Daddy & Me ... The Little League Tryouts
At 9, the Patriarchy served up a bitter, humiliating lesson. He was the one who didn't let the [expletive deleted] get me down.
After writing on Substack for more than two years, this will be the first post I’ve written—either here or at The Patriarchy and the Sacred Feminine—that is actually personal. Might be the last, too. [s] But I offer this one because it’s such a spectacular object lesson in how male supremacy beats down young girls and inflates the already-huge egos of young boys, setting up both genders for a lifelong bias against the female gender and sculpting and cementing gender roles. Happily, some people surprise us and stick by us and fight for us not to become trapped.
I was nine years old when we moved from Graniteville, South Carolina, a mill town just outside Aiken, to a beautiful little town called Holly Hill, just 52 from the Charleston, the South’s most ravishing city.
We had moved in the winter, just after Christmas, so when we got there, all the leaves had fallen, and the scrawny gray trunks and limbs of the trees had a depressing air about them, especially as they were draped in the ubiquitous gray Spanish moss that swayed like funeral shrouds in the wind. Almost the moment we got there, our beautiful little down was struck by an ice storm. The moss broke under the weight, and now the trunks and limbs sparkled wildly with the light refracted by 1/8” of solid ice. It was a winter wonderland that came at the price of destroyed crops and toppled pecan trees.
The adults looked worried. The lives of some of them would never be the same. Others’ lives would be devastated when, in coming years, hurricanes barrelled through or droughts withered cotton and corn and tobacco and soybeans and peach trees. Farming is hard, and this was a gem of a little town surrounded by fields and swamps for 15 miles in just about every direction.
I had transferred in the middle of the 4th grade and instantly loved the school—especially the principal Mr. Rhame—and my classmates. I was sick when I got there and stayed sick for another two months, but in truth I was almost used to it as I’d had dreadful asthma all my life and had just come out of my ninth case of pneumonia. So I wheezed through a few more of winter months, but then … but then …
Spring came. It was incredible. For some reason, as soon as the weather warmed up, I was suddenly much healthier. The theory was that a ground fungus in the foothills had made me sick for years, and now, in the Piedmont, I could get well. Of course, that wasn’t the only reason. Mr. Rhame, who’d been a stunning athlete in his youth, took me each afternoon and taught me gymnastics. When I had a wheezing fit, he’d entertain me with brain teasers. In just a few months, he’d transformed me.
Anne Wiggins (now Smith, married to Glenn) lived across the street, and we instantly became the fastest of friends. We were both tomboys, and though I was still wraith-thin, I was discovering that I had my dad’s coordination and love of sports. AND .. and … right down the street was the high school with its vast open mowed field to the east of a sprawling array of buildings. Baseball fever broke out in earnest just after the last of winter’s puddles had dried.
And so, there we were, boys and girls together, every afternoon after school — and every weekend, all weekend, playing baseball. Older kids taught the younger ones. We congratulated each other’s every small triumph.
We ignored the blisters, the jammed fingers, the Charley horses, and the height differences. Harder to ignore was Carson Rast’s taking a line drive to the middle of his forehead. Knowing the ball was headed his way, I was looking at his face as the ball came towards him in the outfield, and just before it got there, sunlight broke over the trees and he was, in one second, 100% blind. He never had a chance. He went down very, very hard. My mom, who was a nurse, was the closest help, sitting as she was, in the principal’s office. She was magnificent. Amazingly, he didn’t have a concussion—a miracle generally attributed, in the best good humor, to his having an exceptionally hard head—but he had a world-class shiner from his hairline to his check bones for most of a month.
A few weeks later, when the chill of winter was well and truly over, tryouts for Little League were announced. I’d been playing well. I was playing shortstop and sometimes outfield—I could breathe and run!!!!!—and I was starting to be able to really hit. I proceeded from sacrifice bunt, to single, to double. And then, I hit a home run. I stole bases. I was too little to pitch, but I threw fast and my accuracy was superb. I was especially good at catching for some reason. All in all, I was a better than average player my first season out!!!
So, on the fateful Saturday in question, I put on blue jeans and tennis shoes, collected by hat and sunglasses, bat and glove, and went into the kitchen to announce my adventure! I was going to try out for Little League!
I turned in excited joy and headed for the front door. I was on the front steps when my father caught up with me.
“Hold up,” he said gently.
“I gotta go!” I exclaimed in ecstasy.
“No, honey. Really. Hold up. Sit down, Half Pint.”
So I sat down on the landing. It was an absolutely beautiful day, with sunlight teasing the dew on the grass. It was cool with a very slight breeze that seemed to make the pine trees happy.
Daddy touched me on the shoulder. I turned to look at him.
“They’re not going to let you try out,” he said quietly.
“Yes, they are!” I exclaimed.
“No, honey, they’re not.”
I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t believe I wouldn’t be allowed to play.
“Why not!!!!!!??” I demanded.
“Because you’re a girl.”
“That’s not true. We’ve all been playing together for two months. We’ve been having a blast. They say I’m really good!”
“They’re not going to let you try out, and they’re not going to let you play.”
“I don’t believe it!” I protested.
I was stunned. I couldn’t believe these people—MY FRIENDS—were going to push me away. I didn’t believe the parents and teachers—MY MENTORS AND PROTECTORS—were going to reject me just because I was a girl. The latter, the teachers especially, were the ones always telling me to be all I could be. And that wasn’t just an Army slogan; it’s what teachers are always telling girls, who are leaving boys in the dust in everything until the boys hit the Math Moment in high school. I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. It flew in the face of all the loving kindness taught at church.
I wasn’t having it.
“Well, I’m going!!!” Silly bravado. That’s the 9-year-old version of “putting one’s foot down.”
“Half Pint, please listen to me,” Daddy said. He waited until he had my full attention. “You’re about to get really, really badly hurt. They’re not going to let you try out, and they’re not going to let you play.”
“They can’t do that!!!!! They can’t. I’m going!!!” I iterated. I did my best to sound confident, but I wasn’t. This man had only recently saved me from the U.S. Government (more on that later), and he had not once ever lied to me. Secretly I was afraid he was right, but I was NOT having this. I was NOT having being shut out of any part of life I wanted.
He got up. “Come here, Half Pint,” he said. He hugged me so hard my back crunched.
Ever stalwart in carrying a failed metaphor forward, I adjusted my sunglasses as if I were a movie star, slipped my baseball cap slightly to the side for that Jaunty Look, picked up my glove and bat and starting walking down the street.
You have to know the South in the spring and summer to know how fast the dewy, blissful, godly coolness of the dawn turns into the steam bath from hell. It takes maybe 45 seconds, and then you hate you life.
As I marched toward my downfall, the cool gave way to the stultifying, oxygen-free zone of cloying humidity. But I sallied onward.
The doom descended as soon as I was in line-of-sight of home plate. Gathered around were dads, some mothers, and coaches. One of them spotted me from 1/8 of a mile away and, after a mere moment of murmured alert, all conversation died. In its place there arose the low, snaky hiss that is always the hallmark of toxic, back-stab whispering.
Even before I got to the edge of the outfield, the boys had started to snigger. But the strange thing was that they seemed to be held back, waiting for something.
Then, all the sound stopped. Everyone stopped talking. Everyone stopped laughing. Everyone stopped sniggering. … Maybe everyone stopped breathing. So, I walked to home plate to face the coach in a matrix of sound that included only the soft thud of my footsteps and the wind in the canopy of the trees.
By the time I managed to stand in front of the coach, my heartbeat was registering as a 3.5 earthquake, and I hurt everywhere.
“I’ve come to try out, sir,” I told the coach.
Some bitch from the stands screamed, “Stop embarrassing your parents! This is ridiculous.”
Everyone laughed, this time for real. This was not childish sniggering, this was ridicule.
I looked up at the coach’s face. He was flat-out, Kentucky-bourbon, [expletive deleted] pissed. When he looked down at me, he was red in the face and absolutely enraged. You’d have thought I’d have just sucked the very soul out of Major League Baseball.
Now this wasn’t true in all sports. Swimming, diving, La Crosse, basketball, and many more all had their female equivalents, always, of course, in gender classification. But only during WWII was there any equivalency in baseball as a women’s sport. Do, please, see the brilliant A League of Their Own for a history of the only period in which women’s baseball really had a moment. … AND … that may be changing now.
Anyhow, the 6’5” coach looked down on the 4’9” Half Pint squirt, and the full fury of the male rage at being challenged in its “right” to make all the rules came into full flower.
“GIRLS ARE NOT ALLOWED IN LITTLE LEAGUE BASEBALL,” he boomed.
A murmur from the Peanut Gallery seemed to confirm what the Great God of dip-shit, backwoods local baseball had proclaimed.
“Why not?” I offered, in true Socratic fashion.
“Because this is a male sport.”
“Not really,” I opined. “Girls and boys play baseball on this field every afternoon. Boys and girls together.”
He glowered at me.
“We’re friends. So we play baseball together.”
Pause.
“I know I’m tiny, but I’m not bad, and I am improving, and I want to play with my friends. I love baseball.”
Pause.
Pause.
Pause.
Pause.
Then came the pronouncement of the Great God of dip-shit, backwoods local baseball, in defense of men everywhere—like in the Bootstrap Theory of cosmology: here and everywhere, every which way in time:
“THIS IS A MALE SPORT. NO FEMALE IS ALLOWED IN THIS SPORT. YOU ARE A DISGRACE. YOU KNOW THIS, YET YOU COME HERE TO MAKE PEOPLE UNHAPPY. YOU COME HERE TO EMBARRASS YOUR WHOLE FAMILY. YOU ARE MADE TO BE A MOTHER. GO HOME, OR I’LL CALL YOUR FATHER.”
Pause.
Pause.
Pause.
Pause.
“He knows I’m here. He warned me.”
“THEN YOU KNEW NOT TO COME BEFORE YOU CAME. GET OFF THIS FIELD OR I’LL HAVE YOU REMOVED.”
This time there was actual applause. Sneering, bitchy, brain-dead mothers applauded. The boys erupted in peals of jeering laughter. Fathers shook their heads and sniggered.
By now I could feel a great rosy rage on my pulsing face.
“GO HOME!!!!! RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!” the coached screamed. “YOU’RE A DISGRACE!!!!!”
Suddenly, there was this incredible coldness in the middle of my stomach. Suddenly, I feared for my mother’s job and my dad’s position at the bank. Suddenly, this wasn’t just about me.
But I just couldn’t quite give him the total victory he sought by providing him a collapsed person prostrate in total submission.
“You’re wrong,” I said quietly. “On every level I can think of, you are completely wrong.”
Now there was no sound at all. No one laughed. No one talked. No one whispered. No one sniggered.
Because nobody had a [expletive deleted] clue what to do now.
“Your league is an ugliness,” I said. It was clumsy. The comment had exactly no literary grace. It was pathetic.
But it had meaning.
I turned and began the Long March back home on a field that was totally silent.
At first, I was walking normally, but when I got halfway home, I was shivering with rage and pouring hot, angry tears so fierce my shirt was wet. At some point, my grip on my bat fell apart, and I was dragging my Louisville Slugger on the ground, sobbing audibly, and consumed with grief. Above, clouds had gathered, and lightning flashed.
“Good,” I thought. “I hope God dumps the Great Flood all over your precious boys-only [expletive deleted] baseball field.”
Aside: I have no idea how I learned the f-word so early. I do not remember a single time that either of my parents ever used this term.
So, by the time I rounded the curve, it was raining. God’s vengeance!
And walking in the rain, saturated, furious, hurt, scared and scarred, I came into the view of our house, and my father was standing on the landing waiting for me.
Somewhere around about an 1/8 of a mile from the house, I started to run. I dropped the bat. I was sobbing convulsively and running as if for my life. I got to the edge of the front yard, and I could see him running across the lawn in the pouring rain, coming to get me, and yelling, “Come here, Half Pint. Come here, little girl.”
And I fell into this man’s arms screaming and crying in tones filled with rage and agony and fury and hurt. And he carried me up the steps and was about to go through the front door when I said, “No, please. I want to sit for awhile.”
I sat down on the porch, sheltered a little from the rain but not much. Taffy, our Creamsicle Collie, scratched at the screen. Daddy let her out and she came and licked my face. Then he sat down, too, and began trying to soothe me by using the Patriarchy’s favorite shade of lipstick on this pig experience I’d just had.
“I know this seems terribly unfair.” (Operative word: seems.)
“But you have the most important thing of all. You can have children. It is the greatest power and the greatest gift.” He meant well. I know that. But it didn’t land the way he thought it would.
I was still crying, but far more quietly now. I’d stop shaking with rage, but the anger was rapidly being replaced by a very dark depression. Somehow, the fact I had this great gift of being able to have children was going to mean I would never have a complete, full, free, included, equal lifetime. I would be shut out or shut in. I’d be told what to do by men for the rest of my days.
That much I got. There was so much more I would only realize when I ran into one brick wall after another. This was 1958. In those days, I couldn’t get a bank account without a man’s permission. I couldn’t get a loan without a man’s permission. I would sail into adulthood little or no access to contraception. I would need a parent’s signature to leave the state while a male wouldn’t. I would be passed over in favor of a male at the best universities. It would be 35 years before females were included in clinical medical studies and 50 before doctors realized what happens when a woman has a heart attack. In 1958 I could own property, but I couldn’t control it. It had been just nine years since women had been awarded the right to sit on a jury. Women could vote, but overwhelmingly the people who ruled us were men. It would be another 20 years before employers lost the right to fire a woman for being pregnant. Men didn’t go to jail for beating their wives, and mostly got away with both rape and murder.
But there was more. Men hogged and controlled money to the point that a woman’s only chance to escape poverty was to get married. They ran all the businesses and installed Lucite ceilings that blocked a woman’s advance. Women had to have a man’s permission to get a credit card. The leverage around money and complete control of legislation made it an absolute certainty that men would keep their privilege. And if the law wasn’t enough, there was always the church.
Religion is the enforcing agency of Patriarchy. In Christianity, it’s based on the entirely specious “Garden of Eden” story, which damned Eve as cause of “the Fall”— a snappy little piece of theology that wasn’t even fabricated until 1,300 years after Genesis II was written. In Hinduism, it is a long-enforced and deadly sexism. In Islam, it based not on the Qur’an largely, but on ahaditha, alleged sayings of the Prophet Muhammad written after he died. By the time 150 years had passed, there were as many as 600,000 alleged sayings, and not a single fair witness to back up any of them. Even the spectacularly benign Buddhism was at one time so sexist one monk wondered aloud why all the Buddhist women in the world didn’t just get up and walk out.
CHECK OUT A FEW PERTINENT POSTS:
Misogyny's Core Myths: The Garden of Eden Story, Part I ...
Misogyny's Core Myths: The Garden of Eden Story, Part II
Woman as temptress, woman as evil, woman as morally weak, woman as OK to use and abuse as a man’s right is rooted in the very bedrock of religion, and one of its great appeals to men is that religion gives men the right to “rule over” women and says that came directly out of the mouth of God. No, it didn’t, and every scholar of the Bible and fair reader of the Qur’an knows it.
And the Patriarchy’s favorite lie is that having children should be enough for women, so it’s OK to put them into a position that they must marry to stay out of poverty. Theyshould be satisfied by childbearing, child rearing, and housework. They shouldn’t want to be a lawyer—a profession from which they were barred for centuries—or an astronaut (we’ll get to NASA later!) or a corporate CEO or a Senator or President of the United States. They weren’t suited to that. That’s for men. After all, if she’s got the nuclear football and has PMS, think of what could happen!
Well, don’t look now but Leonid Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan when he was blind drunk and the Taliban viciously abuse women for no reason and at least 90% of all violent crime in the United States is committed by men—and you’re worried about women and PMS? If PMS caused violent crime, the planet would be a smoking, radiating ruin, and it’s not. And if female hormones are so dangerous, it would not be the case (as it is) that 96% of the entire prison population is male. The cause of violent crime is not estrogen and it’s not cramps, but testosterone may very well have something to do with it (and there’s evidence to this effect).
So, after having been screamed at by the coach, laughed off the field by the boys—who were my friends just one day before—demeaned by the dads and shunned by the mothers (not one of whom supported me), my father trots out Patriarchy’s great big, fat lie. It’s not his fault. He just didn’t know what the hell else to do.
After he tells me I have childbirth and nothing else, I stare at him blankly for a moment, and then I say:
“So, because we can do just one thing you can’t, that’s an excuse for you to take everything from us??? You take everything from us,” I snarled. “You get everything, and we get nothing. We get shut out of everything, robbed of all the fun, robbed of all the money. Robbed of freedom and adventure. Tell me that’s fair!!”
I was screaming now. “Tell me that’s fair, Daddy!!! Tell me that’s fair!!!” Now I was sobbing again.
It was pouring rain now. Lightning flashed and thunder roared.
“No, it isn’t. It isn’t fair,” he said quietly. “It’s not. It’s not fair.”
I leaned into his side and he put his arm around me. “What am I going to do? What am I doing to do? How am I going to get my life back?”
For the next eight years, until I went off to college, there was a constant battle with my mother’s collusion with Patriarchy. She didn’t want me to play sports because it wasn’t lady-like. She didn’t want me constantly climbing trees and walking in the woods alone and constantly doing “tomboy” with no make-up on and with my hair in tangles. Mostly, she was insistent that I stay out of intellectual conversations, saying that no boy would want to date me if they knew I was smart (untrue) and that certainly no one would want to marry me (also untrue). She wouldn’t let me go out of state to college.
But Daddy was a different story. He supported my every intellectual pursuit and every outrageous adventure. He taught me meteorology—even taking me out into a hurricane eye so I could see what the eye wall looked like as it approached. He taught me astronomy and aerodynamics. He taught me to play golf and took me fishing. He let me play piano in his band despite the presence of alcohol at the dances he and the other guys played. He scraped up the money for musical instruments and summers at the Brevard Music School. And when anybody tried to hold me down or hold me back or tell me I couldn’t have what any of the boys could have, he was there.
And he was there later that day. Cried out and exhausted, I took a nap—and then woke up to hear him on the phone with the coach. He was yelling, something he never did. He told the coach that if he ever screamed at me again, he’d sue him. He told him I was brilliant, bright, and beautiful and deserved everything in life. He told him girls should be allowed to play Little League and everything else. And he told him that if he ever even heard of his screaming at a daughter of his—or any other child—in the manner he screamed at me, he wouldn’t be coaching Little League or anything else.
When it comes to these things, the easy thing to do is just not take a side, which, of course, perpetuates the sleaziness of Patriarchy so things never change. I stood in the doorway to the kitchen looking at this man with such wonder. He’d just taken sides. He’d taken my side and the side of what’s right. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.
He is gone now 13 years, and when I remember standing in the kitchen doorway with tears streaming down my face, I realize how he saved me over and over again. The sight of him standing there on the phone with this bully was absolutely awe-inspiring. It’s one of the most beautiful memories I have.
There are some really, really wonderful men in this world who don’t play this game, who refuse to be infected with the negative ego that says it’s OK to take from another and OK to suppress people and OK to use people and push people around. And he was one of them.
Thank you, Daddy.