The Most They Ever Had (8 page)

chapter six

“i played with bartow hughes”

They say Clay Hammett had a rocket arm, and if you hung him a curve he would knock it into the day after tomorrow. They say he could run, too, and if the catcher had the poor judgment to block the plate, Clay would go in like the Sunset Limited, and church ladies would avert their eyes. He played for the Jacksonville mill in the late 1920s and 1930s, and he will talk about it, sometimes, till you flatter him too much. Then he will say he was only fair, son, only fair. After ninety years, memory tends to ebb and flow and eddy in deep places, and there are deeper places to sink than baseball. He loved one woman, fiercely, all his life, and he asks a friend, who is over for a visit, if he knew that his dear wife Lucille had passed. The friend says yes, that she was a lovely woman, and Clay just nods. He is asked if he would like to talk about baseball some more, and he says he doesn’t mind it. He is asked if he remembers any one special game, but he says no, not that he can recall. “But once,” he said, “I did get the autograph of Tyrus Raymond Cobb.”

“It was 1937, in Rockmart, Georgia,” he said, “and we went over, the team, to see the Cleveland Indians play the Atlanta Crackers. Cleveland beat Atlanta 3–0. Bob Feller pitched.

“One of the boys pointed at this guy in street clothes and said, ‘Don’t you know who that is?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘That’s Ty Cobb. Don’t you know Ty Cobb when you see him? Bet you’re afraid to get his autograph.’ And I said, ‘Heck, naw.’

“So I walked over and said to him, ‘Will you sign this?’ And he said, ‘I shore will.’”

Then, in a break in play, he asked Bob Feller for his autograph, and Feller ignored him, and that made him mad. Bob Feller should have known not to be impolite to a man who played a boy’s game only every other weekend, who spent the days in between eating cotton in a 130-degree heat, and playing patty-cake with a machine that could take his throwing hand.

Clay, a big, raw-boned boy back then, stared right into Bob Feller’s eyes, and told him he was a stuck-up so-and-so.

“I hope,” he said, “you never win another game.”

And Bob Feller just took it.

Clay does not have Cobb’s autograph any more. “Lost it in a fire from a kerosene stove,” he said. But it was a just a scrap of paper, from a man he didn’t really know.

For some reason, that made him think of Bartow Hughes.

“Did you ever see Bartow Hughes play? Now, he could hit, and he could run.” But Bartow Hughes was not a baseball legend in the wider world, just a mill worker like him, running ‘round and ‘round the bases, chased by cheers, by a sound that seemed to make everything else in that hard life all right.

“I played,” he said, “with Bartow Hughes.”

___

It is a cliché, usually, to call someone the last of their kind.

Clay Hammett had to live a long time to be.

There were other teams from the mill village, but none like his, a team of hometown heroes who gave a poor and exploited people a reason to thump their chests and cheer.

What he could have told, light and dark, if only he could have remembered it all. In that too-short visit with friends in ’03, he sat in a straight-back chair, his body still hard and tough looking, his face still handsome, and daydreamed about the machines, his Lucille, and the sound of the crowd.

Baseball, why, that’s easy compared to living.

“My Daddy and oldest brother half-way farmed and sold sweet potatoes to Fort McClellan, where the cavalry trained. When my oldest brother got drafted, there wasn’t nobody to help Daddy farm. There wasn’t no jobs and there wasn’t no money, no place but one. In 1911, Momma and Daddy and my brothers and sisters went to work there at the mill. That was it, or else. I was born in the village, the tenth child of eleven, and the seventh son. I grew up with the constant machine racket, a roar. I could hear it from my bed, them big electric motors. We had a house, though. That’s one good thing I can say. Ever’ Chrismas the mill gave us all a ham. That’s another good thing I can say. But we was still poor. The other boys I run ‘round with already worked, my brother, Buddy Williams, Bert Bragg an’ ’em—them Bragg boys, I tell you, they’d kill you over their dogs. Back then, people didn’t think school, like they do now. I was in sixth grade when I quit. I told my Daddy, ‘I got to go get me a job.’”

The mill was called Profile then, named for a rock face in faraway New England, William Ivan Greenleaf’s way of moving a little piece of his homeland down here among these people. Greenleaf would, in time, banish what he called the shame of child labor, but a fourteen-year-old boy was, apparently, man enough to take his place at the machines.

Clay cannot really remember when his first day was, just remembers being told by a boss man to pick the compacted cotton lint from the machines. But he can still recall the way the jarring and shaking of the machines made the floor ripple, as if it were liquid beneath his toes, as he reached inside.

And that would have been all there was, just that mill whistle, that treadmill of work, if someone had not noticed him playing with his friends on the diamond, had not seen a teenage boy who routinely hit the ball so far they had to send a troop of smaller boys into the pines to fetch it. Old man Greenleaf, the mill boss, gave him a scratchy, baggy uniform with the words PROFILE stitched on the front and a scuffed-up pair of spikes and told him there might be a little something extra for him, a dollar or two, if he put some runs on the board.

He joined a team of men he already knew, some of them young men in their twenties, some graybeards who had fought in WWI and went about their baseball pretty much the same way as war. There was Bailey McClellan, Albert Slaght, Otto “Hook” Burroughs, Sam Hill, Guy “Boss” Hammett, Van Hamilton, Jud “Jutt” Harrelson, Elk Hamilton, Leonard Little, Homer Wilkerson, Jess Duke, and, towering over everyone, Bartow Hughes.

Their legends were born here, in the foothills of the Appalachians, and never traveled much farther. But the boys dreamed about being discovered, like a thirteen-year-old lint-sweeper named Shoeless Joe Jackson who made it all the way from a Greenville mill to the Chicago White Sox, and then down, down in the infamous 1919 World Series.

Old men here say Clay Hammett might have done it, his limbs and mind still young, his lungs still clean, but Clay just shakes his head when asked if his dreams were so big.

It was enough, he said, to be a part of the Profile Nine. With it, he finally found a sound strong enough, sweet enough, to drown out the roar of the machines that chased him every step of his childhood, even into his dreams.

___

Before the opening game, usually with the Blue Mountain mill, they hauled the whole team to Greenleaf’s mansion to have their picture made. Greenleaf did not invite them inside, but it was something, even from the yard.

The photos show rows of rail-thin, jug-eared men in harsh Depression haircuts, unsmiling, swallowed up by their uniforms. Management—Greenleaf, and the mill superintendents—poses with them, in three-piece suits. Nine bats, knicked, splintered, and taped, fan out before them. But for men who learned to hit with sawmill slabs, they would do just fine.

They were not always the product of the mill, these men. Greenleaf was not above bringing in a ringer. But the people never respected them, never yelled for them like they did their own boys, the boys from the machines. It was more than the hero worship lavished on a small-town quarterback, a native son. In its first fifty years, the local high school had never selected a cheerleader or elected a homecoming queen from the mill village. It was not just locality at play here, but class. These boys were of their blood, and their struggle.

They played only on Blank Saturday. The hands were paid every other weekend, lining up at the office to get their pay after a half-day’s work on Saturday afternoon, and the games were played on the Saturdays in between. It was, say the few old men who remember it, more than a mere baseball game. It was as intense as a revival, as violent as a coliseum, and as wild as a prison rodeo. The air smelled like a carnival from the concession stand and the tethered livestock—mules mostly, saddled and tied up to the hedges and fence rails—and if someone had just thrown in a goat-roping and a midget wrestler, it would have been complete.

On the day of big double headers, the railroad ran a special train from Piedmont to Jacksonville, and what few cars there were, in the depth of the Depression, rolled up to the field groaning under the weight of passengers. Children walking to the game through the village streets would beg to ride on the fenders and running boards, so by the time the big Chevrolets and Packards finally made it to the game they were festooned with dirty-faced little boys.

It was one of the few times that the town people and the village people mixed, a free show in a time when all the money was tight. The team played to full bleachers, which was probably only a few hundred then, but seemed like a lot more. An hour before gametime the stands began to fill with men in overalls and women in flower-print dresses, not just cotton millers but tenant farmers and day laborers, sharing rough-lumber slats with bow-tied deacons from the First Baptist Church. The surrounding trees filled with little boys, and every now and then a sinner would take a pint bottle of bootleg liquor from inside the bib of his overalls and take a slash.

Ken Fowler, whose mother was a school teacher in Jacksonville then, was one of the little town boys who ventured into the village every day there was a game.

To say he will never forget it is like saying he will never forget Christmas, or his first kiss.

“Now and then someone would try to hang a mascot, a nickname on the team, but the players always rejected it. That was considered prissy,” said Fowler, who is in his middle seventies now. “If you’re a real man, you don’t want to be called a tiger or cardinal or cub. This was hard competition among really hard men who had lived some pretty hard lives.

“There was an aura about the games. You can’t see it on film and it can’t really be described or explained. You truly had to be there to understand. The world could consider them, the mill workers, whatever it wanted to. But they knew they were something when they played these games.”

The Nine entered the field like conquering heroes. On game days, Hammett said, the players did not yuck it up with their buddies in the morning on the cinder streets, but waited inside their houses, so they could make an appearance.

Then, just before batting practice, they came walking along the unpaved streets, along A, B, C, and D streets, to cheers. More little boys ran beside them, dreaming, because in the world of a mill village, this was as good as it would ever be. They even asked Hammett and the others for autographs.

Some of them warmed up with a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from their lips, but it was deadly serious, out in that dirt, and if there was not a little blood mixed in it was considered a dull day. They liked to fight and they were good at it, but so were the men they played, the steelworkers, rubberworkers, soldiers and such, so brawls were bloody, ugly, but quick.

But all that was a sideshow to the great baseball. They turned double plays like the Brooklyn Dodgers, and ran the bases like Cobb. They beat Goodyear, the Army team from Fort McClellan, and every cotton mill team for one hundred miles. “We even beat the college boys,” Hammett said, in a time when the pretty girls thronged the first-base line, and the air smelled of parched peanuts and barbecue, not hot metal and cotton poison.

Hook Burroughs was so named because he had a curve ball that almost changed zip codes on the way to the plate, and Jutt Harrelson would take one for the team, even a fastball off his chin, if that was what it took to win. But it was Hughes at the middle of it, a man with tree-trunk legs, forearms as big around as fence posts. He could play any position and scat around those bases quick, for a big man. He had such reach he could clear the bases even if you threw it at his shoe tops, or a foot and half outside.

Some of the boys called him Dago—the reason why is lost, because he was not Italian, at least not that they know of—but Clay Hammett never did.

“Some people did say I was pretty fair,” said Hammett, “but man, I liked to watch that big rascal play.”

No one seems to remember their records, just that they were always winners in the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the 1940s, when the soldiers returning from World War II would become the last generation of great textile mill ballplayers.

Clay Hammett left the mill for other work before it broke him, the reason, he believes, he lasted ninety years. But he did not move away. It is an odd condition of people whose childhoods are bound by the mill. Even in old age, they are held to it.

He does not know, for sure, that he gave all that much to the people who came to see him play, but he knows what they gave him. “They were the best people I ever knew,” he said. “You could see the faith in those people,” he said, but he is not speaking of religion. “You can’t beat that faith, in your neighbors, in your friends.”

He could feel it, maybe a little stronger, on Blank Saturdays. He used to remember it all, the scores, even the plays. But he recalled, till the end, that feeling pouring in from those crowded bleachers.

“Some people,” he said, “
are
better than other people.”

___

As much as he loved the game of baseball, it was hard, on a warm day in 2003, to travel far from his memories of his wife. “She passed November 25, 2002,” he said, pointing to a sepia-toned photo of them taken when they were still young. “She was a wife to me, boy,” he said, and then he looked around the room, his eyes fierce, as if daring someone to disagree. He is asked if he has anything else to say about baseball, but he is lost now, in a place even the cheers cannot reach, cannot brighten.