Curveball (34 page)

In the 1960s, under the guise of “urban renewal,” black communities from San Francisco to New Orleans to Kansas City were decimated to make way for highways, industry, and gentrification. Toni’s old Rondo neighborhood in Saint Paul was one of them. The construction of Interstate 94 tore right through the heart of the community, displacing families, destroying neighborhoods, and literally erasing the word “Rondo” from maps. Residents watched with sadness as bulldozers demolished churches and homes, including one residence near the ballpark where the Stones had lived. Those who stayed around Rondo no longer recognized their streets and lost track of their friends.

“A lot was lost when the Negro Leagues went belly up,” novelist John Edgar Wideman wrote. The neighborhoods, social life, and identity that disappeared along with segregation made it difficult to remember the character they uniquely offered. Speaking of baseball, Wideman observed that “what was contained in those institutions was not simply a black version of what white people were doing, but the game was played differently.”
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Stealing bases, hitting behind the runner, taking advantage of a bunt—were all trademarks of black baseball. “There’s two kinds of ball,” Toni said. “I learned black ball. You had to think or get killed.”
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Negro League players who moved to the majors also brought showmanship with them—or tried to. When Ernie Banks first reported to the Cubs, he laced up his shoes with the bright yellow laces the Monarchs wore. The Cubs’ clubhouse personnel thought Banks’s laces were too flashy, “did not fit the style of everyone,” and suggested he change. Teammates and fans, however, loved Willie Mays’s wild dashes that sent his cap flying. “When I first came up to the Giants in 1951,” he remembered, “I never lost my cap.” It fit perfectly. After some time with the Giants, Mays began to think about the showmanship of the Negro Leagues and decided he needed a gimmick. “I started wearing a cap that was too big for me,” he confessed. “Every time I ran from first to second and wheeled to my left, that cap would simply fly off just as if I’d been running so fast I’d run out from under it.” The same was true for stealing a base. When Willie called time to retrieve his hat, “the moment’s delay would keep the fans worked up and make the opposing pitcher think a bit more about the spot I’d got him in,” Mays said.
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“Some people call it ‘show business,’” Toni said as if confronting critics. “But I call it plain hard baseball.”
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Even with a renewed interest in the Negro Leagues, some fans and even a few players distanced themselves from the past.
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In 1985, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Vince Coleman admitted he “don’t know nuthin” about Jackie Robinson and bristled when asked about the pioneer’s legacy. Coleman’s ignorance created a firestorm among former Negro Leaguers, including one who responded, “If I would have been there, I would be serving time now because I would have tried to kill him. [Coleman] is making millions of dollars now for all the sacrifices Jackie had to make.”
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Yet while most players and fans recognized the importance of Robinson, few realized that Toni Stone, Connie Morgan, and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson had once played alongside him. Like Toni, Peanut Johnson and Connie Morgan remained largely forgotten after playing in the Negro League. They created lives outside of baseball and lost touch with each other. Johnson returned to Washington, D.C., when her Clowns career was over. She divorced, remarried, and began a long nursing career at Sibley Hospital. Although her playing days had been brief, she called them “some of the most enjoyable years of my life,” adding had there been a Mr. Rickey behind the women, “it might have been a different thing.” She remembered the satisfaction of strikeouts and loved the constant motion and the allure of leaving some place behind. “It was a tremendous thing to wake up and look out the [bus] window,” she remembered, “and be 500 miles from where you were before.” Baseball “was my dream,” she said. “I even thought of the major leagues, but when I got a littler older, I said, this will never happen.” She had two strikes against her from the start, Johnson said. “I’m black and I’m a lady. So, there’s no place for me to go.”
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After retiring from nursing, Johnson strolled in one day to a Negro Leagues Baseball Shop in nearby Maryland. She liked being among the old photographs, memorabilia, and replica team jerseys of the Clowns and the Monarchs. The store was more than a business—it also educated the public about the leagues and life during Jim Crow. She began working there. On some days, Johnson’s old teammate Gordon “Hoppy” Hopkins joined her behind the counter and jumped to his former pitcher’s defense when a customer wondered if she were mistaken saying she once pitched in the Negro League. “I say, ‘look man,’” Hopkins said, “’the woman played on my team. I played with her and she did what she had to do.’”
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When Connie Morgan completed her business education, after her 1954 season with the Clowns, she began working for the AFL-CIO in Philadelphia and later was employed by a furrier, where long days in cold storage aggravated her arthritic hands. She ended her work life as a school bus driver and retired early, at age forty, when kidney disease set in. Morgan rarely talked about the Negro League. To many who saw her, she was just the lonely woman who sat for days by the window of her Federal Street row house with only the light of a flickering television set. The “sentinel,” someone called her. When the recovery of black history took hold in the 1980s, a researcher with the Afro-American Museum in Philadelphia came across Morgan’s name as a once notable local athlete. Donna DeVore was intrigued and spent months trying to find her, stopping into local barbershops and asking everyone she knew. She finally found her, and when the women first met, Morgan was not convinced she had an interesting story to tell. “I tried to give [Connie] her props,” DeVore said. In 1995, the city’s Afro-American Museum mounted a special exhibit on Connie Morgan and other women in Philadelphia sports, and the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame inducted Morgan—only then did she begin to comprehend the significance of what she had accomplished. Sometimes Connie Morgan’s niece, Leah, would look around her aunt’s house and see a basketball, old sports equipment, or a scrapbook kept about Connie’s playing days. But like most relatives who rarely imagine their elders as young people, Morgan’s niece never thought to ask about her aunt’s past. “Once I understood who she was,” Leah admitted, “it was too late.”
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Donna DeVore made frequent visits past Morgan’s row house with the green awning. Somehow it made DeVore feel better to check, even if a stop meant only a quick glance at the window. Morgan’s kidney problems had grown steadily worse, and she was on dialysis. In October 1996, after work one evening, DeVore drove past the Philadelphia Gas Works and the big Sunoco refineries to Morgan’s Point Breeze neighborhood. She didn’t see Connie at the window. A few days later, she read about Morgan’s death in the
Philadelphia Tribune
: “Constance Morgan, 61 Female Negro Leaguer.” The late Oscar Charleston called Connie Morgan “one of the most sensational female players he had ever seen,” the newspaper reported. Morgan’s family prepared the printed program for the funeral. “She had a dream to play professional baseball and in 1954 that dream came true for her,” the program read, adding that the highlight of her life was the July 1954 game at Connie Mack Stadium—the day her schoolmates crowded around the dugout to wish her well. On the final page of the funeral program, before a listing of pallbearers, was Connie’s old photograph taken with Jackie Robinson on the day of her Clowns tryout in Baltimore.
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Morgan was buried at Mount Lawn Cemetery in Sharon Hill, not far from the grave of Bessie Smith. Blues singer Janis Joplin thought it was a crime that Smith never had a headstone marking her grave. She arranged to have one set in a show of respect and gratitude for the singer. Morgan’s grave remains unmarked.
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Toni had all but given up being recognized as a former professional baseball player. There had been one brief moment in the 1970s when the San Francisco Giants asked her to throw out the first pitch, but in the ensuing years she had grown resigned to people knowing few details about her baseball life. Her husband’s care occupied most of Toni’s days. Now that he was in a nursing home, she visited regularly. As usual, Alberga met her warmly—and always in a coat and tie. While acquaintances and even those close to Toni Stone and Aurelious Pescia Alberga continued to have their own theories about their marriage, the couple remained devoted to each other. If their marriage had been more of a business partnership than a romance, it was difficult to tell, given their years together. Some now called them “ahead of their time” in fashioning a marriage that allowed independence for each other, especially for Toni as a woman married in the Eisenhower era. She married an older man, Toni said, because “a younger one wouldn’t let me play ball.” Whatever sustained them lasted until the end. When he turned one hundred years old in 1984, Alberga once again asked his wife to give up playing—sandlot baseball, that is. This time, Toni relented and stopped playing ball for good. She was sixty-five years old.
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Few expected Alberga to live as long as he did. When he died in 1988 at 103, perhaps only Toni was not surprised at his longevity. Although he had never seen her play one game, Toni viewed Alberga as a worthy partner in her struggles with baseball, and she planned to acknowledge his contributions in a memoir she hoped to publish one day. “He goes with me in this book I’m writing,” Toni said.
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If no one remembered her story, Toni figured she would tell it herself. She had not decided what to title the book. “So many names I want to use,” she said. Toni pored through clippings that littered the floor of her home and reread the famous
Ebony
feature that now seemed to her more “jive” than true. Photographs also told the story. To visitors who stopped by Isabella Street, family pictures showed a strong and agile young woman—fearless, even. The work of remembering kept Toni up at night. Sometimes she would wake up and write notes, and she told anyone who asked that she wanted to “put it all on tape.” Toni knew what she hoped to tell. “It didn’t matter whether I was with the boys, the girls or anyone, it was just tough during that time trying to make a dream come true,” she said. “I always had a dream. I had to find out who I was.”
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One person from the old days could have helped her remember. When the Monarchs were sold to Ted Rasberry of Grand Rapids, Buck O’Neil took the Cubs up on their offer and joined the team, first as a scout, then as a coach—the first African American coach in major league baseball. No one doubted his instincts or his opinion: one of the first players he signed was an outfielder from Southern University in Baton Rouge, Lou Brock. After the Cubs, Buck moved back to Kansas City and took a job with the Royals. He joined others in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which opened in 1994 in the old 18th and Vine area of Kansas City. As Buck said, baseball was a powerful teacher and could “build a bridge across a chasm of prejudice.”
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One evening, not long after plans for the museum were announced, Toni met baseball historian Larry Lester for dinner at a restaurant. About the time the coleslaw arrived, talk turned to O’Neil. Lester knew Buck well, and Toni spoke with an interest that showed her former skipper remained on her mind. Over the years, her anger toward O’Neil had abated, as it does with most people who long forget what past arguments were about. More important, Toni’s joy for the game had returned. It came back while coaching the Hard Heads, playing infield until her knees and hands could no longer bend. It came back while she sat in the stands at Oakland A’s games—always alone and right behind the catcher’s box, where “everything was moving.”
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The thrill she used to feel the first spring day in Saint Paul had not been lost forever on a garage floor in Kansas in 1954. Perhaps Toni realized that Buck O’Neil—more than just about anyone else—understood how much a person could love baseball. “I gave him your telephone number,” Lester said. “He asked for it.” Toni sounded surprised. Eating his meal slowly, Lester seemed already to suspect what had happened. “Did he ever call you?” he asked, tentatively. O’Neil had not. Toni waited a few moments before replying. “Time waits for no man,” she said. “I think I’ve lost a lot of time.”
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“There is no logical reason why girls shouldn’t play baseball,” Henry Aaron once said. “It’s not that tough…. Some [women] can play better than a lot of guys who’ve been on the field. Baseball is not a game of strength.”
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Over twenty years after Toni fought to play professional baseball, the United States put into law the landmark Title IX legislation, opening the door to increased opportunities for female athletes in the nation’s schools.
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When the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum opened its doors in Kansas City, photographs of Toni Stone, Connie Morgan, and Peanut Johnson helped place baseball’s women pioneers back before the public. Saint Paul also rediscovered its past and officially invited Toni home for “Toni Stone Day,” where she met with schoolchildren, reconnected with old Rondo friends, and demonstrated how to move to the right to start a double play. A local professor who taught sports history confessed that he had never heard of her. “It speaks of my own ignorance,” he admitted. “What makes her exceptional is that she had the fortitude and the guts to do what she did.” The homecoming was so surreal, Toni felt disembodied. “It’s like I’m floating,” she gushed. “Just floating.”
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Already city leaders were talking about renaming the new baseball complex for her. The fields stood on the site where Toni had badgered Gabby Street into letting her play. Roger Nieboer, a local playwright, heard about her story and began research for a play,
Tomboy Stone
, to be performed at Great American History Theatre in Saint Paul.
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In New York, producers of
This Week in Baseball
called. They wanted to do a special feature on Toni for Mother’s Day. The attention on Toni kept building, and she thrilled with the recognition. When her hometown
Oakland Tribune
asked to do a story, Toni pedaled on her bike to the newspaper offices. She exploded “like a grenade,” columnist Miki Turner remembered, arriving with jerseys and clippings and words cascading out of her mouth in a torrent. Later, when the Women’s Sports Foundation elected her to its Hall of Fame, Toni bought a sequined evening gown with matching purse and shoes for the Waldorf-Astoria banquet. The woman who had put her baseball career on the line because she would not wear a skirt felt the time had come to be formal. There was urgency in all her actions, as though Toni worried that the time to tell what she had experienced—just like her playing career—would not last. She seized the moment and opened herself to the vulnerability it aroused. When she sat on the dais in New York along with women Olympians, Wimbledon stars, and NCAA champions, she had to concentrate on her breathing to keep from becoming overwhelmed. What made it so difficult? current athletes asked. Why were others threatened by you? Toni chose her words carefully. “People weren’t ready for me. I wasn’t classified,” she said. “I was a menace to society.”
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