He had injured his knee and had fallen to quarreling with Manager Yogi Berra.

Then, while he was in Florida rehabilitating, the police found Jones fully clothed and asleep in his van with a white woman. He had been driving her home when the van ran out of gas. The Mets chairman, M. Donald Grant, an imperious stockbroker, forced Jones to bring his wife to a news conference and apologize, a moment skin-crawling in its grotesquerie and racial overtones. Jones was released from the team not longer after, and retired the next year.

He has long ago made his peace with the club.

We lingered over lunch at Catfish Junction, dining on fried catfish and po’ boys and turnips, and drove back into Africatown. Of late, archaeologists have pulled the wood bones of what is almost certainly the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the Americas in 1860, off the floor of the Mobile River. The white slavers secreted their slaves — an illicit cargo as the importation of slaves was then illegal — in what is now known as Africatown.

Those black slaves later governed the town according to African custom. Jones and his community group are working to build an Africatown visitor’s center and to get new roofs and houses and attract younger black homeowners.

Jones is 76; time is not an endless river. Charles and Clendenon have died, and his friend Agee died much too young of a heart attack at 58. “They knock on his door at 10 p.m. and off he go,” his wife, Angela, says. “You have to do what God tells your heart to do.”

Jones nods. He will in a few days journey to New York to take part in the 50th anniversary celebration of that long ago championship.

“I have already lived a dream where I had to keep pinching myself and asking if this is real,” he said. “I have a chance to rebuild Africatown, the most historic black settlement in Alabama. We’ve had times of despair but life, it’s good. We move in all lanes now.”