Our Own "Real Life Rose Maxson": Inviting a Negro Leagues Widow into Our School in Conjunction with Our Study of August Wilson's Fences - Entrepreneur Generations

Mrs. Geraldine Day

Tonight, I plan on seeing Denzel Washington's film Fences. It's a film I've literally been waiting for for 16 years, when I started teaching the play, and I'm really excited, although also a bit nervous. Having taught it dozens of times to hundreds of 9th graders over the years, and having watched these great kids embody all those moving and funny speeches and perform all those amazing scenes time and time again, I have very high expectations that I'm pretty confident Denzel and Viola will meet.

My introduction of Mrs. Day. 

I rarely ever get tired of teaching any pieces of great literature, because I feel like I can always find something new about it to inspire me. Fences is my favorite play, and the reason why is that it has so many layers as well as hooks that grab me right right in the sweet spot -- baseball as a metaphor for both American racism (a couple of years ago, I wrote an essay about this) and for death; Negro League Baseball; Josh Gibson as a prominent symbol (I visited his grave this year); a tortured and complicated, even morally ambivalent, protagonist. I, and the students, generally have a great time with the play, and their summative assessment for the last few years is to perform a moment from the play in a group, along with a rationale describing the choices made. It leads to some really great moments some years.

This year during teaching the play, we found something else to bring to our unit, closer in our backyard: Mrs. Geraldine Day, the widow of Negro Leagues Hall of Fame pitcher Leon Day, whose 100th birthday was celebrated this October in Baltimore.

The connections between Geraldine Day and Fences are clear. In the play, the Maxson family lives paycheck to paycheck, as Troy was unable to capitalize financial on his baseball prowess due to segregation. At 53 years old, he works as a garbage man, and is understandably bitter about what baseball did to him. His wife, Rose, is ten years younger than him, so when (spoiler alert) Troy dies at 60 years old at the end of the play, she was still middle-aged.

Mrs. Day is presented with her donation.

The same thing happened to Geraldine Day, whose story is the stuff of fiction. The same week in 1995 that Leon Day was voted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame (after several years of being barely passed over), he died. While Leon Day was able to hear about his impending induction in the Hall of Fame, he was never able to capitalize financially off of it. Had he lived a few more months, he could have charged significant amounts of money for his autograph; he could have gained some endorsements; he could have sold some of his baseball memorabilia as a Hall of Fame player.

This is an inauspicious fate for a guy who beat Satchel Paige in 3 of 4 duels the two of them had; Troy Maxson once said he hit seven home runs off of Satchel Paige and "it doesn't get any better than that," but in real life, Day also bested the great Satchel Paige..

However, he died six days after his Hall of Fame election, so he and his family were never really able to capitalize off of it. Like Rose Maxson in Fences, Geraldine was in her 50s when her husband passed away. Indeed, Mrs. Day (b. 1939) was 23 years younger than her husband, so when he died in 1995, she was only 56 years old. The couple struggled financially during Leon Day's life, as he worked odd jobs around Baltimore and New Jersey after his playing career ended without financial success due to segregation. This is what his unassuming house looks like today.

Mrs. Day had many gifts for students.

Fast-forward 21 years to current times, Mrs. Day is still living on a shoestring. She has cancer and struggles to survive on the kindness of strangers and some memorabilia sales. Thus, we decided as a 9th grade class to raise some money for Mrs. Day and to invite her in to speak with our students.

After a Penny Wars netted nearly $400 (another teacher donated more, bringing our school's total donation to her to $750 to pay for her medical expenses), we were able to invite Mrs. Day in to speak to our students. I had the lucky task of picking her up. As soon as Mrs. Day sat down in my car, she started telling stories, and didn't stop:

How she and Leon Day met: At a bar in New Jersey when he was a bartender. She and her girlfriend would keep going to the bar, and Leon would always bring her free beer. Leon, who was in his 40s, was a quiet and charming man who also had an amazing voice, and he sung when the bar was empty or nearly empty. Eventually, she asked him if he was ever going to ask her out. That's all it took.

How she discovered Leon Day was a former Negro Leagues baseball star: A couple of years after the two of them were living together, he asked her if she wanted to go to Mexico. "What?" she said. "We're broke. We can't go to Mexico!" Then he presented two plane tickets to her, and said he Mexico was putting on an old timers game and he was invited to play. It was there that she met guys like Cool Papa Bell and Judy Johnson.

How Leon Day reacted to racism after his return from fighting in World War II: He got into a cab at the airport, the cab driver turned around and said, "I don't drive n_____", and Leon replied, "I've been fighting overseas so you can sit your butt in this cab, so you're gonna drive me" and he did.

All told, the gregarious Mrs. Day spoke to our students for about 45 minutes, answering questions about her husband, Negro League baseball, and Baltimore during the Civil Rights era. Now in her late 70s, Mrs. Day still attends several Oriole games every year.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2iOnCWm Our Own "Real Life Rose Maxson": Inviting a Negro Leagues Widow into Our School in Conjunction with Our Study of August Wilson's Fences - Entrepreneur Generations

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