The Sounds of Summer (Baseball Cards)
Somebody told somebody that everybody told
Neil Armstrong to not even bother stepping foot
on the Negro side of the moon. June, August
and July, three segregated summertime sisters
agreed, weather-wise. The year of our lord, 1969
was a color-line shaped like no shape at all.
It occurs to me now that before I left home,
hitchhiking, at age 16, I did not know
that some things continue to go missing long after
they are found, and I didn’t realize that the physics
of throwing a baseball explains every ounce of
racial tension in America. But I won’t talk about that
now. Now, I want to talk about love. As a kid, I fell
in love with the sounds of
the names of baseball players:
Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron, Roger Eugene Maris,
Edward Charles “Whitey” Ford, Willie Mays, Willie
McCovey, Maury Wills, Billy Williams, Ernie Banks
and Stanley Frank Musical, the St. Louis music man.
And I can still hear the names, baseball games
between the Temptations, the Supremes, the 4 Tops,
Motown songs on Grandmama’s transistor radio.
“Crack,” the sound of a baseball kissing the sweet spot
of a baseball bat. “That ball’s outta here,” the always white
announcer would yell towards the Colored sport section
of my yellowed newspaper wallpapered room. And what
about the other pages in the other yellowed corners of
my unheard short radio story? And what about
that white boy, classmate in every class that year?
He’d never seen a “stolen base” like me. I didn’t know
I was supposed to knock him out. I didn’t know
I was a nigger until he called me “Nigger”
deep in the very bottom of the 9th. Me at the plate,
“crack,” a walk off (case closed) home run, dead center,
solid between the hazel-blue color of two blue eyes.
The Pender County Board of Education didn’t see it
that way in base-hit terminology. Me, expelled completely
from the school system for life for being the “nigger”
I did not know I was until…
Still, so be it, anyway and yes, I know I was
raised in a small, white town of three white Jesuses,
Baptist, Presbyterian and Methodist,
neither of which I liked much or loved the way I
loved potato salad, fried chicken and collard greens,
picnic-style-served after Negro church services
on Sunday, summer afternoons in the yard of
a church without a denomination. But the choir could
sing a stairway to Heaven and part way back if you
decided to get off along the way. Each of
the three white Jesuses had nice white churches with
tall steeples and summer league baseball teams,
but I never asked to pray or play. Perhaps
I knew way back then, if water could be segregated,
“strike zones” could be tailor made not to fit
a Black baseball boy growing up in White Town.
Grandmama must’ve thrown my baseball cards
in the trash the day I left, the day the Board of
Pender Country Education decided I didn’t need any
more education. Years
later, Grandmama couldn’t remember, but I still
remember the magic. Yes, even now on some lazy
weather summer days, I’m eleven years old again,
listening lightly, my voice opening a pack of
baseball cards, the sounds of summer. Me, side-
stepping up and down a dirt country road,
almost swallowing the afternoon, the chew of
stale, hard baseball card chewing gum
stuck to the bottom of somebody else’s shoes, my
clean-up-batter blues.
And then, somehow, I find what I never did lose,
piano music playing clouds across a Carolina blue
sky, reminding me quite beautifully
as I call out the sounds of the names I loved:
Rico Petrocelli, Jose Santiago,
Louis Aparicio,
Bill Mazeroski, Dizzy Dean and Dizzy Trout,
Roberto Clemente and Tony Conigliaro.