Hey Cool Papa, I see picture of you in your later years
Tall black skin withered, straight, proud. You must have been a streak of black gold flashing around the bases like some great African warrior misplaced…
It is said you scored from first on a bunt against the all-white major league all-stars.
You were forty summers then and they wanted to know how you did it.
Was it magic, was it voodoo, was it a freak of segregation, was it special compensation for national mental inferiority in the labs of Stanford?
Was it something that only happens in colored ball, a Saturday night mutation gone insane in the white man’s game?
You must have been the genius black musician of Daho/Sippi carving his own instrument.
So now at seventy they parade you out from your job as janitor St. Louis City Hall and place you in the retroactive Hall of Fame…
And forgive us if we don’t cry Cool Papa, forgive us if we don’t get excited for with you we share the night of that memory,
those memories all the bitter years and buried triumphs because you did it man and no one can take that away. Bitter years, bitter triumphs….
Reference:
Tom Dent
