Willie’s close relationship with his father made it natural for him to seek out others like Cat—strong but nurturing figures who would push him to succeed while protecting him from unwanted intrusions or outright predators. Leo Durocher would be his most storied mentor, but before reaching the majors, Willie fell under the tutelage of an Alabama hero who prepared him for greatness in the Negro Leagues and beyond.
Lorenzo Davis looked like a Roman Centurion, 6-foot-3 and black as coal; even when relaxed, he seemed to stand at attention. Davis was born in 1917 in the small coal mining town of Piper, Alabama. Its Negro school ended in ninth grade, so his family moved to Fairfield so he could attend high school. After he joined the basketball team, Davis was sitting on the bench when fans began to chant the name of his hometown: “We want Piper! We want Piper!” He was Piper Davis thereafter.
He received a partial scholarship to play basketball at Alabama State College, but during his freshman year his family ran out of money, so he returned to Fairfield, where he initially worked in the coal mines. After two miners were killed in accidents, he found a job as a pipe fitter for $3.26 a day. He played in the Industrial League on the weekends, a line drive hitter with long, smooth strides and a strong arm. The Black Barons noticed, and in 1942 the team signed him for $500 a month. He was an instant star. Described in press accounts as “the best second baseman in the Black leagues,” Davis led the team to pennants in his first two full seasons and was named a starter in four consecutive East-West All-Star games. His renown grew further when he played for the Harlem Globetrotters in the off-season.
In 1945, Davis came close to history, drawing the attention of several scouts for Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who was looking for a black player to integrate the major leagues. Rickey chose Jackie Robinson instead. “If [Davis] had a chance when he was young, he’d have been outstanding,” the Dodger scout Clyde Sukeforth later said. Davis was thirty years old in 1947, and he still appeared headed for the majors. The St. Louis Browns purchased a thirty-day option on him from the Black Barons, but they never placed him on their roster and let the option expire. Davis spent the year in Birmingham.
Early in the 1948 season, the Black Barons were on a weekend road trip in Chattanooga, and at the hotel Davis bumped into Willie Mays, who was in town playing for one of the industrial teams in the Birmingham area. Davis had played with Cat Mays in the Industrial League before he joined the Black Barons, so when word spread about a gifted young center fielder named Mays, Davis knew who he was. But he was surprised to see him playing for money.
“Boy, what are you doing here?” he asked.
“I’m playing ball,” Mays told him.
“If they catch you playing for money, they won’t let you play those high school sports,” Davis said.
Willie shrugged. “That’s okay.”
Davis had good reason to be intrigued by any prospect, for he had a new job that year, managing the Black Barons. The team had won two Negro League pennants in the 1940s and three in its history, but never a World Series. If Davis invited Willie for a tryout, he could be criticized for recruiting a callow teenager, but the possibility of a championship was too much to resist.
The next weekend, the Black Barons had a game in Atlanta, and Davis again saw Willie.
“You still interested in playing ball?” Davis asked him.
Willie said he was.
“Then have your daddy call me,” Davis said.
Willie had first seen the Black Barons when he was five or six and had dreamed of playing for them ever since. When he got home, he told his father about his conversation with Davis, and Cat promptly called his former teammate.
Davis was still worried about the rules that forbade high school athletes from receiving money for playing on professional teams.
“If he plays with me,” Davis told Cat, “he can’t play in no high school competition.”
“I don’t care,” Cat said. “If he wants to play, that’s up to him.” Cat gave Davis one piece of advice: “Don’t holler at him. If you want something done, tell him and he’ll do it, but if you holler, he’s going to back up, and you’re not going to get anything out of him.”
Davis told Cat to have his son at the ballpark on Sunday at twelve-thirty. The Black Barons had a doubleheader on the Fourth of July.
• • •
Willie Mays’s time in the Negro Leagues was relatively short but significant for what he learned both on and off the field. Just as he would play in Major League Baseball’s golden age of the 1950s, he participated at the very end of the finest era in the history of the Negro Leagues: skilled teams were still enthusiastically supported by proud communities before integration made them anachronisms. Mays himself was one of the last great products of the Negro Leagues, and he brought with him black baseball’s energy, sass, and theatrical flair, which sustained the legacy of those leagues long after they had faded away.
The Black Barons’ name was derived from the city’s white baseball team, the Birmingham Barons of the Southern Association, a Class AA league. (The Barons’ claim to fame occurred when Michael Jordan played for them, in 1994.) While the white Barons had a strong following, the Negro team played in no one’s shadow. Called “the jewel of Southern black baseball,” the squad was formed in 1920 with players from the Industrial League. With only fifteen or sixteen on the team, their main weakness was overtired pitching, but in all other aspects they were equivalent to AAA baseball or the major leagues—and probably superior defensively.
The Black Barons were at once a source of deep pride for the city’s growing Negro population and a defiant rejection of the racist imagery of blacks as simpletons or savages. Though not in huge numbers, white fans attended the Black Barons’ games at Rickwood Field (in segregated seating), and they watched the best players in the game: local stars like Mule Suttles and Satchel Paige as well as visiting greats from Josh Gibson to Jackie Robinson.
But it was African Americans who most vigorously supported their team, and the Black Barons were beloved celebrities. On game days, they would walk or ride down Fourth Avenue, the heart of the black community, preening in their freshly laundered uniforms. Local businesses showered the players with gifts. The hitter who slammed the season’s first homer would get a diamond-studded watch from a jeweler, two dinners from a restaurant, and $50 from a funeral home. Salons and dress shops would sponsor young women for the annual Miss Birmingham Black Baron Beauty Contest. Some games would feature jitterbug contests, marching bands, and various dignitaries, including “the brown queen of Birmingham.”
John W. Goodgame was a perfectly named pitcher for the Black Barons; when his career ended, he became the pastor of the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church South. On Sunday mornings he would end his sermon, “Well, I’m going to the ball game,” and encourage his parishioners to follow suit.
The fans’ loyalty wasn’t blind—they loved their team when they won but denounced them with equal gusto when they lost. “The ragged, listless, puny performance by the locals against Memphis,” said the Birmingham World, the city’s black newspaper. “Birmingham fans like a hustling, fighting, chatty baseball club. They don’t like players too lazy to trot off and on the field, to speed back and tag up and who are too indifferent about the game to pep things up.”
The Black Barons survived the Depression and, in 1940, were sold to Tom Hayes, the heavyset son of a Memphis undertaker, who oversaw the team’s most successful years. An appealing part of the team was its ballpark, Rickwood Field. Built in 1910 for the white Barons, the concrete and steel structure cost $75,000 and was seen as a monument to baseball’s success in the South. Its main entrance featured twin parapets and fanciful masks to evoke a movie house, while a graceful cupola hovered above the grandstand. In the 1930s, steel-frame light towers allowed Rickwood to become the first minor league park with night baseball. The grandstands could hold seven thousand spectators. Connie Mack, the legendary manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, personally laid out the diamond so the sun wouldn’t interfere with the outfielders. The field itself favored pitchers, with straightaway center at 470 feet.
By the start of the twenty-first century, Rickwood stood as America’s oldest ballpark. It may have been a baseball paradise, but it also reflected the South’s racial hierarchy. The segregated stands gave white fans superior seats. In some years, the Black Barons and their opponents couldn’t use the clubhouses but had to dress in one of the city’s black hotels, either the Palm Leaf or the Rush. At Black Baron games, African Americans could work as concessionaires and gatemen, but the ticket sellers had to be white. The most frustrating disparity was the most obvious: the team didn’t own its park but was forced to pay rental fees—a black enterprise enriching white owners—and was subject to the whims of white schedulers.
In the major leagues, Mays was often described as the game’s most exciting player, and his style can be traced to his years with the Black Barons. The black game placed greater emphasis on speed, creativity, and daring, for it was designed to explicitly entertain fans at a time when organized entertainment was limited. Negro League games featured a range of performers, such as tap dancers, jugglers, vocalists, and bands, and the players themselves were part of the show. Of course the teams played to win, but victory wasn’t the only criterion for success.
At an extreme, the teams relied on showboating and clowning—literally. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Indianapolis Clowns fielded two players as a comic duo, Reese “Goose” Tatum and Richard “King Tut” Martin, the latter wearing a clown outfit and oversized glove, a cigar between his teeth. Goose Tatum blended sports and vaudeville, first as a Clown and later as a rapid-dribbling Harlem Globetrotter, recycling some stunts—such as throwing confetti on the fans—in both acts. Other teams played “shadow ball,” in which fielders whipped an imaginary ball around the diamond, recording “outs” with great flair.
Some of these tactics dated from the 1880s, when black barnstorming teams used comedy to draw crowds, but slapstick was also controversial for its perpetuation of negative stereotypes of blacks, as seen in minstrel shows or in Stepin Fetchit roles. As Piper Davis said, “If you was black, you was a clown. Because in the movies, the only time you saw a black man he was a comedian or a butler. But didn’t nobody clown in our league but the Indianapolis Clowns. We played baseball.”
The Clowns, it should be noted, still fielded some good players, including, in 1952, an eighteen-year-old Alabaman named Hank Aaron.
In the 1920s, Babe Ruth’s dominance as a power hitter turned Major League Baseball into a slugger’s game, slow and predictable, with less emphasis on base stealing, bunting, and the hit-and-run. The Negro players, still striving for entertainment, refined those skills, which, combined with the loose structure of the leagues, contributed to freewheeling theatrics. The games involved constant movement, dancing off bases, subterfuge, improvisation, and verbal jousting. Players would throw balls behind their back or under their legs, or a shortstop would use his bare hand to tap the ball out of his glove to the second baseman to start a double play.
Just as segregation fostered the spirituals, blues, and jazz—designed to perpetuate black culture—the strict racial divide allowed Negro baseball players to develop their own athletic imprint.
When Willie Mays arrived at Rickwood Field, he had been given no assurances that he would make the team. He was given a faded uniform (number 21) with BIRMINGHAM across the chest and a cap inscribed with three Bs on the front.
“Go shag some flies,” Piper Davis told him. His center fielder, Norman Robinson, was a 5-foot-8 speedster with a weak arm, and Davis had heard about Willie’s gunshots from the outfield.
His new teammates were skeptical. “I ain’t never seen a ballplayer like that in my life,” Bill Powell, a right-handed pitching ace, recalled. “When he came out as a little ol’ boy, his pants were too big for him, his bat was too heavy.”
The doubleheader against the Cleveland Buckeyes began, and Mays, sitting out the first game, was doubtful as well. Now turned seventeen, he was more than ten years younger than most of his teammates. He wasn’t nervous about his age—he had always played with older boys or grown men—but these guys were bigger and stronger than anyone he’d played with. And they were good. He didn’t appreciate how good until he reached the major leagues; the Black Barons, he believed, were equal to anything he saw there.
He just sat.
“Watch,” Davis said. “Watch what’s going on.”
The Black Barons won the first game, and before the next one began, the players gathered in the clubhouse, cooling off and drinking sodas. Mays felt isolated, alone. Then Davis approached him. “I’m going to let you play the second game,” he whispered. “I don’t know how you’re going to do. Play left field and give it your best shot.”
Davis called over the equipment manager, Roosevelt Atkins, and handed him a slip of paper. “Roo, hang this lineup in the dugout.” Davis looked at Willie and winked. Listed seventh in the order was “Mays, LF.”
The manager was standing near home plate when he heard one of his players say, “That little boy’s in left field.” Others crowded around the lineup card and were complaining as well.
Davis returned to the dugout and asked, “How’s the lineup look to you fellows? If anybody don’t like it, there’s the clubhouse, and you can go back in there and take off your uniform if you want to. And you can take it with you.”
He had no takers.
Mays had to face Chet Brewer, a tall right-hander who entered the Negro Leagues with the Kansas City Monarchs in 1925, six years before Willie was born. In this instance, youth prevailed—Mays rapped two singles. After the game, Davis told Willie that he was hired and the Black Barons would pay him $250 a month, though it would increase to $300 if he hit over .300 in any one month. (He never did in his first season.)
Mays hadn’t cleared every hurdle. He was completing his sophomore year of high school, and neither Davis nor Cat would let him travel with the team until classes ended. Moreover, his playing for the Black Barons, even at home games, created an uproar at school. He had received payments from other teams for several years, but the visibility of the Black Barons brought his play to the attention of the school’s principal. As Davis predicted, E. J. Oliver called Willie into his office and said that if he was compensated for playing baseball, he would not be able to play high school sports in Alabama. He also threatened to suspend Willie. The youngster wanted to play baseball, but was it worth dropping out of high school? A meeting with Cat Mays, Aunt Sarah, and E. J. Oliver was hastily called.
Oliver was an unforgiving disciplinarian who held his students accountable, including Willie. He lived outside the city to avoid encounters with parents—he believed that could lead him to favor one of their children. To get to school, he rode a streetcar to Birmingham, transferred to the Bessemer line, got off at the Vinesville Station, and walked a mile through the woods—a total of thirty-two miles a day for forty-three years. His well-pressed suits, shined shoes, and carefully trimmed mustache conveyed precision and control. There were many rules. Students had to handle books and periodicals in the library with clean hands, applaud moderately in the auditorium, and walk purposefully in the halls. Girls had to wear dresses or skirts no higher than an inch above the knee. Any act of mischief or insubordination was grounds for corporal punishment, which was sanctioned by one of Oliver’s favorite biblical proverbs: “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it from him.”
Willie Mays felt his wrath, and strap, once. Caught playing in the hall, he was summoned to the principal’s office and told to bend over a chair. Oliver’s message—obey the rules — was delivered with a half dozen decisive whacks.
Oliver, a graduate of Tuskegee, was also a progressive educator. His students were taught Negro history long before it became fashionable. He oversaw a wide range of clubs—math, science, drama, debate—and encouraged his best students to travel to Montgomery for academic meets. He celebrated black ambition, including athletics. He showed his students newsreels of Jackie Robinson playing for the Dodgers. But as its name suggested, Fairfield Industrial High also focused on the trades—such as tailoring and auto mechanics for boys, home economics and cosmetology for girls. Oliver was determined that all his students would be productive citizens once they graduated.
The principal reinforced Mays’s values of deference, sacrifice, and discipline, but the youth’s desire to play for the Black Barons undercut another tenet. In Oliver’s view, for blacks, education was the path to economic salvation. He expected all of his students to graduate, and he feared that Willie would now be distracted from his schoolwork. Oliver was also not beyond self-interest. Willie helped Fairfield win in football and basketball, increasing ticket sales and putting money in the school’s coffers. All of that would be gone if he played for the Black Barons.
What occurred at the meeting with Cat, Aunt Sarah, and Oliver was never disclosed to Willie. Ultimately, Sarah and Cat got what they wanted: Willie would continue to play for the Black Barons and without any disciplinary action, but he could travel with the team only when the school year was over. Willie did indeed lose his eligibility to play high school sports, except when the team played outside Alabama. (He helped the football team win a game in Florida.) The move outraged his classmates, who believed he was putting his interests above the school’s. But Willie was unmoved. He loved football and basketball, but baseball was now his profession.
In 1948, Piper Davis knew that all Willie needed was the opportunity. “He was an infant compared to the folks he was going to be playing with, but you could see the talent in him,” he recalled. “He had that something special inside.”
His job was to teach Willie on the field and protect him off it. In truth, he tried to protect him on the field as well. Mays was not expected to be an everyday player, but Norman Robinson broke his ankle, leaving center field open. The job was suddenly Willie’s, though the corner outfielders tried to take advantage of him. One game, when a ball was hit to right or left, the other outfielders yelled, “Come on, Willie! Come on, Willie!” forcing him to make long runs for the ball.
Davis would have none of it, and between innings, he called over the offending Black Barons. “You’re going to have to earn your money,” he barked. “We can get anybody to stand out there and yell, ‘Come on, Willie!’ I don’t want you running him foul line to foul line.”
While Mays was precocious, he was still unpolished. His arm was as powerful as rumored, but Davis instructed him to charge the ball as fast as possible, especially with a runner on second base. This advice, in hindsight, seems self-evident, but the practice wasn’t common at the time. In organized ball, outfielders were instructed to field grounders on one knee to ensure that the ball didn’t skip past them. When Mays reached the major leagues, he stunned baserunners when he charged the ball—he played the outfield like the infield.
Davis found other ways to help. Playing second base, he would signal to Mays in center field what pitch was being thrown, and on the bench he would tell him what the pitchers would try to do and who would knock him down. On the bases, he implored Mays to slide more aggressively into fielders who tried to block him from the base. At the plate, Mays struggled with the curveball, but Davis told him to stand straighter, keep his shoulder pointed toward the pitcher, and resist lunging. Ironically, major league pitchers tried to get Mays out with hard stuff, high and tight, because he now killed curveballs.
Davis emphasized forcing the action, speed, and aggression, especially on the bases. “If you think you can make, try it,” he’d say. Toughness was equally important. In a game against the Memphis Red Sox, Mays sped toward home plate and barreled into All-Star catcher Clinton “Casey” Jones. Mays and the ball arrived simultaneously, the runner’s spikes catching Jones high on the leg and leaving a long, bloody gash. Jones dropped the ball, but Mays felt terrible. When he reached the dugout, he headed straight for Davis.
“Piper, I couldn’t help it. I didn’t have to hit him like that.”
Davis took him aside. “Willie, that’s the man to hit. He’s got all that equipment on and he beats up on everyone, so he’s the one to tear up. He won’t block the plate on you no more.”
On another occasion, Mays hit a home run off Chet Brewer. His next time up, the veteran pitcher drilled him in the arm with a fastball. No ball had ever hit him so hard. Mays crumbled to the ground and began to cry. When he looked up, Davis was glowering over him and kicked him.
“Skip, they’re throwing at me,” Mays said. His screechy voice rose even higher when he was excited.
Davis made no effort to help him up. “Boy, you see first base?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Point to it.”
“It’s right down there,” Mays said, motioning down the line.
“Then get up and go down there, and the first chance you get, you steal second, and then third.”
Davis turned and walked back to the dugout, and Mays trotted down to first. He stole second and then third. He scored on a fly ball.
Back in the dugout, Davis said, “That’s how you handle a pitcher.”
Willie saw “shadow ball” in his first year with the Black Barons. The game stopped in the seventh inning, and, as he recalls, “they played baseball without the baseball.” His teammates were running around the bases and sliding into home just before the tag. “It was fun and entertaining, and people loved it,” he says, “but the real value was the mental part. You had to think what you were going to do with the ball even when there was no ball. You had to exercise your mind.”
Mays had always competed to win, but now, playing before large crowds, some reaching ten thousand, he realized he could be more than a baseball player. “In the Negro Leagues, we were all entertainers,” he says. “And my job was to give the fans something to talk about each game.”
In later years, he would contrive plays to incite fan reaction—such as slipping to the ground before making a catch—but at this age his natural ability was enough to generate howls, particularly on the bases and in the outfield. “He was the most exciting young player you’ve ever seen,” out-fielder James Zapp recalls. “It was a thrill just to watch him in a rundown because most of the time, he’d get out of that hot box.” Adds Bill Powell, “He did some impossible catches in the outfield, and then people would just stand there and shake their heads.”
On one drive to left center, Willie and the left fielder arrived at the ball simultaneously and nearly collided. The left fielder missed the ball, but Willie leaped and caught it barehanded, then threw it to the infield before anyone knew what happened. It was remarkable—a barehanded catch deep in the outfield—except Willie did it twice more. Using his oversized hand like a glove, he learned to charge and scoop up base hits with his right hand and throw the ball home in one fluid motion. “Nobody,” Davis later said, “and I mean nobody, ever saw anybody throw a ball from the outfield like him, or get rid of it so fast.”
The Negro League’s quintessential showman was Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the ageless right-hander, all legs and arms, whose windmill wind-up, famed hesitation pitch, and memorable quotes fueled his popularity. Among his rules for staying young: “Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society—the social ramble ain’t restful.” His unerring control and ability to change speeds also made him, according to some experts, the greatest pitcher of all time—any color, any league.
Mays faced Paige in one game, in the summer of 1948, when Paige, forty-one and playing for the Kansas City Monarchs, had been pitching professionally for more than twenty years. Mays knew little of the legend, and his first time up, he hit a fastball for a double. As he dusted himself off, Paige walked toward him. “That’s it,” he muttered.
Mays wasn’t sure what he meant, but he heard Paige tell his third baseman, “Let me know when that little boy comes back up.”
Next time up, the third baseman said, “Satch, here he is.”
Paige walked halfway to home plate and said to Mays, “Little boy, I’m not gonna trick you now. I’m gonna throw you three fastballs, and you’re gonna sit down.”
Paige threw three fastballs, and Mays sat down.
Shortly thereafter, the Cleveland Indians signed Paige, who would pitch for five years in the American League and then, at fifty-eight, would return for one additional game for the Kansas City Athletics. But he never faced Willie Mays again.
The greatest year for baseball in Birmingham’s history was 1948. Its white team drew more than 440,000 fans, a Southern Association record, on its way to winning the Dixie Series. Shortstop Artie Wilson of the Black Barons hit .403, winning the batting crown for the second straight year, and the team won the Negro American League Championship, taking the series against the Kansas City Monarchs, 4–3. In the second game, Willie Mays’s game-tying single in the bottom of the ninth allowed the Black Barons to win in extra innings.
In the World Series, Birmingham played the Negro National League Champion Homestead Grays, which over the years had produced such stars such as Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson and this year featured future Hall of Famer Buck Leonard (known as “the Black Lou Gehrig”). The Grays, who had beaten the Black Barons in the World Series in 1942 and ’43, won the first two games of this series.
In game three, Mays made a leaping catch against the center field wall and also threw out Leonard at second base. With the score tied in the bottom of the ninth and two men on and two out, Mays stepped to the plate and singled sharply up the middle, winning the game. But it was the Black Barons’ only victory of the series, with Homestead winning, 4–1.
Willie Mays proved he belonged. He struggled at the plate, hitting only .226 for the year, but he still made his mark in the field and on the bases. The Birmingham World first mentioned him on September 28: “Willie Howard Mays is the find of the year, if not the rookie of the year. He can hit, field, throw and deliver in the pinch. He lacks experience and has a feeble batting average. But he will break up your ball game and turn hits into putouts with sensational catches.”
The season produced one of the most famous photographs in Negro League history. The picture, by Ernest Withers, features the Black Barons in their brick clubhouse after they won the league championship. The jubilant players, many with their shirts off, are pressed together, smiling, cramped in a corner beneath an exposed lightbulb and flimsy hangers, a gritty, victorious image of camaraderie, unity, and love. But in the back row, hidden by arms and shoulders, there is a smooth ebony face without a smile, only wonderment and innocence, a boy among men.
Cross-country bus rides became part of the romantic lore of the Negro Leagues, a celebration of male bonding and roadside adventure that satisfied the wanderlust of any ballplayer. But the rides were also grueling marathons marked by cheap hotels, lousy food, and—particularly in the South—racial indignities. The Black Barons spent more time on the road than most teams: they were one of only two southern teams in the Negro American League, which meant long trips to Kansas City, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Cleveland. Exhibitions, meanwhile, took them from St. Louis to New York.
For Willie Mays, the endless hours on the bus, combined with his sojourns in faraway cities, gave him a view of the country that most of his high school peers could only dream about. These experiences contributed to his sense that baseball was really one big traveling family, quarrelsome at times, but beholden to the greater good of the clan. Willie was still protected, but his time with these older men, intimately familiar with the angry, violent subtext of Jim Crow, broadened his education on how to survive the country’s racial codes.
The cross-country experience was full of contradictions. Negro Leaguers might be denied food or gas by the very people who would patronize their games later that day, but that didn’t deter the players from performing at their highest level. Their exploits made them heroes in their own community but reminded them of their subordinate position in the country at large.
“It was an arduous existence, which consisted of long rides, low pay, and a game almost every day,” said Monte Irvin, who starred with the Newark Eagles in the 1940s before playing with the New York Giants. Players would wash their clothes in the morning and dry them by holding them out the window on their ride to the next town. Barred from hotels in some cities, teams would sometimes sleep on the bus, in rooming houses, or even in jails. “The traveling conditions were almost unbelievable,” Irvin said. “That was the tragic part about traveling, particularly in the South, where we couldn’t even stay in the third- or fourth-rate hotels.”
Negro Leaguers later bristled at this vagabond image—puttering across America, nearly broke, bordering on desperation—as obscuring the dignity of their efforts and their own resourcefulness. Roy Campanella, who began his career in 1937 with the Washington Elite Giants, recalled that the bus combined home, dressing room, dining room, and hotel. “Rarely were we in the same city two days in a row,” he said. “Mostly, we played by day and traveled by night; sometimes we played both day and night and usually in two different cities... [But] I loved the life despite the killing schedule.”
The team’s bus would sometimes pick up Willie in Fairfield. “He was just standing there on the highway with his suitcase, a little country boy,” recalled James Zapp. Other times, the bus driver would pretend not to see Willie and drive right past him, alarming him until he saw the bus circle back to get him.
The driver, Charlie Rudd, was also the team’s navigator, mechanic, and batboy, though he was called “batman” because he was in his fifties. Rudd had more faith in the vehicle than it deserved. Its brakes once went out on a hill outside Asheville, North Carolina, and one of the older players began calling out signals. “If we came to a right turn, everybody leaned left, and vice versa,” Piper Davis recalled. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Lawd, get me out of this,’ and finally the ‘batman’ used his gears, so we stopped. It’s lucky we didn’t meet nobody or catch up with nobody.”
On another occasion, the bus broke down completely on the way to Montgomery. Davis left on foot and returned a half hour later driving an ice truck. “Got to play a game, fellas,” he called out. Mays and his teammates piled into the frigid vehicle and, with the back door open, shivered for the next forty miles.
Rudd picked up the players in front of Bob’s Savoy Café, the largest Negro café in Birmingham, and Davis demanded that they be on time. It didn’t always happen, but Rudd seemed to know when tardy players were moments away from arriving. He would stall for a few minutes by cleaning the windshield, wiping the headlights, or checking air in the tires.
But on one occasion he couldn’t save Willie when the boy arrived early at the Savoy. The owner, a large, light-skinned man, had a table for Willie so he could keep an eye on him, but after his meal Willie put his suitcase on the bus and walked down the street to shoot pool. He lost track of time, and the bus rumbled off. Alerted, he raced outside, found a taxi, and, with the car blaring its horn, caught up with the bus several miles outside Birmingham.
“You can’t leave me!” he shouted at Davis in his high voice.
“You don’t want to be late,” he said, “so get your little chicken butt on your seat and sit down so we can get going to Kansas City.” Davis didn’t reimburse the taxi fare, and Willie was never late again.
As the youngest Black Baron, Mays sat in the back, over the rear wheel, and watched this traveling ecosystem. There were memorable characters, such as pitcher Nat Pollard, who was called “the prophet” and later became a preacher, and catcher Pepper Bassett, who by reputation never met a hanging curveball or a pretty lady he didn’t like. Card games drained a lot of time. Tonk, a kind of knock rummy, was the most popular. Other players sang gospel songs, told jokes, or read newspapers; third baseman John Britton studied the sports pages and told Willie how many hits DiMaggio had. Some players discussed their sexual conquests. But the most popular topic was simply baseball.
Some rides would start at midnight, hurtling past cotton fields and prairies so the team could avoid a hotel bill. A different city every night: Kansas City or Chicago, Little Rock or Memphis. They would eat out of paper bags or stop at grocery stores along the way. At one bus station in New Orleans, black cooks and waitresses would give them special service in the back. One time, a white customer complained about being neglected. The manager walked into the back and yelled at the waitress. Willie always remembered what happened next: “She took off her apron, placed it over her chair, and walked out the door without saying a word.”
Willie’s teammates were accommodating, to a point. One night, over a long, bumpy road, he was jounced so badly that he moved to the front of the bus to sit with Bassett, who at 6-foot-3 and 225 pounds was one of the biggest players on the team. Willie tried to get him to move, but he wouldn’t. So Willie asked Davis, sleeping nearby, for assistance, but Bassett opened his eyes and growled, “You better get away from me.” He took a swing, missed, and hit an overhead rack. Willie retreated.
Willie was usually an adept sleeper, on some occasions able to snooze by lying on the duffel bags stuffed in the back. In the major leagues, when he traveled by train, New York Giant announcer Russ Hodges said that Mays “was the greatest sleeper I ever saw.” He could be wide awake on an airplane as it began to taxi on the runway and be asleep by takeoff. As a Black Baron, resting was easier after the team bought a modish blue and silver bus called the Blue Goose; it had reclining seats, air-conditioning, and reliable brakes.
Piper Davis had assured Cat that Willie would be protected—the boy couldn’t go anywhere without a chaperone. To ensure that he got to bed early, Davis rotated Willie’s roommate, always putting him with the next day’s starting pitcher. Davis assumed that tomorrow’s hurler would prefer sleep to late-night temptations.
While Willie’s classmates may have spent their summers reading about other places in America, Willie was visiting them and could report back on his experiences. He talked about New York, where the bus caught fire in the Holland Tunnel and Willie had to rescue his two suitcases before playing at the Polo Grounds. He described St. Louis, where he attended his first major league game at Sportsman’s Park and saw Stan Musial hit. He discussed Philadelphia, where he got a close look at the Liberty Bell; he told his classmates about the crack. “It was a history lesson,” Mays says. My classmates “got it from books. I got it from life.”
The Black Barons demonstrated character and pride in ways beyond winning games. How you looked also made a statement. “We were one of the sharpest dressed teams in the league,” Bill Greason says. “We walked off that bus and were well respected. We wanted to represent our city well, our people well, and our team well.” Fashion carried other advantages. “Piper and the rest of us told Willie, ‘If you’re looking good, the girls will look at you. And if you’re looking decent, you don’t have to talk as much.’ ” Both appealed to Willie.
If a player didn’t have nice clothes, his teammates chipped in and bought him some. Such gestures were common in the Negro Leagues. The teams didn’t have trainers, so the players gave one another rubdowns. The ballparks didn’t have lights, so the guys strung their own. The owners didn’t have money, so the teammates shared what they had. “It was the togetherness,” Greason says. “We all dealt with family problems, but we all helped each other out. [The Black Barons] were the best group I’ve ever been around.”
The Black Barons gave Willie more formal tutorials about his own baseball heritage. He learned, for example, that Jackie Robinson wasn’t the first black player in the major leagues. As far back as 1872, Negroes played in organized baseball, but they always faced resistance, and by the 1890s, the color line had been firmly established. The Black Barons delighted in telling the story of how Ty Cobb, touring Cuba in 1910, teamed with players of color. The race-baiting Cobb was outraged that three of them had outhit him. “We would laugh about that on the rides: good ol’ Ty—the Georgia Peach—miffed at being outhit,” Mays later said.
He received a more pointed education about race in America. In Fairfield, he had been relatively insulated from overt hostility, his carefree personality putting everyone, black and white, at ease, his athletic achievements making him a budding celebrity. The Black Barons cast race relations in a different light. They understood how tenuously they clung to their freedom as well as their lives.
They played for a team in Birmingham, which was different from the rest of the country, even different from many other places in the South. Different—as in more hostile to blacks. Controlled by white supremacists, the city crushed any hint of Negro defiance with swift, violent efficiency. That message was delivered in 1942, when a black man in Birmingham argued with a white bus driver about three cents in change. The man stepped off the bus, and the driver shot him six times. No charges were filed. The violence was organized and systemic. In 1947, a year before Mays joined the Black Barons, a reenergized Ku Klux Klan adopted a new tool to keep black families out of white neighborhoods: dynamite.
On August 18, 1947, six sticks were used to blow up the house of a black man who had successfully sued to end Birmingham’s racist zoning laws. Within two years, so many black homes had been detonated in one area that it was known as Dynamite Hill, and the city was nicknamed Bombingham. Its most famous bombing, killing four black girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, culminated years of terrorism against the African American community. In the civil rights era, the man most closely associated with using police-state tactics to uphold segregation was Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s police commissioner. He was elected to office in 1937 and was responsible, in 1963, for turning fire hoses and attack dogs against peaceful demonstrators.
Birmingham’s suffocating bigotry stunned the black journalist Carl T. Rowan, who visited the city around 1950 and encountered passive Negroes who “dare not be seen” on any street after sundown. He discovered that blacks in Birmingham lived under a shadow of intimidation and oppression, and he was left “aghast by the obvious fear in the eyes of innocent people.”
All blacks in the South were in peril, for southern authorities had long been arbitrarily arresting African Americans on trumped-up charges, such as vagrancy or loitering, and leasing them into corporate slave camps. Douglas A. Blackmon, in Slavery by Another Name, documents the pervasive use of this practice in the coal mines surrounding Birmingham; headstones still mark the sunken graves of those who died in collapsed prison mines. Blackmon estimates that in 1930, “the great majority” of African Americans in the Black Belt of the South were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor.
Negro baseball players, in comparison, led a charmed life, so the Black Barons had good reason to bear their resentments quietly. At the 1948 Negro League World Series, several games were played at Pelican Park in New Orleans, and black fans, including the wives of players, were separated by chicken wire, corralled like farm animals. But those affronts could be endured compared to other forms of oppression.
Bill Greason, seven years older than Mays, was the second youngest player on the team. He says the veterans taught all the young players how to survive in an unjust, unforgiving world. “With all the rejection we had to suffer, you had to learn to laugh and keep going,” Greason says. “Don’t let anybody know they hit your weak spot. Just keep going as if you didn’t hear it, and try to make your enemy your friend. If you perform well enough, they’ll come to your side.”
He recalls the night that a white fan threw beer on him and called him names. He went to the dugout and changed his uniform but never said a word. “If they try to anger you and you smile, sooner or later they let you go,” Greason says. After he retired, he used his compassion and forgiveness as the pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham.
This conciliatory approach echoed Piper Davis’s advice to Willie on getting hit by a pitch: brush yourself off, run down to first, and steal a base. Physical retaliation or verbal sparring serves no purpose.
The Black Barons taught Mays that defiance was self-defeating, or as Mays describes it: “Keep your mouth closed.” He credits his father for insisting that he remain positive, but the Black Barons prepared him to overcome racial assaults. “I was programmed,” he explains, “to do these things before I got into professional ball. You had to understand that they were going to call you names, you had to understand that whatever you did it was going to be negative because of who you were. I knew that stuff from the Black Barons.”
Mays repeatedly uses the word “programmed” in describing his preparation for the outside world, a hardwiring of stoicism and strength that no adversary could reverse.