I don't know that I ever met a more dignified man than Buck O'Neil.
We chatted for a few moments at a function at the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, an institution that Mr. O'Neil raised a lot of funds for over the years. It was long enough to discover that we had a mutual friend in Riley Stewart, a vice principal at my high school who had pitched for the Chicago American Giants in the years immediately following WWII.
I mentioned him and the old man's eyes lit up; both of them had been interviewed and appeared in Ken Burn's 1994 documentary series "Baseball." If you saw that series, you might remember my vice principal, and you certainly remember O'Neil.
O'Neil remembered hitting against Stewart in a game in 1946 or '47. He thought he did pretty well--two hits, one of them might have been a double.
I never ask for autographs, but O'Neil scratched one out anyway, on a pad he clearly kept for that purpose. I still have it somewhere, maybe I'll pull a book from the shelves and flip through it and that scrap of paper will fall out. I'd like to see it again.
Anyway, when one of the more dignified men I've ever met was 25 years old, in the midst of the Great Depression, he broke a promise to his mother and decided to try to play baseball for a living.
He signed on with the Shreveport Acme Giants, a barnstorming team of Black players that traveled through the Midwest and Canada, taking on all comers and beating most of them, except notably the Pittsburgh Crawfords, who were likely the best baseball team in the world at the time with five future Hall of Famers on their roster. (Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson and Oscar Charleston, who at 39 still managed to hit .344.)
In 1937, he joined the Memphis Red Sox of the brand new Negro American League, which had been formed as a rival to the more established Negro National League. He was given a regular salary instead of small percentage of the gate proceeds.
Given Major League Baseball's gentlemen's agreement banning Black players from the league, it was about as high as he could aspire to go in the game, though O'Neil dreamed of playing for the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the storied franchises of the Negro Leagues.
And he would get there, eventually. But not before a little detour.
About halfway through the 1937 season, when the Red Sox were in Chicago, O'Neil ran into former Negro League pitcher Charlie Henry, who had formed his own barnstorming team made up of Black players based in Louisville. He asked O'Neil how much he was making as a utility player for the Red Sox.
$90 a month, O'Neil told him.
Henry told him that was nothing compared to what he could make on his team. And seeing how O'Neil wasn't under contract (contracts didn't become standard in the Negro League until after Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson and team owners began to worry about losing valuable assets to Major League teams without compensation) why didn't he come play for him?
And so one of the most dignified men I've ever met hooked up with an outfit called the Zulu Cannibal Giants.
The Giants were more spectacle than sport; for most of their existence, the actual team consisted only of six or so players, filling out its roster with local talent on the day of games. (According to a book by Alan Pollock, son of the former vaudeville producer and Indianapolis Clowns' owner Syd Pollock--who worked as a booking agent for the Giants and may have owned a piece of the team--after the game Henry would invite these pick-up players to dinner at a local restaurant, telling them he'd pay them then. He'd tell them to go ahead and order anything they wanted, while he and the traveling members of the team left to fill the cars with gas. They never came back, stiffing the day workers and sticking them with the check.)
They played with their faces painted in an approximation of tribal war paint, barefoot in grass skirts and wigs. In some publicity photos they are bare-chested, in others they wear collarless black pullover jerseys, with no numbers or other ornamentation. (This allowed the six or so regular players to trade wigs with the pickup players and hit for them when their turn at bat came up.)
Some used bats styled as war clubs. They all played under aliases--Wahoo played right field, Taklooie was on third base. Limpopo, the character O'Neil most frequently assumed, was first baseman.
As you might suspect, the Giants were not a straightforward by-the-book baseball team. Like a baseball analogue to the Harlem Globetrotters, they specialized in clowning their (usually) far inferior opponents. (One of O'Neil's teammates on the Giants was a 16-year-old from El Dorado, Reece "Goose" Tatum, who'd go on to become the Globetrotters' "Clown Prince.")
The shortstop might read a newspaper in the field, a hitter might take his cuts while kneeling, balls might be tossed or caught behind backs.
Even at the time, a lot of Negro League players looked down on clown teams, of which the Zulu Cannibal Giants were the most egregiously racist example. (The Indianapolis Clowns, which in addition to playing straight Negro League teams, also barnstormed as a comedy act, sometimes with a white player on their roster, until 1989.) They played mostly in front of white audiences, and most of the revenue they generated ultimately went into the pockets of white promoters and booking agents.
"Me, I was mostly a straight player all along," O'Neil wrote in his 1996 autobiography "I Was Right on Time." "I left the clowning to some other players on the Zulus. But I did have to wear the war paint and the grass skirt."
I guess most of us have to wear the war paint and the grass skirt at some point. Even Hank Aaron was briefly an Indianapolis Clown. But it breaks my heart thinking of Buck O'Neil degraded that way.
Taking offense long ago supplanted baseball as our national pastime, and we can only hope we might grow into better people. But the Zulu Cannibal Giants were not some Reconstruction-era atrocity; they were a minstrel show my father could have witnessed.
Contemporary standards change all the time, the same way Hemingway's character Mike Campbell went bankrupt in "The Sun Also Rises": Gradually and then suddenly.
When we emerge from what we going through now--which in addition to the pandemic might be this country's third great reckoning with our original sin of slavery--a lot of the things we used to take for granted (like sport teams using people as mascots) will seem as absurd as the Zulu Cannibal Giants. And though some will grumble that we've spoiled their fun, we'll all be better off.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@adgnewsroom.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.