Curveball (30 page)

Anyone who spent time with Toni and Buck would tell you they had much in common. First there were their backgrounds and similar routes to the Negro League: caring parents, supportive teachers, and weekend, semi-pro, and barnstorming teams. They both were gifted storytellers with a deep respect for Negro League history and a hunger for remembering the past. They also were among the oldest members of the Monarchs—over thirty—the age by which most Negro Leaguers already had found their way into the majors or found their way home. But the most significant quality that made them similar was comportment. Both Buck and Toni had a way of surviving in baseball without losing their self-respect. In a profession that broke many—the months away from home, the temptations of the road, the frustrations of an unforgiving sport—they could commit to the game while maintaining their dignity. If a person at a Blue Room table looked closely at Buck, for example, he could see O’Neil having as much fun as the other men laughing and drinking around him. But if he really studied the skipper, he also would notice that the highballs Buck kept drinking never seemed to take effect and that O’Neil left Streets as sober as when he walked in. “I never did drink,” Buck confessed later. He and Kingfish had a pact: the bartender would serve Buck a tall glass filled with cracked ice and a slice of lemon, and then pour water into it. “I’d sip at that and act the fool like the other people,” Buck said. “We had a ball.”
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For Toni, the greatest challenge was making her teammates understand that she was dedicated to playing baseball and was not interested in sexual relationships with them. During the hours he rumbled along on the team bus with the Clowns, umpire Bob Motley watched the way Toni drew the line. “Someone must have talked to her,” Motley said, because everyone recognized that Toni was there to play and not play around. Maybe it was her parents, he thought. Toni “was well bred” and mature enough to recognize potential pitfalls to her career. She knew that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she needed to “carry herself like that,” Motley said.
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To many who knew them, integrity was the essence of Buck O’Neil and Toni Stone—a truthfulness to who they were. There was one more quality they had in common. Playing baseball gave them absolute joy. With the 1954 Negro American League season about to start, Buck and Toni would find out if it would always be that way.

Even with a dismal showing at the East-West game, the 1953 season set league records for attendance. In fact, the previous year had been so financially successful that Negro League President Dr. J. B. Martin approved two new teams to join the new season’s league roster: the Louisville Clippers and the Detroit Stars. The addition of new teams and the hirings and firings on existing teams meant five new managers would begin the season. The Memphis manager moved to become skipper of the Clippers, leaving a vacancy with the Red Sox. Seeing the opening, Buster Haywood asked for his release from the Clowns and left for Memphis. After all his years with Syd Pollock, Buster could not accept the prospect of being demoted to the Clowns’ chauffeur.

With Haywood gone, the Clowns had to search for a replacement and—as usual—Pollock’s choice made the headlines. Buck O’Neil, who had seen many great Negro Leaguers in his day, believed the Clowns’ new manager, Oscar Charleston, was the best baseball player who ever lived. White ballplayers in the major leagues wished they could sign him during his playing days. Old John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, once infamously said he wished he could “calcimine” Charleston with whitewash.
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In the 1920s and ’30s, Charleston played for an illustrious string of teams: the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Homestead Grays, and the Indianapolis ABCs, and he posted a .357 lifetime batting average with 151 home runs. After his playing career was over, “Charlie” managed the Philadelphia Stars until 1952 when the team bowed out of the league. A mercurial man, Charleston had a volatile temper and could be insolent on the diamond. After the game, however, he was approachable. His personality was “so calming,” one observer said, “you could have mistaken him for a man of the cloth.”
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Toni respected Charleston and envied the Clowns players who would be under his generous tutelage. Connie Morgan was one of them. “He was my mentor,” Morgan said. He showed her how to run the bases and slide. Morgan was also on the receiving end of Charleston’s courtesy when he paid a visit to Philadelphia to meet with her grandmother and assure her that Connie would be properly looked after on the road.
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After brief spring training in Norfolk, Toni and the Monarchs played preseason games against the Clowns across the tobacco road circuit before heading down to larger crowds in Florida. With the first games came press releases and a chance for both the Monarchs and the Clowns to introduce their new women players. Just as he had done with Toni, Syd inflated the salary figures for Peanut Johnson and Connie Morgan, reporting that Connie was making ten thousand dollars a year and Peanut five thousand. The two women also attracted attention for their early play in North Carolina. Johnson pitched scoreless innings in Winston-Salem and Wilmington, while Morgan had hits in Greensboro and drove in a run in Rockingham.
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Staged photos of Connie Morgan, taken the previous year at her tryout, cropped up in black newspapers across the country: Connie Morgan and Jackie Robinson, Connie Morgan and Gil Hodges. Syd’s press releases called her a “bonus beauty.”
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Toni did not begrudge the young woman’s time in the spotlight; after all, she had helped put her there. She did, however, resent the staged photographs the Monarchs arranged. Seated in front of a makeup mirror with glove and ball on a vanity, Toni looked pained as she pretended to apply powder to her face. Just as she had done with the
Ebony
photo shoot a year before, she went along with the charade, but she disliked making the compromise. She gave in to the publicity because she knew the attention made her more valuable to the sport and might help increase her salary. At least there were a few newspaper articles that portrayed her in a more serious light. The
Atlanta Daily World
reported on her move to the Monarchs, noting that as the first woman in the league last year, she had conducted herself well. She had courage, the newspaper said.
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After a Saturday night game in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the Monarchs boarded their bus for an all-night trek to Miami. They were glad the game had been shortened by rain since the ride to Miami would be over seven hundred miles down the eastern spine of Florida. The night was hot and—with no air-conditioning on board—the team’s uniforms hung limply in the sticky air. Everyone wanted to look good for Miami. Playing in a large city meant that players took extra pains to appear clean and sharp. Sometimes if they arrived at a field ahead of schedule, they would spread their uniforms on the outfield grass and press them with their hands so that their shirts and pants would look almost ironed. A big crowd meant they made other attempts at enhancement, too. Some players would wear double or triple pairs of socks—even in the heat—so that their legs would seem bigger and more muscular. The better for scouts in the stands, they thought.
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Toni believed that the gear that helped her win a spot on the Monarchs was good enough, and in fact she still played with the same old glove she had bought with spare change in Saint Paul. Other players found it odd that she always carried her glove with her. She never stashed it in the equipment compartment under the bus. Maybe she feared the glove would get mixed up with the others; perhaps she worried that someone would steal it. Whatever her reason, Toni kept her glove right next to her so that she didn’t have to worry.

The next morning, the bus labored in the heat twelve miles south of St. Augustine. The Monarchs’ driver shifted into “grandpa gear,” as players called it, trying to take the strain off the clutch and brakes. Umpire Motley smelled something smoldering and looked out the window. A farmer must be burning off crops, he thought. Hearing the team needed to take a bathroom break, the driver eased the vehicle off the road. Just then, outfielder Doc Horn saw smoke rising inside the bus. “Fire!” he yelled, and players scrambled for the door. Toni grabbed her glove and ran with the others. With everyone safely out, Toni watched clouds of smoke fill the bus as a teammate opened the luggage compartment below, hoping to retrieve their equipment. When the door opened, flames roared out. Within seconds the entire bus was engulfed. “Spontaneous combustion,” someone said. A few players tried to re-enter the bus to find their belongings, but turned back coughing and singed from the heat.

Everything was lost: two grosses of baseballs, all the equipment, everyone’s clothes and personal belongings. The team waited beside the road for help, but no one stopped. Finally, after half an hour, a local sheriff pulled up and ambled over to the team. The white officer looked at the bus and the black team and told them he’d get help. Then he slowly walked back to his vehicle to radio the dispatcher. Sherwood Brewer, who shared second base duties with Toni, heard the sheriff make the call. “Nothing serious,” he heard the sheriff say. “Just a bus burning up with niggers on it.” It would be another two hours before help arrived.
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Tom Baird arranged for a new bus and equipment to meet the Monarchs, and after the Miami date the team retraced its steps back through the Carolinas. In Charleston, on Mother’s Day, the Clowns and the Monarchs squared off with all three women facing each other for the first time. Their play rewarded curious crowds, but not in the way Toni wanted. Mamie Johnson held the Monarchs scoreless until Toni ripped a single to the outfield. Straying too far off base, however, Toni misjudged Peanut’s ability to make a quick move. When the small right-handed pitcher fired a pick-off throw to the first baseman, Toni was embarrassed and out.
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The official league opener came a week later on the road in Memphis against Buster Haywood’s new team. The day brought perfect temperatures, and the Monarchs and the Red Sox expected a good crowd. But promoters had not accounted for competition of a different kind and carelessly scheduled the game on the same day as the annual Cotton Makers’ Jubilee.
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With black residents attending parades and all-day parties, fewer than two thousand fans opted to go to the game. To add to their dejection, Kansas City lost to the Red Sox 15–8. The next day, in Sikeston, Missouri, the Monarchs’ luck changed. A young pitcher, Jim Gilmore, who had recently returned from a hitch in the army, threw a perfect 4–0 game for Kansas City. Things were looking up for the home opener at the end of the month.

When the big weekend arrived, Kansas City was in a “dither,” Russ Cowans of the
Chicago Defender
observed, and the old magic of Negro League baseball seemed to have returned. On Saturday, the Monarchs took practice down the hill from Blues Stadium at the old Parade Park. From the practice field, Toni could look up the hill toward the stadium and Lincoln High School. Those two symbols—sports and education—stood like sentries to a future for many black youth. Fifteen years before, Toni had chosen sports as her route forward, as unlikely a path for a young black girl to follow as aiming for the White House. But she had gone far, and now she was in Kansas City, home to the greatest black baseball franchise in the world. That evening as Toni readied herself for the annual home opener banquet, she looked forward to spending time with Bunny and Syd and being introduced as a new member of the Monarchs. But the Booster Club president, a man Cowans described as “a sprightly old coot who knows all the tricks of whipping up the enthusiasm,” was more impressed with Clowns manager Oscar Charleston than he was with Toni or the other new players. In a way, it seemed as though the banquet celebration was all about the past, not the future of black ball. Oscar Charleston was “one of the greatest ball players ever to put his feet in baseball shoes,” the booster declared. Toni, Mamie, Connie, and the other players could not help but feel overshadowed. When she went back to her room at the Streets Hotel that night, Toni hoped the change she told Bunny would “do her some good” would pay off tomorrow.

But the next morning, when Toni looked out across the streets below, the day was anything but bright. Overnight storms had moved across the Midwest, and rain was coming down hard. Hundreds of teenagers milled around Blues Stadium, wondering if their drum and bugle corps would perform during the home opener festivities. About an hour before the game, the rain finally let up—but the field was soaked and too wet for bands and beauty queen floats. Shortly before the ceremony was to begin, boosters announced that the opening show was scrapped. Although the Monarchs won the game 8–5, both teams felt they had lost. The game was filled with errors and miscues, some no doubt caused by the slippery field conditions. Kansas City catcher Juan Armenteros broke his finger trying to hold onto a wet foul tip. Fans complained about missing the pregame excitement and about the game’s sloppy play. Tom Baird and Syd Pollock lost more money than they could afford. Just over seven thousand fans attended the game—a deeply disappointing number compared with the previous year’s nearly twenty thousand. There were other reasons besides the rain for the small turnout, some said. For the first time in the Monarchs’ history, the game was broadcast over local radio. On such a dank day, even neighborhood boys who usually sneaked into the game for free found they would rather stay home and listen on the radio. Peanut and Connie never made it into the lineup. Only Monarchs second baseman Hank Baylis seemed to have a good day. He went two for three and scored three runs. Toni watched his success from the bench.
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The most significant event in May 1954 was not the home opener washout but the news two weeks earlier out of Washington, D.C. In a unanimous decision the U.S. Supreme Court declared separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The landmark
Brown v. Board of Education
decision overturned a century of laws that denied black children equal education and upended the old
Plessy v. Ferguson
ruling that had ushered in Jim Crow laws that stretched from schools to streetcars. As a Southerner, skipper Buck O’Neil knew all too well how deeply Jim Crow education hurt. When he graduated from eighth grade in Florida, O’Neil hoped to continue high school. But there were only four high schools across the state open to blacks, and O’Neil’s local Sarasota high school was not one of them. “I cried for two days,”
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Buck said when he was denied enrollment in his hometown high school. Later, his family asked relatives in Jacksonville if Buck could live with them and attend one of the state’s black high schools nearby. O’Neil moved over 250 miles away from his parents to go to school. He graduated, then stayed two more years in Jacksonville to attend Edward Waters College.
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