Hank Aaron (part three)

Not once at the plate did he ever appear nervous, beaten or had.

Never possessing fear in his soul, as though hinged upon his shoulder blades were great invisible feathered wings. 

Standing at the plate he manifested so greatly the character of a god among the earth. In a homerun derby in 1959, announcer Mark Scott and opposing slugger Al Kaline agreed his approach to hitting a baseball was a study in relaxation, with his wrists bobbing and the bat waving up-and-down behind his head as if casting a fishing rod, lifting his front foot from the earth for a moment before leaning into the flight of the ball, the barrel of the bat pointed at the dugout behind him, then it whips like the pull of a planet’s moon around his body, following the jabbing of his elbow and his striking hands and turned wrists and the movement conjures up the echoes of thunder and by the time the wood of the bat hammers the ball, one can feel the impact of lightning, electricity circuiting through the body.

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He grew up swinging the bat with a cross-handed grip and grew up in a house without electricity or windows or indoor plumbing and grew up playing a version of baseball with tin cans for a baseball or nylon wrapped around acorns or golf balls he’d find, and broom sticks or sticks from the woods for a bat, and wore for clothes his older sister’s hand-me-downs and grew up in a sundown town, where members of the Ku Klux Klan would gather at nightfall and march down the streets, cloaked in white and under white hoods, carrying among them bibles and waving in their hands the Confederate Flag, with many members on either side and holding an enormous American Flag to cover the width of the road in which they walked, and holding up burning crosses, driving cars slowly and honking the horns while other whites in the neighborhood waved and cheered from their porches and lawns, and the young whites had people to admire and hope to become, celebrating and honoring their heritage and white nationalism, marching through Aaron’s neighborhood, and planted countless crosses on fire in their yard, howling at the sight of the crosses, gathering in a circle in his yard over a hundred strong in numbers, walking up and down the roads in an organized manner and chanting hymns of Anglo Saxon, like a finely trained Nazi military division and many of them would have worked with Aaron’s father during the daytime.