A Miracle in Shreveport
Michael Jasper
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Published by Michael Jasper at Smashwords
A Miracle in Shreveport
Copyright © 2011 by Michael Jasper
First published in Electric Velocipede, May 2007. Also published in The All Nations Team.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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BONUS: Read excerpts from two of Michael's novels at the end of this ebook!
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A Miracle in Shreveport
We were lucky to make it out of Shreveport alive on that early spring day in 1917.
At noon, before the first game of our doubleheader, my All Nations team was taking batting practice, and as usual, I was studying the crowd. The people fascinated me: all those life stories that I'd never get a chance to hear, like that old colored man smiling and singing to himself next to his stern, frowning wife in her flowered hat, or the two white women with their cigarettes and exposed ankles. I was amazed by it all, though we never stayed in a place long enough to learn about anyone or anything more than the game and its players.
Looking at the crowd also gave me a painful reminder that we were back in the South.
We actually had two crowds. Sitting on one side of the greasy yellow rope that separated the crowds, behind home plate and the Shreveport Sports dugout, the white spectators laughed with one another and called out encouragement to the members of their team. I even saw a white man holding up a Brownie box camera with both hands, counting to eight as he made a picture of the white crowd.
The clamor of voices from that section felt too loud to my ears when I turned to the colored stands behind our dugout. The people seated here were far quieter, though they were crowded elbow-to-elbow on the rickety wooden bleachers. A few people nodded at me solemnly, while most looked away.
It was an all-too-familiar story told in black and white.
Today, however, would be a variation on that old, ugly plotline.
I should've seen it coming, but I was too busy getting ready for the game and savoring the look and feel of the ballpark, like a kid distracted by a shiny toy. The grass was bright green and lovingly manicured, and the chalk lines were sharp and straight. This field had been built just two years ago, and the twelve-foot-high outfield fence, coated in advertisements, looked twice as tall as the fences we'd seen at countless other fields.
"Going to put un béisbol over that," our Mexican first baseman Buddha Rodriguez said, pointing a thick finger at the wall. He was answered by the laughing jeers and rolling eyes of his teammates as they returned to the dugout.
Before the game started, we had to wait for a trio of men, two in brown suits and one in an olive drab Army uniform, who marched out to the pitcher's mound to address the crowd. I groaned and felt in my pocket for my absent pouch of tobacco.
This was the fifth time in a month we'd run into men like these. It was the war, again. Of course.
"We need to take up this slack of idleness in the industrial field and substitute a period of helpful discipline," the first man said, spraying the field in front of him with each spittle-stressed word. "Our country's people have grown lax and soft with excess, and we bring to you today a solution." He went on in this manner for a few minutes more, stirring the crowd to life until his partner took over.
I looked down at my players, most of whom were simply ignoring the three men. Our white pitcher Boles, however, was standing at the edge of the dugout, listening intently. Next to me, my centerfielder Mack stared at the speakers with a look of dismay on his brown face, which had a yellowish tinge to it today. Every day his skin was a different tone, from pale white to deep brown, and all points in between. His consternation was quickly spreading to something between fear and disgust. I almost gave him nudge to distract him, but I thought better of it. Even after over three seasons with him, I knew little about the man known only as Mack.
"Americans," the second speaker claimed, talking even faster than the first man, "need the sense of purpose that Europeans are finding in their grim, yet ennobling, struggle. And remember, no country was ever saved by just any old fellow on the street, somewhere in the world. It must be done by you, by a million American yous, or it will not be done at all."
He continued at breakneck speed, priming the crowd for the war. Preparedness, they called it. Though Mr. Wilson still claimed we would remain neutral, these men wanted the country to mobilize now, to gather an army for America's inevitable entrance into the war in Europe.
No thank you, I wanted to tell them, looking once more at the enigmatic Mack, then Boles. I've got enough to prepare for right here, gents. And in any case, nobody prepared me for the battles I've been waging all my life.
The last man, the soldier, finished up with a simpler exhortation: "People in the city have grown fat and drunk from riding around in their automobiles and partaking of their sweet drinks and watching their insipid 'movie' shows! They have no discipline, no morals. You fine people are far better than that. Like me, if you join up now, you can earn the right to say 'I helped save Europe!'"
To my surprise, I saw many heads nodding along to the speakers, mostly those in the white stands behind us, as well as Boles outside the dugout. Long after the trio had left the field and piled into their dusty car, the white boy kept repeating the phrases the fast-talking men used to stir the crowd. Finally No Small Foot, our big Cherokee catcher, told Boles to shut his mouth before someone shut it for him.
I looked down at my roster, but couldn't read it for the shaking of my hand. This damn war. I knew it would take a miracle for us to avoid it, unless someone knew some sort of magic to get the countries of the world out of this current jam. I remembered the War Between the States all too clearly, and I'd thought at the time that such fighting would be the worst I'd ever see.
Yes, it would take a miracle. Or magic. Probably both.
Waiting for the tremor to leave my hand, I thought about how, back in the day, Maddie and I had carried on an ongoing discussion — one that usually verged on becoming an argument, especially toward the end — about miracles versus magic. Maddie's faith has always been stronger than mine, so she was quite emphatic about the likelihood of miracles in life.
Miracles I had trouble with, but magic, well, I could believe in that. I saw plenty of it in baseball. As old and jaded as I was, I could still manage to admit this with a straight face. Wondrous things happened on the diamond that I could never foresee, whether it was a wild pitch smothered impossibly in the dirt by our mostly blind catch, or a home run detailed by our centerfielder before he even got in the batter's box. And that was just the start.
In a game, the ball could go anywhere — off the bat or released from a fielder's hand, even off a player's body — and its trajectory wasn't limited to the confines of the field. That's what kept me coming back to this game I loved. The unexpected moments of magic.
Even if one of those moments almost got us killed that day.
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I took off my cap and wiped my forehead with the sleeve of my shirt. I looked around for Mack, my strange, sure-handed centerfielder, but he'd stepped away. I knew I needed to talk to him, because that look on his face was still troubling me.
I gazed at my team, and saw how the so-called four-minute men had cast a pall over everyone on the team but Boles. The day felt too damn warm to be March. If I opened my mouth, I felt like I could take a bite of the thick, hot air.
"Play ball!" the ump shouted, and I forgot about Mack as I turned my attention, at last, back to the game.
I'm sorry to say that we got off to an inauspicious start. Three All Nations batters went to the plate at the top of the first inning, and all three came marching back without a hit. This wasn't like my team. Maybe it was due to the crowd, half of them too boisterous, the other half much too quiet.
The Shreveport Sports were semi-pros from the Texas League, and once the game began, I noticed a tension in my players that I couldn't blame on the speeches. Especially my white players. Out on the field, they kept ducking their heads at the slightest sound, as if caught in the middle of an act more despicable than playing with a mixed-race ball group.
The knot on our pitcher Boles' forehead from yesterday's beaning had receded enough for him to pull his cap down low over his flushed red face. The white boy was always getting hit by pitches, which I blamed on the way he crowded the plate and how he ran his mouth on the mound. Of course, most white pitchers we faced were able to throw strikes to Boles. The white woman I knew only as "Carrie Nation" at second and Art, the Jew at third, kept themselves busy inching forward, then creeping back, their eyes hidden under the shadow made by their caps.
I nodded at big No Small Foot behind the plate, though I doubted my Indian catcher could see the gesture — he was legally blind in his right eye and I guessed his vision was pretty questionable in his left — but he hunkered down behind the batter anyway and began flashing signals at Boles on the mound.
Soon I was so caught up in the opening strategies of the game that I hardly noticed when Donaldson got up and walked over to the jug of water. He took a drink from the dipper and offered it to me. After I took a quick sip — "Strike two!" the ump called, to scattered boos from the white side of the crowd — Donaldson took the dipper and sat next to me with it still cradled in his dark brown hands.
We watched Boles rear back on one leg before unleashing his towering fastball with a grunt. The Sports batter didn't even get to finish his swing before the ball slapped into No Small Foot's tiny mitt. One out, bottom of the first.
"They lynched a man here last night," Donaldson said.
I'd gotten so caught up in the game that I found myself cheering on Boles the loudmouth, and I almost missed what Donaldson had said. The smile froze on my face.
Donaldson continued, not looking at me as he spoke.
"A colored man. He was walking down the wrong side of the street on a Friday night, and he looked at a white couple in a disrespectful way. They strung him up at the edge of own and hung him. Right here, in this town, Coach."
At the far end of the bench, our Cuban pitcher Mendez had taken out his cornet, which he sometimes played for the crowd after our games. He tapped the trio of valves in a silent song while our Old Blount, our bus driver, sawed logs next to him. Blount had his feet up on the splintery bench and a line of drool leaking from his mouth.
Old Blount. The colored man was probably a decade older than me, though like so many of us former slaves, he had no record of his birth. He may have been younger than me for all I knew.
"Heard it from my aunt who lives down here. Never mind today's paper. Wasn't in there. I checked."
I once again noticed that there wasn't a trace of the usual fun-loving behavior breaking loose from the colored stands behind us. No shouting, no singing, no laughing; just a strained silence. We were sitting on a powder keg, waiting for someone to ignite it.