Book Review
Bridging Baseball
Sandra W . Headen ’ s debut novel intertwines segregation , friendship and determination in a transformative story for all ages
By Tom Mayer | CNHI News Service
How history repeats itself : Rickwood Field in Birmingham , Alabama — the oldest ballpark in America — scheduled a game June 20 between two Major League Baseball legacy teams , the San Francisco Giants and the St . Louis Cardinals , connecting the field ’ s 114 years of baseball history , and paying tribute to both the Negro Leagues and the person many consider the sport ’ s greatest living player , Hall of Famer , Giants legend , Birmingham native and Birmingham Black Barons star Willie Mays .
Mays , at 93 , died two days before the game would be played , but he did previously express , in a single quote on the Giants ’ website , how the game of baseball has connected people for more than a century : “ I can ’ t believe it . I never thought I ’ d see in my lifetime a Major League Baseball game being played on the very field where I played as a teenager .”
Which brings us to 2024 and Sandra W . Headen ’ s prescient debut novel about a Black tween in North Carolina who aspires to follow his older brother and deceased father into the Negro Baseball Leagues . Set in 1939 , “ Warrior on the Mound ” ( Holiday House ) details the first-person narrative of Cato Jones as he and his team trespass on a new — and whites-only — ball field , only to be falsely accused of causing damage .
Even at 12 , Cato knows he ’ s in no position to challenge a white person ’ s lie , but from the incident he does learn that the owner of the field and his father , legendary Negro Leagues ballplayer Daddy Mo , were once friends . From there , the unraveling of his Daddy Mo ’ s murder , the racially motivated beating of Cato ’ s brother , Isaac , and the community discords of the period spur the story toward a game between two Little League teams , one white , one Black , that will either tear apart the community or seed healing relationships .
Headen ’ s engrossing novel — a blending of history , sports and family into a coming-of-age story that should be on every required list this summer — skillfully weaves historic and actual facts . The result : A deep and honest dive into a period of racial disharmony that propels a dialogue toward home plate .
Expanding on that dialogue , Headen agreed to answer a few questions about her novel . The following interview has been edited for length and clarity .
www . meridianstar . com
Book art courtesy of Holiday House
Tom Mayer : Sandra , I want to start with this . I honestly believe that “ Warrior on the Mountain ” just might be the most important book that anyone of any age could read this year . Does that resonate with you at all ?
Sandra Headen : It does in part because of the reactions I ’ ve gotten from different kinds of people . I started out talking to a high school group of students , and I ’ m on the board of directors of this high school , and the adults were just as excited as the kids , maybe more so . So yes , I mean , that ’ s what I thought when I wrote the book and I ’ m really glad to hear you say that .
TM : What ’ s interesting is that you could have written this book and its subject on many different levels , but you chose middle school readers . Why this age group ?
SH : Well , I ’ m a social psychologist , and I ’ ve worked in the field of public health . The area I worked in was tobacco-use prevention . It was in the late ‘ 90s , early 2000s , and I was a part of a national movement to decrease the use of tobacco in America to decrease mortality and morbidity from tobacco . One of the programs that we had was targeted to middle graders . And so for seven years , I worked as a consultant with the state of North Carolina on a [ youth ] initiative . It was a peer-education program where the public health professionals worked with youth groups , community youth groups … and we were training them to conduct peer education programs in their communities to help
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