This Month
Michael Street Reviews Carl Fussman's After Jackie
Thurday May 31, 2007 11:30am
In 1961, shortly after Ty Cobb's death, Larry Ritter set out to tape record the recollections of some of Cobb's contemporaries. The result was The Glory of Their Times, an oral history of baseball in the early 20th century which is still in print today. It's a fantastic book, and will be the subject of a future review, but for now it provides a convenient segue to a similar project that promises similar longevity, Cal Fussman's After Jackie. Like Ritter, Fussman set out to collect the oral histories of ballplayers from a bygone era, but his subjects are the nonwhite players who followed Jackie Robinson across baseball's color line.
Initially, I imagined this book would talk about how Robinson made things easier for the players to follow, who would then laud Robinson's courage and strength of character. While there is no shortage of praise for Robinson, what emerges instead is a much more complex picture of the players in his shadow, who lacked the media attention accorded Robinson, and who continued to struggle against racism, even after his groundbreaking season.
Instead of a heartwarming eulogy, Fussman takes a hard look at all aspects of Robinson's legacy, even those that don't give us warm fuzzies inside. We hear from Latin players who, in the eyes of lily-white America, were just as black as Robinson and who suffered the additional indignity of falling from celebrity status in their home countries to second-class citizens in America. Fussman also addresses the lesser-known, unintentionally deleterious effects of major league integration on black America. Robinson and the black ballplayers who followed him killed the Negro Leagues, just as integration would later doom for black businesses. Fussman refuses to take the easy way out, and the result is a book that is engaging, thought-provoking, and mildly upsetting.
Fussman's hand is much more evident than Larry Ritter's, who gave us one chapter on each player, with only a brief summary of each man's career, and just enough editing to make their rambling discourses intelligible. Fussman instead divides After Jackie into topical chapters, introducing each with a short essay and offering the players' commentaries in chunks organized by subject. The result is a book that flows much less naturally than Ritter's-Fussman often breaks one player's story into several pieces to preserve thematic unity-but which has a much more evident theme. One can certainly lament the absence of Ritter's homey feel, but After Jackie is focused on Fussman's agenda, largely a good and appropriate approach.
Beginning with recollections from Buck O'Neil and other Negro League veterans, we're reminded of the pre-integration days every black American suffered through: the "African" outfits worn by black children in town pageants (and by ballplayers in all-black exhibition teams like the Zulu Cannibal Giants), or the refusal of white Southerners to sell them food, drink or shelter at any price. From these days, we proceed to the difficulties all players of color felt, even after 1947, how they endured conditions at run-down "black-only" hotels in the South or the lack of understanding from fellow players and managers.
And just when you worry that the book is merely a litany of complaint against Jim Crow laws, the tale changes to the tangential effects of Robinson. Baseball's integration demolished the Negro Leagues almost immediately; this change foreshadowed the effects of national integration on black businesses, which could not compete with their better-appointed white counterparts once racial barriers fell. Dick Allen talks about his days in Philadelphia, nearly twenty years after Robinson's first season, still fighting for respect from fans and sportswriters alike. Frank Robinson describes his own Jackie-like moment when, upon being offered a pittance to become the first African-American manager, he swallowed his pride and accepted it, knowing that to decline the offer would mean no non-white player would be given another chance for some time.
No matter how far the discussion might range, Jackie is always at the heart of the book. Every man, from Latin players like Orlando Cepeda to modern stars like Torii Hunter, acknowledges his debt to Jackie. When Fussman takes on the dwindling numbers of African-American players in the game today (see the lovemyteam message boards for more discussion on this), it is Jackie's daughter Sharon who takes on the challenge of bringing baseball back to inner-city youth. It seems that anywhere you look today, the legacy of Jackie is unavoidable.
After Jackie paints a complete picture of the color lines in baseball, both before and after Robinson's courageous season. Even the best-informed baseball historian will likely learn something new from the book, and players and fans of any color will be shocked by the awful conditions nonwhite players suffered under, even well after 1947. Robinson didn't make things perfect for players of color in baseball. But by enduring the unendurable without fighting back, he proved that every race deserves to play on the rural diamond of our national pastime, making it a little easier for all those who came after him. Years from now, when we're all living in the colorblind, hate-free world that the utopians promise, the stories in After Jackie may seem as quaint as the dead-ball-era tales in The Glory of Their Times. And if we're not living in that world-which seems more likely-then After Jackie should give those future ballplayers a glimmer of the courage and character exemplified by Jackie Robinson, who made our game the multiracial, multiethnic melting pot it is today.
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