MADreads

Race, ball

August 19th, 2008 Barbara - Alicia Ashman

 Satchel Paige: Striking out Jim Crow is a fast read (less than 90 pages) which is more a story of the segregated South than a biography of Satchel Paige. The author, UW-Madison alumnus James Sturm, throws a curveball with his title: it showcases the celebrity of Satchel Paige through the eyes of an imagined contemporary. It is an odd blend of fiction and biography, telling a bittersweet, fictionalized story of segregation and oppression while providing teasing glimpses of the famed pitcher.

The story is narrated by Emmet Wilson, a sharecropper from Tuckwilla, Alabama. In 1929, Emmet is a young man full of hope, dreaming of making it big in baseball’s Negro National League. His career is cut short by a knee injury sustained when sliding into home plate during a game pitched by the rising young star, Satchel Paige.

Emmet returns to Tuckwilla, raising cotton on land owned by two other former baseball players — the wealthy, white Jennings twins. The 1930s and early ’40s fly by, with the inequities sharecropping and the menacing dangers facing blacks in rural Alabama scarily presented. Emmet’s attempts to keep his son in school during during cotton picking season are horrifically squashed by the twins.

The story jumps to 1944, when the Jennings brothers arrange a local baseball event featuring the now-legendary Satchel Paige and his traveling All-Stars playing against a team of local (white) heroes, The Tuckwilla All-Stars. Baseball long behind him, Emmet is loathe to attend the game but is pulled along by his beloved son,  Emmet, Jr. The kid had heard rumors of his father’s baseball past, but nothing firsthand from his dad: “I don’t talk about my days as a ballplayer. It’s like talkin’ about a dead man.” And Emmet is almost a dead man, he has been beaten down by day-to-day life, by segregation and discrimination and the hardships of trying to raise his black child in a white man’s world. The ball game does and does not change all of that…

Rich Tommaso’s illustrations are as understated and roundabout as the story, with heavy black ink and strange pea-green washes of color (deepening to swampier tones during the darker parts of the storyline). This is not a “pretty” book, but the somber colors and simple drawing style elegantly compliment the text.

The last four pages of the book are “panel discussions”, with text providing additional information on topics touched on in the graphics and story. This is a weirdly moving book. Once you get in there, it does not let you out until the end. It is good!

It is a story of many defeats, both large and small — yet ends triumphantly. As an introduction to segregation and Satchel Paige, it serves more to intrigue than to inform, but any title that raises topics that lead to further reading is a good read in my book.

Entry Filed under: Graphic Novel, Historical Fiction