Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack and the
Tradition of Black Baseball Literature
Emily Rutter
Ball State University
So there was the tenorish snapping sound of the connection, followed by the
rippling vibration down the bat to Henry’s wrists, and he knew it was the best
hit ball that anybody would see in a long, long time. Knees bending in his follow-through, ecstatic, heart leaping, he saw the ball, still rising, shoot for the highest
point . . . it was going and going, still plenty of power behind it and . . . yes! He
dropped his bat and began to run around the bases. He had cracked the top of
the dome.
—Barry Beckham (Runner 82-83)
Henry Adams, the protagonist of Barry Beckham’s novel Runner Mack (1972),
hits a dome-shattering homerun at his Major League tryout for the Stars, “the
American baseball team” (86). However, the prodigiously talented Adams does
not make the roster and spends the remainder of the novel hoping in vain that
he will one day play professional baseball and achieve the American Dream for which
the game purportedly stands. As William Edwards notes, “Baseball is more than a
sport; it is a metaphor for American society. It has always been a sport through
which American society affirms, in part, its creed that any boy can rise above the
lowliest situation to become a national hero” (141). Moreover, as Dave Zirin maintains, “We are unique in playing the national anthem before every game (and, since
9/11, playing ‘God Bless America’ during baseball’s seventh inning stretch)” (19).
Indeed, as the “national pastime,” baseball has long been imbricated in what might
best be termed the American epistemology, predicated on the myths of bootstrap
capitalism and American exceptionalism, “the idea that the United States is not just
the richest and most powerful of the world’s more than two hundred states but is
also politically and morally exceptional” (Hodgson 10). Runner Mack—the first
baseball novel by an African American—untethers baseball from these myths, deftly
narrativizing the dream deferred for black athletes decades after Jackie Robinson
became a Brooklyn Dodger.1
Nominated for a National Book Award in 1973, Runner Mack has now fallen
out of cultural currency and has yet to gain the critical consideration it merits.
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ß MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2017. Published by Oxford
University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw059
MELUS Volume 42 Number 1 (Spring 2017)
Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack
In 1981, Joe Weixlmann noted, “virtually no scholarly attention has been paid to
the novel since the first reviewers gave it richly deserved plaudits” (“Dream” 93).
In his introduction to the 1983 edition of the novel, Mel Watkins observed, “Given
the praise conferred on Beckham’s previous novel [My Main Mother (1969)], the
absence of critical response to Runner Mack is as puzzling as the surrealist environment in which the novel’s hero functions” (xvii). Wiley Lee Umphlett likewise
lauded the novel in a 1987 essay as “the single most outstanding example” of
the “sports fiction tradition” because “of the way in which its author has inverted
the conventional sports fiction theme of ‘making the team’ in order to compel the
reader to examine the harsh facts of the black condition in America” (75). More
recently, in his survey of baseball fiction, Extra Innings: Writings on Baseball
(2001), Richard Peterson identified Runner Mack “as the only serious or adult
baseball novel written by an African American” (119). Despite its noted literary
value, the novel is now commercially out of print, with only Beckham’s selfpublished edition actively keeping it in circulation.
Published during both a prolific decade for baseball novels and a tumultuous
one for sociopolitical struggles, Runner Mack is not unlike Robert Coover’s The
Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) and Philip Roth’s
The Great American Novel (1973) in its surrealist, satiric rendering of the baseball
mythos. However, Beckham’s specific focus on African American experiences
means that Runner Mack does not sit easily beside these works. While other contemporaneous novels such as William Brashler’s The Bingo Long Traveling AllStars and Motor Kings (1973) and Jerome Charyn’s The Seventh Babe (1979) make
black baseball experiences their central focus, these works wax nostalgic about
bygone days of Negro Leaguers’ barnstorming glory rather than attending to
the persistence of racial injustices. Percival Everett’s novel Suder (1983) perhaps
most closely resembles Runner Mack in its surreal and darkly comic depiction of
the racialized struggles that African American players continued to endure in the
post-Robinson era. In fact, the first version of this manuscript, then titled Suter,
was Everett’s master’s thesis, penned at Brown University while Beckham was
directing the MFA program (Weixlmann, “Chronology” xxv)—a line of influence
this essay explores.2 In fact, next to Everett and Gloria Naylor—whose opening
chapter of Bailey’s Cafe (1992) is a paean to the superior caliber of the Negro
Leagues, where “[Jackie] Robinson is a dime a dozen” (11)—no other African
American novelists (to my knowledge) have narrativized black baseball experiences. In other words, not only is Runner Mack the first baseball novel written
by an African American, it is also one of the only such novels, making its recuperation all the more worthwhile.
Unlike Runner Mack, August Wilson’s play Fences (1985) has become an influential counterpoint to white-authored baseball works. Fences is also an apt point
of comparison for Runner Mack, especially in Wilson’s commitment to the marriage of art and politics devised by Black Arts Movement adherents and, more
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specifically, to propagating a Negro League mythology capable of supplanting
Anglocentric baseball myths.3 In contrast, Runner Mack echoes Roland Barthes
when he avers in Mythologies (1957) that while “there are formal limits to myth,
there are no ‘substantial’ ones” (217). For Barthes, myth is socially detrimental in
that “it makes us understand something, and it imposes it on us” (226), naturalizing values and beliefs so that they appear to be common sense. Runner Mack
exposes the commonsense impositions that underwrite myths about American
exceptionalism and the American Dream while debunking the notion that a distinctively African American mythology can take their place.
In an interview I conducted with Beckham, he asserted that “[t]he role of the
writer in general is not to solve the problem. I don’t think that is our responsibility or objective. More importantly, we bring up the issues and leave it there for
the reader.” Accordingly, Runner Mack withholds any specific sociopolitical or
mythological remedy to the endemic injustices that it lays bare, placing the onus
on readers to heed the warnings portended in Adams’s failures and to devise their
own epistemological foundations. Runner Mack’s open-ended and rather individualistic message may explain why it did not garner the cultural or critical purchase that it warranted at the time of its publication—perhaps the most
politicized period in African American history. One of the unifying links between
the interracial vision of civil rights leaders, the strident separatism of Black Power
advocates, and even the socialist tenets espoused by the Black Panthers was collective racial uplift. Elucidating the consequences of investing in either dominant
American myths, including ones associated with the beloved “national pastime,”
and the counterrevolutionary ones that underpinned much of the rhetoric of these
collective social justice efforts, Runner Mack was out of step with the ideological
commitments of its most promising groups of readers—baseball enthusiasts and
social activists alike.
Beckham’s distinct narrative strategies may also explain why the novel
remains understudied. Departing from his Black Arts Movement peers, with
whom he has been grouped,4 Beckham does not align himself in opposition to
the literary establishment as much as he carves out a space for African
American experiences within this historically whitewashed space. For example,
in his oft-quoted essay, “The Black Arts Movement” (1968), Larry Neal contends
that “the motive behind the black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing,
the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world” (64), while
Beckham cites Franz Kafka, Edward Albee, and John Hawkes as dominant influences on his artistic outlook (Personal). Beckham’s allusions to the historical
Henry Adams’s autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), and
Norman Mailer’s novel, Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), likewise situate
Runner Mack within the Anglo-American literary tradition, although Beckham
subverts the Anglocentrism of both of these texts by drawing attention to the
struggles of working-class African Americans such as his own Henry Adams.5
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Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack
Moreover, unlike the vernacular realism that predominates in Wilson’s Fences,
Runner Mack makes use of surrealism and satire to demystify baseball, the US
military, and the eponymous Runner Mack, who spearheads an ill-fated Black
Power-esque movement. Beckham also employs free indirect discourse to enrich
the novel’s parodic mode. The sustained narrative focus on Henry Adams, for
example, allows readers to empathize with him and to critique the institutions,
including Major League Baseball, that prevent him from achieving the
American Dream. At the same time, the distance created by the third-person narration opens up a space for considering alternatives to the wide-eyed Henry’s
guileless submission, first to authorities within the dominant white power structure and then to Runner Mack and his revolutionary movement. By design, then,
Henry is not a prophetic guide to America’s racial inequities and hypocrisies—à
la Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in Invisible Man (1952)—or an emblem of Negro
League defiance, as is Wilson’s Troy Maxson. Rather, Henry is an avatar for
exposing the gaps and fissures in the rhetoric of a broad spectrum of myths
and ideologies.
As I demonstrate, Beckham originated a tradition of black baseball fiction,
extended by Everett’s Suder, that critiques dominant American myths without
replacing them with an alternative mythos or pantheon of heroes. By putting
Runner Mack in dialogue with Suder and Fences, this essay also illuminates their
authors’ divergent views when it comes to the role that myth should (Wilson) or
should not (Beckham and Everett) play in challenging Anglocentrism and
empowering African Americans. These views are suggestive of broader ideological debates that arose in the years after de jure segregation ended but in which
racial inequities continued. This small but nonetheless significant black baseball
subgenre provides a productive glimpse into these debates as they were filtered
through America’s most metaphorically rich sport.
“He was this close. This close”
Raising the tantalizing possibility of social mobility, Runner Mack opens with
Henry and his wife Beatrice having recently migrated north from Mississippi
so that Henry can pursue his dream of playing professional baseball. Yet, within
the novel’s opening pages, he and Beatrice find themselves living in a squalid
apartment in an unnamed northern city, struggling to survive in a hostile world
of alienation and indifference. On his way to a new job, Henry is hit by a “very,
very big truck” that he perceives as having a menacing “grille (smiling) of steel
meshwork and headlights (winking) like two glass basketballs” (Beckham,
Runner 11). Despite this injury and his feelings of apathy and dread about his
and Beatrice’s apartment, Henry perseveres, propelled forward by the promise
that “[h]e was to be a great ballplayer” (17):
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He accepted, agreed, consented, complied, with the understanding that these disappointments and inconveniences were only temporary—were trials actually to test
his mettle, and in the end everything would be all right. So one day, if he did right
and acted right, as his father would say, he was positive of success, was positive
that, just through faith and perseverance and trust, he would enjoy Beatrice as
he wished, would be able to sit and talk with her on a sunny day in the park—just
the two of them with a jug of juice, would make the baseball team, would move to a
nice apartment with heat, hot water, would live. Would live. (59-60)
Henry has little reason to doubt the rationality of his plan, for he “was drafted by
the Crowns when [he] was in high school” and hit an exceptional “four-fifteen”
(20). Just as soon as Henry imagines his and Beatrice’s middle-class future, however, two men “covered from head to toe” with “white helmets” and “long, complicated-looking rifles” inexplicably break into his and Beatrice’s apartment,
molest Beatrice, search through their belongings, and then point a loaded rifle
at Henry’s head (60-62).
Even after enduring this surreally traumatic episode, Henry maintains his
belief in baseball as the epitome of the country’s democratic values and virtues.
Arriving at Star Stadium, he sees “the clear, plastic-covered dome of the stadium
with an American flag—a gigantic flag, the largest Henry had ever seen in his
life—twirled around its pole” (79). By merging the iconography of the nation
and baseball—the flag and the stadium—Beckham suggests both the myths that
the game has absorbed and Henry’s belief that baseball is his ticket to the
American Dream:
This was what his father had wanted for him, and this had been his goal since he
had first learned that you can get paid for playing ball. And that there were black
players in the majors making good money. Now, he told himself, through the gate
and turning to catch the latch, he was this close to making it. He was this close. This
close. (79)
His lifelong belief in baseball is similarly affirmed as he gazes “transfixed” at the
Edenic field, “struck motionless by the impact of its beauty” (80). Stumpy, the
Stars’ “midget manager” tells Henry: “The grass stays green forever. And quiet,
too. You’d never know that shit was going on outside—noise, crowded streets,
red pollution, dirt and garbage” (81). In From Ritual to Record: The Nature of
Modern Sports (1978), Allen Guttman contends that pastoral images of “[o]pen
space, warm, clear weather, a grass field . . . have been woven into the rhetoric
of baseball” (101). The film Field of Dreams (1989), an adaptation of W. P.
Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe (1982), is a readymade example of the powerful sway
this mythic vision of the baseball field holds.6
In Beckham’s rendering, however, the idyllic Star Stadium that Henry encounters soon becomes an absurdist nightmare as he is forced to compete against a
pitching machine cranked up to 150 miles per hour. Shortly after this humiliatingly rigorous exercise begins, Stumpy interjects: “‘We can’t play,’ he said,
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Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack
leaning in the dugout and pushing a button, ‘without the national anthem, boss’s
orders.’ Walking back to the mound. The national anthem blared over the stadium while Henry held his cap at his heart and the others sat on the grass,
yawned, picked up and threw pebbles” (Runner Mack 82). Henry, it turns out,
is the only one who believes in the ideal behind the ritual, and Stumpy and the
Stars do everything in their power to sabotage Henry’s performance. As Henry
strives to make an almost superhuman catch, Stumpy adjusts the stadium’s artificial sun to obstruct Henry’s field of vision: “Now the ball was falling rapidly and
the sun was, too, and he couldn’t look.” Nonetheless, “Henry stuck his glove
upward. The ball plopped in.” Stumpy and the players also put electric shocks
in one of the balls that Henry catches, and he is thus “paralyzed, his arm palpitating involuntarily before he realized their joke.” The team continues to laugh,
with Stumpy “jumping up and down and spinning around and shaking his stubby
arms.” Meanwhile, Henry is left “wondering if he had made the team. Was this
their decision, this laughter, glee, that they were so happy he had excelled?” (84).
Despite his extraordinary feats—hitting home runs that “cracked the top of the
dome” (83) and catching balls headed over the fence as the artificial sun blinds
him—Stumpy and the Stars treat Henry as an amusing diversion rather than a
potential teammate. Using free indirect discourse, Beckham amplifies this disjuncture between the Stars’ abusive behavior and Henry’s phenomenal performance, making readers simultaneously aware of Henry’s naı̈ve inner thoughts
and the cruel and unusual treatment he encounters on what is perhaps
America’s most mythically “level” playing field.
In an ironic twist, Henry calls Stumpy “Mister Rickey” (81), an allusion to the
Brooklyn Dodgers general manager, Branch Rickey, who engineered Jackie
Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier.7 Stumpy’s comically surreal letter inviting Henry to Star Stadium for the tryout is reminiscent of Rickey’s directive to
Robinson that for the first three years of his contract with the Dodgers he “turn
the other cheek” in the face of racialized threats and taunts.8 Stumpy’s letter
advises Henry to “[b]e cautious in your words and in your deportment toward
your superiors, avoid all suspicion of discontent and do not stir uneasiness among
those near you. Heads up, keep your eye on the ball, don’t let your meat loaf” (64).
Through Stumpy’s warning, Beckham implies that the white paternalism and
expectation that black players be especially grateful for Major League opportunities were still firmly entrenched decades after Rickey’s so-called noble experiment.
As Susan Petit notes, “Although all but three of the Major League teams had
signed at least one black player by 1956, the numbers were small, and African
American players were subject to harassment by fans, aggressive tactics by white
players, and discrimination in accommodation and transportation” (124). In his
autobiography, I Never Had It Made (1972), published the same year as Runner
Mack and as he succumbed to complications of heart disease, Robinson himself
issued a scathing rebuke of the “national pastime”: “Baseball, like some other sports,
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poses as a sacred institution dedicated to the public good, but it is actually a big,
selfish business with a ruthlessness that many big businesses would never think
of displaying” (258). Robinson further contends that “[b]aseball moguls and their
top advisers seem to earnestly believe that the bodies, the physical stamina, the easy
reflexes of black stars, makes them highly desirable but that, somehow, they are lacking in the gray matter that it supposedly takes to serve as managers, officials, and
executives in policy-making positions” (258-59).9 Beckham’s satiric narrative echoes
Robinson’s critiques. For instance, Stumpy, who has the honor of serving as the
manager of “the American baseball team” (Runner Mack 86, emphasis added),
allows his racial prejudice to work against the team’s best interests, for surely
Henry would be a valuable addition to the Stars’ roster. Whereas Henry is reverent
toward the “national pastime” and the Stars, Stumpy and his players display, in
Robinson’s words, a “ruthlessness” toward Henry, defiling the game’s patriotic rituals and its meritocratic mantle in the process.
Penned over a decade later, Wilson’s Fences follows Runner Mack in subverting dominant baseball myths. Yet, where Beckham views myth as (at least partially) to blame for the perpetuation of institutionalized racism in baseball and
American society, Wilson follows the lead of Beckham’s Black Arts contemporaries in propagating a black countermythology as a viable solution to white cultural
hegemony. As Neal asserts, “The Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism,
mythology, critique, and iconology” (62). Accordingly, Wilson inverts baseball
myths by lauding the superior athleticism of Negro League players. His protagonist, Troy Maxson, boasts that “[w]e had better pitching in the Negro leagues. I
hit seven home runs off of Satchel Paige. You can’t get no better than that!” (133).
Troy’s best friend, Jim Bono, tells him, “Ain’t but two men ever played baseball as
good as you. That’s Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson. Them’s the only two men ever hit
more home runs than you” (111). Wilson both revises and renovates baseball’s
pantheon of heroes by staging the distinctively black worldview advocated by
Black Arts leaders.
In his essay, “The Revolutionary Theatre” (1964), Amiri Baraka (LeRoi
Jones)—the de facto Black Arts spokesperson during the late 1960s and early
1970s—emphasizes the politically transformative potential of the black stage,
where “new kinds of heroes” will be born (690). Troy is a character forged in
the crucible of this “revolutionary theatre,” both as embodied proof of the talent
on Negro League rosters and as a defiant voice of racial justice.10 As Troy
exclaims, “I’m talking about if you could play ball then they ought to have let
you play. Don’t care what color you are. Come telling me I come along too early.
If you could play . . . then they ought to have let you play” (Wilson 112). Making
use of the directness of dramatic dialogue, Wilson encourages audiences to recalibrate their understandings of baseball history with Troy’s rebuke of the flawed
logic of racial discrimination in mind.
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Barry Beckham’s Runner Mack
Beckham, on the other hand, uses free indirect discourse to ensure that readers maintain an ironic distance from Henry, who is reluctant to accept that the
national myths he has imbibed are as artificial as the sun that blinds him in
the domed Star Stadium. Thus, while readers inevitably recognize the systemic
injustices that have led to Henry’s dashed dream of playing professional baseball,
the third-person narration consistently demonstrates Henry’s undiscerning
approach to all aspects of his life, especially his belief “that baseball was the
American . . . he’d get a fair shake. He had to” (Runner 81). As the torturous
Stars tryout ends, Beckham describes “Henry standing with his hand still itching
from the shock, his shoulders aching from the banging against the outfield wall.
Standing, hoping, frowning. The grass smelled good” (85). Even after he has been
physically abused and humiliated, Henry does not realize that racism is the
cause—with his observation about the fragrant smell of the artificial grass punctuating Beckham’s satirical portrait of his antihero.
While Fences revels in Negro League lore, all mythological paradigms are rendered suspect in Runner Mack. For example, in the midst of an existential crisis
after his tryout for the Stars, Henry approaches his supervisor, Mr. Boye, at the
euphemistically named Home Manufacturing Company, where “[a]bout thirtytwo” workers have collapsed from heat exhaustion in the last month (91).
Much to Henry’s surprise, Boye has extensive knowledge about the Negro
Leagues and even references Josh Gibson’s fabled home run that reportedly
cleared Yankee Stadium: “You know, I started with this outfit the year Josh
Gibson hit that ball—” (93). Elated,
Henry jumped up. “Josh Gibson!” he shouted, blood rushing to his temples. “You
know about Josh Gibson?”
“Do I?” said Boye. “Do you? You know about Josh Gibson?”
“Do I know about Josh,” said Henry, and he was smiling, laughing out the words
excitedly. Boye might not be such a bad guy after all, despite those photographs. He
knows about the black baseball teams?
“What I was going to say is that I joined Home the year Josh Gibson hit that fair
ball out of the stadium.”
“In nineteen thirty-four,” said Henry, “and he hit ninety home runs in a year.”
“Eighty-nine,” corrected Boye, face tinted blue by the fluorescence. Then they
both laughed and Henry sat down and they stared at each other over the desk.
They smiled, talked rapidly, and Henry’s toes were uncontrollable, wriggling in
his shoes. (93)
Initially, this shared enthusiasm for black baseball buoys Henry’s spirits and ameliorates his anxiety. In particular, this conversation reaffirms his belief in the
metaphysical power of baseball to transcend the racial and economic barriers that
separate him from Boye and others. For Beckham, however, this baseball lore—
even about black players’ tremendous feats—cannot compensate for Henry’s or
Boye’s lack of social mobility, as the memory of Gibson quickly becomes a
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reminder of the dismay that accompanies dreams deferred. “Josh Gibson is gone
and I’m still here” (94), Boye remarks, and then adds ruefully, “I’ll be here for the
rest of my life” (95). As with Gibson’s own frustrations about being denied
entrance into the major leagues,11 Boye has reached his professional apogee—
a reality Henry fears will be his own: “If he’s bewildered, why shouldn’t I be?”
(96). Hopes dashed, Henry returns the conversation to baseball in order to salvage his belief in the American Dream, but there, too, Boye refuses to offer
encouragement: “I just don’t know if it looks good for you with the Stars.
They probably won’t call you” (97). Boye’s remarks defy the ethos of a democratic
meritocracy in which anyone with skill and determination can reach his or her
aspirations.
In Fences, similar conversations about Negro League baseball engender opportunities to resist injustice and instill pride in black players’ achievements. Troy’s
son Lyons recalls nostalgically: “I seen him [Troy] strike out three times in a
row[,] . . . and the next time up he hit the ball over the grandstand. Right out
there in Homestead Field. He wasn’t satisfied hitting in the seats[;] . . . he want
to hit it over everything! After the game he had two hundred people standing
around waiting to shake his hand” (186-87). Troy himself remarks: “I was hitting
.432 with thirty-seven home runs! Man [Selkirk] batting .269 and playing right
field for the Yankees! I saw Josh Gibson’s daughter yesterday. She was walking
around with raggedy shoes on her feet. Now I bet you Selkirk’s daughter ain’t
walking around with raggedy shoes on her feet!” Troy also subverts the perception of Jackie Robinson as baseball’s first black all-star: “I done seen a hundred
niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson. Hell, I know some teams Jackie
Robinson couldn’t even make!” (112). Through the larger-than-life Troy, Wilson
both celebrates unsung black heroes from the pre-integration era and provokes
outrage against racial discrimination.
In contrast, Beckham facilitates dissonance between Henry’s consciousness
and readers’ knowledge, making it possible to critique both institutionalized racism and Henry’s steadfast commitment to dominant myths. When, for example,
Beatrice tells Henry, “[i]t’s been five weeks, and I don’t think they [the Stars] will
call you” (Runner 86), his incredulous response is at once tragic and frustrating,
for readers have been made all too aware that Henry will never make the team:
So this was her conclusion, was it? She had given it? She felt he would never make
the big time? . . . He closed the door. “These are the Stars, the American baseball
team, Beatrice. Don’t you understand? . . . look this is the American pastime, they’ve
got to be fair with me. They’ve got plenty of black ballplayers on teams, don’t they?
It can’t be what you’re thinking. They have to judge me on my ability only. That’s
all.” (86-87)
Henry’s belief in the color-blind justice of the game is, of course, part of the
mythology of America and its most treasured sport, and Beckham’s articulation
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of it within the context of the couple’s poverty-stricken surroundings and Henry’s
torturous tryout underscores the disjuncture between reality and illusion (and
history and mythology) that his novel so forcefully exposes.
Like Runner Mack, Everett’s Suder also dispels the dominant baseball mythos
while avoiding the kind of countermythology that Wilson advances in Fences.
Unlike Henry, Everett’s Craig Suder does manage to “make the team”—in this
case, the Seattle Mariners—but he is continuously reminded that only his exemplary performance will justify his and other African Americans’ presence on the
big-league stage. The Mariners’ manager, Lou Tyler, tells Craig: “Now, about that
slump of yours. You know, it wasn’t but a few years ago that you blacks was
allowed in this league. The way you been playing lately, they might kick you
all out” (25). Thus, while the message is telegraphed more directly to Craig than
it is to Henry, Suder confirms that post-integration baseball remains mired in racism. Unlike Runner Mack, Suder is written in the first person, but Everett echoes
Beckham in his satirical subversion of the prototypical baseball hero. As Craig
puts it shortly after the novel begins, “I can’t make love to my wife, I can’t run
bases, and I couldn’t get a hit if they was pitching me basketballs underhanded.
And my kid hates me. To top it off, I got a bum leg that don’t hurt” (18-19). By
contrast, Wilson prefaces Fences by emphasizing Troy’s fortitude and profundity:
“TROY is fifty-three years old, a large man with thick, heavy hands,” who “is capable of rising to profound heights of expression” (105). Where audiences are encouraged to admire Troy, even as they must later acknowledge his failures as a
husband and father, Everett follows Beckham in making Craig conspicuously
unheroic. Everett also makes it clear that Craig is not an altogether reliable narrator. His wife, Thelma, signals this when she tells him, “[y]ou’re not well, Craig,”
and “[y]ou’re like your mother” (57), who was diagnosed with mental illness
when Craig was a child. Questions about Craig’s mental stability continue
throughout the novel, climaxing in his steadfast belief that he will be able to metamorphose into a bird. As with Beckham’s characterization of Henry, Everett
ensures that readers will empathize with Craig’s racialized mistreatment while
maintaining a healthy skepticism about his reliability—an ironic detachment that
Everett inherits from Beckham and which both novelists bring to bear on their
portraits of baseball.
“The fans flooded his ears with cheers”
The second section of Runner Mack, especially compared with the conclusions of
Fences and Suder, is illustrative of Beckham’s resistance to myth and other totalizing ideologies. This section begins at a US military outpost in Alaska, where
Henry has been drafted to serve and where he meets the eponymous Runner
Mack. In these chapters, Beckham continues to critique the American Dream
and, via the Vietnam-era military, American exceptionalism. Free indirect
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discourse remains the narrative strategy by which Beckham conveys Henry’s
inability to distinguish between myth and reality. However, the relationship
between Henry and Mack also becomes a vehicle through which Beckham more
specifically subverts the countermythologies put forward by his Black Arts counterparts and later adopted by Wilson in Fences.
Shortly after their arrival in Alaska, Henry encounters Mack—“black and tall
with a toothpick tilted down from his lips” (135)—which initiates Henry’s transformation from would-be baseball hero to black nationalist revolutionary:
“The name’s Mack,” said the tall black man. . . . “I’m also known as Runner Mack,
Runnington Mack, Runner, and the Run. Where you from, bro? Let me have some
power.” . . .
“Henry Adams. Some what?”
“Some power, blood. Where you from?” He [Mack] was busy moving his feet
back and forth and swinging his long arms, unable to keep still, Henry figured; like
some batters he’d seen in the box, scooping dirt, knocking the bat against their
cleats, hitching at their belts, tugging their cap fronts. . . .
“When a brother ask for some power, you whip this handshake on him, dig?”
(135-36)
Here we see further examples of Henry’s naı̈veté, both in regard to the black
nationalist zeitgeist that Mack propagates and his continual use of baseball as
a lens through which to interpret nearly every life event—even after it becomes
clear that he will never don a major league uniform. We also see the kind of caricatured attributes Beckham imputes to Mack, who speaks in an exaggeratedly hip
lingo punctuated by his ever-present toothpick.
Much in the same way that Beckham introduces nostalgic reminiscence about
the Negro Leagues only to undercut their ameliorative possibility, he also suggests
that Mack could become the catalyst for the demythologizing that Henry desperately needs. “You been brainwashed all your life,” Mack tells Henry, “and now
you start to think about everything you’ve been taught and it’s hard for you.
But you have to grow, Negro. You have to wake up, like every black man in this
country” (154). With Mack as his mentor, Henry undergoes an ideological awakening. Yet, instead of the critical awareness that readers might expect to ensue,
Henry continues to imbibe myths as truths, replacing the dominant American
myths that have thus far structured his worldview with Mack’s dicta: “Mack says
we must overcome or die trying to overcome. He says to die for the revolution is
nothing” (156). Mack’s black nationalist rhetoric is reminiscent of the galvanizing
injunctions issued by Beckham’s Black Arts contemporaries. As Amiri Baraka
declared in his 1970 poem, “It’s Nation Time,” it was “time to be one strong fast
black energy space” (3) and “time to / get up be come / black genius rise in spirit
muscle” (11-13). Under Mack’s sway, Henry likewise dreams of becoming a “new
black man; awakened, sore, angry, strong” (Beckham, Runner 196).
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When Henry first begins listening to Mack, he has the uncanny feeling that he
has previously been convinced of a similarly alluring promise: “It was dreamlike,
hypnotic, this moment, as if he had gone through it before somewhere” (150).
This sense of familiarity derives from the mythical quality of both Mack’s revolutionary vision and the American Dream that Henry believed he would achieve
on the baseball diamond. As Mack, “toothpick straight up, twirling around his
mouth,” explains to Henry, “All right, dig. We’re going to bomb the White
House. After that, we take over. Simple as that” (160). Later, when Henry questions the use of violence, Mack counters: “There can be no revolution without violence. Never has been, never will be” (161). Initially, Mack had assured Henry:
“We must remain humane and spiritual within this madness,” asking rhetorically, “Have we bombed any churches with little white girls in them? Have we leisurely cut the balls off of white men?” (154).12 While Mack denounces white
America’s valorization of violence, he advocates for a violent takeover of the
American government, suggesting the inconsistencies that Beckham perceives
in the binary that Black Power proponents erected between themselves and the
white power structure. As Barthes contends, “Myth deprives the object of which
it speaks of all History. In it, history evaporates. It is a kind of ideal servant: it
prepares all things, brings them, lays them out, the master arrives, it silently disappears: all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from” (264-65). Likewise, Mack presents a seemingly
“simple” solution to complex systemic problems, suppressing the historical
and contemporary circumstances that would challenge the notion that bombing
the White House will automatically reverse centuries of African American subjugation. As such, Mack’s revolutionary vision is analogous to the myth of bootstrap
capitalism, which effaces the entrenched social stratification that impedes economic mobility for most citizens.
Beckham alludes to Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) as a way of subverting
such prescriptive ideologies—in Wright’s case, Marxism. After meeting up with
other members of Mack’s movement in Oregon, Mack and Henry are riding in a
limousine when Mack says, “This reminds me of a novel, you know, about a cat
who iced a gray bitch and stuck her body in the furnace. But before that, he was
riding in a limousine with her. Remember that one?” (Beckham, Runner 187). The
undereducated Henry responds: “‘Uh, no, I don’t think I read it,’ . . . once more
feeling that he hadn’t read anything,” while “the ideas, the concepts were boiling”
within Mack (187). This reference to Native Son and, specifically, to Bigger
Thomas’s slaying of Mary Dalton, which eventually lands him in the electric chair,
foreshadows Henry’s and Mack’s impending demises. Yet, while Native Son concludes with a Marxist vision of a world, as Bigger’s lawyer Max puts it, with “no
whites and no blacks, no civilized and no savages” (Wright 387), Mack’s “boiling
concepts” prove as unrealizable as the hegemonic myths that previously shaped
Henry’s worldview.
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For Wilson, myth can also be quite destructive, as in Troy’s frustration with
being denied entry into the major leagues and, by extension, the elusive
American Dream. At the same time, Wilson devises a black countermythology
meant to uplift and inspire. Fences thus concludes with a scene of family reconciliation and Troy’s ascension into an Africanized heaven, as Troy’s brother
Gabriel finishes his “dance of atavistic signature and ritual,” and “the gates of
heaven stand open as wide as God’s closet” (192). As with Troy’s inspiring monologues, this final scene invites audiences to engage with a black cultural alternative to an Anglocentric worldview. In her reading of Wilson’s conclusion, Susan
Koprince contends, “It’s as if Troy has hit one last home run and is circling the
bases in triumph” and adds that “the traditional mythology of baseball must ultimately make room for a new and revolutionary mythos: that of the defiant African
American warrior” (357). In Troy and the Negro Leagues lore he embodies,
Wilson renders a mythos that persuasively counters whitewashed musings about
pastoral landscapes and “all-American” heroes of yesteryear. For Beckham, however, romanticizing the Negro Leagues does not sufficiently compensate for the
historical and contemporary racial inequities that engendered segregated leagues
in the first place.
Therefore, Henry never achieves Troy’s heroic stature, and he is not portrayed
as possessing the perspicacity necessary to recognize the larger epistemological
truths that his experiences in baseball and, subsequently, in the military have
revealed. Furthermore, where Wilson’s dramatic strategies facilitate the audience’s admiration for Troy, Beckham continues to use free indirect discourse
to both debunk mythologies and challenge Henry’s credulous allegiance to them.
Even, for example, as Henry enacts Mack’s plot to desert their Army post in
Alaska and head east to bomb the White House, he envisions himself as a star
baseball player:
He told himself he was only coming in from the bullpen to protect a lead in the top
of the ninth during the seventh game of a World Series, and as he came into the
infield the fans flooded his ears with cheers. . . . The manager—it was Stumpy with
shades on, his voice trembling with anxiety—gave Henry the ball. “Move out,”
Henry interrupted him. “I’m taking over. You’ve fucked up the game, so get your
asses out of here and let me straighten out this shit.” The crowd cheered him again
as he smelled the rosin. (Runner 168-69)
While he transforms himself into a revolutionary, Henry continues to rely on
baseball (and its promises of heroism) as a framework for understanding his
experiences. Indeed, the second half of the novel is nearly as littered with
Henry’s musings about baseball as the first, confirming that he has not demythologized his mind so much as exchanged his belief in the American Dream for a
black nationalist vision.
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Exposing the sociopolitical ramifications of myth, Barthes maintains that “in
passing from history to nature, myth acts economically” and that “it abolishes the
complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away
with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible” (256).
Like Barthes, Beckham highlights the ways in which myth excludes the complexities that belie totalizing narratives of historical inevitability. Thus, just as
Beckham juxtaposes myths about baseball’s intrinsic fairness with the humiliating treatment Henry endures at his tryout, so, too, does he contrast Mack’s ideals
with the actuality of only eight people showing up to carry out his revolutionary
plans. After this setback, Mack becomes nihilistic, confessing to Henry shortly
before hanging himself: “There are no answers, Henry, that’s the whole problem.
I just figured it out. There are no answers” (Beckham, Runner 211). With Mack
dead and Beatrice, in another surrealist turn of events, deaf from the urban din
(209), Henry redoubles his commitment to the movement: “He couldn’t be
drained. He had to run, search, look, fight—but more than anything, not give
up” (212). Immediately after Henry has these reassuring thoughts, he realizes that
a truck—another Mack truck in fact—is barreling toward him, its fender sinisterly “smiling at him” as the novel abruptly ends (213). Interpreting this sudden
ending, Weixlmann rightly notes: “Beckham is saying, specifically, that the revolutionary dreams of Black militants are no more likely to achieve fruition than
were the more modest dreams of those who came north during the Great
Migration or than is the American Dream of success in general” (“Dream”
101). Suspicious of any unifying myths—whether they propagate American
exceptionalism, a Marxist color-blind brotherhood, or black nationalism—the
novel concludes without offering a prescription for the deep social wounds it
exposes.
Reading the novel through a Black Arts lens, GerShun Avilez proposes that
Runner Mack’s “point is not that revolution is a pipe dream; it is real and realizable. That being said, the novel does not posit revolution as a certainty or a
guarantee. The ending presents it as a possibility that requires work and collective
commitment, which Runner Mack finds that his plan lacks in the end” (61).
I agree that Beckham does not rule out the potential of revolution; nonetheless,
in his consistent satirizing of Henry’s gullibility and the sweeping rhetoric Mack
propagates, Beckham provides neither a viable leader nor a road map for achieving collective revolutionary change. Moreover, using The Education of Henry
Adams as a narrative reference point, Beckham implicitly suggests that if any
message can be gleaned from the tragedies that befall Henry, it is the importance
of self-education and a guarding against what Barthes refers to as the “metalanguage” of myth (224).
Suder’s surreal, ideologically open-ended conclusion echoes Runner Mack’s.
Like Beckham, Everett suggests that if any message can be extrapolated from
Craig’s frustrating experiences as a black ballplayer and, more generally, as a
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black man in a white-dominated society, it is to be self-directed and skeptical of
homogenizing ways of knowing. After being placed on the disabled list as punishment for his lackluster performance on the field, Craig engages in a series of
bizarre escapades that climax with his seclusion in a cabin in rural Oregon, which
he shares with Renoir (an elephant) and Jincy Jesse Jackson (a nine-year-old
white girl), and where he spends his days physically transforming himself into
a bird. As Craig spreads his homemade wings and launches himself off Willet
Rock, he is finally able to proclaim, “I’m pretty much in charge” (171). Craig
is no longer a black ballplayer suffering from racialized double standards on
the field, nor is he referred to as a “nigger” (128), even by Jincy, whom he has
kindly sheltered from her abusive mother. Nonetheless, much like Henry, who
announces his determination to “run, search, look, fight” (Beckham, Runner
212) moments before he faces annihilation by a Mack truck, Craig is only able
to experience this fleeting sense of self-reliance before inevitably plummeting
to his death.
Ultimately, this triad of black-authored baseball works—Runner Mack, Suder,
and Fences—all conclude with the protagonist’s demise, suggesting the high
“price of the ticket,” to borrow a phrase from James Baldwin, for believing in
the promises of the “national pastime.”13 Yet, where Troy’s funeral provides
an opportunity to both adopt an Afrocentric worldview and honor him “as a
noble, even heroic figure” (Roudané 143), neither Henry’s nor Craig’s imminent
deaths offer remedies to the systemic American injustices that Runner Mack and
Suder expose. Beckham and, in turn, Everett each adopt a satirical posture, undercutting the weighty emotional tenor that presides in many baseball portraits,
including Fences. Indeed, while Fences has long been the most acclaimed literary
treatment of black baseball, Runner Mack made a foundational and influential
contribution to what is still an overwhelmingly white-authored field of baseball
literature. Given the essential role that sports in general and baseball in particular
play in our national consciousness, especially when it comes to issues of race, we
would do well to recuperate Runner Mack by further appreciating the many narrative gifts and incisive critiques that it has to offer.
In my interview with Beckham, he lamented, “When we look at the Academy
Award winners and the millionaires and multi-millionaires in the black community, we could be persuaded to think that things have moved along very nicely.
But they haven’t. People that were poor are still poor, the class structure is still
intact, and racism is still in our faces.” As the title of William Rhoden’s Forty
Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete
(2006) suggests, African American athletes may not be truly living out an unfettered American Dream. Gigantic financial rewards have clearly not kept pace with
the limited power black men wield in the nation’s sporting life. Regarding baseball specifically, we need only look at the lack of people of color in the contemporary management and ownership structure of Major League Baseball to
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confirm this point.14 In many ways, then, Runner Mack—and the black baseball
tradition Beckham ushered in—remains as relevant now as it was during the civil
rights and Black Power eras, reminding us that, as an institution, baseball has
been as flawed in enacting a democratic creed as the nation itself.
Notes
1. Here I reference Langston Hughes’s poignant query, “What happens to a dream
deferred?” (1), in his poem “Harlem [2]” (1951), which attests to the illusive
nature of the American Dream for citizens of African descent.
2. When I asked Barry Beckham about his influence on Percival Everett’s Suder
(1983) in our interview, he noted that “the main part of our relationship was
friendly. He would come over to my house often, and we would laugh and joke.”
He acknowledged that Everett “may have been” influenced by Runner Mack, but
he “didn’t want to tell him that.”
3. August Wilson was a Black Power and Black Arts proponent during the late
1960s, but he did not begin writing plays in earnest until the late 1970s, at which
point he began weaving many of the precepts of the Black Arts agenda into his
work. In a 1996 interview, Wilson cited the profound influence that Amiri Baraka
(LeRoi Jones) and his Black Arts-era “ideas of black power, black nationalism”
had on his plays (“August” 199). Wilson also subscribed to a cultural nationalist
perspective, regarding black life as “a whole complete cultural philosophy, religion, mythology, history” (“Black” 97-98).
4. In his essay, “The Black Arts Movement” (2015), GerShun Avilez argues that
Runner Mack “links together the major concerns of the Black Arts Movement
and offers a particularly compelling assessment of the ‘civil rights crisis’” (57).
I suggest, however, that Runner Mack’s representation of the movement is more
satiric than Avilez allows and that Beckham’s relationship to Black Arts is similarly quite complex. Beckham, for example, was friendly with many of the
movement’s most notable proponents while he also recognized the disparity
between the rhetoric of Black Power and the tangible achievements made in
its name. In our interview, Beckham recalled that “[m]usic, theatre, writing,
magazines—in New York City in the late 60s the Black Arts Movement was
everywhere, and I just happened to be there.” At the same time, he lamented,
“I didn’t see the economic pattern; it wasn’t there. It excited everybody, but it
may not have been as organized as it could have been.” See also Sanford
Pinsker’s 1974 interview with Beckham, in which he notes that “too many people
have fallen into a sort of propagandistic idea of what is black and what is not”
(17). Beckham further avers: “When some black critics begin to suggest that
there is only one way to work within the black experience, the result has, for lack
of a better word, a Hitler-like quality” (18).
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5. Naming his title character Henry Adams, Beckham alludes to the autobiography
The Education of Henry Adams (1907) and its central theme of self-education.
However, Beckham significantly revises this theme to speak to the sociocultural,
economic, and political impediments erected to prevent African Americans from
acquiring, as Adams puts it, “mastery of the tools” (x). In Runner Mack’s second
section, Beckham’s satirical portrait of the US military is consonant with Norman
Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), a novel that narrativizes a hunting trip
in which a group of men shoot Alaskan wildlife via helicopter, drawing a parallel
between this decadent display of violence and power and America’s aerial bombardment of Vietnam villages.
6. Susan Petit convincingly contends that both Shoeless Joe (1982) and Field of
Dreams (1989) have an insidious racial dimension in that “the novel never mentions race and includes only white characters” and “the movie replaces the fictionalized J. D. Salinger with the fictional Terence Mann, played by James Earl
Jones, who had won a Tony two years earlier for his portrayal of Troy
Maxson, but Mann’s race is ignored” (127).
7. See Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
(1983) for a detailed description of Branch Rickey signing Robinson to the
Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm club, and then later promoting
him to play for the Dodgers.
8. As Tygiel notes of Rickey and Robinson’s agreement, “He [Rickey] impressed
upon the black athlete the necessity to retreat from all confrontations until he
had established himself in the major leagues” (66).
9. Jackie Robinson’s charge of institutionalized racism within Major League
Baseball was not unfounded. As Peter Dreier notes, “A study in the late 1960s
demonstrated convincingly that good black hitters were not excluded, but weak
black hitters were excluded in favor of weak-hitting white players. In other words,
teams were more likely to favor a white over a black player to be a benchwarmer
or utility man” (48). Moreover, “A 1982 survey of 24 major league clubs (with the
Yankees and the Red Sox refusing to cooperate) discovered that blacks held only
32 of the 913 available white-collar baseball jobs, including secretarial positions.
Of the 568 full-time major league scouts, only 15 were black” (Tygiel 339). It
should be noted, however, that Major League Baseball made strides toward racial
equality during the 1970s. In 1971, for example, the National Baseball Hall of
Fame began inducting Negro League stars (“Hall”), and that same year the
Pittsburgh Pirates fielded an all-black lineup (Skornickel). Rather than reflecting
this shifting racial landscape, Runner Mack’s surreal send-up of baseball accords
with Robinson’s unapologetic critique.
10. See David Letzler’s “Walking Around the Fences: Troy Maxson and the Ideology
of ‘Going Down Swinging’” (2014) for a persuasive account of the ways in which
Wilson lauds Troy as a heroic figure despite the impossibility of his claims about
his baseball feats and the inconsistencies in his worldview.
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11. See Mark Ribowsky’s The Power and the Darkness: The Life of Josh Gibson in the
Shadows of the Game (1996) for a compelling account of Gibson’s baseball aspirations and frustrations.
12. Runner Mack’s reference to “bombed churches” recalls the 1963 bombing of the
16th Street Church in Birmingham, Alabama, by white supremacists, in which
four African American girls were killed.
13. The Price of the Ticket is the title (and title essay) of James Baldwin’s 1985 collected works of nonfiction; a documentary with the same title was released in
1987.
14. William Rhoden notes that “By the beginning of the 2006 Major League Baseball
season, four of thirty big league managers were African American. There were no
African American owners” (124). In May 2006, the Lerner group, which includes
several African American “founding partners,” purchased the Washington
Nationals, although none of these black “partners” are “principal owners” in
the team (“Executive”). In 2012, the Guggenheim Partners, which includes former NBA star Earvin “Magic” Johnson, purchased the LA Dodgers, but
Johnson owns only “a small stake” in the team (Shaikin and Whartan). It is also
worth noting that Arturo “Arte” Moreno purchased the Anaheim Angels (now the
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim) in 2003, becoming the first minority owner of a
Major League team. However, there is some dispute about his minority status
given that he is fourth-generation Mexican American (Chass).
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