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so often that Flora, one of the older cousins who often took care of him, shortened it and started calling him “Momen.” To his family and Puerto Rican friends, at school and on the ball fields,Momen was his nickname from then on.
    The sprawl of metropolitan San Juan eventually would reach Carolina and turn much of it into a noisy jumble of auto shops and storefronts, but it was a very different place, slow and pastoral, during Roberto’s childhood in the thirties and forties. The choke of urban life seemed far away. There was an orange grove across the street from the Clemente house, and in the other direction, behind them, a lane led back to vast fields of sugarcane. Road 887 saw little traffic, so quiet that Roberto and his childhood friend Ricardo Vicenti, who lived across the way near the orange trees, spent much of their time playing improvised variations of baseball in the dusty street. Baseball was Roberto’s favorite sport, his obsession, from an early age. “When I was a littlekid, the only thing I used to do was play ball all the time,” Clemente recalled during an interview decades later. “With a paper ball, with a rubber ball, with a tennis ball.” Sometimes the ball was a tin can, emptied of beans or tomato sauce, or a lumpy sphere made of string and old rags. Often, they hit fungoes using a broomstick as the bat and a bottle cap as the ball. But it was always baseball. Rosa Semprit, a neighbor who walked by the Clemente house on her way to school, remembered that every time she saw Roberto outside he was throwing something; even if he was alone, he would be tossing a ball against a wall.
    There was not that much else for a boy to do in the barrio of San Antón. The beaches of the Atlantic were ten miles north, and El Yunque, the exotic rainforest, stood fifteen miles further east. On a clear day, the breeze carried a scent of saltwater from one direction and the mountains were visible in another, but without a car both were too far away. Many years, the lone trip to the beach as a family came on the Fourth of July, when much of the neighborhood traveled by bus caravan to Isla Verde for the day. For local entertainment, movies were projected onto a wall inside a ranch house down the street. Children attended in packs and sat on hard wooden benches, laughing at grainy movies, a few from Hollywood but most in Spanish and produced in Mexico, black-and-white short films starring the comedian Cantinflas.
    The adults walked to work.Melchor was a regular figure along the back roads, a short man with straw hat and machete, trooping miles at a time to the fields to the west or processing plant to the north, occasionally riding an old country mare. In later years, he also carried a .38 revolver and transistor radio wherever he went. Radios were a family trademark. Melchor was a man of habits, like his son. He was said to eat precisely eight hard-boiled eggs a day. He was gone from dawn until after nightfall, so his children did not see much of him, though Roberto, as an adult, spoke nostalgically of family gatherings that included Melchor. He grew up, Clemente once said, “with people who really had to struggle.” His mother never went to a show, never learned how to dance. “But even the way we used to live, I was so happy, because my brothers and my father and mother, we used to get together at night and we would sit down and make jokes and eat whatever we have to eat. And this was something that was wonderful tome.” His older brother Justino, known to the family as Matino, had one memory less wonderful. His father was loving, but also strict, and punished the boys with a horsewhip. Melchor gave his sons this advice about nonviolence: “Don’t hit anyone, but don’t let anyone hit you, either. I’d prefer to see you in jail than in a coffin.” There was a tradition of dueling in Carolina that stretched back into the nineteenth century and was reflected in one of the town’s old nicknames, El Pueblo