With thoughts about what to wear settled in my head, I drifted off to sleep pretty easily that night.
* * *
The next morning gray skies had settled over the Point. Rain is no stranger down here in spring, but it’d been dry most of the month throughout, so I noticed it this time. I took the 26 up over Bear Creek towards the city. It is a sketchy matter taking that trolley over the creek as it doesn’t quite fit the tracks right and every lurch has you wondering if you’re going in the drink, ass over tea kettle. I think it helps to be tired when crossing so you nod off through the shaking and don’t heed it all that much. I met Reginald on the 26 early, and about a half hour later, after switching trains, we was on 33rd street pulling up towards Venable.
As I said, the stadium opened up just two years ago. Before that there was Venable Park, which was really a half-filled old quarry. I remember reading where a little boy drowned in there once, which tells you how much of a park it was. It was a good idea to put a stadium in there because we got some good football games and all sorts of events. It made Baltimore feel more like a place you’d come to and not just a place you worked in or lived in because it just happened that way. But because of how quickly it was built, it took a lot of work to just keep it on as a working stadium.
When I got back from the war, I spent some time staying on in the service up at Camp Upton on Long Island. Once I’d moved on to Baltimore and landed a spot with Beth Steel I took a place at the boarding house straight off as rents at the Point were a good deal lower than they were in the city. I hadn’t been up for a game at Venable yet, but I followed it in the papers pretty closely and had seen the photographs. The pictures did not do it justice.
The entrance was all fine plaster, painted white and fresh with columns on both sides and a pair of matching tunnels on either side for you to walk through to get to the field. Coming from the Point, which had St. Luke’s but not much beyond that, it was about the grandest place I’d seen in the States. I’d pick up the paper and read about what they was doing out in Chicago with the big stadium in Grant Park and all that, but that was something I’d likely never see. This was right here and all in white like the finest statue, and now I was going to try to get a job working in it. It was hard to imagine.
While I was busy looking up at the front, Reginald got ahead of me.
“Over here, Henry,” he called back to me as I sort of pulled out of daydreaming and came back to why we was there.
We walked over to the very center of the entrance, which had a building built into it. It had eight white columns that stretched up over two stories where they met at the roof to form sort of a porch, but the nicest you have ever seen. I cannot imagine the White House looking much nicer. I should have dressed up more.
“You go in there, tell them your name and that you’re Harold Spector’s apprentice.”
“Apprentice, Reginald? What am I apprenticing at?” I asked him.
There was no mention of my being an apprentice on the ride in or at any other point since we’d been talking about this job. Reginald left some big holes in a conversation sometimes.
“Don’t worry about that. You get yourself over to my dad, and you’re set. My father’s colored, but they respect him around here, at least some do. You’re his apprentice.”
He turned then and walked away, as if that sewed it up neat as a pin and there wasn’t another word to be said about it. Down at the Point no wasting words was a good idea, with the belt moving and all, but out here in front of these white columns, I could have used a little more material to get a job with. Reginald was no further help, now gone away to one of the big ramps that flanked the sides of the entrance and climbed up to the top of the stadium. It was just me.
I took a breath for a moment, trying not to think of the place as that grand. After all, it was just a football stadium that on its best days had a bunch of guys running into each other right in the middle. I took off my cap, brushed my hair back to the side, and walked through the front door.
There were people coming and going, and I had no idea which way to turn. Finally I saw a door to my right that had that smoky glass like some of the managers rated down at the mill. It had a taped piece of paper on it that simply read “Work,” and sure enough, that was what I was here for, so I opened it and walked a little ways in.
Inside it was pretty big, and the floor was made entirely of white tile like you might see in a fancy kitchen. At the far corner of the room was a man sitting behind a desk. He looked about fifty or so and was bald with hardly a hair left. He was wearing those little round glasses that a doctor or professor might wear, and that did not make me feel at ease, coming from a mill like I was. He was also holding his chin up a bit like you saw the British officers do once in awhile. This did not help, either. British officers and professors weren’t really the type of fellows I might have over to play a game of checkers.
“Yes, sir?”
Since he used “sir” with me, I thought it fitting that I use it back.
“Sir, I’m Harold Spector’s apprentice.”
He paused, pushed up his glasses, and looked me over for a moment.
“You’re not colored.”
I knew that. I was hoping it wasn’t one of those tricky questions they get you with to see if you’re fit for the job.
“I am not. You’re correct, sir.”
This was not the right response, I knew straight off, as his face looked red all of a sudden, and his head snapped up from looking at a paper in front of him.
“That supposed to be funny, son?”
He’d dropped the sir, and was talking different altogether.
“No, sir.”
I left it at that because if telling somebody they was correct about something got them mad there wasn’t any use saying more.
“The job is for coloreds.”
I guess nobody had told Reginald’s dad the job was for coloreds, since he is, and there wouldn’t be much need for telling him that.
“Yes, sir.”
He waited for me to say more I think, but I knew well enough when it wasn’t going to help me, so I left it at that and let him have the next words.
“What’s your name?”
“Henry Dawson, sir.”
“Dawson, my name is Hadley Overman. You apprenticed before?”
Now my head was starting to swim a little. At the mill some of the better-paying jobs you’d apprentice for but shoveling coal on a belt, well, that wasn’t one. You took the shovel, and if you did it well enough, nobody stopped to tell you that you was fired. I was in trouble right now, so I threw out something that was true.
“I got pretty handy with a lot of things in the war, and after that I worked at the mill, and I am pretty good at my job, sir.” He paused again.
“You in the war?”
“Yes, sir. 77th Division. 308th Infantry.”
“The 308th? In the Argonne?”
He asked me as if he didn’t believe it, maybe because many of the fellows who went in there from the 308th are dead now. I was relieved we weren’t talking about apprenticing anymore and instead something that I was familiar with.
“Yes, sir.”
But, I wasn’t