It’s 11 on a Saturday morning in February, and the sky is a soiled white. Plenty of parking is still available just outside Triton College in River Grove, and station wagons are still being unloaded. In the basement, aisles marked by folding tables have been laid out for the first Black Heritage Expo. In the first aisle along the wall is a table with T-shirts, and another piled high with copies of In Search of Goodpussy: Living Without Love. Across the aisle is an empty table with a large Illinois Bell sign behind it. Tacked up on the wall behind the next table is a small square of paper on which someone has written in blue Magic Marker:
Birmingham Black Barons
Four-oh-eight. That’s a high average, higher than any other batter’s since World War II. Lockett was one of the best hitters of his time. He was also the kind of player who let his bat do the talking for him.
He says he wants to eat. The other men say they want to eat too. Hellstern collars the organizer again, who points out tables where she can get big plates of homemade food for six dollars each, then adds that for these men the food is on the house. Hellstern can’t carry six plates. Lockett rises slowly and says, “Come on, Clara. I’ll help you.”
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Holway became a journalist, and in 1970 wrote an article about Gibson. Then he thought, what about the other guys? Who were they? Where are they now? He went looking, intending to write a book. As a kid he’d thought the Negro Leagues–East and West–were about equal with the white minor-league teams. But after collecting about 450 old box scores for the book, he discovered that when barnstorming black teams played white major-leaguers the blacks won about a third more games. Visiting Cooperstown later in 1970, he found that the Hall of Fame had practically nothing on the Negro Leagues in its files, just a thin folder with six or seven articles. “In America’s baseball library, half the history of baseball was missing!” he wrote. “Very possibly the best.”
Holway interviewed players who had bigger reputations than Lockett, but then Lockett was never a showy player. He was a very good line-drive hitter. He hit home runs, but not in bunches. He was fast, but not as fast as Cool Papa Bell. He played a number of positions in the field, mostly third and some left field–and he played them well, but he didn’t leap over any walls. Yet in his prime he was one of the top hitters in the western division of the Negro National League.
“What do you mean?”
