New West Book Review

Ghost Ball: Rick Collignon’s “Madewell Brown”

By Jenny Shank, 5-18-09

Madewell Brown
By Rick Collignon
Unbridled Books, 213 pages, $23.95

Rick Collignon returns to the town of Guadalupe, New Mexico for his fourth novel, the quietly powerful Madewell Brown.  The title character is a mystery man, long gone, who turns out to have been a talented pitcher for a Negro league team out of Illinois.  Brown lived for seven years in a shack on the outskirts of Guadalupe, barely interacting with the townspeople, before he disappeared without leaving much of a trace.  Guadalupe is a town that keeps its secrets, counts family loyalty above all else, and doesn’t welcome newcomers, so if Cipriano Trujillo is to uncover the truth behind the ancient canvas bag stamped “Madewell Brown” that he finds after the death of his father, he’s going to have to overcome the congenital reticence of the older townspeople who might know something.  Collignon takes his time settling the reader into the story, told in spare, acute prose, mainly through flashbacks, and the novel gradually gains in momentum as the pieces fall into place.

Collignon begins the tale in South Cairo, Illinois, where an elderly former Negro league ballplayer, Obie Poole, encounters an 11-year-old orphan named Rachael Parish, whom he recognizes as the granddaughter of his old teammate, Madewell Brown.  “You’ve got your granddaddy written all over you,” he says.

Obie begins to tell her stories about the man he believes is her grandfather.  “I played ball with a man named Madewell Brown my whole damn life and never did I see the likes of him.  You put a ball in that man’s hand and he’d turn bats into kindling and buckle a man’s knees so bad he looked the fool.” Rachael and Obie become friends, intensely drawn toward each other’s company to ease their isolation, though they keep up a cranky patter with one another, never admitting their strong bond out loud.  Obie’s death, when Rachael is in her twenties, sets her to seeking information about her grandfather.

Meanwhile in Guadalupe, Rufino Trujillo dies “of a bad heart,” just after telling his son, Cipriano, about how when he was a boy, he and his friend Nemecio came across a black man on Perdido mesa, beat up and near death, and took off with his bag.  Cipriano has little love for his father, who abandoned him to his aunt as a baby, and doesn’t really believe his story.  But when he finds an old bag stamped “Madewell Brown” with nothing of value inside but a photograph of a Negro league team and an unmailed letter addressed to Obie Poole, he mails the letter and tries to find out what he can from the older people in the community.  Rachael receives the letter, and drives out west to see if she can determine what her grandfather was doing in Guadalupe and what became of him.

Madewell Brown has some of the elements of a mystery and some of a baseball novel, but the standard structure of neither.  Through the story of Obie and Madewell, Collignon does an excellent job of tapping into what Greil Marcus called “old, weird America.” Marcus was speaking of early American music, but early American baseball has that same odd, haunted spirit, with the Negro leagues shadowing the Major League, teams barnstorming across the country, legends springing up around ballplayers who plied their summertime trade in little towns, and teams practicing “clown ball,” as Obie does for a time, playing for a Harlem Globetrotters-like baseball outfit.  Obie explains, “Whether we playing colored boys down south or those white boys up north it all come to the same thing.  Even those sweet years we played down in Mexico wasn’t no different.  We just playing ball.  We just playing the game of baseball.”

Collignon writes of the time when baseball was wild, violent, and unpredictable.  Some of the old, weird baseball incidents that Obie recounts: “I seen a man get eat by his own for missing a ball that should have been caught…I seen old men drop dead in the stands from the heat it get so bad.  I seen a baby get struck in the face by a broke bat in Ohio.  His poor mama holding him outstretched like there something we can do with how hurt he is.  A herd of pigs once broke down a center field fence and chase Hightop all the way to the dugout like he done something bad to them that they not forgot."

Collignon has captured Obie’s voice so well it rings in the reader’s head, and the vignettes from Obie’s ballplaying days that he shares with Rachael are riveting, especially an account of when a centerfielder on the opposite team was struck dead by lightning.  Baseball has always been a game obsessed with luck, and its opposite, curse, with each player following his own rituals to ward off slumps and accident.  Madewell believed ‘“there wasn’t no safer places than a ball field,” but Obie knew different.  As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that Madewell Brown was the victim of a curse that there was no warding off.

When Rachael turns up in Guadalupe, no one cares to help her, intent as they are on minding their own business.  Eventually Rachael and Cipriano separately pry the past open wide enough to glean some answers.  There is no big game in this baseball novel, no heroes, no triumph, but there is, in the end, a believable kind of redemption that Rachael achieves by combing through the past.

Rick Collignon will discuss Madewell Brown at the Main Santa Fe Public Library on June 1 (7-8:30 p.m.) and in Las Vegas, New Mexico at Tome on the Range on June 13 (4 p.m.).

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