The Boys of Summer (32 page)

Pafko looked at some signatures. Then he turned the glove over and wrote his name on the back. “I don’t belong with those others,” he said. “Thanks for a good club sandwich. Maybe I saved you a little money, huh?

“Furillo, Snider and guys who could play like that, you oughta buy them the steaks.”

Irony ringed Joe Black’s life in baseball. He appeared without acclaim, determined and fearless, and quickly became the strongest pitcher on the team. Then, with success, came dread. These afternoons as hero might vanish as suddenly as they had come. He had longed to succeed. Now nightmares warned of a sudden end. All of Joe Black’s dreams came true, the good ones and the bad. Five years after his brilliant Dodger season, he was dropped by the Washington Senators, a last-place ball club. His baseball skill was spent. At thirty-three, he would have to make a new life and find another dream.

I saw him two years later one sweltering afternoon at Yankee Stadium, still looking enormous and powerful. A ragged mix of children chattered behind him. “Hey, man,” he said, “you still typing?”

“For Newsweek.”

“Oh, that’s why I don’t see your name; but how are you gonna get well known typing if nobody sees your name?”

His insights were quick and accurate. “What are you doing now, Joe?” I said.

“Getting my master’s at Seton Hall. Me and Doris been divorced. I’m back in Plainfield, New Jersey, where I started teaching and coaching at the junior high school. These are my team. I come to introduce ‘em to the manager.”

He meant Casey Stengel, who was leaning on a strut of the batting cage, surveying line drives stroked by Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. “Hey, Skip,” Black called from a box seat railing. “You got a minute?”

Stengel turned and approached in a rapid limp. “Yes, sir, yes, sir. I remember ya. Good fast one. What’s all that ya got behind ya there?”

“This is my team, Case. They’re having troubles. They’ve lost sixteen out of eighteen games and I wondered what the old master thought I ought to teach ‘em.”

“Lost sixteen out of eighteen, you say?” Stengel scratched his chin. “Well, first you better teach ‘em to lose in the right spirit.”

Long afterward Black left the Plainfield ghetto and went to work For the Greyhound Corporation in Chicago. Now he had written that he was married again, owned a small house on Yates Street, and that the new Mrs. Black, Mae Nell, made excellent roast beef. “So when you get to Chicago, we’d like you to try some.”

I found Yates Street on the Far South Side and Black’s home in a row of neat, buff modern homes, each showing a picture window to a house across the street. Walking up the steps, I saw Black in silhouette holding a baby at one shoulder. He opened the door and greeted me and grinned. He had put on weight at the middle. He must have gained fifty pounds, over the 220 he weighed as a pitcher. Against his bulk, Martha Jo, two months old, cuddled. Her torso was hidden by one hand.

“Well, come on in. This is Mae Nell.” A trim, pretty woman said hello. “She’s from Houston. The house isn’t really set up
yet. We haven’t been in it that long. Sit down and make do with what we have.” On a table in the long narrow living room, Black’s old glove stood, bronzed. “That’s the glove I used when I became the first black man who ever won in the World Series. One nine five two. You saw it.” Black was forty-six, divorced, relocated, but, except for the weight, he had not changed much. The face, the manner were the same, and at once the mood on Yates Street became what it had been in the winter after the World Series, when we played three-man basketball in a Brooklyn gym, Joe always taking care not to trample smaller men, and afterward we drank malted milks, to get back strength, and talked about the funny and exciting things that had been happening, and that lay ahead.

Martha Jo began to cry. Black rose. He was wearing a loose shirt, as heavy people will. He paced the room, making deep, soft sounds to his daughter.

“Before the World Series of 1952, I walked Chico—Joe Junior—who was the same age. I had no idea that morning I was gonna do something special. I was going out to pitch a game. I’d pitched a lot of games. I beat Allie Reynolds, 3 to 2, and when I get the last out, they all come round. Reese, Hodges, Robinson. They’re all slapping me on the back. Then it hit me. I didn’t worry about a thing before, but going back to the clubhouse, I’m all butterflies.

“The first time Charlie used me in relief was here in Chicago; I went an inning and I reared back and fired and nobody touched me. Afterward Dizzy Dean showed up and said to Dressen, ‘Hey, that big colored guy throws as hard as me.’ And then at the end of that season, I’d relieved forty-five times, Dressen gave me a start. It’s a two-thirty game and here it was two-twenty and I kept sitting in the dugout. ‘Hey,’ Dressen said. ‘You’re starting. How come you’re not warming up?’ I told him I wouldn’t know what to do with ten minutes’ warm-up. In the bullpen I’d warm up with
twenty throws. I took seven minutes. I won easy.”

He was twenty-eight then. He felt so strong he believed he would pitch until he was forty. As rookie-of-the-year he accepted a contract for only $12,500 to pitch in 1953. “It was going to be a progression, increasing each time. In ten years, 1963, I’d be making forty thousand. But ten years later I was long gone. The thing about the colored players then was that we couldn’t make the majors early enough. All of us, we had to wait for Jackie.”

Black grew up in an integrated neighborhood, on the west side, the wrong side, of the railroad tracks in Plainfield. The Trianos and the Petris were Italian. There were Polish and Jewish families whose names he has forgotten. It was the 1930’s, and people begged, Joe Black remembered over roast beef, with Brussels sprouts and salad. Streets went unpaved and everyone was poor. His family had moved north from Virginia and Joe’s father had made himself a mechanic. He was a big man with strong hands and he could fix a Ford or a Dodge runabout as well as anyone. But Joe was born in 1924, so by the time he became aware of things, his father was no longer repairing cars. In the Depression a black mechanic was fortunate to sweep in a factory one day a week.

Joe’s mother supported the family, cooking in other people’s kitchens and scrubbing other people’s laundry. A picture survives of Joe at six standing before a little frame house wearing tattered shorts and a shirt and no shoes. “That,” he says, “was my Sunday best.”

After the election of Franklin Roosevelt, Black’s father dug ditches for the WPA and, as Joe remembers it, earned not money but certificates. Each was good for a different staple. One of the three children got into a line where the certificate was good for a loaf of bread. Another got into line for stew. That was how the family fetched dinners, until 1937 when Joe was
a freshman in high school, and times improved and his father found a job.

At nine, Joe began selling newspapers. Two years later, in the autumn of 1935, he had picked up his quota at the offices of the Plainfield
Courier
when he noticed a crowd standing outside on Church Street. “Hey,” he asked a circulation man, “what are they doing, hanging around here?”

“They’re keeping up with the World Series.” The newspaper posted inning-by-inning scores in a window. “The Tigers are beating the Cubs.”

“Mister,” Black said, terribly impressed,
“I’m
going to play ball when I’m older. All those people are going to keep up with
me.”

From that day, baseball commanded his dreams. All he had was a sponge ball, but he threw it for hours, so he could learn to pitch. His bat was broken. It was only half a bat. He swung it over and over again to learn to hit. He heard that major leaguers wore spikes on their shoes. Once he jammed his feet into tin cans and hobbled. He wanted the feel of metal underneath him. His mother worried. “Joe, what are you wasting all this time with ball games for? You got a good mind, Joe. Get an education so’s you’ll have it better than me and your father.”

“I’ll have it better. I’ll play ball.”

In the sixth grade, Joe entered Evergreen School, a Georgian structure set in a middle-class neighborhood, and suddenly became aware that he was different from some children. “Not different black,” he says. “Different poor.” His mother had time to wash her children’s things but had to leave them roughdried. Joe taught himself to use an iron. He wanted to be neat. When he began at Evergreen School, he changed shirts every day, rotating the two he had. Boys taunted him. The collars he ironed for himself were frayed.

For two months Joe endured teasing about old shirts, patched trousers, ruined shoes. Then, after school, he selected one of his
tormentors, and knocked him down. A day later he chose another victim. The teasing stopped.

He believed in God and thanked Him for his powerful athlete’s body. Sports came easily. At Plainfield High he played varsity football, basketball and baseball. He could play anywhere on the diamond. He could hit for power, run and field and throw. At home, he filled a scrapbook with pictures from the Plainfield
Courier.
He liked Lou Gehrig and Mel Ott, who played up in New York, and Paul Waner, who played in Pittsburgh, and Paul Derringer, who pitched out in Cincinnati. His special team was the Detroit Tigers. They captured him during the 1935 World Series when they defeated the Cubs, four games to two. His second-favorite Tiger, Charlie Gehringer, played second base with beautiful agility and once batted .371. His absolute favorite was Henry Benjamin Greenberg from the Bronx. The year Black was fourteen, Hank Greenberg hit fifty-eight home runs. Only Babe Ruth had done better. Black decided he would be a first baseman because Greenberg played first base, and two years later when Greenberg switched to left field, Black decided that he too would be a left fielder.

“No,” said the coach at Plainfield High. “Pitch, Joe, and play short.”

In April of Black’s senior year, the coach asked about plans. Joe said he expected to become a ball player. He was team captain. The coach nodded and said something about a college scholarship, but Joe meant that he wanted to be a ball player in the major leagues. That May, a big league scout, who doubled as local umpire, offered contracts to three Plainfield schoolboys. Black was puzzled. “Hey,” he said to the scout, “how come you sign up all these guys and don’t sign me?”

The scout blinked. “Colored guys don’t play baseball.”

“What? You crazy? You’ve seen me playing for three years.”

“I mean Organized Baseball.”

“This is organized. We got a coach and uniforms.”

“I mean there’s no colored
in the Big Leagues.”

Joe felt that something had struck the back of his neck. There was no pain, only shock. The private hope on which his life was built stood stripped, not merely as boyish fantasy but as
stupid
boyish fantasy. Standing on the Plainfield High School ball field, the sweat of a game running down his forehead, Black pretended that he’d been joking. “Oh, sure,” he said to the scout. “Just forget it.”

That night he took his scrapbook from a drawer and studied it. Every face, Gehrig, Ott, Waner, Derringer, the others,
all
were white. Without tears Joe began to shred the book in his big hands. But before he did, he carefully clipped a picture of Hank Greenberg, crashing out a long home run. He could not bear both, to have the dream dead and to have nothing, nothing at all to show from the scrapbook of his boyhood.

The best scholarship offer came from Morgan State, a black liberal arts college in Baltimore. If he played baseball and football at Morgan, he’d be granted room, board and tuition for $10 a month. Joe’s oldest sister became a stock girl in Bamberger’s Department Store in Newark and at the end of the summer she and Joe’s mother pooled funds. Using the Bamberger’s employee discount, they bought Joe a new pair of pants, two shirts, five pair of underwear and a raincoat. Despite the discount, there was not enough for an overcoat or a suit. “You’re not going to college to get pretty, Joe,” the mother said. “You’re going to get an education.”

The first thing for Joe to learn was that he was black. At Morgan State he was assigned a room in Banneker Hall, the dormitory named for Benjamin Banneker, a freeborn Maryland Negro who taught himself astronomy and published an almanac in 1790. Black had never heard of Benjamin Banneker. During a student assembly, someone asked that everybody join in the Negro National Anthem. Joe was preparing to begin, “Oh, say can you see,” and was surprised when the others sang something
else. “Hey, man,” he said to the student at his right, “what’s this you’re singing?”

“You must be kiddin’.”

“I’m asking.”

The song, popular among Negroes at the time, was called “Lift Every Voice.” “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ “ the other Negro said, “is the
white
people’s anthem.”

The denouement approached comedy. During a time-out at a varsity football game, Joe, ball carrier and linebacker, pulled off his helmet and rubbed the back of one hand upward against his brow. It was a habit he had acquired playing with whites at Plainfield.

“Hey,” said a Morgan State lineman, “what’s that you’re doing?”

“Brushing the hair out of my eyes.”

“What hair? Colored people’s hair doesn’t grow that way.”

“I mean I’m wiping sweat,” Joe said.

“You don’t know what you mean.”

All at once, when he was eighteen, Black confronted his color, and as he did he confronted bigotry. He remembers hating whites for several months before deciding that hate held neither profit nor the keys to any kingdom. As long as he was a Negro, he reasoned, he ought to find out what a Negro was and what a Negro could become and then make the most of himself. He would not let white prejudice warp him. He wanted to live by a motto he had heard somewhere once: “Grab onto life when you’re young. You aren’t going to pass this way again.”

He served the U.S. Army more as athlete than as soldier. “Sixteen months after I was drafted before I touched a rifle. I pitched a lot.” After World War II he signed with the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League and resumed studying at Morgan. Pitching earned enough to pay full tuition. With a degree, he could coach and teach. His own lot would be better than his father’s. If not content, he was amiably resigned.