Stealing Home

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

In baseball, evidently the hardest play to execute successfully is the
steal from third base to home plate. Metaphorically, 10-year-old Joey
Sexton is also trying to get “home,” emotionally, racially, and
spiritually, without being called out.

In 1947, Joey lives in the Bronx, a predominantly black borough of New
York City. Of mixed race, Joey has light-coloured skin, which causes
some “Negro” kids to derogatorily call him “whitebread” and
“cracker.” Following Joey’s mother’s drug overdose death, a
social worker tracks down Joey’s absentee father, a black musician,
but discovers he, too, is dead. Further investigation reveals that
Joey’s mother’s name was Greenberg, not Green, and that Joey’s
maternal grandfather, aunt, and cousin live in Brooklyn.

Warmly embraced by his widowed Aunt Frieda and her 10-year-old daughter
Bobbie, a tomboyish lover of baseball, Joey is confronted by an
emotionally cold grandfather quite prepared to return him to the care of
social services. In this new setting, Joey encounters a series of
challenges beyond just his grandfather’s seemingly negative attitude
toward him and his deceased mother. Too white for the Bronx, Joey finds
he’s too black for some Brooklyn residents. A Yankee fan, he’s in
Brooklyn Dodger territory. He learns that, by birth, he is a Jew, but he
knows nothing about Judaism, a situation that separates him from his
new, possibly temporary but kosher family.

With echoes of themes found in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord
Fauntleroy, all ends well for Joey who even embraces the Brooklyn
Dodgers because of the play of Jackie Robinson, major league
baseball’s first black player. Recommended.