes.”

MY LIFE AND DEATH IN THE NEGRO AMERICAN BASEBALL LEAGUE

A SLAVE NARRATIVE

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

I caress Barton's scarred legs and run my index finger along the inward-folding curves of skin. I ask Jack Henry to tell me about the old-timers, the men who had played before I was born. Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion, had been a first baseman for the Philadelphia Giants. I give Little Johnny Jones the house he desires; I feed women to Kelly; I make Rose Kinnard's face whole again; I ring the money in for them all and, in my mind, holding them to me with my long arms, reveal to them the man they never knew. (“Nothing shall I, while sane, compare with a dear friend,” Horace writes.)

But if he did not show himself, he was not there. My finger glides along skin so thin that I feel I am touching bone directly. It is too late, of course. Even if things could be otherwise than they were—if we could replay those years together—I would never be for them what they have become for me. I reduce their lives to images which please my own mind. In this, I am merely like other men. Why should I perceive the world differently—it is not my eyes or my heart, after all, which are black. Involved in their own lives, and wanting to give me my due as a player, my teammates would doubtless, if asked, remember me fondly. They would (those who are still alive) call me a great pitcher and hitter; they would remark on my quietness, my presumed intellect; they would not allude in public utterance to things private; and they would—clearest of all—not condemn me for my final act. They would have need neither for my gifts, nor for my confession. Why should Barton want me to nurse legs which, deformed though they were, carried him through a career which brought him an income he had never dreamt possible? He would prefer, surely, to be called Little Johnny's sister, and to keep wearing the uniform of the Brooklyn Royal Dodgers.

There remain, then, only facts. I met George Herman “Babe” Ruth some six weeks after the close of the 1924 World Series, and we became lovers. I saw him for the first time on the afternoon of November 26, 1924, when we played his team, the Touring Yankee All-Stars, in Charlotte, North Carolina. When I emerged from the dugout at the city baseball park and glanced, as I always did, toward the outfield to see which way the wind was blowing any flag which might be there, he was at the plate, striding forward with his right foot, his back to me. I tried not to see him. There were no flags, which I must have already known, since the outfield had no fence behind it, but ran to pasture. There were ample stands along the first and third base lines, for whites; ropes had been strung up along the left and right field lines, behind which our own fans stood. Boys—white and colored—had, as always, ducked under the ropes and roamed in the pastures behind the Yankee outfielders, hoping for long drives.

He seemed as real, standing there, as he had been in my mind. I was carrying the photo, now broken along its folds. Bingo called to me, telling me to begin my warm-ups, but I stood and stared, and saw, as Ruth followed through and his profile was, for the first time, revealed to me, just how black his skin was. His turn at bat completed, he picked up his glove and walked in my direction, along the first base line.

“Hiya, kid,” he said easily. I looked away. The greeting was, of course, the one he was famous for—the one he gave to the world: to fans, children, friends, teammates, sportswriters. His voice was young and thin—lighter than my own. Though I had known his age (he was ten years older than I was, and had been playing in the major leagues since 1914), it surprised me to see with my eyes that he too was a young man. His skin, though burnt from the sun, seemed especially smooth, and his round features made him appear more boyish than his photographs had indicated. His smile, sincere and vapid, revealed the dumbness my teammates had enjoyed mocking. (“Once,” Bingo had told us, “when the fans got on him during an exhibition game—this was in Montreal—they say that they started yelling ‘Nigger' at him, and that Ruth, who never did have rabbit ears, only smiled back at them, pleased, remarking to a teammate, ‘See—they know me up here too.'”)

I wound up, kicked high, and fired the ball at Bingo; it left my hand too soon, though, from far back of my ear, and I saw at once that it would be wild. I felt faint. Bingo leapt, but the ball sailed above his head and Ruth laughed as his teammates, at the plate, hearing Bingo's cry of “Heads up!” ducked and cowered, covering their ears, unaware of the direction from which danger approached. The ball hit no one, however, but skipped in among the fans. Ruth jogged off in his bandylegged way, without looking at me again. He tipped his hat to the crowd along the right field line, behind the ropes, and they cheered him.

I saw Johnson then, leaning with one arm on the top of the dugout, some ten steps from me. “Sure now, fair ass,” he said, picking at his teeth with a fingernail and smiling in a way which made me burn. “You want to pace yourself.”

His voice revived me. I glared at him—at the purple blackness of his skin—and fired the ball at Bingo, stinging him in his glove hand. My weakness was gone as quickly as it had come. I thought of Johnson's age: his perforated face told no lies. In every city in which we played, throughout the southeastern United States, I and not Johnson had been the central attraction. I was the man who, in the Negro press, was already being called “the Black Babe,” though my ignorant public could not know that the young man so heralded bore the likeness of one they would refer to, when they had seen him, as “an all gone”—the term deriving from their belief that any Negro of my color would have to have passed through three generations in which white and black had mingled—mulatto, quadroon, octoroon—until, in the fourth, the dark pigment would have been all gone.

I was also, then, a curiosity. After games, young boys would wait outside the ballparks to look closely at me. The brave ones would touch me. I remember none of them—not a single face—though I do recall the voice of one boy who, following me from the park to our hotel, in Savannah, kept begging me to tell him what he had to do to make his skin white. “Oh cap'n,” he whined, dancing around me, bowing his head, his hat in hand. “I'd give anything to have skin like yours. What I got to do—tell me please, cap ‘n. Oh what I got to do to make my skin white.”

“For what is this love of friendship?” Cicero asks. “Why does no one love either an ugly youth, or a handsome old man?” I did not, for once, believe that I envied Johnson those things which enabled him to hate me with such an indifferent scorn. I did not listen to Bingo, telling me to take my time. I knew that the Yankee players had stopped around home plate to watch the fast ball they had heard so much about, and I sensed that his eyes were, from behind, even while he joked with his fans, watching my every move, gauging my speed.

I had nothing to hide. I threw with all I had, yet easily. I set down the Yankees—Dugan, “Witt, Meusel—in order in the first inning, and my teammates did not need to tell me how good I was. My ears were ringing, yet I heard nothing. Jones's banter was for the pleasure of the white fans, behind our dugout. I burned with pride and did not believe that any man could touch me.

Ruth was the first to face me in the second inning, and as I watched him smile at me from his moon face, I thought that his eyes were playful, that he thought he could toy with me. But it was probably, as always, only his beloved fans he was thinking of; he would have done anything to please a crowd. I reared back and, wasting nothing, fired two strikes across the heart of the plate while he stood, amazed, with bat on shoulder. He hitched his belt then, resolutely—as was always the case in the off-season, and sometimes during the season, he had grown thick around the middle, from too much eating and drinking. As others often remarked, his shape was, incongruously enough for a man of such grace, like that of a pregnant woman. The fans, excited by the confrontation, were silent. I kicked high and threw again, whipping my arm downward and snapping the ball off the tips of my fingers. The ball flew—a brilliant white line, low, toward the knees. He stepped forward and lunged, his bloated torso twisting in vain, for the ball was already cracking the pocket of Bingo's glove even as Ruth was bringing the bat around. I had never thrown faster. The crowd roared; I felt the blood pounding in my ears. Bingo rifled the ball to third base, and my teammates flipped it around the infield. I could not have done other than what I did, but I wondered nonetheless, and it was a moment before I allowed myself to look toward the plate again. He was still there, as if contemplating what had happened to him. His eyes met mine. They showed puzzlement for an instant only, and then he smiled and returned to the bench, clucking to himself: I had pleased him.

In our half of the third inning, I took my first turn at bat and, standing in against Waite Hoyt (himself a native of Brooklyn, as all our fans, receiving reports of the game back north, would have known), I did not hesitate. The first pitch was letter-high and outside and I moved into it with an ease that belied the energy released: I met the ball solidly and drove it high and far toward right field—Ruth took one step back and then stopped. He turned and watched the ball soar—far beyond him, where the crowd of young boys had also turned and were already giving chase.

I gave all I had. In his second at bat, Ruth set himself for me, and after swinging and missing at the first two pitches, and taking the third pitch for a ball, he timed a low fast ball perfectly and drilled it to right field—straight at Johnson, however, who took it easily. In his third at-bat of the day I took Bingo's instruction and sent the first pitch for his chin, to keep him from crowding the plate the way he loved to. He fell down and sat there laughing, even though the pitch had nearly hit him—a pitch like the one with which, four years earlier, his teammate Carl Mays had killed Ray Chapman. He got up and took his stance, swinging at the air several times, slowly, giving away no ground. I felt nothing and thought of nothing except, as always, of what I was doing. I threw hard, to the inside again. He swung—on time—but the ball, snapped off and breaking, rose in the last twenty feet and passed above the bat. “Oh I feel the breeze,” Jones called. I pitched again—a called strike, low on the outside corner—but Ruth continued to regard me with a smile. His shoulders were broad and though one could feel, as he took his practice swings, the power they contained, the great power, as I myself knew, came not from size or strength, but from the energy generated in that moment when bat and ball met and the wrists circled one another, snapping across—breaking was the word the players used—as if straining against an impossibly fierce wind. I felt no fear, though, and with two strikes on him gave him my best—a bullet across the middle, waist-high; he swung, his wrists snapped swiftly, but his bat only grazed the ball—so slightly that the ball did not alter its course. It smacked into Bingo's glove for the third strike. “You own that man!” Jones called. “Oh you own that man now, honey!”