The Yiderati: “Diamond Ruby” Author Joseph Wallace Guest Blogs Pt. 2

Joseph Wallace is the author of the novel Diamond Ruby.  He will be blogging over the next week for Jewcy on 3 subjects we asked him to expound upon.  The first one was on the topic "Old Time Brooklyn," and today he will be discussing making the transition from non-fiction writing to fiction.

For the first twenty years of my writing career, I wrote nonfiction articles and books. Sometimes they were about nature and the environment, sometimes medicine, sometimes baseball, but the thread that tied them together was my enthusiasm for history. I loved the "treasure hunt" aspect of finding a fascinating, revealing, or just plain strange story from the past, rescuing it, and sharing it with a new audience. Of course, while I got to add context and choose to include or leave out details, the basic rules were always the same: I had to tell the truth. Leave it to others to embroider or make things up. Leave it to others to write novels. Until I found out about Jackie Mitchell, the central character in a piece of history I felt compelled to rewrite because I didn’t like the way the truth turned out. I had to tell the story that way it should have happened, and that required fiction. In 1931, seventeen-year-old Jackie Mitchell was such a baseball phenom that she signed to pitch for the Chattanooga Lookouts, a (formerly all-male) minor-league team. The mighty New York Yankees then stopped in Chattanooga to play an exhibition game. The express purpose: to see how the girl pitcher would do against two of the greatest sluggers of all time, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. How did Jackie do? It took her just seven pitches to strike out the two Hall of Famers. The best stories, true or not, are the ones that make you ask, "So what happened next?" The problem with Jackie’s story is that the answer is: "Not much." Just days after her feat, she-and all women-were banned from playing professional baseball by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. To all intents and purposes, Jackie Mitchell’s career ended right there. I was infuriated by this outcome, and not only because of the obvious injustice done to Jackie Mitchell and other aspiring female ballplayers. As a storyteller, I crave tales with an arc, a beginning, middle, and end. This story had just a beginning. And as a baseball fan, I wanted to know where Jackie would have ended up on her own merits, not because of some dictatorial decree. So I rewrote history. Ruby Lee Thomas, Diamond Ruby‘s heroine, is not Jackie Mitchell. The book is set during the Roaring Twenties, not the Great Depression, and mostly in Brooklyn, not Tennessee. But the two teenage girls share the ability to throw a baseball, and the desire to prove themselves to a suspicious, unwelcoming world. Only by making my story fiction could I give Ruby the opportunity that Jackie never had. The chance to fight back, to try to outsmart the commissioner, to strive to keep on doing what she was best at. In addition, I was able to give the story the beginning, middle, and end it deserved in reality. I still love rescuing and retelling true stories. Sometimes, however, the truth is simply not good enough.