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Debut Collection: The Poetry of Race and Baseball
Former UK baseball player explores Hall of Famer Josh Gibson’s life, career, in poetry
By Jacalyn Carfagno
When Dorian Hairston graduated from Lexington’s Tates Creek High School, where he was a standout baseball player, his mother’s gift wasn’t a glove, bat or baseball signed by a professional player. Instead, she gave her son an autographed copy of Nikky Finney’s National Book Award-winning volume of poetry, “Head Off and Split.”
She knew her son.
A little later, when he was playing baseball for the University of Kentucky (he got academic scholarships but played and lettered all four years), an ESPN reporter asked what made him want to come to UK. Hairston ’16 ’18 AS recalled answering, “Nikky Finney and Frank X Walker were holding down the English department and I wanted to be part of that.” It did not seem to be the answer the reporter anticipated.
Finney left UK for her native South Carolina, but Walker became teacher, mentor, fellow poet and friend to Hairston as the younger man pursued both undergradu- ate and graduate degrees at UK.
“I’ve been impressed with him from the very beginning,” said Walker, the first Black to be named Kentucky’s Poet Laureate. They’d met when Walker came to Hairston’s high school but having him as a student was “even more special.” It gave Walker the rare opportunity to be the mentor he wished he’d had as a young aspiring poet. “Having an African American male student poet is not something that happens every semester.”
Walker brought Hairston into the Affrilachian Poets Collective, which he had founded in 1991 to create a home for Black people writing poetry in the Appalachian region. “Being in this family,” Hairston wrote about the Collective, “receiving your love and support, is a gift I hope to return in all that I do.”
One of Hairston’s poems, “Manifesto for Black Baseball Players,” was published in 2018 in “Black Bone: 25 Years of Affrilachian Poets.” It is part of his book that became “Pretend the Ball is Named Jim Crow: the Story of Josh Gibson,” released in early 2024 by the University Press of Kentucky.
The collection of poems tells the story of Gibson, who hit more than 800 home runs in the Negro Leagues and was considered the equal of if not superior to Babe Ruth. Gibson was locked out of major league baseball by the color barrier. He died in 1947, the year that Jackie Robinson became the first Black major league player.
Hairston began working on the collection for an independent study project as a senior in high school. Walker had recently published “Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride” about the legendary Black jockey. Phyllis Schlich, who taught creative writing, suggested Hairston use that as an inspiration but write about a baseball player.
He tried to write about Robinson but found he was writing more about the white team manager and commissioner of baseball. “I was just so accustomed to needing white voices to help tell black stories. That’s why I defaulted to Branch Rickey (who spearheaded the integration of Major League Baseball) and Happy Chandler (Kentucky governor and then Major League Baseball commissioner)," Hairston realized.
He went to the library — a place he frequented — and found “Josh Gibson: The Power and the Darkness.” Gibson, he learned, married about the age Hairston was at the time. Just as his baseball career was taking off, his wife, Helen, died while giving birth to their twin son and daughter. “How would I handle that,” the teenage Hairston wondered. “I’m discovering this man who was trying to discover himself,” as a baseball player, a widowed father and a Black man.
He’d found his topic.
“I was in the right space … the early Josh poems were just writing themselves.” Schlich remembered that when Hairston connected with Gibson’s story, “he was enthralled.”
But it would be another 10 years before Hairston completed the book he envisioned and offered it to the world. “Life happens,” Schlich said, “he got married, he’s had two children, he was dealing with what to do about a career.” Writers, she said, “need time to be able to really focus on the writing, it’s hard.” Hairston got a second master's degree, in teaching secondary English, from the University of the Cumberlands and began teaching in the Fayette County Public Schools.
While life seemed to have slowed his writing, Walker believes the life experience enhanced Hairston’s work.
Marrying, having children gave Hairston “a kind of vulnerability that transferred on the page,” he said. As Hairston writes in the voices of Gibson, Helen and their two children, “you feel what’s happening, you believe what’s happening.”
Even though Hairston tells a deeply personal story, Walker said, the book is much more. It’s impressive, “what it has to say about race and politics and sports and American history.”
In his “Author’s Note” at the front of the book, Hairston cites a quote from Negro League and Giants baseball great Willie Mays that Hairston’s college baseball coach, Gary Henderson, had posted in the locker room. It read, in part: “Baseball is a game, yes … But what it most truly is is disguised combat. For all its gentility, it’s almost leisurely pace, baseball is violence under wraps.”
At the time Josh Gibson was playing baseball, Hairston said, “there’s a war being fought over the skin, or on the skin of these Black baseball players.” The owners of the Negro League teams joined in the fight, he said, “trying to legitimize the existence of Black people in this country and show that they can play the game just as well if not better than their white peers.”
And that, Hairston said, “is violent and I’m glad that these guys won.”
Henderson (himself an English major, like Hairston) said the quote means many things but one is that in baseball, “you can’t run out the clock, you better be prepared.” Henderson, now the head coach at the University of Utah, said Hairston worked hard to be prepared. “He was very serious about his craft, serious about being a good baseball player and very serious about being a good student.”
Schlich has stayed in touch with her former student, often inviting him to read his work and talk about writing in her classes “I don’t think he ever turned me down, ever.”
Life is busy now for Hairston and Schlich is retired but “every now and then he’ll just call me out of the blue,” and they talk about teaching and writing and life for as long as an hour, she said. “He’s a wonderful person, he’s one of my favorite people in the world.”
Hairston’s first book has been well received but he doesn’t harbor any dreams of moving off to Greenwich Village or an artist’s colony to think and write. He’s happy to be here where he received “a world-class education,” to be close to his parents and his in-laws, to Walker and the other Affrilachian Poets. Plus, he said, Kentucky is home. ■
