Curveball (8 page)

When Tomboy joined the Colored Giants, she became part of a long line of traveling Midwest baseball teams. Black baseball players in Minnesota went as far back as the nineteenth century when Prince Honeycutt, a former Union Army “mess boy,” played for the white Fergus Falls North Stars in 1873. During one game that year, Honeycutt scored eight runs as the North Stars defeated the Big Fellers with the unbelievable high score of 60–54. Two years later, the Fergus Falls team—then named the Musculars—traveled a day and a half by wagon for a game in Perham. This time they were on the receiving end of a defeat, 43–64. Organized black baseball teams first made their appearance in Minnesota in 1876 and achieved prominence in the early part of the twentieth century with the great University of Minnesota first baseman Bobby Marshall. Marshall played for the Saint Paul Colored Gophers against Midwest regional teams including the well-known Chicago Leland Giants. The Colored Gophers and other teams such as the Minneapolis Colored Keystones were so successful that they gave rise to other traveling teams, including the Colored Giants in Duluth, the Hub City Browns in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and the Wonders in Buxton, Iowa. Frequently black ball clubs played white touring teams from Chicago and beyond. When traveling black players came into towns for a game, the residents viewed them as a novelty. Black families in prairie towns were few, and curious white fans packed the stands. But the matchups at times moved beyond novelty and sparked more than a flicker of racial competitiveness as white fans cheered for white teams to beat black ball clubs.
⁸

The Twin City Colored Giants already had achieved distinction and some local fame—for their gumption, if nothing else. If there were no black teams available to play, the Colored Giants played semi-pro white teams in towns across Minnesota and Wisconsin—and they usually won. Occasionally they played integrated teams that included Negro League stars and whites from minor league teams. Integrated baseball teams in the Upper Midwest were not uncommon. With fewer blacks in the region, white residents were less concerned by the larger ramifications of integration. They felt less threatened, for example, than the white population in larger cities by the prospect of an integrated job force.
⁹
In August 1935, the Colored Giants squared off in one series against an integrated team, the Bismark Churchills, that boasted an extraordinary lineup including black pitchers Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe, Hilton Smith, Barney Morris, and Leroy “Satchel” Paige. During the year, the Bismark pitching quartet combined for fifty-five wins and six losses; the team’s offense was equally impressive, outscoring opponents by nearly three hundred runs. Nearly a decade after he played with them, Paige said that the 1935 Bismark team was the “best team I ever saw; the best players I ever played with.”
¹⁰
Given that the team played across the desolate Dakotas and their games were rarely mentioned by metropolitan newspapers, few baseball fans recognized the team’s brilliance. “Who ever heard of them?” Paige said.
¹¹

The Colored Giants from Saint Paul had. Many of the players such as right fielder and power hitter Maceo Breedlove knew about the exceptional team and were eager for the challenge. A few teammates, however, were nervous. When the Colored Giants pulled up to the Bismarck, North Dakota, ballpark, they were astonished by the big-city look of the field. Club owners had pumped five thousand dollars into the field for improvements, adding three thousand new seats, bleachers for children, and a five-hundred-slot car park for fans who wanted to watch the game along the outfield fence. An elevated train track stood over right field for standing-room-only crowds. Fans said the field was the best in the Upper Midwest and larger than any major league park outside of Shibe Field in Philadelphia. It was 332 feet down each line and 460 feet to center. Paige said the Bismarck farmers loved the team and relished betting on games. They came to the field, he said, “with hats full of money.”
¹²
No wonder some Colored Giant players felt wary.

The Colored Giants held their own in the first two games, even though they lost 8–5 and 9–5. Breedlove went two for four in the opener and two for four in the second game, including a home run against Smith. For the closing game, the Colored Giants knew they would be facing Satchel Paige. One Colored Giants player left word he was sick that day and couldn’t suit up. “He didn’t want to play against [Paige],” Breedlove said. Bismarck exploded out of the gate with five runs. Saint Paul answered with two. In the second, Bismarck added another four and then nine more in the fourth. Only Breedlove could figure out how to hit Paige. He homered early in the game and later added two doubles. As a team, however, the Colored Giants were completely overpowered. By the bottom of the eighth, Bismarck and Paige were ahead a whopping 21–5. When Bismarck came to bat, the players swung around to the opposite side of the plate to give their opponents a break—or perhaps additional humiliation. In the top of the ninth, Satchel took control of the game and made an announcement. “A catcher and a first baseman,” he declared. “That’s all I want.” The grandiose gesture was a favorite of Paige’s—a way to stir up crowds that might have been dozing during a lopsided slugfest. On command, all fielders trotted into the Bismarck dugout. In short order, Paige struck out the first two batters. Breedlove came to the plate. “Looked like everybody in North Dakota at that ball game,” he remembered. Satchel threw; Breedlove fouled it off. The Colored Giants in their motley uniforms looked up to the stands and saw crowds of people now yelling and screaming, urging Satchel on. It didn’t make them feel any better to know that they were the center of attention for thousands.
Why don’t you let Satchel strike you out and get it over with?
one Giants teammate thought. Breedlove dug in, fouled off another, and another. “I bet I hit fifteen foul balls,” he said. A Bismarck player who knew Breedlove from Saint Paul yelled from the opposing dugout, “Satchel done picked the baddest boy on the ball club to show up.” Paige was throwing the ball so fast, Breedlove couldn’t get around in time to make contact and fouled off a few more. Tired of throwing his heater, Paige served up a curveball. Breedlove was waiting for it, connected, and whacked the ball into an empty left field. With no one there to catch the long fly, Breedlove trotted around the bases with his second home run of the game. When a teammate later asked where he found the grit to keep up with Paige’s endless blaze of fastballs, Breedlove was definitive. “I wouldn’t let nobody make a fool out of me in front of all these people.”
¹³

Perhaps it was the determination, self-respect, and perseverance that Breedlove and other Colored Giants represented that appealed to Tomboy. Their local renown impressed Boykin Stone as well. While Willa would never sit in the stands and watch her daughter play ball, she had learned that baseball offered Tomboy more than recreation. “When I found out I could throw a baseball that was it. I knew then what I wanted to do,” Tomboy said.
¹⁴
Unlike her friend Janabelle, who turned to coaching and teaching as a way to maintain her involvement with sports, Tomboy only wanted to be in the game. Coaching was too far from the action, and she liked being part of a team. The Colored Giants needed her, not just as a novelty to bring in crowds but as a legitimate player who could help win games. “They took her seriously,” John Cotton said, “because she produced [runs].”
¹⁵
If fans came to their games because they wanted a look at Tomboy and more money came into players’ pockets as a result, everyone on the Colored Giants was happy. By the end of July, the team had played eight games and won five. A Minneapolis newspaper reported that the Colored Giants had “the distinction of having a girl pitcher on its roster. No other team in the Northwest can boast the same. Miss Marcenia Stone, 16-year-old girl athlete, has been doing much to amuse the fans with her great catcher and wonder hitting power.”
¹⁶
Tomboy was eager to play any position she could. During the season, she took a turn at the infield, played center field, and occasionally pitched. From the multiple playing positions to the bouncing from town to town to the mismatched uniforms—all the improvisations appealed to Tomboy. There was an inventive, extemporaneous, fuguelike quality to the games that she loved. Playing baseball felt as if the rules she lived by—at home, in school, at church—no longer applied and she was making up her own on the fly. “Shag ball,” she called it.
¹⁷

Playing was only part of the incentive of joining the Twin City Colored Giants. Traveling with the team to games was another. When Tomboy took a seat in one of the team’s two beat-up cars, she enrolled in an on-the-road seminar in black history and the science of baseball. The Colored Giants’ stories became the textbook her public school classes ignored. Breedlove talked of being recruited ten years before to play for the original Negro House of David barnstorming team.
^*
He had to keep his hair long and grow a beard in order to look like the other House of David players. He also had to master the art of entertaining the crowds. House of David teams knew that crowds came to barnstorming games to watch baseball and be entertained. Between innings, players quickly tossed the ball around to fans’ delight. Soon the rapid ball-handling transformed itself into the House of David’s signature play. At nearly every game, in the middle of the fifth inning, four players would line up and play an acrobatic game of catch, complete with balls thrown behind their backs, fake tosses, and wobbly baseballs sliding down their arms. Young John Cotton loved it. The performance wasn’t demeaning, he said. “It was fun. Everybody knew we could play ball.”
¹⁸
Chinx Worley, the Colored Giants’ third baseman, told of playing for the New York Cubans—a team where African American players posed as Cubans in order to bring crowds through the gate. Then there were all the team nicknames, those imaginative concoctions that were a fixture of Rondo. There was “Rubber Man” Johnson, a right fielder, Tom “Rotation” English—so called for his slick pool cue maneuvers—and Bobby “Grand Old Man” Marshall, of University of Minnesota fame, the team captain. While riding around in the cars, talk would turn to strategy, as older players explained a few tricks to the youngsters. Tomboy listened carefully. Their conversation was the instruction she had craved. Take, for example, the “swing bunt.” To lay down a swing bunt, an older player said, a batter winds up, takes a full swing, and drops the ball lightly right between the catcher and the pitcher. Everybody is fooled. Or the “delayed steal”—a combination of pretense and nonchalance that gave the infield jitters.

Just the process of getting to the games was a lesson in spontaneity. The Colored Giants traveled in two old cars with a handmade wooden trailer rattling behind. Breedlove’s nephew, Smokey—the team’s all-round driver-cook-mechanic-and-sometimes-player—occasionally slept in the rickety enclosure. The trailer held bats and balls, bases, benches when necessary, even one ambidextrous pitcher’s six-fingered glove. When one of the cars broke down, Smokey lassoed one automobile to the other with the trailer bringing up the rear. The team limped into the next town like an old dog trailing a bum leg. Money for gasoline was always a problem. The split of gate receipts did not always pay much money when divided among all the players. Sometimes payment came in the form of a ham sandwich and a glass of lemonade. On one occasion, after a couple of rainouts left no gate receipts to divide, Breedlove had to hock his watch in order to buy gas for the trip back to Saint Paul. Not every road trip could be completed in an afternoon. There were times when the team brought tents, found campsites, slept in the cars or in the dugout. Like the other male teams she had played with so far, teammates looked upon Tomboy as a baseball player, not a girl. “She was thin, kind of built like a boy,” a teammate said.
¹⁹
“We never thought of her as a date, she was such a good player.” If Tomboy or her parents had any concerns about impropriety on the road, those worries were not sufficient to keep her from playing.
²⁰
The Stones were too strict to place their teenage daughter in a risky situation.

Not all that Tomboy learned from the Colored Giants was about baseball. She also witnessed subtle signs of racism that older teammates tried to shield from her. There were whispers about which restaurants would serve black people or questions about why opposing white players—so seemingly friendly during the game—would turn their backs once the game was over. Even John Cotton and Tomboy, the youngest players on the team, could sense the cold treatment. Rarely were they invited to join white teams for food or drink after a game—rarely did conversation between the two teams even continue after the last out. Their opponents made it clear that they wanted the Colored Giants to pick up their equipment and get out of town. Manager George White had seen more flagrant expressions of bigotry, of racism so deeply rooted that the offender was unable to recognize it. On a road trip to Bloomer, Wisconsin, a field announcer presented the Bloomer lineup, then turned to the Colored Giants. “And now, the starting lineup for the niggers,” the announcer said. White was so stunned and angry that he ran out of the dugout. “We will not play unless that man [the announcer] is gone,” he forcefully said. Unaware of how he had triggered the confrontation, the announcer asked, repeatedly, “What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?” Tears were in his eyes. “He really didn’t know,” a player said.
²¹

Playing on the Twin City Colored Giants showed Tomboy a world outside Saint Paul. Of course, that world was only a few hundred miles away from her Rondo neighborhood, but it did help her sense the future. It suggested a way to make a living that did not involve being a nurse or a teacher or a secretary—careers her family and school envisioned for young women. When her brother, Quinten, began to show talent in sports, Tomboy told him to stay out of her world. “You get your own dreams,” she told him, “because I’ve got mine.”
²²
She also continued hanging around the meatpacking plants down by the stockyards until she finally persuaded workers to add her to a local team in the men’s Meat Packing League.
²³
More times than not after the barnstorming summer of 1937, Tomboy skipped classes at school. After Hammond Junior High, she moved up to Mechanic Arts High School in Saint Paul. Perhaps she did not find attentive teachers like the ones who encouraged her at Hammond, or perhaps she simply decided that school would always be too much of a personal struggle. “I was a dropout,” she said. “I’d come in and come out.”
²⁴
To remove her from distractions and show their daughter more conventional possibilities than baseball, the Stones sent her to New York to spend the Christmas season with her aunt Byntha Smith, a registered nurse at Sea View Hospital on Staten Island.
²⁵
Later the family tried another trip, a much longer stay with her grandparents in West Virginia. Tomboy enjoyed rural life. Her grandmother taught her to cook beans and ham hocks. She was especially fond of her grandfather, who trained horses. “I love riding bareback,” she said. Tomboy also enjoyed the currents of country life: gardening in the sun, eating the hearty chicken patties and handmade biscuits that her grandmother prepared early in the morning before the family went out to the field.
²⁶