He Truly Was A Prince (Finding Buck O'Neil Pt. 2)

This started out as a post describing how I met "my Buck O'Neil," so to speak. A man named Joe Henry. A former Negro League baseball player who lived in Brooklyn, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. They called him Prince back in his playing days with the Memphis Red Sox, Indianapolis Clowns (the same Negro League team Hank Aaron played for), Detroit Stars, Detroit Clowns, and Goose Tatum's All-Stars.

Prince Joe passed away last Friday, he was 78 years old. I started this post way back in December, and I'd been meaning to call Joe for sometime. It's been far too long since we talked- something always came up, looking back it was usually something trivial. Not too long ago I was sitting at work with nothing much to do. I pulled out my phone, scrolled down to his name, and pressed the call button. But no one answered. But I didn't try again, and that's something I'll always regret. I'd stayed close to his grandson while I was in St. Louis, we talked at least two or three times a month. His grandson had taken it upon himself to be his full-time representative, and he was good at it, garnering for Joe the recognition that he deserved such a long time ago. His Riverfront Times Column "Ask a Negro Leaguer" was a must read every week. And during the MLB Draft this year, he was ceremoniously "drafted" by the St. Louis Cardinals. And yes, he finally did get his baseball pension.

I can't say that I knew him as well as I'd like to pretend I did. In the three years after the event, we probably talked 5 or 6 times, and the last time was no later than early 2007. I got close to his grandson though, and I followed his path to recognition through our conversations. Joe was no saint- he was, at times, a bit vulgar (even though I never heard him curse), and sometimes he was so enamored with his own intelligence that he'd completely crowd someone out of a conversation. He could ramble on with the best of them. But mostly he was man full of pride and full of stories, a man who was proud to be from Brooklyn, Illinois, proud to be from the wrong side of the river. And he thought kindly of me, told me that I was intelligent, a remarkable young man- which is something I will never forget. So thank you Joe! Thank you for believing in me, thanks for agreeing to talk, to enter my life and to help me pull off my first event as a member of Washington University's Association of Black Students Exec Board. You were a man against organized religion, but knew your Bible backwards and forwards. I don't know if there is a heaven, but it sure would be a fun place if you're there. This post, this long meandering post is my dedication to you. In all of its rambling glory! Enjoy the peace and rest my friend, because you've earned it!
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(original start date 12/16/08)

The truth is that I have my own Buck O'Neil. I met him my sophomore year of college. I was the history chair for the Association of Black Students at my school and I wanted to do something memorable for the Black Arts and Sciences Festival (BASF) Week. If you read this blog (all three of you), then you will know that I love baseball. The thought of combining history, baseball, and Black people was too good of an opportunity to pass up. I started contacting people at the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, wondering if they could do a display and Q&A session on the history of the Negro Leagues, document some of the stars (Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson) and really just give people an idea about something that is either forgotten or cariactured far too often in our national discussion. I wanted it to be a celebration as well, because too often when we study Black history, because of the tragedy and heartache involved, everyone always gets bummed out. It usually goes something like this-
BC-1600: NOTHING!
1600-1863: SLAVERY!
1863-1865: GOOD LORD LINCOLN FREED US!
1866-1877: IGNORANT COONS TAKE OVER SOUTH (AKA Reconstruction)
1878-1954: SHIT WAS BAD! I MEAN REAL BAD! (except for small break for Harlem Renaissance)
1954: BROWN VS. BOARD
1955-1968: CIVIL RIGHTS!!! MARTIN LUTHER KING!!!!! (Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and a bunch of other people too, but mostly MARTIN LUTHER KING!!!!!)
1969-Present: NIGGAS BEEN FUCKIN UP EVER SINCE!

Well, what I'm trying to say is that I wanted to study something that occured in the period before the "modern" Civil Rights movement, something during that, "Shit was Bad" period. Because yeah, it was bad, but there was beauty and joy within that period as well, and Negro League Baseball, the largest Black business, was one of those things that brought joy to people.

There was one little problem though, we didn't have a lot of money. The man who I talked to was great. He was pleasant, knowledgeable, timely in his responses, and willing to come all the way across the state to St. Louis to give the talk. And although the museum curator racket is not quite as lucrative as Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, the man still needed to get paid. When I added everything together, the honorarium, the travel, the hotel stay, the total was far more than we could pony up. I called to tell him the bad news (for us at least). After weeks of going back and forth, planning how the program was going to go, I felt like I'd wasted the man's time, and there's nothing I hate more than wasting someones time, particularly someone who had been so kind to me. He told me he understood, I mean the man works for a history museum, he knows what it's like for an institution to not have any money. He then pointed me in the direction of a Negro League ballplayer who lived in the area who was willing to do speaking engagements, the man's name was Joe Henry. He lived across the bridge in Brooklyn, Illinois, and he was clear to make that distinction. To me, everything over the bridge was just East St. Louis, but I guess nobody wants to live with the connotation of what it means to be from East St. Louis hanging over ones neck. He gave me his number and told me to give him a call soon so everything could be arranged.

I gave him a call a few days after I got his number. He sounded tired and a little annoyed when he first answered the phone- I started to think twice about inviting him. But after I explained to him what we would be doing and that we would be willing to pay him a $500 honorarium, he suddenly became all ears. That first time we mostly talked about his days playing baseball with the Memphis Red Sox, when he was a serious prospect, and the injury he suffered on a double play which made it painful to throw and could have ended his career (he was playing a Philadelphia Phillies farm team). But then came his days with the Clowns and Goose Tatum, and his trademark tuxedo and top hat. He spoke fondly of those days, because at the end of the day, baseball, like all spectator sports, is about entertainment (something I think people running the game forget from time to time). At the end of the conversation, he accepted my offer and told me to set everything up with his grandson.

We talked on a few more occasions- the topics stayed close to baseball for the most part. He'd had a falling out with the game after MLB refused to give him a pension. MLB gave pensions to Negro Leaguers who had not played in the Major Leagues only if they played during a certain date- a little while after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke the color line. Joe's argument at the time, and I thought it was a good one, was that even though the color line was broken, for a long time only stars were signed and many teams did not integrate until long after Jackie Robinson. The Red Sox did not have a Black player on their team until 1959. Black players who were slightly below average or bench players, had no shot at competing for a job in the bigs, and so were denied long after Robinson had entered the game.

Even though he did not follow baseball like he once did, he still had opinions on some of the players, most notably Barry Bonds. We talked about his chase for the record and the scandal that consumed him. At the end, he invited me over to chat at his house, so we could go over last minute details and so he could show me some of his memorabilia. I agreed.

I took a day off of school that next Tuesday (I believe) to give Mr. Henry a visit. I got into my crappy 1993 Mazda 323 Hatchback and rumbled my way to Highway 64/40. I remember it being a beautiful October day, with a bright beautiful sun peaking through the clouds that dotted the sky. It's weird, I was already 19 at the time and had been in control of when I went to school for more than a year, but I still felt a sense of excitement every time I played hooky, especially when I played hooky for a good reason. My car weaved in and out of traffic on the bridge straddling the Mississippi River, the road gleamed a very bright gray. I took exit to St. Clair, a short round-a-bout that took me under a thoroughly rusted old bridge that trains use to go over. Every time I drive through East St. Louis, it feels like I'm traveling through a dystopian novel. It's like a ghost town; you can hear the wind better there than anyplace I've ever been to. Abandoned buildings and potholes make up most of the scenery, with weeds playing a strong supporting role. Even the trees look sad, the only remaining witnesses from glory days long since passed. Driving through the heart of the town is more of the same. My tires take a severe beating and the buildings are still largely empty, but there's more people outside, cats in hats and tees, posted up on the corner, on sides of buildings, in alleyways, next to semi-luxury cars with 22 inch rims. And darting in between them are people tattered clothes and scabs on some of them, you figure you know who those people are. But mostly, it was just people trying to get through- maneuvering strollers through the patched up sidewalks or running while sloppily putting their Popeye's name tag on their purple Popeye's shirt, they're purple Popeye's hat blocks the sun that always seems to beam just a little more unbearably in this part of town. I sped off, hoping the young man made it to work on time.

My mapquest directions told me I was close, just a few more turns past the titty bars that were as ubiquitous there as Walmart in Nashville. Names like Pink Slip, Soft Touch, Roxy's- I got to know all of them in time. 5 more minutes of going straight and another left turn brought me to a high school. There was a group of kids hanging out in the parking lot- playing Juneau hooky, just chillin out in front of the school but not daring to set foot in there. I got out of my car and reached for my bag in the back. There was a row of about ten or twelve trailers in front of my car. I couldn't see any numbers, so I scanned the row about four or five times before pulling out my phone.
"Who you looking for?" one of the teens asked me.
"Joe Henry," I said sheepishly looking every bit as lost as I was.
"Oh, Mr Henry's over there," he said pointing to the white and blue trailer a little to the right of the trailer I was parked in front of. I slammed the car door before marching through the tall weeds that separated the school from the start of the trailer park. The side screen door was slightly cracked, and I could hear labored footsteps echoing towards the outside. I knocked on the screen door- a little too loudly, the metallic rattle alarming even myself. A shadow of a man gingerly made its way towards the door.

"Mr. Henry! It's Antonio Rodriguez." I exclaimed as the figure made its way down the steps leading to the doorway. He paused for a second.
"Antonio?" he said, with only a slight hint of recognition. Damn, he doesn't remember me, I thought. But then I saw the smile on his face, as if he'd recalled my voice right after he made the statement. He pushed the door open to let me in, and we walked up the stairs past the kitchen into the living room. The floor and table were generously littered with papers and books and stands which held items from Prince Joe's past. There was a red couch on the left side near the window with enough space for the both of us, he offered me a seat after we said our pleasantries, pointing his arthritic hand towards the far right end. He made his way slowly back to the other one, right next to his white mug of water.

And we sat on that tattered red couch and talked for four hours. At first it was just a reprisal of our phone conversations. I described Black Arts and Sciences week as a whole, and then how I wanted our specific event to go. For the most part it was going to be free form- I wanted to give him as much room to operate as possible. The only thing that I'd do was give a brief history of the Negro Leagues complete with an all-time player packet, and then he'd get to talk about his life and hopefully at the end there'd be time for Q&A. He nodded, with that smile on his face, the smile that in one day would become so familiar to me.

"Well, I got some things I want to say and I'm going to say them," he said. I knew what that meant, I'd read a few of the "Ask a Negro Leaguer," columns before. At best, his answer would only be loosely connected to the question he was presented with. Really, it was just an excuse for him to pontificate on whatever was on his mind. I couldn't blame him, no newspaper, not even a liberal free weekly was going to just give an old Black man living in an East St. Louis trailer park his own opinion column where he could talk freely about politics and religion. But if he disguised it as an advice column? So that's how it was going to be with the Q&A too. I appreciated his honesty and told him so. And then we really started talking.

Joe was like a combination of my grandfather and my favorite history professors. He didn't curse like my grandfather, but he could be just as hilarious and even more prescient in his observations. He was most proud of his knowledge of the history of Brooklyn, Illinois. He knew it like he knew the seams on that old red couch. You could see the pride on his face as he recited facts about the businesses and people who use to inhabit his beloved home town; and you could see the hurt (actually it was more like timid anger) on his face as he described Brooklyn's long descent into a land of strip clubs, drugs, crime, and despair.

But then he perked back up and we got back to talking about his memorabilia. Pictures with Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, boards with his fellow Negro Leaguers standing on the foul lines. And a blue board that contained pictures of one of his ultimate scourges- Bingo Long's Traveling All-Stars (starring Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones). Oh he hated that movie. How it portrayed Negro League ballplayers as buffoons only concerned with getting a laugh out of the crowd, lacking any kind of professionalism. It was especially insulting to him because he played for Goose Tatum, and he did play third base in a tuxedo with tails and top hat. To many people there's a fine line between being entertaining and acting like a coon- like there's a fine line between entertainment and Soul Plane. Too fine a line for some people, and although I never asked him directly, I bet that it troubled him to think that people saw him that way, as some kind of person who would sell out the dignity of Black people for a quick buck. He just wanted to play ball. I guess it's similar to Buck O'Neil having to play in a grass skirt during the Great Depression. I don't know what I'd do in that situation; I'm just glad I'm not in a situation where I have to choose between doing what I love and sacrificing my dignity to do it.

On the table right next to the couch, Joe had a Bible. He didn't seem like the religious type to me, but he knew his scripture very well. I always get a little uneasy when I talk to people who are very religious, I'm a pretty secular guy and I don't like offending people when I talk about the disagreements I have with organized religion. As it turned out, I had a kindred spirit, at least in one sense. Joe loved the Bible but he had no use for organized religion.
"It would take crack 200 years to do the same amount of damage to the Black community as preachers already have," he said to me. I almost spit out my water laughing. He didn't like the absurd amounts of money churches took in, he didn't like how churches weren preoccupied with building new facilities instead of helping to better the Black community. Joe's favorite book in the Bible was Exodus, and he was constantly relating the deliverance of the Hebrew people from Egypt to anything that he talked about. If organized religion was to truly be worth all of the problems that it caused, then at the very least it would help to deliver people from their earthly problems.

What brought a smile to his face more than anything else was when he talked about young Black children though. Joe would go to elementary schools to speak sometimes, and the unadulterated joy he expressed to me about those moments- well, I've rarely seen someone so happy. He knew that, statistically speaking, that many of them, particularly the ones who lived in Brooklyn and especially the young men, would have a hard time stayng out of prison, a hard time getting out of Brooklyn. But I think he enjoyed reveling in the hope that he had in the gradual progress in the collective fortunes of Black people. He'd seen a lot in his 75 years, he'd seen Black people come a long way. He was old enough to have cognizant thoughts during the Great Depression, old enough to have saved and scrapped during World War II, old enough to have lived through the entirety of the Civil Rights movement, and to have fought in his own way. But most importantly, I think, is that his age brought him a much clearer perspective. It's something that I lack at times, when I despair about the state of our country and the people who run it, the state of the Black community and the people who pretend to care. He'd seen it all; 70 years means that you've seen the big picture from a lot of different angles. Things are getting better, not necessarily in a straight line, there's backsteps and potholes, traps and wrongturns, but things are getting better. Joe loved the Constitution, and, under the circumstances, the "Founding Fathers" too. I think he was in love with the ideas that they generated, the ones we seem to get away from too often. Regardless of whether or not they were hypocritical (and they were) the message of the documents is key, and he believed in trying our best to meet that message as best we could. We ended our conversation with him recounting his days as a union steward- I applauded like a good liberal should. He seemed just as proud of those days as he was playing in the Negro Leagues, which, to me at least, showed just how much he cared about making sure others had opportunities that he himself had been denied.

I left feeling ecstatic about the prospect of Prince Joe talking to my peers. And he didn't disappoint. With his grandson and his wheelchair and the myriad of posters and pictures, he talked to the Association of Black Students at Washington University. Just like we did on that rundown old couch, as personal and as prescient, with vulgarity (one of the best was when he talked about modern ballplayers shittin the ball out of the ballpark) and a vitality that hid the fact that he could barely stand. Like he promised, he came with his own agenda, a blend of the Bible, bitterness, baseball, and those same beautiful stories. Like the time the Washington Senators wanted to sign him to one of their minor league teams. This was pre-Castro, so the Senators still had their team in Havana- but Joe was absolutely petrified of flying (I guess he could have gone by boat but...) so out went his chance of becoming a major league ballplayer. People were flabbergasted at first when he would completely bypass the questions asked- I could see the look in their eyes, the way they mouthed "What?" to each other and tried to stifle laughs. In the end though, he got everybody to listen, everybody to see his reasoning behind it. After the Q&A he stayed to sign posters, for every person who wanted one. Cracking jokes, answering questions, getting around about as well as a 75 year old man in a wheelchair could. A stuck-up woman who came in from Springfield representing something called the Chicago Baseball Museum tried to monopolize his time, but his grandson was pretty cool about letting other people meet him. (I tried unsuccessfully to get an internship out of her, it would have been pretty cool working at a baseball museum). I was so happy that we'd pulled off a successful event, and even happier that we'd gotten together the $500 to pay him a decent honorarium. Thanks to the History Department and Professor Hillel Kieval- and absolutely no thanks to the AFAS Department. *edit* upon further review Joe said that it was $300, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, I mean he was the one getting paid.

After the event was over, Joe told me to stay in touch, and I did, at first. In his next column, he mentioned me, said that I was a remarkable young man. I can't begin to say how touched I felt. When I first got the clipping, I read it over and over again, just to make sure he'd actually said that. I'd call ever few months, just to say hi. The last time I talked to him though, he sounded tired, more tired than he normally did, that enthusiastic rambling replaced by a more ominous tone. I could barely believe it was the same man, and honestly, I could barely stand to hear it. Mostly though I kept in touch through his grandson, increasingly so as I progressed through college, and in time I got to see his grandson as kind of a mentor. I can't remember the last time we had a full conversation, probably not since my junior year of college and I hope I get to sometime. He's been on my mind, because of the book, because of the MLB Draft where the Cardinals ceremoniously picked him, and because I recently talked to Sean. I'm just happy he's lived long enough to get some kind of recognition, however belated, however understated. Thanks for everything Joe. You truly are a prince!