Safe at Home by Richard Doster

Author:Richard Doster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christy Award, Sportswriting, Baseball, Civil Rights, Integration, American South, Southern fiction, Jim Crow, bus boycott, segregation, 1950s
Publisher: David C Cook
Published: 2012-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

I walked back to the office through the town square, passing the barbershop, Reeves Department Store, the diner, the hardware store, and I thought, Why not? Why wouldn’t baseball be the thing that wrapped around our town and held it together? I understood Charley’s point. He lived for the game, for wins and losses, for outsmarting the guy in the other dugout, for transforming raw kids into graceful athletes who would, one day, take all that he’d preached and practice it in the game’s great cathedrals: Connie Mack Stadium, Sportsman’s Park, and Wrigley Field.

But I had the advantage of distance. I could see the game from a different perspective. And I understood, in a way Charley couldn’t, that baseball’s about more than wins and losses, or strategy, or the players’ performance. For six months a year baseball is the glue that binds fathers to sons; a topic that makes supper a time to look forward to; a season when moms, dads, kids, and neighbors all share the same hope. When I was sixteen and knew the answers to most of the world’s questions—when I couldn’t find a thing in common with a father who’d suddenly gone stupid—we had baseball and box scores. While guys like Charley schemed to win games—when they plotted hit-and-run attempts, sac flies, and pickoff plays—baseball sustained a bond that had, in every other place, come unglued.

Far away in the back of my mind, I thought, though never dared to whisper, that baseball had cast its spell on me and Walter Jackson—a colored man and white man, who, if nothing else, shared a love for the game. So why couldn’t baseball be a bridge from Burt to Phil Edwards? From Joe to Chester LaBarr? From Helen to a waitress in Walter’s part of town?

Baseball was woven into our lives as seamlessly as our churches and schools. And because of Burt and Joe and Percy, it was a cloth that now covered the whole town.

Baseball’s purpose, I thought, was surely nobler than Donny Jones’ long and last shot at a big-league career.

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