A Well-Paid Slave (6 page)

Flood volunteered Carl's armed robbery conviction and drug addiction, but newspapers had already covered Carl's most recent brush with the law. Curt kept his drinking, womanizing, and financial problems to himself. Nor did he reveal the secret behind his portrait-painting business.

“Nothing you've said so far scares me,” Flood said.

Miller tactfully broached the question of Flood's counsel. More than just Flood's interests were at stake here. His lawsuit would affect current players, future players, and the Players Association's current and future negotiations with the owners. Flood, therefore, needed the best possible legal representation. Zerman possessed neither the experience with antitrust law nor the stature to be able to litigate a case to the Supreme Court. Sitting at Flood's side, Zerman agreed with Miller's assessment. He was impressed by Miller's candor with Flood about the risks involved in the lawsuit.

Flood expressed concern to Miller that a top law firm's fees for a case like this could amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. He asked Miller for the union's help. Flood's awareness of the legal costs impressed Miller.

At some point during their conversation, Flood volunteered a motivating force behind his lawsuit. He told the story about sitting on a stool in the clubhouse in Maracaibo, Venezuela, feeling the shock of being traded after two seasons in the Reds' minor league system and vowing that he would never let himself be traded again. Both Miller and Flood would repeat the Venezuela story many times. Many players, however, are traded early in their careers. They do not react by threatening to sue Major League Baseball.

After four hours of interrogation, Miller said he would not begin to seek the Players Association's help until Flood went home for two weeks and thought about what they had discussed.

Flood did not immediately return to St. Louis. That night he ate dinner at a Greenwich Village restaurant with Phillies general manager John Quinn. They talked for four hours over dinner and drinks. The more time Flood spent with Quinn, the more he liked him.

Flood broached the subject of a salary for 1970, following Miller's advice to explore all his options. Quinn offered him $90,000 plus $8,000 for spring training expenses. Spring training expenses usually amounted to a few hundred dollars. Quinn's offer was nearly the $100,000 contract that he had sought from the Cardinals before the 1969 season. Money, however, was not the issue. The issue was whether Flood wanted to play baseball in 1970 and whether he was willing to submit to a system that ignored his desire to stay in St. Louis or play for another team of his choice.

An incident later that evening persuaded Quinn that Flood would play for the Phillies. A woman at the next table interrupted Flood's conversation with Quinn and said to Flood: “I know you from somewhere. Don't tell me. Lou Brock!”

Flood wanted to spare himself further embarrassment and to send the woman on her way as quickly as possible. “No, I'm Curt Flood,” he told the woman, “and this is John Quinn, the general manager of the Phillies. I'm with them now.”

With the words “I'm with them now,” Quinn believed that he had his man. He told several members of the Philadelphia media to expect a public announcement about Flood's signing.

To Flood, however, the words meant nothing. He never told Quinn about the meeting earlier that day with Miller and Moss or his problems with the reserve clause. At the end of four hours of dinner and drinks, Flood agreed to call Quinn in December.

On November 26, the day after dining with Quinn, Flood headed to a meeting in Philadelphia. Shortly after the trade, a Philadelphia-based executive for Gault Galleries, a national chain of art galleries, contacted Flood. Flood agreed to meet with the executive to explore possible business opportunities. He arrived at noon for a two-hour lunch at Penn Towers where they discussed the art franchise business. He visited the Gault warehouse, a suburban gallery, and then Gault's downtown offices. He even took home one of the gallery's paintings, a nude woman looking into her purse, painted by Paul Butterfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

During those seven hours, the two men could not agree on a business deal. Flood wanted part ownership in Gault and a possible tie-in with his own franchise business. Gault wanted him to work in public relations in conjunction with the opening of new galleries in the Philadelphia area. The Gault executive called Quinn and offered to serve as an intermediary in persuading Flood to come to Philadelphia. Quinn dismissed the offer, perhaps thinking that based on the “I'm with them now” comment, Flood was already on his way.

Flood returned to St. Louis and spent a week sitting around his apartment thinking about what Miller had told him. He and Zerman huddled at a St. Louis restaurant one night making a list of the pros and cons about suing baseball. They looked at each other after making the list. Flood decided to sue.

Flood called Miller in early December with his decision and his desire to enlist the union's help with legal fees. Miller suggested they meet once more in person. Miller and Moss had begun talking to some of the player representatives; Moss had also begun researching the law and plotting strategy. Miller wanted to give Flood an idea of their next move. He also wanted one last chance to look Flood over before they embarked on a lawsuit that would affect both of their futures.

One night in early December, Flood and a female companion arrived at Miller's Greenwich Village apartment for cocktails. Then they joined Miller and his wife, Terry, for a relaxing dinner at Nat Simon's Penguin, a steakhouse that billed itself as “the second most charming restaurant in the world.” The conversation over dinner and drinks was light. They talked about the case, but not with the intensity that had marked breakfast at the Summit Hotel.

Miller believed that in Flood he had found a principled man. He was still curious about why Flood was throwing away his career for a lawsuit he had little chance of winning and no chance of benefiting from, but Miller knew he might never know the answer to this question. It did not seem to be a coincidence that the potential plaintiff was black. Four hours of interrogation and their most recent dinner had not revealed the depths of Flood's racial convictions. Miller supported Flood yet still wondered where this young man was getting his resolve.

—Curt Flood's journal

C
urt Flood's inner strength came from his mother, Laura. She never feared anyone or anything—except for the Louisiana lynch mob that once tried to take her life.

Laura's first husband, a Houston man named Ivory Ricks, worked as a supervisor at a lumber mill in De Ridder, a small southwestern Louisiana mill town north of Lake Charles. A black supervisor did not sit well with the white workers in De Ridder in 1915, or their wives.

One of the white wives, who ran the lumber mill's company store, frequently took out her husband's frustrations at reporting to a black man on Laura. But one afternoon in the store, the woman pushed Laura too far.

“Laura,” the woman said, “I have been observing you, and you look like a clean nigger. I am going to let you wash my clothes.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Laura replied. “I wash my own clothes, but I wouldn't touch yours.”

The woman slapped Laura. Laura beat her to a pulp. A black man might supervise white men in Louisiana in 1915, but no black person could lay a hand on a white woman and live to tell about it. The word was out: Laura Ricks was going to be lynched.

With the mill workers loyal to Ivory Ricks holding off the mob by guarding his family's home, Laura and Ivory packed up the family's belongings, received an armed escort to the train station, and escaped unharmed to Houston. They soon moved to Oakland, California. By 1920, Laura had divorced Ricks. He won custody of their two children, but she took them anyway.

Laura and her children occasionally took the train from Oakland to De Quincy, Louisiana, a town 30 miles south of De Ridder where her parents lived. Laura would disembark in Houston, while her children continued to De Quincy to see their grandparents. Her children thought that she stayed in Houston because she liked the big-city nightlife. They were unaware of Laura's lingering fear of returning home to Louisiana and being lynched.

During one of those nights in Houston, a young piano player spotted Laura at a blues club. With her caramel complexion, bobbed hair, and long pants, Laura stood out among other African-American women during the mid-1920s. She told the man eight years her junior that she was from Oakland, but she refused to give him her address or phone number.

Herman Flood left his native Texas and his job as a cook at a local drugstore and followed Laura to Oakland. He found a job there as a waiter on the ferry, figuring that one afternoon she would have to ride the ferry from Oakland to San Francisco (the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was not built until 1936). Though it took nearly a year, they finally met again on the ferry, and in 1928 they were married.

Herman and Laura Flood moved back to Houston in 1931 before their oldest son, Herman Jr., was born. Herman Sr. worked two jobs in Houston, as a hospital orderly and a janitor at a church, but he never saw a dime of his paychecks. He always handed them over to Laura, who had opened her own beauty salon. She ran the house. She also decided when they were going to move. They moved frequently. Anytime Laura disliked her home, her neighborhood, or one of her neighbors, she quickly packed up all her family's belongings. Rickie, Laura's daughter from her first marriage, would come home from school and find an address on the door with a three-word note: “We have moved.”

Herman and Laura had four children of their own. Herman Jr. was born in 1931, followed by Barbara two years later and Carl a year after her. Then came the baby.

Curtis Charles Flood was born in Houston on January 18, 1938, in the black section of Jefferson Davis Hospital. It did not take him long to take to baseball. One afternoon on Elgin Street, Laura told Herman Jr. to take the baby for a walk. After they had been gone for some time, Rickie went looking for her younger brothers. She was astonished at what she saw on the local playground: Curt was up at bat. Although only 18 or 19 months old, he insisted on swinging a small wooden bat that was almost as big as he was.

The South had no impact on Curt's childhood. Just as Jackie Robinson's family had moved from Cairo, Georgia, to Pasadena, California, when Robinson was a toddler, Curt was two years old when his family left Houston for good for Oakland.

The Floods, like so many other black families, settled in West Oakland. They lived in a two-story white wooden house at 2839 Helen Street. Rickie and her husband, Alvin Riley, lived on the first floor. Herman and Laura slept in one of the two upstairs rooms. In the children's room, Herman Jr. and Curt shared one bunk bed, and Barbara and Carl shared the other.

Jobs were so plentiful in Oakland during World War II that the
San Francisco Chronicle
referred to it as a “Second Gold Rush.” Herman initially found a job as a dockworker and later at a military installation in Vallejo. After the war, he worked 60-hour shifts as a janitor at Fairmont Hospital. On weekends, he played Texas-style blues guitar in Oakland's clubs.

At home, Laura worked as a seamstress and served as the family disciplinarian. She also opened a café in the back of a local tavern called the 1430 Club. She served Creole food from her native Louisiana and always left an open seat at the far end of the café's lunch counter. People too poor to afford a meal knew that they could sit in that empty seat, satisfy their hunger, and still preserve their dignity.

Herman taught his children to love art and music. Herman Jr. played the trumpet. Young Curt learned to play the piano by ear. Both Curt and Carl loved to draw. The Floods may have been poor, but Herman and Laura always had enough money for bowls of fresh fruit to fill their children's empty stomachs and for pencils and sketch pads to feed their dreams and imaginations. Curt credited his parents with teaching him “righteousness and fairness.”

West Oakland was a working-class black community that produced Congressman Ron Dellums, the Pointer Sisters, basketball players Bill Russell and Paul Silas, and scores of baseball players, including Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and Curt Flood. The Floods and many other West Oakland parents moved there from the South in search of jobs and to give their children better lives.

The line between trouble and triumph in West Oakland was a thin one. Curt and Carl initially stayed out of trouble by playing baseball at Poplar Park, only a few blocks from their home. Carl pitched, and Curt caught. Together they played on Police Athletic League teams and rode to the games in the back of a paddy wagon. Carl, however, began to get into real trouble, and Curt started to follow him.

Curt wanted so badly to join his older brother, who had been locked up in juvenile detention, that he stole a truck from the local sawdust mill. Even though his feet could not reach the pedals, he started the truck and drove it for two blocks before plowing it into a parked car. Curt had never seen his father so angry or his mother so disappointed as when they had to bail their two youngest children out of jail on the same day. While trouble would always find Carl, Curt vowed never to get into trouble again.

Curt's ticket out was a man named George Powles (pronounced
Poles
). A failed outfielder with the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals, Powles took a temporary position in 1931 with the Oakland Recreation Department. He enrolled at San Francisco State and received his teaching certificate in 1936, but was unable to find a teaching job. He worked at a brewery, an oil refinery, and a creamery to support his family. In his spare time, he coached baseball.