Chapter 5: Behind the mask
From the book "Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Middle Class" by Larry Tye.
It was the only baseball they had. And now it was gone. It was the only ball because in Freeport, Maine, of 1918, where boys gathered every afternoon between school-out and chore-time, the town could not afford a baseball diamond, uniforms, bats, or even a ball. Not with fuel shortages, food rationing, and a flu epidemic infecting the nation. The spare change the boys could pull together totaled one baseball. One. But one ball was enough, because Freeport was a baseball town. Boys joined the team as soon as they were big enough to grip a bat. They played on the empty lot between the high school and town hall, using old sweatshirts as bases and battening down windows within range to keep the glass intact and ball in play. If it landed in tall grass, the game was suspended to ferret it out. If a batter connected hard enough to knock off the cover, the men at Dave Longway's garage stuck it back on with friction tape. During the frozen winter the boys painted their baseball yellow to see it in the snow.
And then on a lazy afternoon near the start of summer, the ball, the same one that the Freeport fry had played with for months, was lost. It sailed off Hank Soule's bat up over second base, cresting over the iron railroad tracks that ran through the outfield, descending like a rocket on a brilliant harvest night. Then it landed, thwap, right in the open palm of a Pullman porter on the Halifax bound sleeping car. The porter was no more prepared to catch a ball than the boys were to lose theirs. But there it was, floating through the open vestibule of his parlor car, and he raised his open hand, instinctively, like any good American boy would know to do. And for a moment he was as stunned as they.
It all seemed like a dream as the boys reflected back. The old Maine Central work train motoring ahead on tracks just 50 feet behind second base, an empty Pullman sleeper in tow. The porter waving with his free hand, clasping the ball with his other. The boys were mesmerized -- at the hit that sent their ball straight into the train door, and the ease with which the porter snagged it. Then they were enraged -- that he had kept their only baseball, and there would be no more games 'til they could scrabble together enough dimes to buy another. Something had to be done. Perry Taylor got the number of the train from stationmaster Charlie Bailey and wrote a letter to the president of the Maine Central. The other boys added their names. Who was that porter, they asked, and could he bring them back their ball? Please? They mailed the missive, then pooled their coins and bought a brand new hardball at the sporting-goods counter of L.L. & G.C. Bean, the local department store that would make their town a destination.
By the time the sleeper came through again two weeks later, the boys had almost forgotten about their ordeal and letter. The same porter was deadheading with the empty car, and he waved from the steps of the vestibule. Then he tossed them a new ball clean of everything except some scribbling. The boys gathered around to read what they could see were signatures. There was Deacon Scott, the Boston Red Sox' sure-handed shortstop who set a record for consecutive games. Catcher Wally Schang, who during the offseason sewed covers on Pullman mattresses. And George Herman Ruth, the "Babe," who divided his time between first base, center and left fields, and pitching, and carried that 1918 Red Sox team to a world championship. It would be Ruth's next-to-the-last year in Boston and Boston's last World Series title in that still-young century, making it the stuff of legends and curses.
"It had the autographs of all the first-string players," John Gould, who was 10 at the time and had just moved to Freeport, remembered 80 years later. "We never played with that ball. It was put in a small wood box with cotton batting, and the last I knew, Perry Taylor was its custodian." And there were more baseballs, one nearly every time that porter passed through. Some were autographed, others clean. Enough, in the end, to fill a bushel basket. "I think the porter was a baseball fan. He had friends and they'd either go to Fenway Park or Braves Field and sit in the bleachers and catch foul balls," Gould added. "We never needed balls after that. We had all the baseballs we wanted."
They also had their only encounter ever with a black man. Everyone was white those days in Freeport, and most of Maine. No one knew the name of the porter who brought them the baseballs, where he lived, or whether he had boys of his own. No one thought to ask. They were uncertain whether it had been his plan all along to return a signed baseball, or if that came in response to their letter to the railroad. Most believed the former, especially when the balls kept coming. To those boys, a black man was a Pullman porter, and their Pullman porter was magical. "This began an association with the only black man our town knew anything about in those days," concluded Gould, columnist, historian, author, and dean of the Maine press corps. "And if nobody else feels it has historical importance, I do."
And so it was for whites across America from the late nineteen century through the middle of the twentieth. The Pullman porter was the only black man many of them ever saw. To some he embodied subservience and obsequiousness. To others, dignity and mystery. Whatever their notion of him, it almost always was shrouded in mystery and born of ignorance. He remained a dark silhouette passing by at 50 miles an hour, the way he did through the Freeport outfield. Even if they rode the train with him, they never inquired about his life.
If they had, he would not have revealed much. That was how a Pullman porter insulated himself in a world filled with insults and indignities, one where he was called "George" or worse, and forced to beg for tips to support a family. He donned a mask as soon as he boarded the train, letting his white passengers see only his servant's face. The rest -- his identity as a man, his humanity -- was out of bounds. It was a matter of self-protection, the sort blacks in America got used to during generations on the plantation. It was a matter of survival.
Copyright 2004 by Larry Tye. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company.
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