Catalog of Ships

Last night, I started reading Buck O’Neil’s autobiography, “I Was Right on Time,” which he wrote back in ‘95. Lots of great stories and passages, especially ones revolving around names, a theme which begins with the opening line — “Call me Buck.”

Here are some passages along that theme:

At one time, we had three or four leagues playing all at once, the Negro National League, Negro American League, Negro Southern League, Negro Western League, and so on….

And we had names. We had Fox and Piggy and Bunny and Possum and Groundhog and Rats and Mule and Frog and Burro and Early-bird and Goose and Turkey. Turkey, whose name you’ve already come across, was really Norman Stearnes, one of the greatest hitters and strangest men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. They called him Turkey because of the way he flapped his arms around when he ran. You expected Turkey to take off and fly when he was running, but I was more fascinated by his devotion to hitting. Turkey carried around his bats, a thirty-four-incher and a thirty-five-incher, in a special bat case, like they were violins. One time, after a tough loss, the Monarchs were in the hotel eating dinner, and the manager, Frank Duncan, asked me to go check on the Gobbler — that’s another thing we called Turkey, you see. So I knocked on the Gobbler’s door and he said, “Come in,” and there he was, sitting in the middle of his bed dressed in his pajamas talking to his bats. He said to the 34-incher, “I used you and only hit the ball up against the fence.” Then he turned to the 35-incher and said, “If I had picked you, I would have hit the ball over the fence and we would have tied the game.” Strange man, but Turkey’s another guy who belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Man, did we have names. We had Sea Boy and Gunboat, Steel Arm and Copperknee, Darknight and Skin Down, Mosquito and Jitterbug, Popsickle and Popeye, Suitcase and, of course, Satchel. Our trainer with the Monarchs was Jewbaby Floyd — I can’t recollect why we called him that, and I can’t remember what his real first name was. There were some pitchers with great nicknames, Steel Arm Davis, Ankleball Moss — that’s where that mean sonuvagun threw the ball from, his andkles — and Cocaina Garcia. Cocaina, whom I used to face down in Cuba, got his name from his wicked curveball, which made all us hitters go numb.

As for my own names, well, there are some pretty simple explanations for them — and some pretty complicated ones, too.

[And then, later on.]

It seems like half the teams in black baseball were called the Giants. There were the Bacharach Giants, the Lincoln Giants, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Brooklyn Cuban Giants, the Cuban X Giants, the Philadelphia Giants, the Pittsburgh Giants, the Chicago Giants, the Chicago American Giants, Cole’s American Giants, Gilkerson’s Union Giants, the Celeron Acme Colored Giants, the Shreveport Acme Giants, the Page Fence Giants, the St. Louis Giants, the Harrisburg Giants, the Mohawk Giants, the Baltimore Elite Giants, the Columbus Elite Giants, the Columbia Giants, the Twin City Giants, the Quaker Giants of New York, the Zulu Cannibal Giants … among others.

The Reason there were so many Giants was that many newspapers across the country refused to print pictures of black people, But there were a lot of excellent black teams around, and they were a big attraction, even in predominantly white towns. So Giants became a code word. If you saw a placard in a store window or an advertisement in the newspaper announcing that the River City Giants were coming to town to play the local semipro team, you knew right away that the visisting team was a black one. I think everybody in the Negro leagues was a Giant at least once. I was a Giant three times!

(back to me)

Reading these long lists of names reminded me of the catolog of ships from the Iliad. I used to think of that passage as evidence that the poem was, in fact, divinely inspired — no mortal could really list all those names. But reading O’Neil’s book and imagining him reciting all that information to his ghost writer, maybe it’s not so improbable. I can imagine a group of Greeks gathered around an old Homer. He’s telling them these amazing war stories, when all of a sudden he just starts going off about all these ships and tediously sharing which ship was headed by which captain. At first the audience is rapt, then they become a little bored and antsy, but as it goes on and on, they just become stupified by what a list this man is able to recite.

Maybe it’s not necessary to think of Homer as a divinely inspired bard, maybe you can just think of him as an Abraham Simpson type.

Perhaps the ability to catalog the names of yesteryear is a gift that comes with old age.

Buck O’neil certainly had that gift.