Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line

By Emily Ruth Rutter

Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research

Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others.

Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496817136

Emily Ruth Rutter

Emily Ruth Rutter is dean of the Honors College and associate professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, published by University Press of Mississippi, and The Blues Muse: Race, Gender, and Musical Celebrity in American Poetry. Along with Tiffany Austin, Sequoia Maner, and darlene anita scott, she coedited Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. Her numerous essays have appeared in A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry, African American Review, MELUS, and Aethlon, among other journals and edited collections.

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INTRODUCTION

Archival Interventions: Black Baseball and Imaginative Literature

During a recent interview with the former Kansas City Monarch Ira Mc-Knight, I asked him what he wanted people to remember about the Negro Leagues. He lamented, A lot of stuff isn’t out there. You can go to the library and read about it, but a lot of stuff isn’t in there (personal interview). Indeed, most Americans will have never heard of McKnight, who became a professional player after Jackie Robinson had already made his momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. With the exception of a brief stint with a New York Yankees Minor League team, McKnight spent his prime playing in the Negro Leagues, mainly for the Kansas City Monarchs (1956–1960). After the Negro Leagues folded, he barnstormed with the Satchel Paige All-Stars and spent many rewarding years gracing Canadian fields with his skills as both a catcher and a formidable hitter. Like many talented players, McKnight has never received the fanfare he deserves, but he nonetheless stands as a living testament to the sacrifices that African American men in particular made to play the game they loved. As the imaginative literature examined in this book shows, McKnight’s experiences are like those of many players before and after Robinson broke the color line—experiences that are crucial to understanding the legacy of racial apartheid within baseball and, more broadly, American life.

Barred from playing in organized, professional leagues by the so-called gentlemen’s agreement among white owners in 1883, African Americans established their own formidable teams.¹ From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885–1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920–1960), black baseball was a staple of African American communities in the early twentieth century. The move toward organizing the Negro Leagues began in 1920 when Rube Foster founded the Negro National Baseball League, but Foster’s League did not withstand the economic troubles ushered in with the Great Depression. The Negro National and Negro American Leagues were then reestablished in 1933 and became a vibrant and vital part of African American communities. However, when Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization on October 29, 1945, the beginning of the end was in sight, and after over a decade of waning support, Negro League play ended in 1960.² Yet the story of the Negro Leagues does not end there, as the authors in Invisible Ball of Dreams make clear. The dissolution of black baseball may have gone relatively unnoticed at the time, but the specter of the segregated past continues to haunt the national pastime and the literature that engages it.

The title of this book comes from Quincy Troupe’s Poem for My Father (1996), in which he describes both the pains and pleasures of black baseball through the poignant metaphor of an invisible ball of dreams (81). The poem is a tribute to Troupe’s father, Quincy T. Trouppe Sr., who played very briefly in the Majors for the Cleveland Indians after a long and storied career as a Negro League catcher. On the one hand, Troupe’s invisible ball refers to the innovative performance of shadow ball, a staple of Negro League games in which players would pantomime pitching, hitting, and diving for balls with such vigor and panache that the audience believed it was real. On the other, Troupe, like many black baseball authors, laments the social erasure (or invisibility) of African Americans by white supremacist power structures. As bell hooks avers, One mark of oppression was that black folks were compelled to assume the mantle of invisibility, to erase all traces of their subjectivity during slavery and the long years of racial apartheid; further, whites cultivated the practice of denying the subjectivity of blacks (the better to dehumanize and oppress), of relegating them to the realm of the invisible (Representations of Whiteness 21). Baseball was another arena activating this dichotomous relationship between white presence and black absence. Finally, baseball has long been enmeshed in the rhetoric of meritocracy, even while Major League-caliber African Americans and persons of color more generally were excluded from organized, professional (white) baseball. The metaphoric ball of dreams, therefore, was illusory to black players in Jim Crow America—a reality that both African American and Euro-American writers elucidate as they reimagine baseball behind the color line.

Moreover, while we can piece together a black baseball timeline, much of the lived experience of African American ballplayers and their fans was excluded from written records, not least because white authorities, who were also barring African Americans from the Major Leagues, were controlling the archives. Examining representations of black baseball by novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers, I argue that imaginative literature plays a key role in redressing these archival erasures. Curiously, while other contemporaneous forms of African American cultural production, especially music, captured the imaginations of American writers—think of the many jazz- and blues-inspired texts produced in the early-to-mid-twentieth century—there were scant literary references to black baseball until after both the Negro Leagues folded and the civil rights and Black Power movements awakened many white Americans to the moral costs of systemic racism. Invisible Ball of Dreams thus begins its exploration during the early 1970s and moves into our own era, comparing a diverse array of texts (novels, filmic adaptations, poetry, and a play) by black and white authors, men and women, and assessing their contributions to how we know what we know about racial apartheid within baseball. Reading representations across the literary color line, I argue, opens up a propitious space for exploring the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the one hand and black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the other. This comparative framework similarly enables an examination of black baseball literature that attends to writers’ distinct interests in bringing this past to life, including a desire to reminisce about a golden age of black solidarity and self-determination; to trace a progressive history from segregation to integration; and/or to ensure that the daily insults incurred as a result of de jure and de facto segregation are not forgotten. In other words, black baseball was the best of times or the worst of them, depending on the literary chronicler.

Examining these wide-ranging representations is especially crucial, given the relatively scant critical attention black baseball literature has received. Cordelia Candelaria’s Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature (1989), Deeanne Westbrook’s Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth (1996), and Richard Peterson’s Extra Innings: Writings on Baseball (2001) stand out as significant contributions to the field, but none of these scholars make black baseball literature their primary focus. Peterson, for example, devotes a chapter to the subject, but his is a survey, rather than an in-depth analysis of the role that representations of black baseball play in shaping our understanding of this history. Westbrook considers several authors’ treatment of black baseball, while her focus remains on the function of myth in the canon of baseball literature, not the contributions writers have made to cultural knowledge about the game behind the color line. Candelaria’s study also attends to the genre of baseball fiction, specifically texts that feature, as she puts it, white men participating in a closed activity of the dominant—that is, white, male, Christian, and capitalist—culture (3). Conversely, Invisible Ball of Dreams centralizes literary representations of black baseball and the sociocultural work that these texts perform. How do playwrights, novelists, poets, and filmmakers address the absences in the archives of the national pastime, and how do they use their own research to fill in these gaps? In what ways do writers subvert and/or perpetuate the myths about baseball as an athletic manifestation of the American dream, and what are the sociopolitical implications of the countermythologies that black baseball literature propagates? What kinds of racial slippages occur when white authors attempt to represent the lived experiences of black players? Moreover, how do all of these authors (white and black, men and women) grapple with the androcentrism that is endemic to baseball narratives and the game itself? In addressing these questions, I hope to further untangle the insidious conflation of white (not to mention male) and American that has underwritten much of baseball and, by extension, American history. Further, while my particular focus is black baseball, Invisible Ball of Dreams provides a model for assessing the literary interventions in and contributions to other marginalized cultural histories.

Archiving and Mythologizing Black Baseball

Baseball has long prized meticulous documentation, and its commitment to statistics is unrivaled by other major American sports. Gerald Early asserts, Only in baseball are the records so freely and persistently consulted. Baseball, above all other sports, can be contained in its entirety in an encyclopedia of its numbers and records ("Why Baseball Was 39). Yet African American participation in the national pastime is a history haunted by absences. Black baseball’s triumphs and failures were historically omitted from Major League Baseball annals, and, as Early notes, the Negro Leagues never kept good player statistics until nearly the time of their demise (39). Given the economic constraints facing the black press, black ballplayers’ accomplishments were also not recorded in the same minute detail as their Major League counterparts. As the famed Negro League player Buck Leonard recalls, We’d give a player the job of keeping the box score. Maybe he didn’t know how to keep it. Or in the middle of the game he’d have to go in and pitch and some other player would have to finish the box score (qtd. in Holway 262–263). And, as Donn Rogosin notes, the majority of games played by Negro league teams were not bitterly contested league games but instead exhibitions held wherever a profitable afternoon beckoned (118), and records of these off-season barnstorming games are even harder to accumulate than league statistics" (Heaphy, Negro Leagues 140).

Haphazard and inconsistent systems of record-keeping mean that we will never know exactly how many home runs Josh Gibson hit or how many games Satchel Paige won. Go to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s website, for example, and you will learn that in Babe Ruth’s twenty-two-year Major League career, he hit 714 home runs, including his remarkable 60 in 1927. Further, His lifetime statistics also include 2,873 hits, 506 doubles, 2,174 runs, 2,213 RBI, a .342 batting average, a .474 on-base percentage, and a .690 slugging percentage (Babe Ruth). By contrast, the numbers are less certain on Josh Gibson’s page: His legendary feats with the Homestead Grays have many experts regarding Gibson as the sport’s greatest home run hitter. Negro leagues statistics of the time are largely incomplete. But the legend of Gibson’s power has always been larger than life (Josh Gibson). In recent years, the Hall of Fame and Museum, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research), along with biographies of star players, documentaries, and histories of black baseball,³ have done much to fill the gaps in our knowledge, but it is not possible to fill them all. Moreover, these historical texts could never account for the complex lived experiences of players, fans, and communities, for black baseball was a vital social institution for those living behind the color line. It is precisely these sociocultural voids and silences that interest many of the playwrights, poets, novelists, and filmmakers considered here.

A central premise of Invisible Ball of Dreams, therefore, is that imaginative literature plays a crucial archival role, both revivifying baseball behind the color line and raising epistemological questions about this past. In fact, archival tropes abound in baseball literature, featured in such canonical works as Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973), Donald Hays’s Dixie Association (1984), and W. P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986). These novels implicitly trouble hegemonic, monosemous readings of history and the archives that buttress them. Coover’s and Hays’s novels, for example, are detailed chronicles of fictitious leagues—the Association and Dixie League, respectively—suggesting both the prized significance of records and the need to fill in feats and failures absent from official baseball annals. Similarly, in Roth’s satiric novel, his first-person narrator, Word Smith, seeks exasperatedly to prove the existence of the Patriot League, which he claims was "willfully erased from the national memory (17). Imbued with a more surreal atmosphere, Kinsella’s novel is devoted to uncovering the history of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy, a league erased from human memory" (24), and preserved only by the protagonist, Gideon Clarke, and his father before him. Imaginative works about black baseball fit within this rich tradition of using baseball as the metaphorical ground on which to pressure dominant readings of history, while expanding the archival, sociocultural implications of that tradition. Where Coover, Roth, Kinsella, and Hays centralize white male protagonists who are, in one way or another, seeking to validate their interpretations of America’s pastime, black baseball works are often attuned to the emotional and psychological experience of being systematically barred from Major League fields. Perhaps most importantly, the imaginative literature considered here invokes an actual historical chapter deliberately effaced by both the white-controlled Major Leagues and media.

In literature about other national sports, we can see similar efforts to both document marginalized histories and subvert hegemonic myths. Many black and brown subjects of British colonialism, for example, invested in mastering the game of cricket as an opportunity to subvert white supremacist power structures and stereotypes of inferiority. For example, the Trinidadian C. L. R. James concludes his influential memoir Beyond a Boundary (1963) by emphasizing the significance of cricket in both establishing self-governance and challenging British colonial ideologies: West Indians crowding to Tests [national matches] bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands (233). He further predicts, In the inevitable integration into a national community, one of the most urgent needs, sports, and particularly cricket, has played and will play a great role (252). More recently, the critically acclaimed Indian film Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001) dramatized the role of cricket in challenging colonial exploitation. A group of Victorian era villagers learn cricket in order to win a match against British Raj officials that both absolves them of their onerous land taxes (or lagaan) and leads to the withdrawal of British troops from the region. Whether the game be baseball or cricket—sports that are both inextricably bound up in national myths—writers and directors insist that the intraracial and interracial contests that transpire on the ballfield lead to sociopolitical transformations off of it. Thus, while Invisible Ball of Dreams focalizes literary representations of black baseball in particular, the constellation of athletic resistance, creative writing, and archival memory mapped herein is applicable beyond US borders.

In her seminal essay The Site of Memory (1987), Toni Morrison outlines the process by which writers reimagine individual and collective histories, particularly of the nonliterate, whose interior lives were not set down into the textual records that dominant narratives rely on to make the past legible:

It’s a kind of literary archaeology: on the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image—on the remains—in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of truth. (1074–1075)

Morrison likewise notes that the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot (1075). Accordingly, the imaginative literature I explore centralizes lived experiences with segregation that artifacts and statistics, when they are available, cannot fully reanimate.

With similar concerns in mind regarding facts and truth, scholars have been reexamining the concept and function of archives, traditionally considered to be neutral vaults housing unassailable knowledge about the past. In the last few decades, however, scholars influenced by poststructuralism, as well as critical race and gender theories, have emphasized the role of archives in maintaining hegemonic power structures. Perhaps the most well known and oft cited of these texts is Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), in which he contends that all archives are "at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional. An eco-nomic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law" (7). Following Derrida, critics have devised nuanced modes of accessing the past that question institutionalized ways of knowing and the archival frameworks on which they are often predicated. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), for example, Diana Taylor avers, There are several myths attending the archive. One is that it is unmediated, that objects located there might mean something outside the framing of the archival impetus itself. What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis. Another myth is that the archive resists change, corruptibility, and political manipulation (19). Recognizing the mediated nature of archives—in this case of baseball’s—I also take a cue from Wendy W. Walters’s Archives of the Black Atlantic: Reading between Literature and History (2013) in attending to both the physical and social space of the archive, accounting for the power of both the specific evidentiary traces of actual lives, and also the institutional systems that decide which lives to record (2). Put another way, archives validate the claims advanced in master narratives, even as many Americans will never visit a physical site where historical records are stored. Derrida, Taylor, and Walters represent a growing body of scholarship devoted to exposing archival imbrications in mechanisms of political power and social control, while also advancing new modes (à la Morrison) of documenting experiences that were excluded from written and artifactual records.⁴

Extending the work of these critics, I conceive of the archive not only as a curated vault but also as a signifier of a particular kind of knowledge, whether that knowledge is propagative of dominant narratives or resistant to them (or somewhere in between). Specifically, I argue that literary portraits of black baseball perform three kinds of archival roles. First, they fill in gaps and silences in both recorded baseball history and popular cultural narratives. Despite its centrality to the story of white hegemony and African American resistance, black baseball is unfamiliar to many Americans, even to many athletes. As sports columnist William Rhoden notes, For the young black athlete, the mere idea that African Americans could not play professional baseball, basketball, or football is beyond comprehension. After all, far from remembering a time of segregated leagues, this generation cannot recall a time when African American athletes were not the dominant force in the mainstream sports landscape (5). While African American participation in the national pastime has waned in recent years,⁵ the black baseball era remains crucial to understanding continued social inequities, as well as to considering the platform that sports and baseball in particular provided for addressing institutionalized racism. Accordingly, the writers ahead (black and white) attend to the pain and frustrations that segregated leagues engendered, while showcasing the many unsung black players and communities who defied the logic of white supremacy and established their own way of participating in the national pastime.

Second, black baseball authors democratize access to archives by sharing their own research with readers. In recent years, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, along with a raft of historical texts, have enriched the previously scant documentation of baseball behind the color line. Baseball-Reference.com and other digitized sources have likewise made baseball records available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. Nonetheless, authors and directors bring the archive to life in a way that an Internet search of, say, Josh Gibson’s lifetime batting average does not. Many of the authors here conduct meticulous research that they weave into their representations, and others invoke particular players as points of access to the tangle of feelings bound up in a history of dreams dashed and deferred. Arguably, these creative representations also lay the seedbed for readers’ and viewers’ further research into black baseball, germinating and nourishing the interest of wide-ranging audiences.

Third, these texts advance countermythologies to whitewashed baseball lore. When it comes to the national pastime, we speak not only of the facts but also of the myths and legends that inform them. As John Thorn writes,

The history of baseball is a lie from beginning to end, from its creation myth to its rosy models of commerce, community, and fair play. The game’s epic feats and revered figures, its pieties about racial harmony and bleacher democracy, its artful blurring of sport and business—all of which is bunk, tossed up with a wink and a nudge…. The bearer of fact cannot hope to annihilate the legends in baseball’s Elysian Fields, but simply to play alongside them, occasionally getting a turn at bat. (5)

It is difficult to discern where the myth ends and the game begins (and vice versa) with a sport so deeply embedded in America’s real and imagined sense of itself. Baseball, of course, has long been imbricated in the myths of bootstrap capitalism, whereby anyone regardless of race, class, or creed can climb the socioeconomic ladder, and American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States is not just the richest and most powerful of the world’s more than two hundred states but is also politically and morally exceptional (Hodgson 10). As Dave Zirin maintains, Sports in this country reflect a distinctly U.S. project, rooted in aspirations for greatness as well as conquest and oppression…. We are unique in playing the national anthem before every game (and, since 9/11, playing ‘God Bless America’ during baseball’s seventh inning stretch …) (19). These patriotic rituals reify the image of baseball as an athletic manifestation of the country’s democratic values.

By contrast, the authors considered here highlight the use of phenotype, not skill, as a primary metric determining who did and did not make Major League rosters. In Kevin King’s novel All the Stars Came Out That Night (2005), for instance, the pitcher Satchel Paige opines about playing on a big-league stage only to have the slugger Josh Gibson tell him ruefully, Don’t think so, Leroy. Niggers ain’t gonna get a shot. Not in your lifetime (63). As it turns out, the reverse was true, for Paige was signed by the Cleveland Indians in 1948, while Gibson died January 20, 1947, months before Robinson’s watershed debut with the Dodgers. This dramatic irony notwithstanding, King reveals the dehumanization that black athletes endured, knowing they could compete on the highest levels but being systematically denied that possibility. Alternatively, Yusef Komunyakaa’s 1992 poem Glory (chapter 4) describes how A stolen base or homerun / Would help another man / Survive the week (15), suggesting that the sport offered a rare opportunity to prove one’s virility in a society that reinforced black inferiority. These varied portraits of black masculinity both complicate romanticized notions about the game’s democratic ideals and further enrich baseball archives by posthumously honoring the figures who never had the opportunity to climb the meritocratic ladder.

Even while they elucidate the struggles of African American men, the literary works ahead often express the biases that remain entrenched in baseball and the country for which it stands. In The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969), Michel Foucault notes, It is not possible for us to describe our own archive, since it is from within these rules that we speak (130). Accordingly, like the archives that it