By 1922, in Indianapolis, the letters A B C no longer stood for “American Brewing Company” but now brought to the minds of the Circle City’s citizenry the appellation of the town’s famous Negro National League baseball team, originally sponsored by the brewery at its founding in 1913, now its own eponymous eponym. Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, applied the alphabetic advertisement that summer’s season circling above the Washington Baseball Grounds, just west of the White River, the field they shared with the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association. As he composed the gigantic quilt of letters, stitching each white abraded thread to the blue field of the sky, he sang the children’s alphabet song—A B C D E F G…—partially to pass the time but also to keep time, the duration of the verse and its rests a kind of rally point, a sing-song metronome of time-keeping until the next turn or bank. He knew too that the melody was also the one used in “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and above him he could see, beyond the thinning veil of the atmosphere, mostly made pale in the bright sunlight, the quavering stars and twitching planets, maybe even the ethereal ghost of a gibbous washed-out membrane of the moon. The song too was the line on which was hung the lyric of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” and, as he left wondering about the location of the little star, he turned effortlessly to the number of bags of black wool the black sheep had for the master, the dame, and, descending, the little boy in the lane. Flying low now over the dusty diamond below he caught the teams hustling between innings, his plane seeming to herd the flock of wool-flanneled baseball players off the field, annotated with lullabies and nursery rhymes. Olivia Taylor, C. I. Taylor’s widow, was now the owner of the ABCs, and the season would be a turnaround year. In the bleachers on the third-base side, she shielded her eyes with her gloved hand and inspected the elemental instructions and monumental inscription she had commissioned in the sky overhead.
It was Henry Chadwick, The Father of Baseball, who, once he had devised the box score for the game, suggested the letter “K” to designate a strikeout, arguing that “K” was the “most prominent” of the letters in the word “struck” and had a harmonic relationship with the boxing abbreviation “K.O.” for “knockout.” The “K” stuck. It continues to be used today as an indication of an out made by striking out. Purists will still reverse the letter to indicate that the strikeout was a result of a called strike instead of a swing and miss. This “K” captured over the Washington Baseball Grounds during another Indianapolis ABCs’ game that year was a kind of swing and a miss. Mrs. Taylor had been so pleased with the earlier skywriting that she had commissioned Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, to keep score in the sky. But this experiment seems to have been a disaster what with the measured pace of the game, the rudimentary communication from the field below, and the shifting wind all making for an illegible hodgepodge of drifting symbols, cyphers, and figures. And, finally, it did not seem to illuminate, in any significant way, or increase meaningfully the enjoyment of the game or the appreciation of the ABCs’ play on the field that day against the Chicago American Giants.
One might imagine that the skywriting pictured above from the summer of 1922 was part of the failed sky scoring aloft during the Indianapolis ABCs’ home game at the Washington Baseball Grounds. Of course, the official annotation for a walk is a “W” or the preferred “BB,” standing for “Base on Balls,” so it was curious that the more cumbersome W A L K would have been spelled during the disastrous attempt to record the competition below. Additional research has revealed that this W A L K, while applied above the bleachers during an ABCs game, was photographed in this incomplete state and captures only a partial rendering on its way to becoming a complete advertisement for the near west side enterprise of Madam C. J. Walker. The E and the R are yet to be generated. The C. J. Walker Company factory, at 640 North West Street, was a nearby neighbor. The company was the leading manufacturer of hair care products and cosmetic creams, shampoos, pomades, and irons. There also, it trained Madam Walker’s “beauty culturists” in “The Walker System.” Madam Walker herself had died in New York City three years before, the year of The Red Summer, 1919, but her legacy continued in Indianapolis, the company run by her daughter, A’Lelia, who also would continue her mother’s philanthropy, political activism and patronage of the arts in New York during the Harlem Renaissance. When A’Lelia died in 1931, she was buried next to her mother in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. At the interment, Hubert Julian, The Black Eagle, circled above in his modified Curtiss Jenny, dropping red gladiolas and dahlias on the mourners below. But years before that, in 1922, the very same summer Art Smith was writing in the skies over Indianapolis, Hubert Julian, The Black Eagle, was making his first flight over Harlem during the Universal Negro Improvement Association Convention, affixing to the sky various UNIA slogans. That year too, The Black Eagle had patented his “airplane safety appliance,” a parachute combined with a rudimentary propeller. It is not known, and highly unlikely, if Art Smith was equipped that day with such a device. We can now, from the distance of this future time, see that this W A L K affixed over the ABC game in 1922 was also a kind of historic annotation as the Great Migration of African-Americans from the southern United States to the north was reaching its zenith. At the same time, the rural American population, of all colors, was moving into America’s expanding cities. People were on the move and beginning to close distances and distort, though the inventions of speedy transport—cars, trains, and now, airplanes—time itself. Perhaps here is where the myth of baseball as a pastoral pastime set in the frenetic urban space began. Not the machine in the garden so much as the garden inside the furious infernal machine. In any case, Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, circled, applying a kind of cosmetic adornment to the ordinary sky about the application of cosmetic adornment for the crowds below watching boys play a game in summer. It is said that beauty is only skin deep and that a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case, a picture of one word seems to have been worth about a thousand more.
Allow me to return for a moment to that brooding K floating over Indianapolis in the summer of 1922 referred to above. As the reader knows or can, at least, intuit, Franz Kafka, a contemporary of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne, was writing in Prague at this time, though not in the sky there. That year Kafka began work on a novel that would later, after his death in 1924, be published as Das Schloss (The Castle) whose featured character, named K. Kafka, too, was swept up in the zeitgeist of that era. It should come as no surprise that Kafka, in 1909, was in attendance at the famous Air Show at Brescia, Italy, publishing, that same year, the story fragment “Die Aeroplane in Brescia” in the newspaper Bohemia. It is said to be the first description of powered flight in the German language and its literature. In 1913, Kafka traveled with friends to Vienna, and there sat for the only photograph extant that pictures this important writer smiling.
I have searched through Kafka’s published work to see if there is a reference to baseball. There is none that I could ascertain though in the incomplete finale of fantastic fragments in Amerika and its “Nature Theatre of Oklahoma,” I did find something. There, the protagonist, Karl, in the almost limitless vastness of the valleys and hills, a pastoral paradise, adopts, strangely, the new name, “Negro.”
On March 9th, 1915, at Daytona Beach, Florida, the famous pioneer aviatrix Ruth Law was to drop a baseball from 500 feet into the waiting catcher’s mitt of future Hall of Famer, Wilbert Robinson. The story goes that Law left without the baseball and instead launched a grapefruit earthward, which then burst apart as it hit Robinson’s glove. The red pulp, the stinging acid of the citrus fruit, led the catcher to believe that the baseball he thought was heading his way had injured him badly, blinding and bloodying him. Six years later, Art Smith, acquainted with his fellow flier, Ruth Law, who was the first to do the loop-to-loop, proposed to the ABCs’ front office a similar stunt that summer. He would launch from above while circling over the Washington Baseball Grounds not one, not two, but three baseballs that would plummet into the waiting grasp of the team’s outfielders below. By 1922, the art of aerial bombardment had been advanced immeasurably by the crucible of The Great War. Art Smith jettisoned the baseballs from an altitude of 500 feet, and they descended through the baffle of capital K’s he had previously etched on the otherwise cloudless daylight skies over Indianapolis. The balls accelerated, propelled by the constant attraction of gravity at thirty-two feet per second per second. Though there is an inevitability to this descent—one can imagine the spheroids approaching from the point-of-view of waiting targets growing larger and larger, backlit and looming as they drew closer—and the irresistibility time provides, the historic photographic record here creates the illusion of levitation and the paradox of an infinite regression. There! Did you catch it? Those motes, the minuscule specks of black suspended in midair? Are those the captured shadows of the plummeting balls? No, perhaps only a period-sized dot of dust that intervened between the negative and the fixing agent, a bubble in the emulsion. In any case, nothing else remains as evidence of that event. It was after all a stunt performed during a Negro Leagues doubleheader in a minor league town, during a time when acrobatic and barnstorming flight with all its wonders was just reaching its height, only a few summers from the stall, initiating its own parabolic descent, and the novelty turning toward endurance records and the competitions for altitude, speed, and the rewriting of history.*
* It should be noted that, simultaneously to the events recorded above, the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, led by the notorious D. C. Stephenson was reaching its ascendancy that summer. The Indiana General Assembly passed legislation to create Klan Day at the Indiana State Fair, which included a nighttime cross burning. And on July 4th of the next year, there would be a rally of more than 100,000 in Kokomo.
