On Tuesday, July 27, the ball field at Camp Penticuff basked red and dusty in the sun. We rode out to it in the Bomber, dressed out in our flannels, more anxious than we’d admit about taking on these Negro barnstormers in front of a hopped-up crowd of colored GIs. We’d just come off a five-game road trip (three wins, two losses), and the Mockingbirds and the Gendarmes would play us three games each at home towards the end of the week. I had the impression, jouncing past the stripped-down barracks and the parched parade grounds, that Muscles, Hoey, Dunnagin, and some of the other Hellbender vets felt we’d bitten off a chaw big enough to choke us.
The stands out here already teemed with khaki-clad black soldiers. They sat or stood in the main grandstand behind the backstop or on portable metal bleachers a maintenance unit had set up beforehand. The sun blazed, slapping the whole sports and training complex like a huge catfish bladder on an unseen stick. The very air seemed to stretch out and pop under the blows. The Bomber pulled up, after the Splendid Dominicans’d already arrived, to some ear-splitting whistles.
“Bout damn time!” yelled somebody sun-sore and antsy.
We parked behind a fleet of ten- or twelve-year-old Buick touring cars, dented and furred with rust; and the Splendid Dominicans ran out onto the field. Until we’d showed, they’d apparently spent their time mingling with the troops: boosting morale. Learning that about em lowered ours. It implied the Dominicans (“These guys’re Dominicans like I’m a Hawaiian,” said Turkey Sloan) hadn’t felt obliged to warm up in advance of our arrival. Two seconds after hitting the field, though, they had a ball whipping around the horn like men born in spikes and caps. I watched them from the Bomber while, outside the fence around the park, Mister JayMac and Darius shook hands with Mr Cozy Bissonette and Major Dexter.
Inside the bus, Fadeaway said, “Cottonton all over again-no dugouts. We’ll bake in this sorry-ass sun.” He had bench time ahead of him, and I almost sympathized. Almost.
In baggy white flannels-shirts with numbers whip-stitched to their backs and the letters SDT sewn to their chests-the Splendid Dominicans didn’t seem much like black supermen. Like us, they had guys built like fire hydrants, flag poles, or haystacks. This one could’ve pruned Azalea hedges in Alligator Park, that one could’ve tonged blocks of ice at the cold plant. No doubt, though, that Cozy Bissonette’s ragtag bunch could hit and hustle.
“All right,” Mister JayMac said from up front. “Pile off.”
“Criminy, we’ll slide out on our own sweat,” Parris said.
We got up and pushed through the aisle, looking for relief-from the heat, from our nerves, from the suspense of taking on these colored unknowns, who, in their own cities, had even more fans than we did in Highbridge.
I saw a few white faces-brass and senior NCOs, company commanders and cowcatcher-jawed topkicks. But the faces of the Negro GIs outnumbered the pasty or sunburnt faces among them fifty-to-one. A dark sea in the stands: beige, caramel, chestnut, shiny bruise-black. Even at a military post deep in the heart of Dixie, those hundreds of young Negro men shook me to my boots. What if they all got loose and we had to wade through their strutting tide?
Darius touched my arm and urged me through a gate onto the field. “See?” he asked. (Or was it “Sea,” like in “body of water”?) When I glanced at him over my shoulder, he gave me an unreadable smile.
The field had a press box, a platform on stilts that may’ve sometimes served as a reviewing stand. A goofy-looking white lieutenant in wire-rimmed glasses sat behind a microphone on the platform. His welcome blared out at us from metal speakers mounted on creosoted poles.
“Men of the First and Second Battalions of the Special Training Regiment of Camp Penticuff, Georgia,” he said, echoes from the speakers overlapping and blurring, “give a soldierly hello to the fine ball clubs that’ve come out here today to entertain you-our sister community’s Highbridge Hellbenders of the Chattahoochee Valley League, and the Splendid Dominican Touristers, some talented barnstormers from the Negro American League! Let em hear you, men!”
A tumult of claps and gospel shouts. The lieutenant broke into it to read lineups, ours first, and each Hellbender player trotted out to line up between second and third base. Oddly enough, the GIs of the Special Training Regiment made as much racket for us as our own fans in Highbridge would’ve.
Then the lieutenant read the starters for Mr Bissonette’s glorified pickup squad. “Batting in the lead-off spot and playing second base, Terris ‘Slag Iron’ Smith!” If that ball field’d had a roof, those colored soldiers would’ve blown it into the Gulf of Mexico. Slag Iron Smith could’ve been every last one of em’s favorite cousin.
I recall the name of every other Dominican Tounster the lieutenant said, each with a road alias cornier by several degrees than any of ours-Rufus “Pepperpot” Cole, Luis “Gumbo” Garcia, Hosea “The Gator” Partlow. Each of their guys got a send-off Highbridge fans would’ve reserved for a regiment of heroes. Don’t think it wasn’t intimidating either.
The Army appointed umpires. No big deal? Ordinarily, maybe not, but Major Dexter’d asked a Negro captain from a Negro tanker unit to call balls and strikes, and a black NCO from his own battalion to patrol the bases. You’d’ve thought, gauging these appointments by the reactions of our biggest in-house bigots, he’d asked Attila the Hun and Vlad the Impaler to do it. Even Mister JayMac, seeing these men on the field, felt it incumbent upon himself to buttonhole Major Dexter and argue for one white ump-on the grounds we’d made dozens of courtly concessions to Mr Cozy’s boys already, including playing them at all, meeting them in front of their enlisted cousins, and using a CVL rest day to come out here. Neither Mister JayMac nor Major Dexter would allow himself the pleasure of ranting or kicking dirt-but the argument drug on. Both teams went to their benches, and the GIs began to get restless. They swayed on their seats and sang out ad-lib Jody chants:
“Left, right, left, right, march yo ass.
All that glitters must be brass!
“Left my home in Tennessee.
Ever DI looks de same to me!
“Why you fellas has to stall?
We come out to watch some ball!
“Jody, Jody, see me sweat.
My po body got a liquid debt!
“Count yo fingers, count yo toes.
Be a year fo one team scohs!”
During these chants, the Dominicans retook the field, but without a ball. They pretended to have one, though. Their pitcher-Turtlemouth Thomas Clark, a crafty s.o.b. once the game got clocking-went into this showboaty boa-constrictor windup and let absolutely nothing fly. A Dominican at the plate with a bat took a swing as broad as Turtlemouth’s windup and drove that whistling air ball into right for a make-believe single.
By this time, the crowd’d stopped chanting. You could even hear the thwock! the bat made hitting the ball. (The catcher’d made it, sticking a finger into his cheek and popping it out like a champagne cork.) Anyway, as the batter ran to first, the right fielder scooped up the ghost liner on two invisible hops and fired absolutely nothing to the shortstop covering second. This man looked the runner back to first, walked the nothing in his hands a few steps towards the mound, and flipped it to old Turtlemouth.
“Hell’re they doing?” Fadeaway said, not trusting his eyes.
“Shadow ball,” Dunnagin told him. “Watch.”
The next batter took a couple of pitches, on both of which Turtlemouth wound himself tighter than the rubber band on a model airplane’s propeller. The batter banged his third pitch-thwock!-an air-ball knuckler, to the shortstop, Pepperpot Cole. Cole flung himself down, trapped absolutely nothing under his scrap of a glove, retrieved it, and zipped it to the second baseman, Slag Iron Smith, who caught this nothing at belt height. The runner from first tried to take Smith out of the play, but Slag Iron pivoted, leapt like a deer, and threw absolutely nothing to first.