Your narrator, George Grunion
The Story
This novel is the baseball story I’ve had in my head for a long time now — since I wrote a newspaper article about the Negro Leagues back in ‘98.
Back in the years before World War I, an actual team existed much like the team in my book — a fully integrated team of black, white, Cuban, Japanese, Mexican, and Filipino players, and even a lone female player.
This fictionalized version of that team faces racism, poverty, and hard times as they criss-cross America, with side trips to Cuba and Canada. And then the war in Europe heats up, and the team begins to shrink.
Head coach George Grunion, a former slave, holds the team together, but just barely over the course of the 1918 season. He fears there will not be another season of the All Nations after this one, so they have to do all their winning now, while they still can.
Before people can forget his integrated team, and all he and his team have accomplished.
The Excerpt — from Chapter One
The final season of the World’s All Nations team began with the terrible sound of a baseball striking a human skull.
A sound not unlike that of a book slamming shut.
Not a fancy leather-bound bible sitting in a rich white man’s parlor, mind you. More like a small prayer book that’s been snapped under your nose by your wife after she catches you dozing during the sermon again. An unholy sound, destined to haunt your nights and steal your sleep.
The fatal impact occurred as night approached in the final innings of my team’s second exhibition game of the 1918 season, at the tail end of a long winter.
The All Nations Teams, 1918 (photographer unknown)
I remember the cold wood of the bench under me, and the competing smells of sweat and dust and woolen uniforms in my nose. Despite the shooting pain in my knees, I made myself get up and pace in the safety of the visitor’s dugout.
In those moments before that popping sound shattered the night, my thoughts weren’t on the game, but on the season’s conclusion: settling down at last at the end of my travels next to a warm fire, surrounded by grandchildren I’d yet to meet, a book of stories in my hand instead of an incomplete roster.
My old heart kept trying to convince my thick head that I’d made the right choice in answering the letter tucked into my uniform pocket.
My thoughts raced and diverged like horses on a track. And as a result of my distraction, I took my eye off the ball.
Only for an instant, I lowered my gaze to my empty hands — imagining retirement, an ending — just long enough to miss the quality of my pitcher Donaldson’s throw.
But after over fifty years of playing, nothing could stop me from looking when I heard the ever-promising pop of a bat making contact with a ball.
That pop brought me back to the game, just in time for the second sound of impact.
Next to the plate, the batter from the Kansas City Maroons was already down on one knee, the stub of his broken bat cradled in his dusky hands like a fallen bird. His eyes bulged white as eggs as he stared at a spot just outside our dugout.
In front of him, the area between the batter’s box and the pitcher’s mound was littered with a thousand splintered slivers of wood that formed a jagged halo.
Silence coated the Kansas City ballpark. I felt the chill of the winter-tinged air as the wind changed direction, bringing with it the smells of popcorn and pine tar.
That day had been the first of April. April Fool’s Day.
Thinking back on that moment now, I can still taste my own anger and bitterness, tempered by the strong bite of guilt. If I allow myself, I can even hear that sound, ringing in my ears, loud as a gunshot.
A prayer book snapping shut. A life stopping in mid-stream.
Worrell. You took your eye off the ball, you foolish white man. I wanted to tell you to get in the damn dugout. I should’ve dragged you in, though I never would’ve dared to even touch you.
Nobody could have foreseen this, not even our prescient centerfielder Mack. Even if Mack was — as I suspect now — somehow responsible for what had just happened to our head coach. When I looked out into the brown stretch of dead grass that passed for centerfield, I saw Mack standing twenty feet in front the crooked white-picket fence of outfield, his skin gray in the fading daylight, his eyes…
His eyes –
No.
Let me stop a moment. I’m getting ahead of myself.
To recount this history properly, I must go back to before the line drive that went screaming past our dugout.
Before the endless series of foul tips, before the bunts and the squeeze plays, even before my distraction with that letter. Back before the crowd screamed for a win against my team and the air thundered from hundreds of boots and shoes and cold bare feet pounding on the ground and the wooden bleachers.
No, I need to start with the early innings of that second game, with my last face-to-face talk with head coach Abraham Worrell.
“George,” he called to me at the bottom of the third. “Come here, please, and explain something to me.”
The sun was already sagging toward the horizon behind us, above the six levels of bleachers and the line of bare oak trees beyond that, but still high enough to stab my outfielders in the eyes.
Worrell gripped our roster tight in one hand as I stepped closer, inhaling his soapy odor; he was always clean, without perspiration. The man was thin as a rail, blonde hair cut short and parted sharply. He stood just as tall as me, but I always felt like I had to look up whenever I talked to him.
“Who put Mack after No Small Foot in the lineup?” he said in his soft, scratchy voice. His words brought back a familiar tightness to my chest.
What I wanted to say was: Why, Mister Worrell, sir, since it’s only you and me coaching this team, well, if it wasn’t you, then it would’ve had to be me, now wouldn’t it, sir? We could blame the Huns overseas, if you like. Or maybe an enemy spy lurking under the bleachers, for that matter. And while you may not have noticed that Mack has been hitting with twice the power of our Cherokee catcher lately, I did notice, and I made the switch. So perhaps we can quit pussyfooting around and get back to the game, sir, since we are down by two runs already?
What I did say was: “That was me, sir.”
Worrell shook his head, now fatherly toward me with his smile, though the man was barely half my age. Patronizing, like so many of his kind before him. His eyes held nothing more than a gleam of contempt.
“George,” he said. He was now holding tight to his trusty bible underneath the wrinkled-up roster. “Let’s not make such decisions without consulting first. With his speed and ability to get on base, Mack should always be batting second or third. No Small Foot bats cleanup. That is how it is.”
His hands tightened on the roster and the bible, and his watery eyes narrowed.
“You know that. Do not tamper with my winning combinations, –”
I could hear the missing word of his final sentence hanging in the air: “boy.”
Worrell bit down on the word like a gob of spit before it slipped out between his straight white teeth and exposed him for the kind of man he really was.
I wanted to grab him by the front of his starched, spotless uniform, one hand on the big A and one on the big N, and press him against the metal of the dugout fence.
How does it feel, I’d shout into his pale face, to be always meek as a child at my age? To be unable to speak on your own God damn behalf? How does it feel now, to be helpless?
But all I did was turn and walk away from him without a word. My knees twinged with pain as my metal spikes bit into the cold, tobacco-stained ground, gouging out clods of dirt in my wake.
I did not wish for his death, then. But I did not wish him good health and longevity either.
The bottom of the inning began, accompanied by the five gongs of the big bell at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church.
Maybe if I left this two-bit stadium here at the ass-end of winter, and just started walking until I arrived at the return address printed on the folded-up letter from Lizbeth in my pocket, then she could speak to Maddie for me, and we could all be together again.
But, as always, I stopped at the far end of the dugout, knees aching and chest pounding, and turned back to the game.
I couldn’t think about Maddie right now. Twisting my fingers into the chicken wire of the dugout fence in front of me, I exhaled in a slow-forming cloud and gazed at the field and my players scattered across it.
My players. They were never Worrell’s.
From behind the plate, No Small Foot the Indian flashed a sign for the next pitch to our colored southpaw on the mound. A burly Mexican man stood at first, a white woman at second, and a lanky amber-skinned fellow from the Philippines played shortstop. A Jew covered third. In the outfield, a compact Japanese man waited in left field, a light-skinned Negro with a trio of brown and white feathers trailing out of the bottom of his cap paced back and forth in right field, and the man I knew only as Mack prowled center.
The All Nations Team, the posters called us.
We were one of a kind, the only truly mixed team in those days filled with the constant, numbing echo of war from the other side of the world. If J.L., our team’s owner, hadn’t gathered these players for our team, they’d be working twelve-hour days in Chicago slaughterhouses or Pittsburgh steel mills or California orchards, or they’d back in their native lands, living in a slum or a tent or a shanty, trying not to starve to death on a daily basis.
Or more likely, they’d be stuck in a trench on the Western Front, aiming rifles instead of bats as they tried to hold back the German onslaught. But our team owner had a cousin in the draft offices, and he’d pulled some strings to shield most of my men from the draft. That was J.L. for you: a good man, even if he was white.
I considered all of them my players, though I’d always be their assistant coach, serving Worrell or some other white man. The unspoken fact was that a man like me could not coach a team with white players on it.
We’d already had two other white head coaches like Worrell since the team began in 1914. Our original head coach left with most of our share of the gate receipts before the last game of that first year, and his weak-spined replacement parted ways with us when we lost our Pullman car and most everything else that came with it near the end of the 1916 season. I can’t even remember their names anymore.
As for me, I’d been here from the start: reliable assistant coach Grunion.
Still burning from Worrell’s scolding, I gave No Small Foot behind the plate the sign for one of Donaldson’s wicked curves. I limped past Jose Mendez, our Cuban pitcher, as he recovered after tossing over a hundred and fifty pitches in our first game that day, a 5-1 win. Each step I took sent needles of pain into my knees, but I refused to sit down. One of these times, I’d sit down and never get back up again.
My team — and the game itself, with all its amazing catches and minute strategies and close calls — were pretty much all that kept me going at the age of sixty-four, or, as I liked to think of it, sixty-sore.
“Come on, Donaldson,” I called out. “Toss it in there.”
I paced for a dozen more pitches before my sixty-sore-year-old body stopped cooperating. I had to rest.
The moment I sat down on the splintery wood of the dugout bench, the Maroons batter clubbed the ball deep into center, for what looked like three bases, easy.
But I didn’t bother getting back to my feet; our man Mack chased the ball down in a dozen long strides, plucking it from the air with his gloved right hand as if it were a firefly. He’d made an impossible catch look easy. Again.
My smile dissolved when I looked at the chalk scoreboard above the home dugout and saw that we were being out-hit by these meat packers, factory workers, and day laborers. The Kansas City Maroons led three to one thanks to an unlikely home run that passed over our rightfielder Grant’s head.
As the third inning ended, my team jogged to the dugout accompanied by scattered boos and hisses from the crowd. Even here, in our unofficial home town of Kansas City, the All Nations were seen as the villains, the team the fans loved to hate. I could allow the spectators that luxury, especially if it made them forget the bloody war in Europe for just a few hours. I was used to always being a visitor, and sometimes a villain.
But what I hadn’t grown used to was losing, even in an exhibition game against colored players. I stood up and spat my plug of Red Man into the garbage barrel, suddenly furious that we were playing like such bush leaguers.
“Damn it all anyway,” I said as I met my players filing back into the dugout. “Let’s get off our sorry asses and knock the stuffing out of that ball, before I knock the stuffing out of each and every one of–”
“That’s quite enough, George,” Coach Worrell murmured from the far side of the dugout. My mouth snapped shut as Worrell continued speaking, soft as a saint. “Now, let’s get some hits this inning, gentlemen, Miss Nation.”
Worrell and his churchly ways. Why, to my knowledge, the man had never uttered any word stronger than “Dang” in his life, and he didn’t even chew tobacco. That behavior only got you so damn far in this game.
And the little prayer book snaps shut, right under my nose.
Continued…
