As an academic, I have always enjoyed attending conferences because they provide a space to meet new people and to learn about new ideas and specifically about new literature. At the Appalachian Studies Association conference, I went to an Affrilachian poets panel featuring Amy Alvarez, Ricardo Nazario y Colón, Dorian Hairston, and Frank X. Walker. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch all of the poets because I arrived late. However, I did hear Hairston read some poems from Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow: The Story of Josh Gibson, a collection of poems about Baseball Hall of Famer Gibson’s career, told from the perspectives of Gibson, his family members, and contemporary Black baseball players. As the back of the book says, “Hairston captures the complexity and the pain of living under the oppressive weight of grief and racial discrimination” while playing baseball in the Negro Leagues and beyond the diamond.

I just picked up Hairston’s book, so I haven’t had time to delve into it deeply, but I wanted to take a moment and whet your appetite for Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow by looking at the first poem in the collection, “Manifesto for Black Baseball Players,” told from Gibson’s perspective. When I cracked open the book and started reading, this poem grabbed me because Hairston packs so much into the eighteen lines of the poem. Visually, Hairston breaks the poem down into nine sections of two lines each, so a line for the top and bottom of each of the nine innings that constitute a baseball game, and the book as a whole is organized, by sections, in a similar manner, moving across innings in a baseball game.

The poem begins by invoking Jackie Robison in the first two lines, calling attention to the role that Robinson plays in our collective narrative of baseball history. Gibson starts by saying,

never forget the 42 reasons
baseball is best played with color

Through these lines, Gibson pays reverence to Robinson while also using Robinson as a jumping off point to talk about what made the Negro Leagues so exciting for fans, specifically, as he notes in the second stanza, the speed on the base paths, the countless records that surpassed white players, and the introduction, as Gibson points out later, on lights to play games at night and protective batting helmets.

Gibson uses these things to call attention to the racism and oppression at the historical heart of the nation, and the nation’s pastime. In the same stanza where he mentions speed on the basepaths, Gibson compares stolen bases to the ways that colonizers “stole this country,” thus invoking the foundational groundwork for Jim Crow, the system which Gibson calls upon Black baseball players to pretend is the ball when they swing. Gibson continues the colonization metaphor when referencing his posthumous induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 when he says, “(de)colonize/the hall of fame” in inning five, pointing out the historical trajectory the nation and also of Gibson’s life, even after his passing in 1947.

During the seventh inning stretch, Gibson intones, “never be controlled/by anything white,” a forceful proclamation of autonomy and agency which the Negro Leagues embodied through their very existence and history. Moving to the eighth inning, Gibson continues this invocation to Black baseball players by telling them to sing, with their while being, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as they stand on the field “during they national anthem.” Here, Gibson again points out the historical underpinnings that form his story, specifically echoing individuals such as Frederick Douglass and his famous speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? Through this, Gibson points out that Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner” speaks for “they,” the whites, while James Weldon Johnson’s “Life Every Voice and Sing” serves as a counter and refutation to the empty platitudes of equality expressed in Key’s song. Johnson’s anthem, like David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, highlights that the foundations of the nation rest on the backs of Black individuals and others who did the labor and work for whites. Along with extoling Black baseball players to sings “Life Every Voice and Sing,” the eighth inning also alludes to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling for “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the white backlash that ensued from his protest.

In the final inning of the game, Gibson propose to his future wife Helen. He gets down on his knee and commences to “place a baseball field on her fourth finger.” This inning doesn’t have the same historical context as the others, rather it is a personal moment where Josh proposes to Helen. Yet, I find this last stanza very poignant, and it highlights, for me, Hairston’s ability to pull together different images in the space of a few words. We refer, colloquially, to the “baseball field” as the “diamond,” and when Josh proposes, he gives Helen a diamond, placing it on “her fourth finger,” another metaphor to the four bases on the diamond, the fourth being home plate, the base that the player crosses to score a run.

If you know me, you know I am not one who reads much poetry. I gravitate more to novels, history books, essays, and prose; however, when I read poetry, I enjoy the ways authors create so much with so little, packing so much meaning into each word and the form of the poem. I haven’t read all of Hairston’s Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow yet, but I know, based on what I have read and what I heard him read, that I will enjoy it. I know I’ll learn from it, and I’m sure it’s going to send me down a rabbit hole, back into looking at baseball history and specifically further into the history of the Negro Leagues.

Stay tuned, because I am sure I will post more when I finish the book. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.