Volume 25, Number 13 · August 17, 1978
Black Diamond
By Jerome Charyn
Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues
by William Brashler
Harper & Row, 201 pp., $9.95
Sometime during my baseball-crazy childhood in the 1940s, when I was feverish about the Big Cat, Johnny Mize, and played out an entire Giants' schedule in my head, I heard of a baseball player who had nothing to do with the National or American League. His name was Josh Gibson, and he was supposed to be another Babe Ruth. Josh was black, but he could still play for the Giants. The Dodgers got Jackie Robinson. Why couldn't the Giants have Josh? Was he alive or dead? Nobody knew. Stories would come to me. Josh hit a thousand home runs in the league he played for, a league of black men. Infielders had to duck under his line drives, or lose their brains to Josh. The black Babe Ruth could tear a man's head off with that mean sock of his. Josh had all the mystery of someone you could never trace.
Review, 1839 words
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