Sam's Legacy Read online

  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.

  Whatever else may have nagged at me—my brothers, my sister, my work at school, my chores at home, my mother’s state of being, my battle not to ruin permanently what Tucker had taught me was “the temple of the body,” my broodings concerning my color—these were gone, not in any ecstasy, but in the simple act of playing, in the attention required to see through every seemingly leisurely detail of any game, short or long. I remember specific feelings, of course—and can see myself now, as if I am one of the old men who would stand in the high grass, on the third base side of our makeshift playing field, clucking over us: I was tall for my age—six feet by the age of thirteen—and though everyone in our section (which was all black by this time) knew me and never thought but that I was one of them, still there must have been something striking in watching this slender, fair-skinned boy, in overalls and flannel shirt (the sleeve slit into strips with a razor blade, as Tucker’s teammate Bill Stacey had taught me, so that, in the follow-through, the ball would fly at the batter from a background of fluttering white), rearing back, striding forward, and firing bullets.

  I had, from this age, a natural hop to my fast ball, so that it seemed to be a fiery white line moving from my hand to the plate, heading downward, breaking some fifteen or twenty feet from the plate, soaring toward the catcher’s glove at an angle identical to that at which it had been moving down. That is to say, I picture it now not as a ball in flight, but as one long hard white line, and when I threw it, if I thought at all, I thought of it this way also: as if there were a transparent piece of tubing (narrowly larger than a baseball) on a line from my hand to the plate, through whic
h, without touching the sides, my ball would spin. I threw no curves, no sinkers, no changes of pace, and did not—a source of pride at the time—have need to throw the various kinds of spitballs that others relied on (the most popular being the cut-ball spitball, in which the ball, where the spit was to be applied, would be nicked with a bottle cap). Unlike most fastball pitchers, I had also—my greatest strength ultimately, and the talent which would have seen me through for the long pull—little trouble with control; I was able, from the beginning, to tell the ball where I wanted it to go.

  In 1919, at the age of fourteen, I pitched my first game for the Brooklyn Remsens, defeating the Brooklyn Atlantics 6 to 2, with my brother Paul catching me. The enthusiasm of my brothers for my pitching performance was infectious, and I soon found myself something of a hero in our neighborhood, to the children and the old men; my mother fussed over me also—had she not told me that I was her White Star, her Hope and Deliverance?

  I started games every Sunday after that, from March through October, and during the years 1919 through 1923 I rarely lost. By that time Paul was working with Tucker (they opened their own store in the Bushwick section, featuring custom-made furniture); George was attending Columbia, on his way to the New England Conservatory, and it was agreed upon by all that I too would attend a university; thus I stayed in school and did not accompany the Remsens when they traveled away from Brooklyn. Even during July and August, when school was out, I did not go against my family’s wishes; I stayed home, reading books, giving piano lessons (thereby making my contribution to the family’s expenses), helping Tucker and Paul in their store, and waiting for Sundays.

  Despite my brothers’ pride in my reputation (for I was known throughout Brooklyn), and their knowledge of exactly how good I was, my family began, I know, to fear my abilities, for the idea that I might want to make a career of baseball was odious and impossible. Riding around in broken-down cars, playing in games that were preceded and followed by minstrel shows, being teammates with men who were generally of little or no education—this was not, in brief, the life that had been envisioned for me, the life of a gentleman.

  As for myself, I did not think much about it one way or the other. Traveling around the country—seeing far-off cities and living the life that Tucker’s teammates had described so graphically for me—this held no particular appeal. I was happy at home, in Brooklyn, pitching on Sundays; what I wanted, simply, was to be able to play more often and (I admitted this at the time) to play in front of larger crowds. More than this, I began, after the first time Mr. McGraw came to Dexter Park to watch me play (in 1923), to nurture the most foolish of my private dreams: that I would, one day, play in Yankee Stadium (which had opened that year), for a team of blacks, before a crowd of whites and blacks, and that I would, in the name of my people, defeat the enemy.

  The vision lacked specifics: I do not recall if I saw myself pitching for a team that was all black, yet part of the Major Leagues; if my team were part of a separate league which played in an annual World Series against the white champions; or if I saw the team as, somehow, of mixed races—like the All Nations Club (but with the blacks as regulars and the whites as substitutes). I knew only that I wanted to be there, proving to the public what all baseball men knew in private. What I dreamt of, then, was that I might someday have the best of both worlds: to be the champion of my own people, loved and honored as one of them (as the best of them)—and, at the same time, to have my abilities (and thus, the abilities of all my brothers) acknowledged as superior by those whose color skin I possessed.

  I did not, however, think things through in this manner. I knew only, when Mr. McGraw came up to me after the game, and when he shook my hand and told me that he wished to speak with me in private, that—though I gave him my coldest manner, my most indifferent air—I saw, not the dream that was soon to burn in my own head, but the light in the eyes of my teammates, the slight breathing in of satisfaction by Paul and Tucker and George, the deferential way in which all those friends and fans who had come down from the stands to shake my hand began to back away; so that I was left alone with Mr. McGraw at a time when, truly, I wanted the warmth of those other bodies around me. I must have known, of course, that I would say no to whatever offer he might have made, and if, as I accepted his praise and his good wishes, as I watched his ruddy hands gesticulate, I sensed what was to come, then I must have sensed also where this left me—I sensed, that is, not only that I could never have the best of that world I was about to begin dreaming of, but that I would no longer be able to have, unthinkingly and fully, the world which had until then given me such pleasure.

  The alternatives were clearer then, though I can perhaps name them more convincingly now; no matter which road I chose, I saw that I would lose. Therefore, I chose no road, but stayed where I was. “I grew up in a fighting baseball school, young man,” McGraw told me. “And I will fight for you, if you’re willing. You’re well-known in Brooklyn, but you’re only seventeen years old. Your body will change—if you drop from sight for one or two seasons, people will forget. I’d like to have you play for the New York Giants, and I believe, taking on a new name at the age of, say, nineteen, that this can be. I’ve seen the best of the best, and you can be one of them. “I said nothing.” It has long been my hope, as you may know, to bring people of your race into the Major Leagues, and I believe—if you will play the ballgame as I have outlined it—that, after you are established, we will be able to reveal your true identity. Once the breaking of the color bar is a fact, I know that we will have no trouble. Judge Landis, the Commissioner of Baseball, will support me in this—he already knows, in fact, why I have come here today. If you say yes, you will be doing a fine thing, for yourself, for baseball, and for your race.”

  I did not, of course, hesitate—nor did I give him any reasons; what reasons, after all, even to myself—and more, to all my teammates, my brothers, the fans who loved me—would have seemed adequate? I would, to be sure, have been a fool, by their lights, to have refused, and yet, if I had accepted, I would have proven to them the very thing I longed to disprove—that I was one of them. If I had been the instrument for the success of Mr. McGraw’s plot, I would have only cast greater doubt on who I was; I would have succeeded, that is, not for those things which made me one with my brothers, but for those very things which set me apart from them, and this included, not merely my outward appearance, but those God-given skills which made me special, and which were destined, over and above the reality of my origins, to give my life its special providence.

  This then must be something like what entered into the sentence I gave Mr. McGraw without prethought, with a shrug of my lean shoulders, and with a smile which must have shown some kind of embarrassed appreciation for his having gone to the trouble of approaching me: “I’m a colored boy, Mr. McGraw,” I said, and I said it without any particular pride, without deference or shame, and without the rage which would come later.

  Was I being merely selfish?

  This is, of course, the question which came to haunt me when it was all over—and it is a question for which I have never had an adequate reply. I had to choose, and to choose irrevocably, and I have never doubted the choice I made, since I have never believed that I had a choice. What I have doubted, though—and the distinction may, to one who has not lived with it, seem more foolish than fine—is my belief, my faith in that decision. I have not considered that interview with McGraw to be one of the high points of my life for the very reason that I do not—and did not—feel it to be a moment of decision; yet all of my life, and its events, have clearly flowed from what passed on that day.

  I knew, first of all, that I could not have accepted his offer and have remained the player he courted; to put it most simply, how could I, disguising myself as a white man, have retained the speed of my fast ball, and the superb control I had of that speed? I knew, as soon as he had presented the possibility of another life to me, that I could only, during games in such a life, have beco
me, literally, a self-conscious man. And if, on the mound, I had begun thinking at all, then I surely would have been lost.

  Still, though I could not have done otherwise, I must wonder, now more than then, if an opposite decision would not have led to early opportunities for others, and if, despite the (to me) deceptive foundation these opportunities would have been based upon, they would have been, nonetheless, opportunities. If I reflect, however, and see that my excessive pride may have kept me from doing what Mr. McGraw thought I could do for my people, then I must also see that it was this very pride which had made me who I was; if I had lacked an ounce of it, I would not have been the man Mr. McGraw would have chosen to approach. What the world calls selfishness or self-interest was necessarily a part of that pride, and it made me the man and player I was; and yet, if I could not have done otherwise, and if I do not, after all the years which have passed, doubt my decision, why is it that my faith in that decision seems always so weak, crumbling now more than ever?

  That summer I went on the road with the Remsens—as far west as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and as far south as Washington, D.C.—and when the fall came, I had to tell my mother what her fears had already confirmed: that I had decided to try to make my way as a ballplayer in the Negro Leagues. I sat at her feet, my head on her lap, and, as I had expected, she did not protest; my brothers, for their part, tried to persuade me to go to college first, to play baseball on Sundays and during summers, but I think they were—certainly this was so with Paul and George—secretly glad of my decision; they assured me that they would, as always, see to my mother’s needs; I vowed that I would be home as often as possible during the season, and would continue to live at home during the winter months. Listening to my mother humming, I dreamt of her standing in the crowd at Yankee Stadium, in a box behind third base, wearing an orchid corsage. I tried—swelling with my own pride—to imagine the mother’s pride she would feel in my moment of glory, and I thought, at the time, that there was no other gift I could have given her which would have made her life as full. My imagination, clearly, was even more foolish and self-serving than my life could possibly have been.