Curveball (27 page)

Felix “Chin” Evans, a Clowns pitcher, became famous for his response to the smashed dishes that so deeply disturbed young Henry Aaron when the team tried to eat in Washington, D.C. Chin had heard the sound of crashing plates so often in one D.C. restaurant that he came prepared on a later visit. When he purposefully walked toward the restaurant for lunch, a teammate grabbed Chin and tried to steer him in another direction. Chin went in anyway, alone. Just as everyone suspected, an infuriated host threw a menu at him and stomped off, muttering about the “nigger ball club” whose bus was parked outside. Chin ordered, ate, and shooed the waiter away when it came time to clear the dishes. He didn’t want the server to appear “like a servant haulin’ off a colored man’s trash,” he said. The bill for Chin’s meal came to under one dollar, but he handed the bigoted host a twenty-dollar bill. “Pretty big tip for a nigger clown,” the host replied. It wasn’t a tip, Chin explained. It was a “waste riddance fee.” That’s when he reached into his pocket and brought out a hammer. Chin pulled the tablecloth up over the dishes, swung the hammer, and smashed every plate, cup, and saucer. “Just throw the nigger dishes out in the nigger tablecloth and keep the change,” he said and walked out.
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The treatment the Clowns received at Jim Crow restaurants infuriated them, but the team’s experience with hotels was often miserable and occasionally terrifying. Tired and dirty from being on the road, Toni and her teammates would dream of a clean bed. It was the little things that she missed, Toni said, like being able to wash out her underwear. “You could kinda feel a little like home” when that amenity was available, she said.
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When black hotels were not available, the team stayed in boarding houses, rooming establishments, or private homes. Teams had to find these accommodations before local curfews for blacks went into effect. One player remembered playing one town in Mississippi where the local police announced the game would have to be over by 10:00 P.M.; black men were not allowed on the streets after that hour. The team played fast, got back on the bus, and returned to Memphis in sweaty uniforms and without any dinner. They simply couldn’t risk stopping anywhere for food.
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And Ed and Joyce Hamman later received bomb threats at their own home because Ed was involved with a black team.
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While threats against blacks occurred less frequently than they once had, ball clubs like the Clowns and the Monarchs were always vigilant travelers. They never became complacent or beguiled into a false sense that they were safe. On the Monarchs bus, team manager Buck O’Neil made a ritual of offering advice and warnings based on recent news reports whenever the team pulled into a new town. Like the Clowns’ King Tut, Buck had seen nearly every stretch of road, and he knew from experience which businesses would welcome black men. He realized he had young charges under his supervision, some of whom came from the North and might be naive or uninformed about the reach of Jim Crow. When the Monarchs arrived in one Kansas town, Buck got up to offer his usual speech. But this one was more serious than usual. He told his ballplayers that there had been a recent lynching. Buck told his team, “Just get dressed, go to the park, and play.” Ernie Banks found it odd that the white fans who cheered for him from the stands could threaten him on the street. Then there was that most ridiculous of charges: “reckless eyeballing.”
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The mere phrase “reckless eyeballing” was laughable, he thought, but he also knew that a white woman could report any black man—even have him thrown in jail—if he looked at her a second too long. “Those were dangerous times,” Toni later said.
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For Toni, finding comfortable and safe accommodations was the most difficult challenge of life on the road. Sometimes rooming houses would offer her—but not the men—a place to stay. “I told [the proprietors] ‘thank you very much’ and got back on that old bus and went to sleep,” she said. Toni believed refusing a room under those conditions was an important show of respect toward her teammates. “They’re my brothers,” she said. “And we stick together.”
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Asking Toni where she slept was a favorite question of reporters. Everyone was curious about her sleeping arrangements and whether her teammates took advantage of her sexually. Toni had a practiced, if not always truthful, response. “I found that this wasn’t any headache,” she said. “At first, the fellows made passes at me, but my situation in traveling around the country with a busload of guys isn’t any different from that of the girl singers who travel with jazz bands. Once you let the guys know that there isn’t going to be any monkey business, they soon give you their respect.”
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Of course Toni did not mention that showing there would be no “monkey business” sometimes meant taking a baseball bat to the head of a teammate as she had on a bus ride years before. But Toni’s comparison of her life to that of jazz musicians was appropriate. They were both willing to accept rough accommodations, loneliness, and isolation for steady work doing what they loved. But there was one difference. People were used to female singers traveling with jazz bands: Billie Holiday, Alberta Hunter, Ella Fitzgerald. Few people, however, expected to find a woman on a men’s baseball team. If hotel proprietors in small towns had not read about Toni Stone in the
Defender
or in magazines, they made assumptions about why she traveled with the men.

What Toni did not tell reporters but confessed to her family years later was that those assumptions hurt. But she found a way to take advantage of them. At times hotel proprietors assumed Toni was a prostitute traveling with the men in order to serve their sexual needs. They refused to let her stay and gruffly directed her to the nearest brothel.
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Her teammates, Bunny, and Buster either would not or could not successfully defend her. That’s how she discovered the underworld of prostitutes’ hospitality. “They took me in,” Toni said. The “sporting girls” gave her a clean bed to stay in and a meal to eat. Perhaps Toni saw something in the women that reminded her of her own outsider status; perhaps they saw some of the same in Toni’s unconventional life. They liked each other, and when Toni returned the women would have a car waiting for her. They sometimes attended her games, followed her in the sports pages, and encouraged her to take her responsibility to the race seriously. “You got to represent,” they told her.

Toni developed a network of brothels throughout the South where prostitutes took care of her, sometimes washing her uniform during the night and leaving it folded on the dresser for when Toni awoke the next morning. After Toni complained of the discomfort of taking hard throws to the chest (some intentionally), the women sewed padding into her navy blue Clowns shirt, hoping the extra padding—something sports columnist Sam Lacy never saw—would keep her safe. Some mornings Toni would wake to find a few dollars beside her uniform—extra money to make the two-dollars-a-day meal money she received from the Clowns go further. Those mornings weren’t the first time that Toni had encountered the kindness of prostitutes. Before she turned to the church for help finding a permanent room in San Francisco, she found temporary housing in the attic of a prostitute’s home. “She was a ‘wrong woman,’” Toni said, “but a beautiful human being. She taught me many things … the walks of life. I had no crime with her.”
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Realizing many people thought otherwise, Toni was quick to come to prostitutes’ defense. “They were good girls,” she said. Like other times in her life when Toni expressed respect and even tenderness for social outcasts, she sounded as though she might be seeking respect herself. As confident and driven to play baseball as she appeared to be, Toni could be wounded by incivility and humiliation.
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She heard the jeers: “Why don’t you go home and fix your husband some biscuits!”
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Playing professional baseball might simply be too hard and maybe it wasn’t the right thing for her to do, she sometimes thought.

But there were other women athletes who admired Toni and were eager to follow in her path-breaking footsteps. Eighteen year-old Mamie Johnson was a pitcher for the semi-pro Alexandria (Virginia) All-Stars and the St. Cyprian’s recreational league in Washington, D.C.
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Like Toni, Mamie grew up playing baseball with the boys. As a child in rural Ridgeway, South Carolina, she learned baseball from her uncle and practiced pitching by throwing at crows on a fence. Her ball was a rock wound with twine and sealed with heavy masking tape. She made bats from tree limbs. First base was a pie plate. Second was a broken piece of flowerpot. Third was a tree root near a lilac bush, and home plate was the lid from a five-gallon bucket of King Cane syrup. Mamie lived with her maternal grandmother while her mother, who had once played baseball herself, worked as a dietician in Washington, D.C. Mamie’s father, a construction worker, was not an active presence in her life. When her grandmother died, young Mamie went to live with an aunt and uncle in Long Branch, New Jersey. One day she wandered into a police precinct in New Jersey and asked about playing for the Police Athletic League (PAL) baseball team. The PAL organization in Long Branch had never had a black ballplayer on the team and certainly not a female one, but the lieutenant invited her to try out. Once she started pitching well, the team accepted her. Mamie played with PAL through high school and then moved to D.C. where she lived with her mother. She married and started playing recreational baseball in the lots across from Howard University.
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Playing baseball was a passion for Mamie—much more than working at an ice cream shop in the District. “The more I played, the better I got and the more I wanted to play,” she said. When her friend Rita Jones—a first baseman for the St. Cyprian’s team—heard on the radio that the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League was holding local tryouts, the two young women made plans to attend. After locating the baseball field, they looked around and saw that all the players were white. “You think they’re going to let us try out?” Rita asked. Before they could put on their baseball gloves, AAGPBL players and organizers gave them a stare that communicated everything. “They looked at me like I was crazy,” Mamie said. She and Rita understood immediately that they were not welcome. The experience marked Mamie. “It dawned on me,” she said. “They think we’re not as good as [they] are.”
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Mamie returned to Washington and continued playing with St. Cyps on Sundays at Banneker Field. One afternoon, Bish Tyson, a sometimes bird dog for the Clowns, watched the five-foot-four-inch teenager pitching. He liked what he saw, but the risks with Mamie were substantial. She had played on local men’s teams, but she lacked high-level playing time and had not been out on the road with a team. Her experience could not be compared with the depth of Toni’s background. Nevertheless, Bish thought Mamie was worth a look and contacted Bunny Downs, telling him he had found a player worth evaluating. Bunny arranged for Mamie to meet the team in a September swing through D.C., take some cuts off Clowns pitchers, and serve up some fastballs to Toni Stone, Gordon “Hoppy” Hopkins, and other Clowns players. After conferring with Syd Pollock and Buster Haywood, Downs offered Mamie a noncommittal postseason spot with the Clowns when they barnstormed for two months in the fall. Within days, the young woman quit her ice cream shop job and was on the Clowns bus bound for Norfolk and barnstorming games against the Negro League All-Stars. “Honestly, to be frank,” Mamie said, “I slipped away.” Her husband did not appear to have a voice in her decision, either. “It didn’t make any difference because I was going to play anyway,” she said.
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About the same time Mamie joined the Clowns for postseason play, another young woman, inspired by Toni Stone, approached the team. Connie Morgan had read about Toni in
Ebony
magazine and announced to her grandmother that she was going “to write to Toni Stone and see if I can get on a baseball team.”
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But her grandmother did not take Connie’s ambition seriously and shrugged it off “like a pipe dream,” Connie said. The young woman did write a letter, and Toni passed it on to Bunny Downs. When the Clowns traveled to Baltimore for the start of their postseason barnstorming tour, Syd invited Connie to drive from her home in Philadelphia for a tryout. Connie Morgan was a standout with local softball and basketball teams.

Like Toni, Connie had honed her athletic skills at community centers. No one really knew where she got her athletic talent. Her parents, Vivian and Howard, were not particularly athletic. Her father was a window washer and her mother worked for the local Sea Farer’s Union.
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The couple had six children: two boys and four girls. The oldest of the siblings, Connie tried to interest one sister in basketball, but the younger girl did not stay with it. When Connie entered Bar-tram High School in Philadelphia, a neighborhood youth worker saw her playing softball and asked if she would be interested in joining a recreational league. Connie joined the Honey Drippers and played with them for nearly five years. A right-handed hitter, she batted around .370 and played every position except pitcher.
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But as the girls on the team neared the end of their high school years, most of them lost interest in softball. The “girls got so they didn’t want to play anymore,” Connie said. None of the girls in her class ever heard of athletic scholarships to college and “no one offered me” one, she said. A good student, Connie enrolled in the William Penn School of Business in Philadelphia after she graduated from high school and took typing and bookkeeping classes to prepare for a career as a secretary. While enrolled at William Penn, Connie read the article about Toni Stone and wrote her letter. Her parents were proud that their daughter had taken a step toward playing black baseball, but were “shocked,” Connie said, when the Clowns invited her to Baltimore.
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