To Be Young, Gifted, and Black at Fenway

I have a recurring dream about my father and me, one of the few welcome dreams I have about him. We’re both in our late thirties, though he’s fitter than I remember him ever being. We’re at Fenway, out in the right-field bleachers, several rows behind Ted Williams’s red seat.

I can see the bulge of a cigarette pack in his shirt pocket. Our square faces and hairless arms are similar. I haven’t, since I was a boy, wanted to resemble him, but in the dream, and for a brief time after waking, I don’t mind looking like his son.

The stands are empty. No game, no batting practice, but we’re watching something. It’s bright enough to be day, though it feels like night, like late August. An unseen ball clatters against the hard plastic seats. My father bounces down the rows, using the benches as stairs. He’s light and agile—moving as I’d never seen him. I know he’s going to collect the souvenir for us. He disappears. I wait.

I spent a lot of time at Fenway growing up. There’d be a bustling in the house, and my brother, David, would tell me to get my glove. At first, I’d think the two of us were going to play catch in the street, or our father was going to take us out to practice grounders and flies. But if my father told us to “bring coats ’cause there might be a chill,” I knew we were going to Fenway.

We would drive there in my dad’s Catalina, which was the color of amber ale, with chrome bumpers and door handles. I don’t know what model year, but it had that Pontiac nose and a black vinyl roof that looked like close-cropped hair. My father never seemed to worry about traffic. He’d ease along shoulders or speed down side streets to find a parking spot. If he couldn’t find one, there was always some secret lot he knew of, or an old buddy’s gas station nearby. He always tried to get “closer.”

I was four when I went to my first game. It was the only time I remember walking to the park. It was a hot and hazy Saturday afternoon. My father, brother, sister, and I travelled east along the Charles, cutting over to Beacon and eventually making a left on Lansdowne. Over the hot asphalt, through the smell of sausage grease and sharp and sweet green peppers and onions. In the Monster’s shadow. The silent net above. The calls of venders—“Git ya hats here, git ya yeah-ya books!” Through the turnstiles and tunnels. That bright sun at the runway end, the growing collective murmur, and then—out.

We sat in the lower grandstand just outside the overhang’s shadow. The P.A. announcements were like instructions from one of Charlie Brown’s teachers—“Wah, wah, wah”—but I could feel it in my belly, not my ear. The Red Sox took the field. They were playing Milwaukee. Roger Moret pitched—though I might be combining multiple memories—and we lost. But we didn’t lose to the Brewers at home that year, and Moret never started a game. Does it matter?

I was used to seeing the players through the center-field camera’s lens—a Saturday-afternoon game with a homemade Italian sub on my lap and a cold glass of grape Funny Face. But in person the colors were brilliant. Our RCA CRT console never came close to reproducing them: Yaz’s sharp red “8”; the players’ high, bright stirrups and white socks; the teal walls; the emerald-and-pine double-cut grass. All of the black was blue.

I didn’t know what to do, so I watched my father. Someone would get up, get on, or get out, but he’d take his time scoring the at-bat. He’d go half the inning without recording anything, then quickly draw those stat glyphs which I still love studying. Most of the day, he sat, smiled, and enjoyed the sun, even when the Brewers scored or the Sox failed to. If an ump made a terrible call, he’d grumble “Hey” or “Come on.” But, regardless, it seemed as if he couldn’t have been happier.

We went to Fenway often that year. We usually sat on the first-base side—sometimes grandstand, sometimes box, sometimes those bizarre, wrong-facing seats out by Pesky’s Pole. It was always the same: for the first three innings, my father ignored the venders and ignored us. There was only the game. Before the fourth, he’d ask, “Hungry?,” and then there would be hot dogs, with long squirts of French’s yellow, and Sprites, never Cokes. I’m sure he’d have a beer, but I can’t picture it.

There were rarely more than a few Black people scattered in the stands and, of course, very few on the field. If I think quickly, there aren’t many that come to mind: Tommy Harper, Reggie Smith, George Scott, Cecil Cooper, Fergie Jenkins, Moret. The Sox’s owner, Tom Yawkey, was still a force back then, a man who was thought to have said, “Get those niggers off the field,” and who didn’t roster a Black player until 1959. “Get those niggers off the field” meant keep those niggers out of the stands, too.

But there we were, Black. Back then, it seemed that the white/Black ratio was five hundred to one. My father was a generation removed from Jim Crow; our great-great-grandfather had been born a slave. My father wasn’t physically intimidating. I doubt that he could fight. And yet wherever he was he moved through the throng—white, Black, or other—with a jazzy defiance. He appeared to live easily within the “wider society.” Fenway should have been terrifying. But, in those days, it wasn’t.

I remember that first time, when the game was over, my father got up and led us through the crowd. He had a way of zigzagging into open spaces without cutting anyone off. Up the stairs, through the tunnel, down Lansdowne and Brookline, across the square, west down Commonwealth—to the Charles. I tried to look at everything and to keep up, too, and I didn’t do either well. At some point, he stopped, threw down his cigarette, then lifted me over his shoulders. From up there, I watched: on the left, Storrow Drive’s slow, mirage traffic; straight ahead, on top of the red brick bottling plant, the dormant Coca-Cola sign; to the right, the picnickers, sunbathers, and orange-silver river, which we followed home.

With my father, being Black around white people meant—felt like—one thing; with my mother, it was another. Both demanded politeness, precise vocabulary, flawless enunciation, immaculate public personae, and respectful private ones, too. But my mother insisted that there would be no holes, no stains, no off-brands. No dirty fingernails, funky pits, or nappy heads. “Don’t leave this house looking like a street urchin,” she would say.

She was quick to anger and judgment, and her rules could seem arbitrary, stifling, and conformist, but later I realized that they didn’t have anything to do with becoming white and upper middle class. Neat and clean hair didn’t mean we couldn’t use picks with fists or folding red-and-green handles.

There were threats everywhere, real and imagined. Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the Gerber Baby—it required constant vigilance on her part to keep those things from doing us harm. Her hope for us was humble. Again, crossing over wasn’t assimilation or integration. It was choice: the freedom to choose.

My mother’s migration from Hampden Sydney, Virginia, to Boston seemed of another generation. In my father, she found a new Negro: educated, urbane, and comfortable around white people. One look at his lone dark face in his Brighton High class picture tells you—he hadn’t had much of a choice.

My older siblings have memories of our parents being unified. My brother recalls Sunday afternoons spent driving through the suburbs, house-hunting. I remember fracture: uneasy dinners, grim Christmas Eves, and my father’s sudden escapes into small jazz clubs in and around Boston. I never saw my parents being kind to each other. My early understanding segregated them into distinct Black American traditions: he, Du Bois, she, Washington; the new and the old; white-collar and blue; the talented tenth and those they were charged to uplift. It wasn’t that neat, of course.

My father, for all his altruism and cultural literacy, never moved away from his home town. He kept us in the same house in Allston in which he grew up, and, like his father, he often left us there. When he was home, the television was always on, the house always in disrepair. He was, simultaneously, honky-tonk and erudite, quoting Emerson while watching “The Munsters” on TV.

We didn’t go to games in ’73. My mother worked. He didn’t. I was too young to attend camp with my siblings, so I stayed home with him. A typical day began with me memorizing passages from the Western literary canon. I’d been reading since I was three, and my favorite book was “The Monster at the End of This Book,” narrated by Grover from “Sesame Street.” I’d sit with it until I heard my father stir. He wouldn’t talk to me if I read children’s stories. The only picture books he’d acknowledge were the encyclopedia and Ingri and Edgar D’Aulaires’ books on Greek and Norse mythology. Sometimes I’d study them on the living-room floor while he sat on the couch, watching game shows and smoking. Midmorning, he’d quiz me: “Spell ‘ankylosaurus.’ ” Or “Jurassic” or “Cretaceous.” He’d ask me to list the gods and goddesses by name, rank, and dominion.