Born in Alabama, fled an abusive sharecropper father at fourteen, drifted north, killed a man in a robbery, spent fifteen years in prison where he learned to play baseball. In the Negro Leagues he was genuinely great — better than most men who made the majors. The color line stopped him. His bitterness is historically legitimate and personally catastrophic. He is not a villain — he is what happens when a man of enormous capacity is systematically denied the space to exercise it, and then passes that deprivation on as wisdom.