In the reviews I’ve done thus far, I’ve spotlighted indie authors or debut publications. E Ethelbert Miller is not in that category. A quick google search will highlight his years as a poet, activist, and teacher, and the many awards and honors he’s gathered in those roles. In short, he’s a hugely accomplished and acclaimed poet and an inspiration to countless writers. One of Miller’s recent collections is If God Invented Baseball, highlighting his passion for the game. Over the course of a month, I had the opportunity to chat with Miller, visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and read the collection.
The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is in the historically Black 18th and Vine neighborhood of Kansas City, less than a mile from downtown. Walking there involves passing under an interstate highway and several desolate blocks, a geography I’d guess isn’t happenstance. The museum shares a building with the American Jazz Museum and the nearby streetlights have banners proclaiming, “Let’s Play At 18th & Vine”, some featuring jazzmen, others ball players. There are several colorful murals and a few jazz clubs around, including the famed Blue Room which is connected to the museum. The Negro Leagues Museum was free for Black History month with donations accepted. My donation made, I entered and the first image I encountered was a painting of Satchel Paige, the legendary pitcher who also graces the cover of Miller’s collection. Paige’s legend and accomplishments are unmatched in baseball. His semi-professional career started at age 18, he first pitched in the majors at 42, and threw his last major league pitch at 59. He is reported to have won over 2000 games, thrown a ball at 105 mph, and often told his fielders to sit down while he proceeded to strike out the side. Miller writes about Paige in “Rain Delay”:
The rain stops in mid-air
like Satchel Paige throwing
his hesitation pitch or the Supreme
Court deciding it’s all deliberate
speed when it comes to integration.
Satchel’s hesitation pitch was designed to fool the batter. Miller’s poem, like many in the collection, might fool us into thinking it’s just about baseball when soon we’re taken into a history lesson or a jazz riff. “The Boys of Summer” ends with the line:
Our mothers talking about Jackie Robinson
and how Willie Mays learned to catch a ball
while turning his back, running full speed
as if he were Emmett Till.
Willie Mays made “The Catch” in the first game of the World Series, September 1954. A year later, Jackie Robinson led the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first ever World Series win over the vaunted Yankees. Emmett Till was brutally lynched in between those events in August 1955. Connect those basepaths.
Miller was generous with his time and talking with him was a great pleasure as well as a challenge to keep up with the pace of his mind and references. The conversation jumped between baseball, literary, historical, and family topics. When I told him that my interest in baseball was reignited after years of dormancy by my son’s baseball career (my own little league career included a mere three hits across three seasons), he thought for a moment then tossed at me, “How did baseball influence your parenting?” It wasn’t a softball.
Later in the conversation, I asked Miller his opinion of the pitch clock, an innovation Major League Baseball introduced last season to speed up the games. He took me to the theater. “Imagine a phone rings during a play. We need the character to be on one side of the stage and the phone on the other. The character has to walk the entire stage to get to the phone.” Point taken.
The Negro Leagues Museum is a collection of treasures. Newspaper cutouts, old gloves and bats, ticket stubs, and uniforms fill cases. There’s also a mini baseball diamond with statues of the legends. Satchel Paige is, of course, on the mound, throwing to Josh Gibson, arguably the greatest power hitter to wield a bat. Cool Papa Bell, one of the fastest players ever, hangs out in center. There was a joy to these portrayals which also came through in the quotes and videos. But there was also the reality of Black life in America. “There was no place between Chicago and St Louis where we could stop and eat … So many times we rode all night and not have anything to eat, because they wouldn’t feed you,” Bill Yancey, New York Black Yankees. Imagine playing a game at the highest level in front of thousands of fans and then having to sit hungry and dirty for hours on a bus. I found a quote from Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the powerful and racist baseball commissioner, saying he strongly opposed the barnstorming games between the Negro League and MLB teams. He knew his teams were more likely than not to lose.
I was moved by the history, imagining the lives of these men, living their dreams by playing a game, in a country where the fleetness of their feet could also save their lives. I was also moved by my fellow museum visitors. I walked in parallel with a father and his daughter, a girl of about seven or eight. She laughed, pushed him along, grabbed his phone to take pictures, but also stopped and made pointed observations about the men in uniforms who could have been one of her great-grandfathers or uncles.
One of my favorite poems in Miller’s collection is “The Trade”, recounting his experience as a boy upon learning he was going to switch to an all-white school. It closes with:
You give your mom a Curt Flood look
And your dad nothing at all. You turn
From the doorway and walk
to your room. You feel traded. You feel
betrayed.
And then, just as the Negro Leagues Museum gives way to the Jazz Museum, the poem moves into music.
Outside your window
the birds are chirping blues.
Ma Rainey is singing about the Mississippi risin’.
Sam Cooke calls from next door and says
“Yes, a flood is comin’ and a change is gonna
come.”
In both the painting and the book cover, Satchel Paige looks tired, impatient. When is that change gonna come? The brilliant poet Matthew Johnson, who shares many of Miller’s sensibilities, argues in “Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever” that Paige’s weariness may have come from not being the first Black player in the MLB.
That after decades of setting the groundwork,
Carrying black baseball on your back for well over a decade
Someone else was chosen, and you weren’t the first one 𑁋
A change did come and Paige made it to both to the show and eventually to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame at the Negro League Museum will have no more members, yet it remains as relevant as ever.
Visit the museum, read E Ethelbert Miller and Matthew Johnson, and push for more change.
Links
E Ethelbert Miller’s work is widely available. You can find If God Invented Baseball many places. One is linked below as well as a terrific interview in which he discusses and reads from the collection.
Matthew Johnson’s poem cited above was published and nominated for an award by this press. Link to the poem and his full collections below.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
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