“Come see the end of Mister JayMac’s morning sweatout,” Darius said. I wanted to fetch my duffel from Euclid, thinking I might need my glove, but Darius shook his head. “Naw, naw. Jes you watch today, Danl. Jes be thanking God the obligation aint on you to huff it up wi them mens awready out there.”

Darius led me through an entrance near the bleachers on the third-base line. We ducked through a low concrete tunnel and broke into the ballpark’s summer dazzle.

Grass you wouldn’t believe, trim and green, the pride of an eager-beaver team of groundskeepers. Even the ads on the walls seemed magical: signs for local department stores, Octagon Laundry Soap, Obelisk Self-Rising Flour, War Bonds, Old Golds, Shelby Razor Blades, 666 Cold Medicine. Most touted stuff you can’t buy now, but, just then, they bamboozled me. I wanted to dash through the outfield grass (me, a shortstop), make leaping grabs against the Feen-A-Mint and the Moroline Petroleum Jelly signs. I wanted to play the caroms off their paint. And right after the game, I’d run downtown to stock up on chewing gum, cola, soap, smokes, you-name-it.

Lord among us, McKissic Field was Heaven!

Never mind no other park in the CVL, except maybe the one in LaGrange, could stand beside Mister JayMac’s place. Never mind how quickly I learned even McKissic Field didn’t equal the Land of Beulah. I mean, it had bumps in the infield, shadowy corners where a fielder could get lost, camelback crickets in the showers, and split benches in the bleacher sections. That morning, though, the old stadium dazzled me.

Near the third-base line, Darius hurtled a low wall and ambled onto the infield grass. He picked up a catcher’s mitt and waved it at a player lazing around the batting cage. The player-Peter Hay, better known as Haystack, but I didn’t know that then-followed him to the bullpen, where Darius squatted and caught Hay’s warm-up tosses. After a while, Darius pounded his mitt, asking for more heat; he fired Hay’s pitches back harder than Hay’d thrown them. Hay struggled to put more zip into what he was doing. An amazing scene: In a south Georgia ballpark, a black man instructing, even cussing out, an older white player.

“Nigger gave me that crap, I’d deball him with a spoon.” Until then, I hadn’t seen the rookies-three guys in street clothes-in the stands behind me. The kid who’d just spoken hunched between two others about his age, all of them squinting like moles, each about as nervous and mock-tough as the other two. The one who’d spoken wore caked boots and denim overalls; he had a blacksmith’s arms. He also had, several hours ahead of schedule, a five-o’clock shadow.

“Would you let a nigger boss you thataway?” he asked me.

I turned half around. I shrugged.

“You a ballplayer?” he said. “Or Jes lost?”

“The nigger brought him,” one of the other two guys said. “He cain’t be lost.”

Both these fellas had on cheap jackets and ties. They were taller than the farm boy; next to him, they looked like Esquire models-or like they’d mistaken the day for Sunday and McKissic Field for a concert hall. Their names, I found out later, were Heggie and Dobbs. The farm boy with the stubble was a south Georgia cracker name of Philip Ankers.

“He’s ugly, though,” Ankers said, looking at me. “Nothing that nigger do or say can stop him being ugly.”

Maybe these drips were dogfaces on furlough.

“What’s yore name?” Ankers asked.

I patted my throat and gargled a few gargles. For safety’s sake, I stayed put, three bleacher rows ahead of him.

“What is it, Rube? Ya swaller a sock? Or ya jes don’t know yore name?”

I gave the farm boy a quick up-yours sign, half expecting him and his dime-store clothes-horse buddies to come down and boot the pea-turkey out of me.

But Ankers laughed and said, “Screw ya, Rube.” His pals chuckled too. When they started watching the practice again, I edged over a few feet so they wouldn’t be right behind me.

From the mound, Mister JayMac hurled batting practice into a chicken-wire cage. Criminy. Mister JayMac had his health, I guess, but the sight of that old guy unleashing strikes on his own players couldn’t help but get you. He creaked some (not too much), but the dust on his cuffs and the clay on his shoes didn’t faze him. After yanking a swinging strike on a batter, he made the klutz take three laps. No one, Mister JayMac said, should flat-out whiff against him. He wasn’t Bob Feller. Or even Lefty Grove. Thing was, though, not many Hellbenders took Mister JayMac to the outfield, and nobody hit one over the wall off him.

At Mister JayMac’s orders, players changed in and out, coming in to hit or hustling out to field. Pretty soon, I’d started sizing up the shortstop. The number on his practice flannels, also the team’s away uniforms, was seven. I didn’t expect to move in on this guy unless he produced nothing but air currents at the plate. He could field, and throw, and think. I reckoned him at least twice my age, mid-thirties, maybe older, gray winking at his temples, cowboy creases from his nose to his lip corners. On every pitch, he crouched so low you wondered if he had the body grease to unravel and make a play. He always did, though, and gracefully: a whangdoodle shortstop.

The other big thing I recall about that practice is how bad the guys playing first base did. Mister JayMac used at least four fellas there, but not one could handle a first baseman’s glove. That leather claw gave them fits. One fella, Norm Sudikoff, moved pretty as a gazelle, but usually managed to turn a sure out into a misplay. My pal Goochie would’ve given all these goons a clinic.

Me, I wished I was six or seven inches taller. Then, if I couldn’t beat out Number Seven at short, I might win a starting job from the relay team of jokers yo-yoing in and out at first base. Otherwise, I might spend my whole season on the bench. Growing a half foot fast would help, but I’d do as well to pray for a Hollywood agent to tap me as the next Gary Cooper.

At noon, practice ended. Darius hadn’t brought me to McKissic Field so much to watch it as to keep from having to make an extra trip from the players’ boardinghouse to the stadium. He’d picked up the other three rookies, Georgia boys all, a couple of hours earlier, when a train from the Atlantic coast had dropped them at Highbridge Station.

Now Darius came over, diamonds winking in the black lamb’s wool of his hair, his coffee-colored skin aglow. “Yall go git on the bus. Sit toards the back. The other mens don’t like rookies crowding em.”

“Who sez?” Ankers said to Darius.

“Ast em,” Darius said. “Be my guest. But ast em on the bus, or yall might have to foot it to Mister JayMac’s.”

Dobbs and Heggie didn’t grumble, but Ankers flicked Darius a lightning storm with his eyes.

On the bus, these guys sat a row or two in front of Euclid, now reading a Plastic Man comic, but I plonked down next to him, not out of any Eleanor Roosevelt fondness for black folk, but because he had my duffel. He paid me no mind, poring over his comic like it was a book of secret codes.

In about twenty minutes, ballplayers started straggling out and climbing aboard, including Darius. Mister JayMac swung up into the seat back of Darius’s. None of his players had tried to sit in it, his reserved spot. They always scattered about here and there, flopping like wore-out bird dogs. Number Seven, the shortstop, came laddering down the aisle and dropped into the long rear seat. He stretched his arms along its back and goggled around.

“Hey, Darius,” he said, “who’re these handsome cats?” He meant the three new Georgia boys.

“I disremember their names, Mr Hoey. Course I’m jes a driver, not a traveling secretary.”

“Oh now, Darius,” the shortstop said, “you’re more n a driver, you’re a Hellbender institution.”

Hands on the wheel, Darius didn’t seem to want any of Hoey’s soft soap and told him so by clamming up. Of all the men who’d practiced that morning, he was the only one still wearing the clothes he’d worked out in. The top of his head showed in the big rectangular mirror just inside the divided windshield, his hair asparkle with sweat.