Pretend the Ball Is Named Jim Crow

✍ Scribed by Dorian Hairston

• Book ID: 112297601
• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 501 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780813198866

✦ Synopsis

Joshua "Josh" Gibson (1911-1947) is a baseball legend--one of the greatest power hitters in the Negro Leagues, and in all of baseball history. At the height of his career, this trailblazing athlete suffered grueling physical ailments, lost his young wife who died giving birth to their twins, and endured years of Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination--all the while breaking records on the ball field.

Dorian Hairston's debut poetry collection explores the Black American experience through the lens of Gibson's life and seventeen-year baseball career, which culminated in his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Hairston brilliantly reconstructs the personas of Gibson and others in his orbit whose encounters with white supremacy interweave with the inevitability of losing loved ones. By alternating between the perspectives of Gibson, members of his family, and contemporary Black baseball players, Hairston captures the...