White Guilt Read Free

his head as if to wonder at his own helplessness, and then he began to give me orders. The orders meant I was hired, and I was exhilarated. I learned every player’s bat, and at home games I quickly mastered the batboy’s art of speed and unobtrusiveness. I could retrieve the newly dropped bat after a play, get it back into the dugout bat rack under the right name, and get the next man on deck his bat in one unbroken circle of movement. After games and practices I pounded the dust out of the bases, packed them in the coach’s trunk, bucketed loose balls, bagged the catcher’s equipment, and last, made sure the field and dugouts were completely denuded of team equipment. For all this I received absolutely nothing, though I hoped for a team cap that would finally force my snickering friends to see that I really was team batboy.
    This was not to be. On the Saturday morning of our first away game I arrived at the Y early to load up the bus we weretaking to a famous semipro ball field in South Chicago. The players were excited and playful when they arrived, and I looked forward to this first bus ride with the team.
    It was when I was pushing the last few bags into the bus’s hold that I noticed that the entire bus had gone silent. When I looked up, I saw eyes in every window, and they were all trained on me. I knew instantly that I had come to the brick wall that had been waiting for me all along. What an effort it had taken not to acknowledge it, as if all by myself I was going to will evil out of the world. But here it was finally, almost welcome for the relief it brought.
    Still, there had been a great momentum in this entire effort to become a batboy, and that momentum—a kind of good faith—would not let me stop just because reality was finally showing itself. So I stood aside as the bus driver locked the hold, and then I walked straight to the bus’s door. But the coach was already descending the boarding steps as I got there. He paused for a second to meet me with his eyes, and then he stepped down to the sidewalk and put a huge hand on my shoulder.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said. “But they don’t allow coloreds in the park we’re going to. And that’s the way it’s going to be for all the away games. I can’t use you anymore.”
    The same momentum that had led me to offer myself up in this way made me start to resist, to say something, to beg or protest or both. But then it was as though my very insides dropped out and I was utterly hollow. No words ever came. He patted my shoulder, then climbed back into the bus. I wanted to cry, felt all the precursors for a collapse into tears, but I did not cry, and I never cried. Encircled by all those eyes, I turnedaround and walked back into the YMCA. I will never forget the sanctuary of the huge revolving door at the front of the Y, nor the words that I said to myself as I passed through it: “This really happened, didn’t it. And it’s really bad.”
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    Segregation was, of course, an institutionalized infidelity to democratic principles. But to say this is only to state a fact. Incidents like this gave this fact an emotional history. Through them the societal infidelity marked the human being—and here it marked the coach and all the players as well as myself. Back then I would have denied any mark. Who is tougher than a twelve-year-old boy? And even today I am certain that racist rejections like this do not cause low self-esteem in their victims. They cause disenchantment with the world. My self-esteem was not diminished in the least by what happened to me on that Saturday morning. That is not how injustice is absorbed. That morning I had had what I would much later understand to be an existential experience. This had been an encounter with the absurd, and the world was simply no longer as firm for me as it had been. So my loss of faith was not in myself; it was in the world. Ironically, this