WE ARE THE SHIP
The Story of Negro League Baseball
Written and Illustrated by Kadir Nelson
Jump at the Sun/Hyperion (Ages 8 and up)
88 pages
SATCHEL PAIGE
Striking Out Jim Crow
by James Sturm
Illustrated by Rich Tommaso
The Center for Cartoon Studies/Jump at the Sun/ Hyperion
(Ages 10 and up)
89 pages
No more tragic or romantic institution emerged from the Jim Crow era of American life than the
Negro League. African-Americans were banished from the majors in 1884, and a few seasons later from the minors as well, under a “gentleman’s agreement” between white owners and players. None would return until Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers some 60 years later.
Black baseball players scrambled to make a living any way they could. In 1920, Rube Foster, star pitcher, manager and owner of the Chicago American Giants, banded eight leading black teams from around the Midwest into the Negro National League, and a legend was born. Over the next 40 years, and through three more segregated major leagues—a second Negro National League, the Eastern Colored League and the Negro American League — African-Americans invented a whole new brand of baseball on the outskirts of town, one that was usually faster, tougher, more merciless than the game played in the white leagues. When black players, led by the likes of Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Frank Robinson, Bob Gibson and Roberto Clemente, were finally allowed into the white game, the intelligence and ferocity of their play frequently overwhelmed the opposition.
“We are the ship; all else the sea” was how Rube Foster described his new league, and Kadir Nelson takes the phrase for the title of his riveting picture-book introduction to the Negro Leagues. It was a ship always on the verge of foundering. Players made little money and barnstormed constantly between league contests, sometimes logging as many as three or four games in a day. They traveled everywhere jammed into well-worn buses or private cars, often arriving in a town after many hours on the road only to find that there was no place, in the segregated America of their time, to get a room, have a meal, use the bathroom. They slept in their uniforms, bought their bats at a store and played in fields that were little more than roped-off cow pastures. Owners operated on a shoestring. A harried Foster was committed to a mental asylum, where he died in 1930; his league collapsed a year later. Players were left with the bitter realization that they would never compete on a bigger stage.
And yet, as was the case with many Jim Crow improvisations, African-Americans transformed a white institution into something of their own—something better. Many Negro League teams were owned by blacks; one owner, a hard-edged numbers king by the name of Gus Greenlee, even built his Pittsburgh Crawfords team its own park, in the middle of the Depression. Black managers and players came up with daring new plays and pitches, they performed at dizzying speed, and they regularly beat white teams—perhaps as much as 60 percent of the time—in the postseason exhibitions they put on.
The painter Kadir Nelson has illustrated several award-winning children’s books, including some on black history. This is the first book he has both illustrated and written, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. He uses the conversational, first-person voice of a fictional, anonymous player. It’s a device that generally works well and allows him to include many of the great old tales of the Negro Leagues; he conveys the humor, showmanship and joy that were an integral part of the game, without soft-soaping how hard it all was.
Nelson bolsters his text with an index and endnotes, for the readers who will be drawn by his work to learn more. There is the occasional gaffe. White ballplayers in the 1940s did not make $7,000 a month—more like $7,000 a season—and he goes too easy on the black owners of the Negro League teams who were also running numbers rackets on the side. True, such men had limited opportunities in apartheid America, but they were still gangsters, vultures who preyed upon the desperate hopes of their own communities.
Nelson’s visual narrative is nothing short of magnificent. His paintings include numerous portraits and action scenes, as well as facsimiles of baseball cards, a ticket to the “First Colored World Series” and a beautifully drawn, melancholy sign for a “colored” inn. Particularly enthralling are his full-page portrayals of a white “House of David” ballplayer (from a religious colony in Michigan) with his trademark beard and long hair; an outfielder in an old park during the last days of the black leagues; a double-page spread of Foster’s American Giants stepping down from a Pullman car; and, especially, an early Negro League game played at night.
James Sturm and Rich Tommaso’s Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow offers a different approach to the subject, but it’s every bit as engrossing. Both veteran writers and illustrators, Sturm and Tommaso tell the first-person story of a (fictional) black ballplayer who has a heady game against the Birmingham Black Barons in his first weeks of Negro League ball—he doubles off the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige—but then must return to the suffocating, racist world of Tuckwilla, Ala., a small cotton town dominated by an arrogant, white planter family.
It’s a haunting story in which Sturm’s text poignantly conveys the quiet bitterness of his hero, and Tommaso’s spare, two-tone drawings brilliantly contrast the physical beauty of the old, rural South with the savagery of its social institutions. An abiding air of menace hangs over the story like a gathering storm cloud. The authors refuse to look away from anything, not even lynching, although the material remains suitable—even vital—for most children.
Paige himself is as elusive here as he was in real life, but Sturm and Tommaso, along with an excellent introduction by Gerald Early, provide a telling glimpse of this consummate showman, entrepreneur and competitor, who pitched into his mid-60s and against all odds managed to rise above both the black game and the white one. “Don’t look back; something might be gaining on you,” Satch liked to say, but both of these books offer an invaluable look into the treasured and sorrowful past.
