Jackie Robinson (25 page)

The most unkind cuts came from whites who opposed the ban but saw Jack as the wrong choice. In the New York
Daily News,
columnist Jimmy Powers declared that with the flood of returning talent Robinson “
will not make the grade in the big leagues next year or the next if percentages mean anything.… Robinson is a 1000-to-1 shot to make the grade.” The future Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, who had played in one exhibition game against Jack, “
couldn’t foresee any future” for him; a football player, Robinson was “tied up in the shoulders and couldn’t hit an inside pitch to save his neck. If he were a white man I doubt they would even consider him as big league material.” (In fact, Robinson had doubled once in two at-bats against Feller in a barnstorming game earlier that year.)

The Monarch owners threatened to fight the signing as a violation of Jack’s contract with them. “
We won’t take it lying down,” J. L. Wilkinson fumed to the Associated Press. “Robinson signed a contract with us last year and I feel that he is our property.” Wilkinson, who had previously attacked Rickey for venturing into black baseball, snapped again: “
Rickey is no Abraham Lincoln or FDR and we won’t accept him as dictator of Negro baseball.” Standing up in support of the property rights of the Negro leagues owners were the venerable owner of the Washington Senators, Clark Griffith, and the Yankee general manager, Larry MacPhail, both of whom profited mightily from renting their parks to black teams. “
The Negro league is entitled to full recognition as a full-fledged baseball organization,” Griffith declared.

But when the black press rallied behind Robinson and the Dodgers, the Monarchs backed off. Rickey himself gave no quarter: “There is no
Negro league as such, as far as I am concerned.” Without contracts, and with several eastern clubs in the hands of numbers kings, the leagues “are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them.” He then created a further sensation in New York by revealing that his scouts had turned up some twenty-five Negro players who, as the press reported, could play in either the major or minor leagues, “
and who are being lined up by the Brooklyn executive to play with the Dodgers or their farm clubs.” “I have never meant to be a crusader,” he insisted, “and I hope I won’t be regarded as one. My purpose is to be fair to all people, and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.” A day or so later, under severe pressure from other blacks, the president of the Negro American League, J. B. Martin, lauded Rickey to the skies: “
I feel that I speak the sentiments of 15 million Negroes in America who are with you one hundred per cent, and will always remember the day and date of this great event.”

With the barnstorming tour of Venezuela delayed by its organizers, Jack remained in New York. There, he saw much of Rachel, who was rooming with Janice Brooks in Harlem next door to the YMCA on 135th Street. The room was in an apartment rented by a family long known to Rachel’s mother. But Rachel’s adventure was not going well. The family treated the girls like roomers, not friends; they were included in nothing. They also had to eat out. Looking for work as a nurse, Rachel had been asked to sign a one-year contract; instead, she took a job on the East Side at a fancy restaurant that exotically used young black women as hostesses. Teetering on high heels and wearing a slinky silk dress, Rachel escorted customers to their tables. The job soon lost its appeal, especially after she found out that the restaurant would not serve blacks. Rachel then signed on to work at the Hospital for Joint Diseases, but also made time to shop for her trousseau. At Saks on Fifth Avenue she had found something really nice—a hammered-satin gown sewn by hand from prewar fabric; a matching ivory-tinted veil adorned with seed pearls; and a pair of dyed shoes. To her surprise, Saks allowed her to pay for all this treasure on layaway.

These weeks shared by Rachel and Jack in Manhattan were invaluable; the city brought them closer together. But they saw it with different eyes, especially when they looked around Harlem. With his Army and Negro leagues experience, Jack had often known blacks en masse; to Rachel, the sheer vitality and depth of the Negro community on the teeming streets and the crowded subways were a revelation. She found such human density inspiring but also daunting; Jack moved more easily in the volatile mix. As a fellow Californian, he understood her sense of distance from this scene, but it was important to him that they both bridge the gap between
themselves and the mass of black people, with whom Jack readily identified despite their differences.

This difference was not the sort of thing they talked about. Rachel lived and relived in her imagination her reactions to the world. Jack would not talk about his feelings, or even analyze them aloud, for her to hear. But he had a strong sense of knowing who he was, of being unassailable, invulnerable, especially where the color of his skin was concerned. He was satisfied with his constant anger at injustice, although also satisfied that he could control it. Rachel began to think of them as complementing one another. Her identity was fluid; his was a rock. He was impulsive, she was organized and practical. They could help one another; they did help one another. What they needed was a chance, and this was what Rickey and white baseball were offering, although neither Jack nor Rachel knew for sure what lay ahead.

Late in the autumn, now the best-known black baseball player in the world, Jack left for Venezuela. Apart from his quick trip to Montreal, this was his first journey outside the United States. He needed to make some money for his coming wedding, but above all he needed to hone his baseball skills for the coming challenge. In the latter task, his barnstorming teammates certainly could help him. A brilliant group, they included the catcher and outfielder Roy Campanella of the Baltimore Elite Giants (who was quietly signed by the Dodgers on his return from Venezuela); the first baseman Buck Leonard; Jesse Williams at second; Parnell Woods at third; the catcher Quincy Trouppe; and one of Jack’s partners in the Fenway Park farce, Sam Jethroe. The pitchers included the talented Roy Welmaker of the Homestead Grays and Verdell Mathis of the Memphis Red Sox. In addition, the team included such stalwarts as Felton Snow, Marvin Barker, and Gene Benson of the Philadelphia Stars. Their schedule called for twenty-four games, played mainly in the capital, Caracas.

Jack was now the center of attention, with almost every move magnified both by the hopes and dreams many people invested in him and by the envy and resentment he stirred in others. Reaching down like a white God among the Negro leaguers, Branch Rickey had picked—a rookie! The fact that the rookie was almost twenty-seven years old mattered little. Hilton Smith echoed the sentiments of many players when he declared spitefully about Robinson that “
it all came down to this, he had played with white boys, he had played football with white boys.” These older Negro leaguers had good reason to be bitter. Soon, the leagues would be finished, destroyed by integration. “
We’d get 300 people in a game,” Buck Leonard would say. “We couldn’t even draw flies.”

Jack found himself caught in a tight place. He had immense confidence in his athletic skills, but hardly wanted to make enemies of people who
sought to help him. Inevitably he did, at least according to a few observers. One writer about the Negro leagues would describe the strenuous efforts of his teammates on the Venezuelan tour to help Robinson but also declared that he “
did not like being tutored by the self-made Negro leaguers.” Quincy Trouppe recalled: “
One day Felton Snow tried to talk to Jackie, about the right way to handle a certain play at shortstop, and Jackie really talked to him bad.” However, Jack’s roommate on the tour, Gene Benson, offered a far more favorable picture. Robinson was “
just a swell person. I had been told he was controversial and used to get involved in fisticuffs all the time. But when we started rooming together, I didn’t see any of that.”

On January 4, after about ten weeks in Venezuela, Jack returned by airplane to Miami, then took a train north to New York City and a reunion there with Rachel. He also visited Branch Rickey in the hospital, where he was confined with heart problems. The following Thursday, January 10, Jack and Rachel boarded a train and left for Los Angeles. His preoccupation now was the coming wedding, for which he had flubbed his first assignment. He had gone to Venezuela with Rachel’s design for her ring; losing the sketch, he had come back with a botched version that left her almost in tears. On his own, he had bought her an alligator-skin bag. Rachel beamed with delight, but her most charitable thought was that, given time, it yet might become fashionable. Last of all, Jack offered a wooden jewelry chest, hand carved. This gift she genuinely liked.

In California, they found preparations for their wedding in high gear. Zellee Isum had married twice, but never in a traditional ceremony. Now, with her own mother’s help, she was making up for her lost chances. Bypassing her Bethel AME Church as far too small, she secured the Independent Church of Christ across town, reputedly the largest black church in Los Angeles. “
It was my mother’s show from start to finish,” Rachel would admit. “Jack wanted a small, intimate wedding, and so did I. What she had in mind was much more like a pageant, an extravaganza. I was glad to make her happy in this way. She chose my silver, my crystal, my china. She wanted me to have all these fine things she had never had. I didn’t fight very hard. I guess I wanted them too.”

On Sunday afternoon, February 10, Jack and Rachel were married by the Reverend Karl Downs, who had come from Austin to perform the ceremony. The church was packed with family and friends. Ray Bartlett, who had introduced the couple in the late summer of 1940, was away, still in the Army; but on Jack’s side of the church, in addition to his mother and other members of his family, were his best man, Jack Gordon, and Jack’s wife, Bernice, who had eloped to Yuma, Arizona, in 1942. There were Sid and Eleanor Heard, who had been married by Karl Downs before he left
Pasadena. UCLA was well represented by a group including Jack’s old football coach Babe Horrell, the graduate manager Bill Ackerman, and Bob and Blanche Campbell.

As Jack, decked out in his rented formal wear, waited for Rachel to arrive, he was visibly nervous, restless and tightly strung. At last the organ sounded for the bride’s entrance and Rachel entered, escorted by her older brother, Chuck Williams, who was now fully recovered from his war wounds. As Rachel drew near, Jack’s nervousness reached a fever pitch. Holding Jack Gordon’s hand tightly in his own, he looked around, caught a glimpse of Rachel in her veiled satin splendor, then did a double-take that made the church erupt in laughter. Rachel was mortified. And then Jack Gordon couldn’t find the ring! Finally he located it, and Karl Downs finished the ceremony by pronouncing Jack and Rachel man and wife. “
It was a lovely wedding,” Bob Campbell recalled.

Now Jack’s nervousness fell away, and with it whatever sense of nuptial etiquette he had brought to the church. Halfway down the aisle, he abandoned Rachel to exchange whoops and hollers with his old friends from Pasadena. Angry but determined, Rachel completed her walk down the aisle alone.

At the reception and dinner at Rachel’s home, when the time came for the couple to slip away, their car could not be found: Gordon and his cronies had hidden it. Finally, after several hours, Jack and Rachel were allowed to leave.

Across town, they attempted to check in, as planned, at the Clark Hotel on Central Avenue, the only black hotel in Los Angeles. A reservation? What reservation? Jack Gordon had forgotten to make one.

They were shown to a room in the annex of the hotel. Inside, Rachel looked expectantly for a bouquet of flowers, but found none. She could have sulked; instead, she found herself laughing, and happy to be there, at long last, with her husband. “
I could feel all my resistance to marriage falling away. I could feel all my anxiety about sex falling away.” A few days before, they had finally had sex together. But Jack had little experience and Rachel none, and the event had left her so upset she had gone to see a doctor.

“But now, suddenly, my fears seemed to have no foundation. It suddenly felt so right to be there, with Jack in that room, knowing we would now be together all the time, forever and ever. Really, when the door closed, I felt that all my troubles had melted away, and that a wonderful new life was beginning for Jack and for me.”

T
HE DAY AFTER THEIR
wedding, Jack and Rachel left Los Angeles for San Jose, just south of San Francisco Bay, to spend what they hoped would be a quiet, blissful honeymoon at the home of one of Rachel’s aunts, who would be away. But their stay turned out to be less than idyllic, although they were deeply in love and happy to be alone together at last. When neither Rachel nor Jack could master the wood-burning stove, her plans for elegant little meals for two fell apart; “
I also compulsively spent more time washing and cleaning than having fun.” Nervous about his coming ordeal, Jack was restless. San Jose was too quiet for his taste; when some pals from Pasadena showed up suddenly, he welcomed them. The couple took in a Harlem Globetrotters basketball game in San Jose, then crossed the bay to Oakland to visit Maxine Robinson, Frank’s widow, who was now living there with their children. Then Jack and Rachel cut short their honeymoon and headed back to Los Angeles to prepare for the biggest challenge of his life—and Rachel’s, too. At Rickey’s insistence, she would be the only wife allowed in the Dodgers camp in Daytona Beach, Florida, that spring.