Free A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder Page A

years later, Flood’s future Cardinals teammate Bill White, who also played for Danville, was the first black player to survive a full Carolina League season. A black player did not join a North Carolina-based Carolina League team until 1955, just a year before Flood’s arrival. Racism plagued the southern minor leagues well into the 1960s and by 1956 had reached a fever pitch in the Carolina League, which Flood called the “peckerwood league.”
    Games at High Point-Thomasville’s Finch Field generally drew between 500 and 1,000 people, and Flood could hear every heckler in the 3,500-seat ballpark. He internalized all the insults he heard in the stands. “One of my first and most enduring memories is of a large, loud cracker who installed himself and his four little boys in a front-row box and started yelling ‘black bastard’ at me,” he said.
    During the first few weeks of the season, Flood could not wait to get home to his room at a black boardinghouse, where every night he would break down and cry. “It’s hell down here,” he wrote home. “I didn’t know that people could act like this. The home fans are swell to me, but on the road they are on me all the time. . . . I don’t know how long I can take it.”
    He called his sister, Barbara, and told her that he wanted to come home. “I felt too young for the ordeal,” he said. “I wanted to be home. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted to be free of these animals whose fifty-cent bleacher ticket was a license to curse my color and deny my humanity. I wanted to be free of the imbeciles on my ball team.” Barbara frantically phoned Reds scout Bobby Mattick. “His sister called me and said he wanted to come home,” Mattick recalled. “I said, ‘You call him back and tell him not to come home. Tell him to tough it out.’ ”
    Flood understood the stakes. “What had started as a chance to test my baseball ability in a professional setting had become an obligation to measure myself as a man,” he said. “As such, it was a matter of life and death. These brutes were trying to destroy me. If they could make me collapse and quit, it would verify their preconceptions. And it would wreck my life.”
    With the Hi-Toms (the name of the High Point-Thomasville team), Flood wore a stealth shield on his back, number 42, the number worn by Jackie Robinson. The number honored his hero, reminded him of what Robinson had gone through, and pushed him to go forward. It was like wearing Superman’s cape.
    Robinson had experienced the South, but not for a whole season. At the start of spring training in 1946, he had to leave Sanford, Florida, in the middle of the night because of threats on his life if he continued to stay there. Two other Florida cities, Jacksonville and DeLand, canceled spring training games in 1946 rather than allow him to play there with the Triple-A Montreal Royals. Later that season he played in two southern border cities, Baltimore and Louisville. The Dodgers tried to insulate him from future spring incidents by training in Havana in 1947 and later purchasing their own spring facilities and housing in Vero Beach, Florida. Robinson and his family, however, still experienced the Jim Crow South outside the walls of the Vero Beach training complex, at spring training games in other Florida towns and during a few exhibition games each spring on the Dodgers’ annual trek north to Brooklyn.
    Flood and other black players of his generation survived entire minor league seasons in the South. “We were Jackie’s disciples,” said Ed Charles, a member of the 1969 World Champion New York Mets who spent one of his eight minor league seasons in the South with Flood. “We were an extension of Jackie. We were the early trailblazers, on the heels of his trailblazing. He was up North. He assigned us to break the barriers in the South. . . . We had to