Great Men Die Twice by Mark Kram Jr

Author:Mark Kram, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466877009
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

4

No Place in the Shade

(COOL PAPA BELL)

Sports Illustrated

August 20, 1973

In the language of jazz, the word “gig” is an evening of work, sometimes sour, sometimes sweet, take the gig as it comes, for who knows when the next will be. It means bread and butter first, but a whole lot of things have always seemed to ride with the word: drifting blue light, the bouquet from leftover drinks, spells of odd dialogue, and most of all a sense of pain and limbo. For more than anything the word means black, down-and-out black, leavin’-home black, what-ya-gonna-do-when-ya-git-there black, tired-of-choppin’-cotton-gonna-find-me-a-place-in-de-shade black.

Big shade fell coolly only on a few. It never got to James Thomas Bell, or Cool Papa Bell as he was known in Negro baseball, that lost caravan that followed the sun. Other blacks, some of them musicians who worked jazz up from the South, would feel the touch of fame or once in a while have thought that their names meant something to people outside their own. But if you were black and played baseball, well, look for your name only in the lineup before each game, or else you might not even see it there if you kept on leanin’ and dreamin’.

Black baseball was a stone-hard gig. Unlike jazz, it had no white intellectuals to hymn it, no slumming aristocracy to taste it. It was three games a day, sometimes in three different towns miles apart. It was the heat and fumes and bounces from buses that moved your stomach up to your throat, and it was greasy meals at flypapered diners at 3:00 a.m. and uniforms that were seldom off your back. “We slept with ’em on sometimes,” says Papa, “but there never was ’nough sleep. We got so we could sleep standin’ up or catch a nod in the dugout.”

Only a half-mad seer—not any of the blacks who worked the open prairies and hidden ballyards in each big city—could have envisioned what would happen one day. The players knew a black man would cross the color line that was first drawn by the sudden hate of Cap Anson back in 1883, yet no one was fool enough to think that some bright, scented day way off among the gods of Cooperstown they would hear their past blared out across the field and would know that who they were and what they did would never be invisible again.

When that time comes for Papa Bell—quite possibly the next Hall of Fame vote—few will comprehend what he did during all those gone summers. The mass audience will not be able to relate to him, to assemble an image of him, to measure him against his peers, as they do a white player. The old ones like Papa have no past. They were minstrels, separated from record books, left as the flower in Gray’s “Elegy” to “waste its sweetness on the desert air.” Comparisons will have to do: Josh Gibson, the Babe Ruth of the blacks; Buck Leonard, the Lou Gehrig of his game; and Cool Papa Bell—who was he?

A comparison will be hard to find for Papa.

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