The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [41]
The Braves sent Carty to play minor-league baseball in Waycross, Georgia, where he thought Jim Crow laws did not apply to him because he was a Latino. Like Pedro González, he ate a lot of chicken because he could say that. Later he learned how to order hamburgers.
In the United States, it was difficult to find familiar foods. In his autobiography, Felipe Alou wrote of being revolted by the coldness of the milk. In rural Dominican Republic, milk generally arrived unpasteurized and was boiled for safety and served warm. But chicken was the one familiar food they could find.
This story about only knowing how to order chicken is repeated over and over again by the early San Pedro major leaguers. Why was that the word they knew? Not all of them even knew that. San Pedro players tell stories of Dominican rookies favoring fast-food restaurants that offered photographs so they could simply point to the chicken picture or even walk in, flap their arms, and make chicken noises to indicate their orders. Poor Dominicans live on a diet of rice, beans, tropical fruits, root vegetables, and occasionally a chicken.
On the wide main curving street that runs by the Tetelo Vargas Stadium, there are many small restaurant-bars where fans can watch American baseball games on large-screen TVs. They serve mostly chicken. Chicken may have been, as González suggested, the word they set out to learn. Chicken is popular and good in San Pedro. As in much of the Caribbean, most of it is free-range, because sending chickens foraging is the most cost-effective approach in the tropics.
Not all Dominican players chose chicken. “Ham and eggs” was another phrase the Dominican players quickly learned to say. When José Mercedes got to the Orioles, he learned the phrase “same thing” and simply waited for someone else to order and then said, “Same thing.”
Carty was not as isolated as González had been, because there were some Dominicans in the Braves organization, even other Macorisanos—even one whose father had played cricket with Carty’s father. But only Rico made it to the majors.
Carty was liked and certainly respected by the other players, but he was always somewhat of an odd man out, a colorful character. They were puzzled by his habit of carrying his wallet in his uniform into the game because he was not confident that his money would be safe in the locker room.
He found American racism hard to understand. He could see that, as a Latino, he had a slightly better standing than American black players. So he always presented himself as a Latino. But American black players were resentful of this. Carty did not understand much about black America at the height of the civil rights movement. He called himself “Big Boy,” and the black players resented it because they did not want to see a black man call himself “boy.” He changed it to “Man”: “Beeg Mon.” But he never really understood the issue.
It was after the Braves moved to Atlanta that Carty got a taste of what it was like to be a black man in America. In September 1971, after Carty had established himself as a baseball star, he was driving in Atlanta with his brother-in-law, Carlos Ramírez, at about midnight. Ramírez was visiting from the Dominican Republic and spoke no English. Racial tension had been heightened in Atlanta by the killing of two white policemen in a black neighborhood. According to Carty, who described the incident in a 1975 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, another car pulled up with two white men. The two called out to a black man in the street, “Hey, nigger.”
Ramírez asked Carty in Spanish what was happening. When Carty told him, his brother-in-law asked, “Do they do that here?”
“ Yes,” Carty replied. “Sometimes between the blacks and whites.”
“Why?” Ramírez asked.
“I don’t know,” said Carty. “I just play ball and go home.” And the two laughed. Then the two in the other car started shouting “Nigger!” at the Dominicans. Still not understanding the ways of American racism, Carty shouted back in