The next day after practice Cal asked me if I wanted to meet his old lady. I didn’t want to, particularly, but I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went.

The A train rocked back and forth as we headed uptown. There weren’t too many people on it. At the far end of the car there were two teachers with their classes. The only thing was that the teachers were really young. I winked at one of them, and instead of turning away, she gave me a nice smile.

“I told you about Aggie?”

“You mentioned her,” I said.

“When I first met her, she was singing,” he said. “She’s good, but she just couldn’t get over.”

“If she was that good, she should have made it,” I said.

“Hey, man, you don’t know nothing, do you?” He looked at me and shook his head. “Just because you good at something don’t mean you have to make it. Especially us. Every time you see a black person who’s got it halfway made you can bet there’s a dozen more just as good as he is waiting for a chance. There’s a lot of singers out here who can smoke anything you see on television. How many ugly singers you see making records and singing on television?”

“None, really,” I said.

“Right. You think ugly people can’t sing? They out there, but they can’t make it. And for every black basketball player in the NBA under six ten, there’s two more out here just as good who won’t see the inside of the Garden unless he’s got a ticket or a broom. Anybody that looks at a black guy and tells him that he can make it in basketball just because he’s good is either lying or dumb. You got to be so special your feet don’t touch the ground when you walk. People used to laugh when Satchel Paige used to say, ‘Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.’ Any black cat in the world that knows anything knows what old Satch meant.

“I remember one time a black football player came over to me in a hotel and told me how hard it was to make it in the National Football League. He said, the only thing that made it for him was that he could sew buttons on uniforms.”

“Sew buttons on uniforms?”

“That’s the same thing I said when he told me. He said he went to the tryouts thinking he was bad. He started telling them about his college record and how many yards he had gained. He said this red-neck coach looked at him and pointed to a ten-foot brick wall. The coach said, ‘Boy, we got fifteen niggers in camp who can jump over that wall, we got ten that can run through it, and we got six that can run through it without messing up our uniforms, and we only got room on the squad for three. Now what can you do?’