In A League of Her Own

Kaia Alderson

(William Morrow)

Interview by Diane Slocum

Effa Bush divorced her first husband because she didn’t want to be just someone’s wife. She wanted to BE somebody. This was not a usual role for a black woman (who looked white) in the early 1920s. Her first idea was to open a milliner shop. But when she attended a Yankees game with her friend Avis Blakeher delight at seeing Babe Ruth soon faded in comparison to meeting Avis’ friend, Abraham Manley, a wealthy Black man of dubious background.

AUTHORLINK: How did you first hear of Effa Manley?

ALDERSON: After my first novel, I knew that I wanted to write a novel based on one of the four women who played in the Negro Leagues. It was during my initial research of that idea that I found an article about the four female Negro League team owners with Effa Manley being one of them.

AUTHORLINK: How did you go there to writing a novel about her?

ALDERSON: I was fascinated by the fact that she was a woman who could – and sometimes did – pass for white but chose to live Black in the 1930s and 1940s. She reminded me of my grandmother, who had a similar appearance. We have so many stories out there about passing and that was the thing to do if you could. However, my grandmother and Mrs. Manley were real life examples of women who unapologetically chose to do the opposite.

AUTHORLINK: What did you do to research Effa?

ALDERSON: I read everything I could get my hands on about her. Prior to my novel, that was 3-4 nonfiction books that focused on her baseball life. I also scoured Newspapers.com. While the general assumption was that Mrs. Manley was a white woman, the census records show that she was definitively a woman of color via her maternal grandfather and that she was raised in a Black household.

The icing on my research cake was that I went to the Baseball Hall of Fame to study the scrapbook that she kept during her baseball years.

AUTHORLINK: What about your Negro League Baseball research?

ALDERSON: My Negro League Baseball research was through accessing Black press archives via Newspapers.com. I also read every history of the Newark Eagles I could find along with reading Monte Irvin’s autobiography.

AUTHORLINK:How did you expand on the historical records to fill out Effa’s private life and other parts of your story?

ALDERSON: I think I did the first deep dive illustrating Mrs. Manley’s social justice work in detail prior to getting involved with the Negro Leagues. There are a few juicy rumors floating around her inconsistent behavior around the spring of 1938. Sportwriters had been explaining it away by calling her a flirt, femme fatale, or sexpot. But the fact is that a good friend of hers had died that spring. Once I realized this, her alleged choices made more sense and helped me to humanize her in the novel.

I would not have been able to put two and two together if not for the society pages and front page news published by the Black press in the 1930s.

AUTHORLINK: Did you add any fictional characters?

ALDERSON: Lucille Richards is a fictional character very loosely inspired by Lucille Randolph, Harlem socialite and wife of activist A. Philip Randolph.

The player who Effa had a “flirtation” with in the book is made up. But I did borrow some personality traits from some of the actual players on the team.

AUTHORLINK: What can we learn from Effa’s story?

ALDERSON: Women have been making significant contributions to baseball for a long, long time. Black women specifically held leadership positions in the sport long before any other groups of women did. Olivia Taylor was the first and Mrs. Manley was the second. I find it interesting that they had those opportunities in the few years that the Negro League teams existed versus the almost nonexistent leadership roles offered to women in the Major Leagues until very recently.

AUTHORLINK: How did writing and publishing your second novel differ from your first?

ALDERSON: It was a lot harder to figure out the fictional character Effa Manley since she was based on a real person. My main characters in Sisters in Arms were completely fictional so I knew who they were right off the bat.

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

ALDERSON: I am working on proposal ideas for my third novel. I have about three historical settings that I’d like to explore. I just need the right story for each of them.

About the author:

Kaia Alderson holds a sociology degree from Spelman College and a masters degree from the University of West Georgia. Her passion is uncovering lives of Black women who distinguish themselves in unexpected ways and revealingtheir stories in historical fiction. Her first novel, Sisters in Arms, tells a story of the only all-Black battalion of the Women’s Auxiliary Army  Corps as they fought racism and sexism to serve their country during World War II.