For Cleon Jones, Baseball Was Only the Beginning

MOBILE, Ala. — “Hey Cleon! Thanks for the roof!”

Cleon Jones leans out the window of his van and frowns at the woman who has called to him from her porch. “If Jesse weren’t sitting there” — Jones points at her white-haired husband — “I’d throw a brick at y’all. You weren’t even at our community meeting today.”

The woman holds her arms up, mock surrender, and smiles. “Sorry!”

Jones laughs. “All right, girl, all right. We ain’t going to mess with you.”

We bounce down the road deeper into Africatown, Mobile’s ancient black quarter, where Jones came of age in the canebrakes and alligator reeds that run to the Mobile River, where he learned baseball well enough to star with the Mets and where he and his wife, Angela, built a handsome brick home next to the shotgun shack where he grew up without running water or electricity.

He is a de facto mayor, neighbors turning to him to find loans to repair roofs, build a community garden or care for a son struck by lightning. Jones, his mustache snow-white in his eighth decade, peers from under a blue-and-orange Mets cap. His words amble out in a moonflower-soft Alabama accent.

Source: The New York Times

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