Field of Dreams

In Paul Beatty’s poem “Darryl Strawberry Sleeps in a Field of Dreams,” the speaker is using the movie “Field of Dreams” as a starting off point to make a larger argument. As a member of the audience of this film, and as a reader of this poem (also the audience), I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas of representation in a work of art, including a film or a poem, and about the reactions I have to this work of art as an audience member and reader.

I re-watched “Field of Dreams” this week to double-check my memory of the movie as a pleasant-enough, inoffensive, father-son, baseball movie because Beatty’s poem at first seems to indict the whiteness of the movie. I actually know plenty of “white boys...truly believin this is the best movie they’ve ever seen” (or at least they believe it’s the best baseball movie they’ve seen). Personally, I prefer “Bull Durham,” but that reflects my bias because Susan Sarandon plays an instructor of English at the local community college in that movie.

My bias here, and that of the white boys I know, is what I’ve been thinking about. I don’t think that Beatty is using his poem to especially criticize the movie “Field of Dreams;” it is what it is, but he is using a popular movie that people might be familiar with to make points that the movie doesn’t make. His point is to notice what the movie is not about; what was left out of this “white iowa” slice of baseball life movie is what his poem is about. If, in this movie, “baseball players/are reborn/in their prime/to play in modern day times,” it makes me ask the questions, “how can you possibly tell this story without baseball players of color?” and “is this what the world is really like?” Beatty, in the last line of the poem, asks the question “is all the movies for real.” We need to recognize that our realities depend on our own perspective and our definition of ourselves, and that movies, however entertaining, only show part of any reality.

If we grant that in 1919 – the era of Shoeless Joe Jackson, ostensibly whom the movie is about – the color line in baseball had not yet been crossed, then the world this movie is capturing will not include players of color. Beatty effectively takes the poem out of this time by referring to historical figures and events that we, the readers, ought to know more about. He mentions “homestead grey/inna grey away uniform,” and we can read this “grey,” on the surface, as some kind of blending of black and white, or we can discover underneath, that the Homestead Greys were the team in the Negro League that Josh Gibson, mentioned later in the poem, played for and whose biography describes Babe Ruth as a “white Josh Gibson” because Gibson was such a good ball player. It makes me forget about the connection to “Field of Dreams” and ask, “why hasn’t there been a movie made about Josh Gibson?” He could have at least made an appearance in this movie – as could any of a number of players of color whose dreams may have included playing in the all-white majors or at least getting the attention and recognition they deserved.

Susan Sarandon’s character in “Bull Durham” quotes Walt Whitman and says, “I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game.” Baseball’s history is full and rich and includes segregation, discrimination, racism, sexism and other general ugliness such as substance abuse and domestic violence. Beatty mentions Pam Postema in the context of the father-daughter interaction in the film. She was one of the first (and only) women to umpire in professional baseball, but because she was a woman, she never made it to the majors. She filed a federal sex discrimination lawsuit and settled out of court. I didn’t know about her before I read Beatty’s poem.

I felt that Beatty wanted me to learn about the people and incidents he writes about in his poem. He mentions well-known baseball figures like Darryl Strawberry (who was a superstar player [yes, of color] with the Mets until he ran into difficulties with drugs and with the law), and Shoeless Joe Jackson (who was also a superstar player, albeit white, until he ran into difficulties for allegedly throwing the 1919 World Series), Mel Ott and Ty Cobb (who were both superstar players, also white, back in the day), and I felt I should be able to “get” all of Beatty’s references. I want to read August Wilson’s play “Fences” (I know there’s something about baseball in it); I want to know more about what a “tap dunk” is (isn’t that basketball?), and I want to figure out all the other allusions I don’t know.

To get these references, however, do I need to be a member of a particular group, or can I be educated? If it’s not part of my direct experience, is it not an “authentic” reading of the poem? “Field of Dreams” probably was not meant to be a film that makes a statement about racism in baseball, but Beatty responds to the movie with a poem that has so much more to sort out which, in turn, raises the question of what my role is as an audience member. I root for the Yankees, I have watched “Field of Dreams,” and I have read Beatty’s poem – all opening layers of impressions for me. I can’t see the green of the baseball diamond after having read this poem without thinking about Cabrini Green where we “aint sure they got dreams/damn sure aint got a field,” and I think that’s the point.

Sheila Joseph