Beyond a Boundary

by C.L.R. James

If someone is impatient with me and, while riding their motorized LIME scooter on a sidewalk in San Francisco, decides to accelerate recklessly, and, in doing so crashes into the stroller carrying my two year old who is luckily implacable and more luckily not injured, my reaction is, after confirming the “not injured” portion for my kid, absolute frothing anger. An attempt to follow this hypothetical maniac who fled the scene after hitting a literal baby with a motorized vehicle might end as he, a tiny speck scooting through traffic down Owens and across 16th Street, hides from his own shame.

This would be justified anger, anger in the name of Justice, of irreconcilable vengeance for clear wrong-doing. Yet it would engender no urge in me to, say, sideswipe this scooter-person with an ever-larger motorized vehicle.

If two mystery strangers were to see me and my wife walking to a comedy show at 7pm and, finding the weekend-before-daylight-savings-time extra-dark streets of North Beach too enticing to avoid criminal mischief, decide to smash my face into an illegally situated Honey Bucket–answering whether they would hit a man in glasses in the affirmative–in an attempt to swipe a phone, it might end with blood-slick hands wrestling over the device as the bits of shatter glass slice their way deeper into the eye with each moment of struggle.

Afterword, even with permanent vision loss there is no sense of remunerative old world Hammurabi vengeance flowing through me: though they took an eye, yet I want no eye in trade. 

The handful of times in my life I have been confronted with true, faceless injustice–not inconvenience or the potential consequence of other people’s poor choices, but actual cruelty, malice, or disregard bubbling up from the depth of the human condition–I come away from the encounter without any strong desire beyond finding a sense of personal equilibrium. Perhaps it is me, coming from the privilege of white-passing integration; me who doesn’t wear his American Othered on his skin, who can seek peace through internal retreat rather than external exhortation. Perhaps it is a lack of de facto peril for my children, or myself, beyond the random fluctuations of violence and happenstance.

What I see, while reading Beyond a Boundary, is that a system will grind one down in ways unrecognizable to those who flourish under such laws and mores. When the people who make the rules (of society, as in sport, the rules are built through arbitrage of vested parties) can lacquer and gild them in such a way to favor themselves, everyone must deal with the idiosyncrasies that arise. Society generates all the froth that washes over the people not upon the beach. Kids will hurt strangers to seek cohesion from gang initiation rituals. Middle-aged office workers are impelled to risk toddlers to make their 9:30am meeting. Individual actors take the blame or the credit for their individual actions, but those actions are chosen in response to social forces large and uncontrolled. How useful is it to be able to hit a small ball with a thin bat, if that’s not part of the game?

A book like Beyond emphasizes how a system abstracted down to components (sport) contrasts with a system predicated by its exclusions (society). It unobscures the arbitrary inherent in who thrives and who flounders:

The conversation broke up, leaving me somewhat bewildered. “They are no better than we.” I knew we were man for man as good as anybody. I had known that since my schooldays. But if that were the truth, it was not the whole truth. The year before I left, the internal contradictions of this seductive generalization had been laid bare. England went off the gold standard and some local patriots proposed that the Legislature vote a sum of money to send to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thus we would show our loyalty to helping to mitigate England’s difficulties. An Englishman wrote a furious letter to the Press, denouncing the proposal. In England, he said, the children were getting free lunches, free rides to school, many children in the West Indies had no lunches and no schools. This started off an acrid discussion on the educational opportunities of children in England as compared to ours. As a lecturer at the Teachers’ Training College, I knew the ratio of opportunity was somewhere about ten to one. If with all that they were still no better than we, then either we were very good indeed or they were very bad. To say that all we needed was the opportunity, was to say nothing. It was precisely the opportunity that only a few of us got. Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement; not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.

Beyond a Boundary is clever, more clever than almost any piece of non-fiction I have read. It weaves sport and history, culture and condition together like a puzzle. It appears as though the author doesn’t need to do much work because the revelations clear: the book is uncovering, rather than coalescing, that which comprises the world. It appears that way, in the way that professional training can make physical feats of astonishment appear simple: the ease of gameday belies the labor of practice.

If one takes the time to study an unknown foreign alphabet, one might begin to intuit how an American kindergartener might view reading and writing in English. When one doesn’t know cricket, one might begin to intuit how it would feel to enter the Westernized global capital marketplace after a childhood spent on the fringes of the Imperial core. The rules feel arbitrary, the meanings look natural for others while the point of what one is doing nearly vanishes in the constant thrum of particular vagueries:

In the Lancashire League Constantine developed it to a finished and elaborated method. In his own opinion the finest innings of his career was played against Sidneu Barnes in the league with all the dice loaded against him. Barnes pinned him down. To score he had to get the leg-break away through two short-legs and force the off-break through two gullys. Against the break all the time.

I personally happen to love playing the “not-knowing” game , so I was prepared to walk into a book about cricket, about the politics of the West Indies, about the 1920s to the 1950s, ready to muddle through. What I was less prepared for was the strength and clarity of the writing–try reading a non-fiction book from the 1980s and ‘90s and tell me the voice and style aren’t so desiccated as to be nigh unreadable–but being bathed in a book where you can’t quite figure out what is happening is not the same as making one’s way through a world of shifting cultural norms.

The writing is superb, the detailing on topics I know nothing about is mysteriously compelling, but it was through the instantiations of justice that Beyond a Boundary continuously made its biggest mark on me:

Any West Indian who took one glimpse at [Constantine’s] father would know that somewhere in his ancestry, and not too far back, there was European blood. The Constantines, however, were black people. Off the cricket field the family prestige would not be worth very much. Constantine was of royal ancestry in cricket, but in ordinary life, though not a pauper, he was no prince. This contrast explains not all, but much.

The flip between the agree-upon conditions of success or failure in sport, in a lazier book, would have made a nice clean contrast to the shifting sand of modern society. Instead, we get the steady encroachment of matériel from outside of games muddling the appearance of equalization:

Constantine, the heir-apparent, the happy warrior, the darling of the crowd, prize pupil of the captain of the West Indies, had revolted against the revolting contrast between his first-class status as a cricketer and his third-class status as a man.

Constantine, consummate cricketer, could not obtain leave from his work to tour abroad with the national team. Beyond a Boundary shows us, time and again, that the boundary between society and anything else is porous, no matter how insulated one attempts to make it. No game or sport is free from the prevailing cultural ethos, from Greek tragedy to American Football: while playing, players may be isolated in their chosen fields and audiences may mingle in the bleachers, but when the the theater closes everyone has to go back to their role in the world.

Reacting to fluctuations in happenstance, good and bad coincidence, poor individual choices and outcomes are not the path toward justice. The structure of the world, much like the structure of sport, or any game, is predicated by material condition. Who has what, and why? What are the rules we have agreed upon, and how do they impact every person?

When a single outcome from the single event might be unjust, a book like Beyond the Boundary can place that moment in larger, more meaningful context. Is your hurt a fluke, or is it baked into the system? Is this person scooting on the sidewalk because the bike lane has three übers and a doordash scooter idling in it? What it means to play a game can not ever be a microcosm of society, because the game is, as everything must be, part of society, no matter how uniquely designed or isolated it may seem. “What do they know of cricket, who only cricket know?” What do they know of justice, who only justice know? The moments of injustice I have faced are a bad inning; some people never get the chance to hold a bat. No one is free until all are free, and sport is no exception.