Curveball (4 page)
Authors: Martha Ackmann
Then there was the matter of Tomboy’s name. Everyone in Rondo had a nickname. There was “Rock Bottom” and “Flat Head” and “Turkey Breast” and “Puddin’.” The names stuck, and sometimes kids couldn’t even remember how they got the names or what they stood for. Tomboy’s neighbor Norman “Speed” Rollins could not recall if “Speed” came from the fact that he always ran home as fast as lightningor that he liked to dance fast. “Hey, Speed. You’re speeding. Slow down,” friends used to tell Rollins on the dance floor.
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Ask anyone at Dunning Field who “Marcenia Lyle Stone” was and you were apt to get a blank stare. Tomboy knew the nickname embarrassed her parents.
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The Stones were formal people. Willa was so proper that she would not go anywhere without her hair done up in rosettes and her fingernails polished, and Boykin was a member of the elite Sterling Club of serious, civic-minded black professionals. The Stones aspired to the likes of Thomas and Eva Neal, the elite black family of Rondo who entertained prominent educator Mary McLeod Bethune and later welcomed first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the city. The Neals supported “worthy Negro causes” and took a special interest in neighborhood girls, showing them the correct way to make conversation, use a dessert fork, and avoid wearing the color red. “Red is the color for street women,” Mrs. Neal once told Evelyn.
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Tomboy knew her place was not with women like Mrs. Neal. “I wasn’t high on the elite side,” she said. “That’s why they called me Tomboy.”
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Feeling unrefined and not understood by family and friends—like an outcast, Tomboy said—made Father Keefe’s help with playing baseball all the more welcome.
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Not only did she finally receive neighborhood recognition for the victories she brought the St. Peter Claver team, but she also attracted citywide attention as the one of Saint Paul’s outstanding girl athletes. For the time being, Tomboy decided to stay put in Rondo. She shelved her plan to run away from home, like the forgotten ice skating trophy in her upstairs bedroom. Although her parents had yet to watch her play and still wished Tomboy would turn more attention to her schoolwork, Boykin and Willa were grateful to see their daughter’s confidence grow. They even were willing to admit that Father Keefe’s decision had been right. In playing baseball, Tomboy Stone had crossed a line. But it wasn’t sin that she was embracing. It was salvation.
*
St. Peter Claver Catholic Church was named for the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit “slave of the slaves” who ministered for nearly half a century to men and women in the Caribbean. He was elevated to sainthood in 1888. Saint Paul Archbishop John Ireland worked with a black “congregation of converts” to establish St. Peter Claver in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. In 1910 Father Stephen Theobold, a native of British Guiana, began his ministry at the church. Theobold was legendary for his speeches on race relations and, along with other members of the Church, helped found the Minnesota NAACP. St. Peter Claver church members also played leading roles in working with W. E. B. DuBois in establishing the Niagara Movement—a campaign that called for a “mighty current” to end racial discrimination and disenfranchisement across the country. Theobold died of peritonitis in 1932 and was succeeded by Father Charles J. Keefe in 1933 (
St. Peter Claver Diamond Jubilee, 1892–1967
, 5–9).
*
Hallie Q. Brown and its Minneapolis counterpart, the Phyllis Wheatley Center, were linchpins in the Twin Cities. “Hallie Q.,” as it was affectionately called, opened after the black YWCA closed in 1928. It offered child care, athletics, senior activities, health care, and cultural, political, and social events. The center was named for Hallie Quinn Brown, an Ohio educator who spearheaded the black women’s club movement in the nineteenth century. In Saint Paul, “Hallie Q” was led by the formidable I. Myrtle Carden from 1929 to 1949. Carden improved the lives of countless African American residents in and around Rondo. Children in the Rondo neighborhood, including Tomboy, also played at the Welcome Hall Center and took part in its activities sponsored by the Zion Presbyterian Church.
*
The Saint Paul Saints team was used as “development ground” by the New York Yankees from 1919 to the early 1930s. Bob Connery, a scout for the Yankees, bought the Saints in 1925. Among the players who moved from the Saints to the Yankees were Leo Durocher and Vernon “Lefty” Gomez (e-mail to author from Stew Thornley, November 13, 2008).
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I base the Stone family’s arrival date in Minnesota on the fact that Boykin Stone and his family are listed in the West Virginia census for 1930, and Saint Paul school records indicate that Marcenia Stone enrolled in 1931.
*
Scholar Jennifer Delton in
Making Minnesota Liberal
noted “‘Oatmeal Hill’ reportedly referred to the lighter skin color of blacks in the solidly middle-class areas, as opposed to ‘Cornmeal Valley,’ the area west of Dale Street, where the southern migrants settled, the term referring to a southern food staple” (187).
*
Scholar Douglas Bristol Jr., in a study of black barbers, wrote that “from the 1820s to the Great Migration almost a century later, [black barbers] dominated the upscale market serving affluent white men even as other African American business people lost their white clientele…. A perceptive understanding of their customers, in the sense of W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double-consciousness, allowed black barbers to capitalize on racial stereotypes. Because they understood how whites saw them, they were able to create masks that white customers found appealing…. The willingness of black barbers to accept and exploit the racial stereotypes of their white customers represented an entrepreneurial innovation that secured their economic niche” (Douglas Bristol Jr., “From Outposts to Enclaves: A Social History of Black Barbers from 1750–1915,”
Enterprise & Society
vol. 5, no. 4, The Business History Conference 2004, 596–597).
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Whitney Young’s 1947 master’s thesis in the University of Minnesota School of Social Work addressed African American negotiation skills. Young (1921–1971) became executive director of the National Urban League in 1961, and he was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington.
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Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were the victims of the lynching. In 2003, citizens of Duluth, in an effort to atone for and learn from the tragedy, dedicated a monument in their memory.
*
W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) was one of the most prominent African American voices of the twentieth century. A prolific author, DuBois is most notable for his 1903 book
The Souls of Black Folk
. One of the founders of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, DuBois was often at odds with other leaders such as Booker T. Washington concerning the best way for blacks to gain power and respect. While Washington believed blacks should assimilate into white culture, DuBois argued that white dominance should be challenged. DuBois was familiar with Minnesota politics: he worked at a resort on Lake Minnetonka near Minneapolis following his graduation from Fisk University in 1888.
Miracle in Saint PaulI do feel, in my dreamings and yearnings, so
undiscovered by those who are able to help me.—M
ARY
M
CLEOD
B
ETHUNE
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T
omboy Stone loved her baseball glove. It was smooth and dark and worn in all the right places. Although she sometimes envied the new gloves that other kids had, this old beauty she had bought for twenty-five cents at the Saint Paul Goodwill would have to do. To earn the money for the glove, Tomboy had worked around the neighborhood for small change.
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Her parents would not offer money for equipment that might lend her encouragement to play even more baseball. “They wanted me to do anything but wear old tennis shoes and spend all day hitting baseballs,” Tomboy said. The baseball shoes that she admired in store windows were expensive, and she realized she shouldn’t pine about them to her mother and father. Even though she knew the shoes were out of reach, she couldn’t get them out of her head; they looked so professional with their rows of shiny, teethlike spikes. “Professional”—that’s the word Tomboy used to confer her highest praise on anyone or anything associated with baseball. When she let her aspirations run unchecked, she admitted that she hoped one day to be a professional baseball player. After playing in Saint Paul’s Catholic boys’ baseball league for almost four years, Tomboy said, “I knew I wanted to be an athlete,” adding, “I didn’t concern myself that there weren’t any women in the game.”
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Boykin and Willa Stone resigned themselves to Tomboy playing baseball during the summers with the Catholic boys’ league and, later, the Saint Paul’s HighLex girls’ softball team. Given her strong arm, Tomboy played the outfield and occasionally pitched. But she did not stay with the girls’ team for long; she quit a little after a year. “Not [for] me,” Tomboy said. “It wasn’t fast enough,” and the girls’ play failed to challenge her the way the Catholic boys’ did.
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When Tomboy decided to quit softball, her parents were relieved; at least it meant one less team she would be playing on.
What the Stones didn’t know was that Tomboy had another opportunity in mind. She started to hang out at the meatpacking plants in South Saint Paul. She’d ride her Silver King bike, the one her father bought for her for eleven dollars, or grab a streetcar and head down to the Armour or Swift plants, situated side by side next to the groaning stockyards and the Mississippi River.
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The workers, many of whom were black men, organized company baseball teams—some integrated—that played on the weekends. The Armour squad was so good they won the Minnesota Municipal League State Championship for several years in the 1920s.
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Tomboy hoped there might be a way for her to join the workingmen’s league or at least get the men used to the idea.
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She also liked hearing the men talk. They had an easy way about them, and—years before—a few had played in the Negro Leagues. She felt more comfortable listening to old men discussing balls and strikes than she did hearing girls her own age chattering about who had won the Jitterbug contest the previous weekend. “I wasn’t popular with the girls because I loved to play with the boys,” she said. When girls around Rondo called her “Tomboy” in their derogatory way, the sneer fueled her determination, and she vowed to keep playing baseball until she could earn a living at it. “One day this is going to be my game,” Tomboy said.
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Father Keefe’s gamble of encouraging Tomboy to play Catholic baseball did affect her in positive ways. She was consistently attending school, and she was reading more. But not her textbooks, necessarily. History classes disappointed her the most. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested in history; it was that the books did not offer any record for understanding who she was. She didn’t have the words to describe how she felt about that absence, but she knew that a significant part of history was missing from the books her junior high teachers asked her to read. All the women and black people in her textbooks led subservient lives, it seemed to her. They were either assisting a white man in an invention or traipsing along after some clear-eyed blond who “discovered” a territory that Indians had been living in all along. Tomboy’s friend Evelyn Edwards agreed. School history books, she said, presented blacks only as slaves or victims, and there was little mention of any black achievements. Evelyn knew for certain that blacks had contributed greatly to music; she had learned that at her prayer meetings.
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For Tomboy, blacks in her textbooks “were all cotton pickers.”
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Her neighbor Speed Rollins knew what she meant. One of his most humiliating days at school occurred when his teacher insisted that—as a black child—he read the Little Black Sambo part during story hour. The experience felt degrading to him.
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Tomboy knew there were many distinguished black Americans. She’d heard her father talk about his time at Tuskegee and the indelible marks Booker T. Washington and Dr. George Washington Carver made on the country. W. E. B. DuBois’s trips to Saint Paul made clear that he too was an accomplished man. Textbook history always boiled down to “Captain-John-Smith-and- Pocahontas,” Tomboy said. Even fifty years later, that phrase remained her shorthand for describing the intellectual impoverishment she experienced at school.
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