DETROIT FREE PRESS

It was the only baseball they had. And now it was gone.

It was the only ball because in the Freeport, Maine, of 1918, where boys
gathered every day after school and before chores, the town could not afford uniforms, bats or even a ball. Not with fuel shortages, food rationing and a flu epidemic. The spare change the boys could pull together totaled one baseball. But one 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 next to the town hall. If a batter connected hard enough to knock the cover off the ball, the men at Dave Longway's garage stuck it back with friction tape. During
the frozen winter the boys painted their baseball yellow to see it in the snow.

But on one lazy afternoon near the start of that summer, the ball was lost. It sailed off Hank Soule's bat, cresting over the iron railroad tracks that ran through the outfield. Descending like a rocket, 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 one. But there it was, floating through the open vestibule of his parlor car. He raised his open hand, instinctively, like any good American boy would. 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 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. Then they were enraged -- the porter had kept their only baseball, and there would be no more games until they could scrabble together enough dimes to buy another. Perry Taylor 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.

Then they 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 one day make their town a destination.

By the time the sleeper came through again two weeks later, the boys had almost forgotten about their ordeal. The same porter was deadheading with the empty car, and he waved from the vestibule. Then he tossed them a new ball -- clean of everything except some scribbling. The boys gathered around to read signatures. There was Deacon Scott, the Boston Red Sox' sure-handed shortstop. Catcher Wally Schang, who during the off-season sewed covers on Pullman mattresses. And George
Herman Ruth -- the "Babe."

"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.

Then came more baseballs, one nearly every time that porter passed through. Some were autographed, others clean. Enough, in the end, to fill a bushel basket. "We had all the baseballs we wanted," Gould said.

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. To those boys, a black man was a Pullman porter, and their Pullman porter was magical.

And so it was for whites across America from the late 19th Century through the middle of the 20th. 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 born of ignorance. He remained a dark silhouette passing by at 50 miles an hour.

Had they probed further, they would have found that behind the porter's constant smile and courtly service lay a day-to-day struggle for dignity that anticipated black America's bloody crawl toward racial equity. The porter's story extends from the end of the Civil War, when George Pullman launched his sleeping car service, to 1969, when the Pullman Company ceased operations.

Pullman was a hard-headed entrepreneur. He knew that service was the key to success for his expensive new sleeping cars, and knew that ex-slaves would make the most compliant servants. So when he launched his business just after the Civil War he hired only Negroes -- nearly all ex-slaves, the darker-skinned the better. And he paid the porter barely enough to survive, ensuring he would do any bidding required by passengers to earn the tips that were vital to his welfare.

However coldhearted Pullman's reasoning, the result was that, by the start of the 20th Century, the Pullman Company was the nation's largest employer of African Americans. Its work force included 12,000 porters.

The porter had the worst job on the train because he was the low man. The conductor was his boss. So were the ticket agent and all the inspectors and supervisors, who often worked undercover. A porter was not allowed to talk back to passengers, no matter the abuse he took.

But that was only half the story. In the Negro world of the late 1800s all the way through the mid-1900s, it was axiomatic that the two best jobs were "Pullman and Post Office." While the latter paid more, the former was the only way a black man of that era could see the country and rub shoulders with presidents, cinema stars and Wall Street barons.

The typical porter handled name-calling and other insults by donning a mask as soon as he boarded the train. He let 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 -- and survival.

One way porters did fight back was by crafting their own lexicon, a language that let them talk out loud without passengers understanding, and let them bond with one another much the way Jewish immigrants did by speaking Yiddish and the Irish by resurrecting Gaelic. A handkerchief head, for example, was, in porter dialect, a close relation to Uncle Tom. The earliest porters and first Negroes to see America were travelin' men, and ones too loyal to George Pullman were company porters.

Pullman porters were not the first group of black workers to try to launch a union, but they were the first to succeed. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters got them more money, more vacation, more time to sleep and more pride than any black worker of that era. It also pried open the AFL-CIO to African Americans, encouraging other black workers to unionize.

It was a Pullman porter, Edgar Nixon, who launched the Montgomery bus boycott that sparked the civil rights movement -- and who tapped Martin Luther King Jr. to lead both. And it was the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, who led the civil rights struggle before it was a movement and before King was born. Porters turned over their union halls for civil rights meetings, funded the movement, carried the word to hamlets across the South, and made their union a model for black advancement.

The proudest legacy of the porters can be found in the likes of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, politians such as former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, artists like jazz great Oscar Peterson, and all their other children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces, who run universities and municipalities, sit on corporate and editorial boards, and helped give birth to today's black middle class.

If race is the story of America, the Pullman porter represents one of its most resonant chapters.

Copyright © 2004 Detroit Free Press Inc.