In the summer of 1953, I was the third-baseman and occasional pitcher – yeah, I had an arm back then – for Savannah in the Sally League. If you think Savannah is South, go to Jacksonville, which is where we were playing in mid-July, and imagine you’re the only black guy on the team.

In the top of the second, some big old crewcut cracker from Arkansas named Conley tried to stare me down as I came up. He mouthed a few words at me, the nicest of which was “boy.”

I smiled at him, not trying to be a smart-ass, but just to let him know I wasn’t going to be intimidated by a fourth grade dropout who happened to throw a serious fastball. Conley threw a ball at my head and I ducked just in time. The crowd laughed and yelled bad shit at me. I looked back at Conley and knew what was coming next. Double-A farm-boy racists aren’t the most accurate so he missed my head, and I caught it in the back. I didn’t look at him nor rubbed my back as I jogged down to first.

I stole second, scored on a single, and we went on to win 14-0, Conley giving up twelve runs and hitting me twice more, but that’s not important.

That year, Jacksonville attempted a team flag, multi-colored, but the crackers never warmed up to it – a terrible design, they said, but it was probably because one of the colors was black. Probablypossiblymaybeperhaps, who knows, right? Long time ago. Who remembers what, right?

After the game, I wandered down the crumbling corridor, flipping a baseball, past Jacksonville’s clubhouse/hole in the wall, to the room where the groundskeepers/concession stand workers/janitors/black lackeys hung out. Five aging tired black guys sharing a few joints and a bottle of bourbon that they passed to me.

They were sitting on piles of discarded flags, and I told them what I thought. One of them picked up a mop, went into the Jacksonville locker room, returned to us, smiled, and nodded.

When Conley came out of the locker room, the sad losing pitcher, last out, we were waiting for him, wearing black hoods made out of the abandoned flag remnants.

We dragged him down the dilapidated hallway, past the boiler room, past several non-descriptive junk rooms that may once have been useful storage closets, past the time when things were completely dysfunctional. Adrenaline was pounding through these old beaten men.

Four of the men (not the mop man obviously who showed his face to Conley and then ran away) held Conley up against a wall and laughed their asses off. They spread out his arms and legs.

Conley was scared shitless. Four men in black hoods, holding onto a white man against his will: the opposite of his life and history.

We didn’t have a tree so we did what we could.

A trickle of pee appeared at his crotch.

I looked at him through my mask, then threw a fastball. It missed his left ear by an inch or two. The ball bounced back to me. His legs wobbled. The team held him up. I threw another fastball, grazing his crewcut. Then another just missing his right ear. Then another between his legs. Two more missing his armpits. And a few more just for good measure around his head.

He dropped to his knees.

I left then, looking back only once. Maybe my buddies kicked the snot out of him.

Maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. Who remembers what, right? Maybepossiblyprobablyperhaps. I don’t remember now if there were any repercussions; it was a long time ago. Maybeperhaps…

More stuff happened to me as I moved up to Triple-A and eight games in the majors but I never retaliated, well, not in the same way. I used to spike certain opponents, but that was just part of the game back then… Right? Years later, I can’t say I care too much.

I look at myself in the mirror, and don’t know myself, and say, “Really? That guy is ninety-four?” And I remember I did that when I was sixty-five and forty and twenty-two. I’ve looked at myself for such a long time I never saw any changes and don’t notice any difference. It’s me and it ain’t.

I can’t throw a baseball worth a damn anymore. Sometimes I think I’m living someone else’s life.

~ Bill Kitcher