Tidewater: My Life & Death in the Negro American Baseball League (A Slave Narrative) is a collaboration with and adaptation of a section of a novel by my father, Jay Neugeboren. The book was originally published in 1974, the year I was born, and is my favorite of his works. The section I am adapting is a fictional autobiography (see the title) of a once-great baseball player who is now an anonymous janitor at a thrift shop in Brooklyn.
The story follows his rejection of an offer by a major league team to "pass for white", to becoming a mutli-tool star in the Negro Leagues, to a blossoming relationship with Babe Ruth while they are barnstorming in the southern United States and Cuba.
While some of the characters are drawn from historical fact, the narrative is entirely fictional. As of Spring 2015, two out of eight chapters are complete.
