Free A Well-Paid Slave by Brad Snyder Page B

complete the job that he had started, and that means we had to comport ourselves the way that he did. . . . We were on a tightrope all the time.”
    Fans in other Carolina League towns tested Flood’s resolve. Greensboro was bad. Smaller, southeastern North Carolina towns such as Wilson, Kinston, and Fayetteville were worse. In Wilson, during one of the league’s two midseason all-star games, a High Point Enterprise columnist noticed the “considerable amount of cat-calls directed at the all-Negro outfield.” In Fayetteville, a military town, one fan called out upon seeing Flood: “There’s a goddamned nigger son-of-a-bitch playing ball with them white boys! I’m leaving.” In Durham, Flood hit a ball into the left-center-field gap, and his cap flew off as he rounded first base. A man sitting in a wheelchair halfway up the stands behind the Hi-Toms’ dugout yelled: “Run, nigger, run.”
    The words “Run, nigger, run” stuck with Flood’s lone black teammate, pitcher John Ivory Smith, for the rest of his life. A native of Cocoa Beach, Florida, Smith pitched for the Hi-Toms until he was transferred to another team in early May. A month later, Bo Bossard, a black infielder from Columbia, South Carolina, joined the team. These native-born southerners knew what to expect; for Flood, however, southern segregation was foreign territory.
    The worst part of life in the Carolina League for Flood was the travel. White teammates saw Flood’s shoulders drop as they got off the bus to eat while he was forced to stay on the bus and wait for them to bring him food. Sometimes he was told to go to the back of the restaurant. He once ate a hamburger in the yard of a diner among barking dogs while his teammates sat inside. His teammates went to the bathroom at rest stops; Flood had to ask the bus driver to pull over to the side of the road. At home and on the road, the bus dropped him off in the black section of town. The routine alienated him from his white teammates. His manager, 42-year-old former Reds utility player Bert Haas, did nothing to bridge the gap.
    Like the Carolina League’s dozen other black players, Flood learned an important early lesson: how to duck. As the league’s best hitter, Flood saw more than his share of beanballs and knockdown pitches. Johnny Pesky, the former Red Sox infielder who managed the Durham Bulls that season, praised Flood’s “attitude” and “courage.” “They keep throwing at Flood to keep him loose up there at the plate and he continues to dig in,” Pesky said.
    One night, as Flood lit up Kinston’s pitching, Kinston manager Jack Paepke decided he had seen enough. He inserted himself as the team’s pitcher. Kinston outfielder Carl Long cringed when he heard what his manager was planning in the dugout. “The manager said, ‘I’m going to hit that son-of-a-bitch upside the head,’ ” Long recalled. “And he hit him upside the head. Curt went to first, stole second, and stole third. After the ball game, he said he was going to steal home if he could. The next at-bat he hit a home run.”
    Black ballplayers and entertainers of that era were prime targets for white violence. On April 10, 1956, singer Nat King Cole was knocked to the floor as he performed before an all-white audience in Birmingham, Alabama. Six men were arrested before they could do him serious physical harm, but a plot was uncovered that involved more than 100 people and aimed to kill the singer. In a Carolina League game that year in Greensboro, Danville outfielder Leon “Daddy Wags” Wagner mysteriously dropped an easy fly ball. His manager began to yell at him between innings until Wagner explained the situation. “[A] guy was hiding out behind the left-field stands,” Wagner said. “He pointed a shotgun at me and yelled, ‘Nigger, I’m going to fill you with shot if you catch one