A Miracle in Shreveport

We were lucky to make it out of Shreveport alive on that early spring day in 1917.

At noon, before the first game of our doubleheader, my All Nations team was taking batting practice, and as usual, I was studying the crowd. The people fascinated me: all those life stories that I'd never get a chance to hear, like that old colored man smiling and singing to himself next to his stern, frowning wife in her flowered hat, or the two white women with their cigarettes and exposed ankles. I was amazed by it all, though we never stayed in a place long enough to learn about anyone or anything more than the game and its players.

Looking at the crowd also gave me a painful reminder that we were back in the South. We actually had two crowds. Sitting on one side of the greasy yellow rope that separated the crowds, behind home plate and the Shreveport Sports dugout, the white spectators laughed with one another and called out encouragement to the members of their team. I even saw a white man holding up a Brownie box camera with both hands, counting to eight as he made a picture of the white crowd.

The clamor of voices from that section felt too loud to my ears when I turned to the colored stands behind our dugout. The people seated here were far quieter, though they were crowded elbow-to-elbow on the rickety wooden bleachers. A few people nodded at me solemnly, while most looked away.

It was an all-too-familiar story told in blacks and whites.

Today, however, would be a variation on that old, ugly plotline.

I should've seen it coming, but I was too busy getting ready for the game and savoring the look and feel of the ballpark, like a kid distracted by a shiny toy. The grass was bright green and lovingly manicured, and the chalk lines were sharp and straight. This field had been built just two years ago, and the twelve-foot-high outfield fence, coated in advertisements, looked twice as tall as the fences we'd seen at countless other fields.

"Going to put un béisbol over that," our Mexican first baseman Buddha Rodriguez said, pointing a thick finger at the wall. He was answered by the laughing jeers and rolling eyes of his teammates as they returned to the dugout.

Before the game started, we had to wait for a trio of men, two in brown suits and one in an olive drab Army uniform, who marched out to the pitcher's mound to address the crowd. I groaned and felt in my pocket for my absent pouch of tobacco.

This was the fifth time in a month we'd run into men like these. It was the war, again. Of course.

To be continued...