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A lot of people think that Negro baseball was like that movie with James Earl Jones, Richard Pryor, and Billy Dee Williams, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings. But we were no minstrel show. We didn't just all pile into a Cadillac and pick up a game here and there -- although there were times when I did some of that stuff. I had to if I wanted to keep eating. That was reality. But in the Negro leagues proper, we had a schedule and we had coverage by newspapers and we had league commissioners and league presidents. Like the white big-league fellows, we had spring training down South. We had an all-star game every year for over twenty years in Comiskey Park, and we outdrew the white all-star game some of those years, when we'd have fifty thousand people looking at us. Most years, we had a World Series, too.
Mostly, though, we had a tradition of professional men, going back to the 1800s when Moses Fleetwood Walker was the first black man to play in the big leagues around 1884 before they hounded him out of the game. Black baseball wasn't organized until 1920, but black men had been playing since the Civil War, and there were great players and great teams the whole time, teams like the Philadelphia Giants and the Cuban Giants -- who were really black -- and the Indianapolis ABCs and the Algona Brownies and the Tennessee Rats. Then came the Chicago American Giants and Kansas City Monarchs and Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords and Newark Eagles.
At one time, we had three or four leagues playing all at once, the Negro National League, Negro American League, Negro Southern League, Negro Western League, and so on. We had black and white businessmen, brilliant men like J. L. Wilkinson, a wonderful and kind man who owned my Kansas City Monarchs. Show you how smart Wilkie was, he invented night baseball five years before the big leagues got around to playing at night, though when they did nobody ever gave him any credit.
And we had names. We had Fox and Piggy and Bunny and Possum and Groundhog and Rats and Mule and Frog and Burro and Early-bird and Goose and Turkey. Turkey, whose name you've already come across, was really Norman Stearnes, one of the greatest hitters and strangest men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. They called him Turkey because of the way he flapped his arms around when he ran. You expected Turkey to take off and fly when he was running, but I was more fascinated by his devotion to hitting. Turkey carried around his bats, a thirty-four-incher and a thirty-five-incher, in a special bat case, like they were violins. One time, after a tough loss, the Monarchs were in the hotel eating dinner, and the manager, Frank Duncan, asked me to go check on the Gobbler -- that's another thing we called Turkey, you see. So I knocked on the Gobbler's door, and he said, "Come in," and there he was, sitting in the middle of his bed dressed in his pajamas talking to his bats. He said to the 34-incher, "I used you and only hit the ball up against the fence." Then he turned to the 35-incher and said, "If I had picked you, I would have hit the ball over the fence and we would have tied the game." Strange man, but Turkey's another guy who belongs in the Hall of Fame.
Man, did we have names. We had Sea Boy and Gunboat, Steel Arm and Copperknee, Darknight and Skin Down, Mosquito and Jitterbug, Popsickle and Popeye, Suitcase and, of course, Satchel. Our trainer with the Monarchs was Jewbaby Floyd -- I can't recollect why we called him that, and I can't remember what his real first name was. There were some pitchers with great nicknames, Steel Arm Davis, Ankleball Moss -- that's where that mean sonuvagun threw the ball from, his ankles -- and Cocaina Garcia. Cocaina, whom I used to face down in Cuba, got his name from his wicked curveball, which made all us hitters go numb.
As for my own names, well, there are some pretty simple explanations for them -- and some pretty complicated ones, too. Jay, or J.J., is what the members of my family called me when I was growing up in Carrabelle and Sarasota. "Jay," my father would tell me, "when I'm away, you're the man of the house." Along with the responsibility, my father passed on some of his baseball talent. When I was fourteen, the local semipro team, the Sarasota Tigers, asked my school principal Emma Booker if they could borrow me to play first base. By then, I had a nickname as well as a position: Foots. That's because I had pretty big dogs, size eleven since I was twelve.
It was Ox Clemons, the great coach at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, who gave me my next handle. I had gone to Edward Waters straight out of eighth grade because they didn't allow blacks at Sarasota High School -- only four high schools in the whole state did. (I finally did get my diploma from Sarasota High in the spring of 1995 -- sixty-four years after my original class graduated!) Ox saw my rural ways pretty quickly among his city boys, and he started calling me Country. Cap, short for Captain, was a name that came along later in life, when I was manager of the Monarchs, and it's what one of my first base coaches, Mr. Lionel Hampton -- the same Lionel Hampton who's a magician on the vibes, even in his eighties -- calls me to this day.
But it was Buck that stuck, which is funny because that one was purely a case of mistaken identity. I left Edward Waters in 1934 to go play for the Miami Giants, a pretty good team that was owned by a man named Buck O'Neal -- that's right, a different spelling. Although I'm not proud of it, a few years later I was playing in a grass skirt for the barnstorming Zulu Cannibal Giants, a team that was owned by Abe Saperstein, a big-time promoter of Negro league games in the Midwest who also started the Harlem Globetrotters. Abe was perfecting the Globetrotters' act with us ballplayers, even though we hated doing things like wearing the grass skirt, putting war paint on our faces, and generally acting like a bunch of fools to draw white folks to the park -- though, let me say, I don't believe many white fans came just to see us clown around. Most had respect for us as ballplayers and would've come regardless.
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