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Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1464-1474



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Bailey's Café as Sports Bar, or, Why Baseball Needs a Way Station

Margaret Whitt


Gloria Naylor is no stranger to the world of professional sports. In Mama Day, she discovers that George is an avid fan, much to her dismay, of football, and in particular the New England Patriots. She has stated that she has had "surprises," for when her characters "become full-blown. . . . you just become the stenographer"(Moehringer 7). She claims to have known or cared little about football, but with and for George, she had to become a student of the game. When Naylor turns her attention to developing the proprietor of Bailey's Café, the unnamed maestro, she makes him a baseball fan. The maestro, however, does not come to his sport in the same manner as George did; rather, Naylor grew up hearing about baseball from her father, who loved the game. Her father, born in 1929 near the end of the first decade of Negro League play, spoke often about his favorite players and games, but Naylor had to research her references because after she was born in 1950 her baseball memories include mostly talk of the Yankees and the Mets (Whitt interview). The maestro is not sure about the roots of his fascination with the sport, but, as with his creator, knows his "father being such a big fan probably helped" (Naylor, Bailey's Café 8).

The maestro's knowledge of baseball serves as a foundation to understand the greater world that opens for him once he leaves Brooklyn for military action in World War II, for each player and team mentioned in the novel had an enormous reputation within their respective spheres of influence. Naylor's choices, on this level, are obvious ones. But the baseball references serve to introduce the abiding theme in this novel: each of them has a story that travels deeper than a superficial popularity. What the war and time in his café have taught the maestro is that "anything really worth hearing . . . happens under the surface" (35). In a novel that mixes jazz terminology with biblical allusions--and deepens these references to link cities with jazz history and to suggest parallel stories between women in the Bible and contemporary women in pain--the baseball references, each in their own turn, expand and comment on a period in American history that is laden with racial injustice and that suggests a need for the way station that will come to be Bailey's Café. As a sports bar, Bailey's Café, because of the maestro, is a place where any visitor can talk about baseball, but the by-product is what matters more. Sports bars provide a common meeting arena where a recurring clientele can develop into a supportive community. It is in this manner that the sports bar transforms into a way station, where Naylor's characters find a "space, some place, to take a breather for a while" (28). In Bailey's Café, Naylor makes reference to a half dozen players and eight teams before she focuses the maestro's attention on [End Page 1464] the 1948 World Series champions, the Cleveland Indians. In this essay, I will deepen the baseball references, identify players and teams, and suggest how paying attention to the particular choices Naylor makes prepares a reader to experience the novel more fully as a way station.

The Cuban Giants and the Philadelphia Giants are referred to explicitly among "other Negro independents" (8), a term used to indicate teams that pre-dated the establishment of the Negro League in 1920. The Cuban Giants are generally considered the first professional black baseball team, but with a twist. Formed in 1885 at a Long Island resort, the team served as entertainment to the wealthy vacationing white tourists. "Cuban" was chosen to confuse the players' blackness "with the uncertainties of Caribbean race mixing" (Rogosin 61) and because the team was so good, the word "Cuban" in baseball became synonymous with high quality play and an exotic place...

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