Jackie Robinson (30 page)

Hustling to leave the ballpark in time to catch a plane, Jack made the mistake of stepping back onto the field before he could shower and change. Deliriously happy Montreal fans snatched him up in celebration. Previously, they had lifted Clay Hopper and a white player to their shoulders. Now, hugging and kissing Robinson, slapping him on the back, they carried him on their shoulders in triumph, singing songs of victory, until he was finally able to break away. Watching, the veteran writer Dink Carroll of the
Gazette
began to cry: “
The tears poured down my cheeks and you choked up looking at it.” Inside the locker room, Hopper warmly shook his hand. “
You’re a great ballplayer and a fine gentleman,” he told Jack. “It’s been wonderful having you on the team.” When Robinson reappeared outside in street clothes, a large part of the crowd was still waiting. “
They stormed around him, eager to touch him,” the
Gazette
reported. Knowing exactly what he had accomplished over the season, they sang in tribute, “
Il a gagné ses épaulettes
”—He has earned his stripes; “they almost ripped the clothes from his back.” In the
Courier,
his friend Sam Maltin wrote memorably of the astonishing scene: “
It was probably the only day in history that a black man ran from a white mob with love instead of lynching on its mind.”

From De Lorimer Downs, Jack and Rachel rushed to the airport and caught a flight to Detroit, where they parted ways. He went on to join a barnstorming team on a tour that would end in California. In the last month of her pregnancy, she returned directly to Los Angeles, to her mother’s home on West 36th Place.

On November 18, Jack was at her side when their son was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles. The delivery was relatively easy; their baby boy was healthy in every respect. His parents named him Jack Roosevelt Robinson Jr. For Jack and Rachel, his coming was a miracle that left them euphoric. Jackie’s birth capped the most tumultuous year of his father’s life to that point. And yet Jack and others knew that the coming year, 1947, might yet surpass the astonishing year that had just ended. In Los Angeles, he waited for the call that might summon him to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the major leagues.

A
T
T
HANKSGIVING DINNER
in Los Angeles, Jack was grateful for his new blessings, thrilled by the presence of his infant son, Jackie Junior, and surrounded by women who adored him: his wife, Rachel; his mother-in-law, Zellee; and Zellee’s mother, Annetta Jones, who was now living with her daughter on 36th Place. With Jackie Junior the first child born into their family in twenty-five years, Zellee and Annetta doted on father and son. Jack and Rachel were living in cramped conditions, and the future was by no means certain; but Jack felt a substantial debt to God as he led his new family in prayer at Thanksgiving in November 1946.

He was happy, but also short on cash. Robinson’s brief barnstorming adventure had yielded him nothing; according to Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey’s assistant, “
the promoters—Negro, at that—succeeded in swindling him out of his net profits.” Jack had returned from the road with a fat bundle of checks totaling about $3,500, but almost all of them had bounced. With the aid of Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP he pressed his creditors, a Pittsburgh group, but the pressure yielded only promises. Unwillingly, he had then signed a contract for fifty dollars a game to play basketball with a local professional team, the Los Angeles Red Devils.

Here, as in baseball, Jim Crow was an issue. While the leading professional league, the Basketball Association of America, barred blacks, the Rochester Royals of the upstart National Basketball League, taking a cue
from Rickey, had just signed their first black players, William “Dolly” King and William “Pop” Gates, both formerly of the elite all-black New York Renaissance team. (Because of racial friction, Rochester dropped both men the following season. Three years passed before another black played.) In Los Angeles, the Red Devils, seeking admission to the NBL, hired Robinson and two other black players for its otherwise white squad. Shifting gears smoothly from baseball, Jack played well. Against the visiting Sheboygan Redskins, he was the top scorer in a Red Devils victory; in a nonleague game, the Red Devils also defeated the Renaissance team. By early December, the Red Devils had won eight games and lost only once. To local blacks, this success was an important victory for racial integration. “
Even if you don’t care for basketball,” a black sportswriter urged his readers, “see them anyhow, if only to get a real glimpse of a team that practices interracial harmony with real success.”

Despite his solid play, Robinson’s stint with the Red Devils ended suddenly in early December. Quite possibly, he was injured in a game and quit rather than risk a disaster. He had a particularly rough time against the Chicago American Gears, whose commanding center, George Mikan, would later be voted the most dominant basketball player of the half-century. Jack’s friend Jack Gordon, present at these games, recalled how Mikan and the Gears “
put a real hurting on Jack; they left him dizzy.” But Jack may have quit basketball after a freak accident on a golf course in Los Angeles, when his back suddenly gave out in the middle of a swing. In addition, Branch Rickey, visiting Los Angeles early in December for a round of baseball meetings, met with Robinson and perhaps convinced him to give up basketball. Through a black boyhood friend and former teammate, Walter Worrill of the Pasadena YMCA, Jack then made several appearances as a speaker before groups of black, white, and Mexican youths in Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Phoenix, Arizona. In January, a journalist who watched him interact with his young audience reported that “
to say that Robinson inspired the boys is to put it mildly.”

Nevertheless, the thought uppermost in Jack’s mind early in 1947 was his possible promotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers. On this matter, Rickey had been planning and scheming. Near the end of the Dodgers’ season, claiming that Montreal needed Jack’s services, he had rebuffed calls to bring Robinson up for the National League pennant race. Now, in January, an Associated Press poll of sports editors established that the major question of 1947 was whether or not Jackie Robinson would be promoted; a symposium on this issue in the weekly
Sporting News
took up an entire page. Of the top ten hitters in the International League in 1946, only Robinson had not moved up to the majors. But Rickey refused to be rushed. “
I have made
every move with great deliberation,” he reminded a reporter. “If Robinson merits being with the Dodgers, I’d prefer to have the players want him, rather than force him on the players. I want Robinson to have the fairest chance in the world without the slightest bit of prejudice.”

Carefully, Jack followed Rickey’s plan, as he told a reporter: “
I guess Mr. Rickey wants to see if last season was just lucky for me, which I don’t blame him.” Rickey, if not Robinson, was aware of the deep opposition to Jack’s promotion among the single most important group in baseball—the team owners, who in a secret ballot had voted fifteen to one (with Rickey alone dissenting) against integration. One year after Jack’s historic signing, no owner had followed suit. Undeterred, Rickey took a significant step: he moved 1947 spring training for the Dodgers and Royals away from the Jim Crow South to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Panama. He also sought to channel and control the surging black interest in Robinson’s future. This interest, Rickey believed, could wreck his plan if it served to antagonize whites. Consulting a number of black leaders, including Herbert T. Miller, the executive secretary of the Carlton Avenue branch of the YMCA in Brooklyn, Rickey arranged for Miller to invite more than thirty black New Yorkers to a working dinner. At that time, according to Miller’s invitation, the group would discuss with Rickey “
the things which are on his mind as well as ours, in connection with projection of what seems to be the inevitable.”

On the raw, cold evening of February 5, after breaking bread with the group, Rickey laid out his brazen thesis that the major threat to Jackie Robinson’s success—“
the
one
enemy most likely to ruin that success—is the Negro people themselves!” Painting a garish picture of the worst scenario he could imagine after Robinson’s promotion (just as he had done in his first meeting with Jack), he lashed out at his astonished audience. “You’ll strut. You’ll wear badges,” he told the blacks. “You’ll hold Jackie Robinson Days … and Jackie Robinson Nights. You’ll get drunk. You’ll fight. You’ll be arrested. You’ll wine and dine the player until he is fat and futile. You’ll symbolize his importance into a national comedy … and an ultimate tragedy—yes, tragedy!” Above all, Rickey wanted nobody to use Jack’s triumph as “a symbol of social ‘ism’ or schism,” or, indeed, as “a triumph of race over race.” Many in the audience, which included doctors and lawyers, must have been taken aback by such language, which Rickey himself called cruel; but his obvious sincerity, the directness of his appeal, and their pathetic lack of power within the world he represented won them over. Through the black press and churches, the word went out about the need for moderation at this crucial hour.

Around February 20, leaving Rachel and Jackie Junior behind, Jack flew to New York. There, according to Roy Campanella, he boarded an Atlantic
Seaboard train headed south for Miami. With him were the three other black prospects, including Campanella, now in the Dodger organization. Campanella had been Jack’s teammate in Venezuela in 1945, then had played with Nashua in 1946. At Nashua, under manager Walter Alston, Campanella was hailed as the outstanding catcher and voted the Most Valuable Player in the league, as his team won the league championship. Also at Nashua and now on the train heading south was the six-foot-four-inch pitcher Don Newcombe, who had won sixteen games. The last of the four players was a left-handed pitcher, Roy Partlow, a thirty-six-year-old former Negro-leagues star. Signed the previous season by the Royals after they demoted Johnny Wright in the Dodgers’ farm system, Partlow had pitched inconsistently for Montreal. Sent down to join Wright, he had then overwhelmed the opposition and was now getting another chance with the Royals.

Once again, Jack reported to training camp seething about Jim Crow. Arriving in Havana, he was stunned to learn that the black players would be quartered away from not only the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were at the luxurious Hotel Nacional overlooking the Caribbean, but also the other Royals. While the white Royals would live and train at the National Military Academy, a spanking-new boarding school for the Cuban elite about fifteen miles out of the city, the four black players were to make do in a shabby downtown hotel. At first, Jack angrily blamed the Cuban government for insisting on Jim Crow; but the idea was Rickey’s. “
I was told that he felt his plans for us were on the threshold of success,” Robinson wrote later, “and he didn’t want a possible racial incident to jeopardize his program. I reluctantly accepted the explanation.” Such a racial incident might involve white Cubans; more likely, white American tourists, many of whom insisted on segregation in local hotels and nightclubs, would cause trouble. “
I can’t afford to take a chance and have a single incident occur,” Rickey informed Robinson. “This training session must be perfectly smooth.”

Buttoning up his anger, Jack was soon complaining of various ailments. He had stomach trouble, which could be blamed, at least in part, on unfamiliar food and water, and was treated for dysentery; he needed minor surgery for a growth on one of his toes; and he saw a leading Havana doctor after his back seized up painfully in a recurrence of his golfing injury. On top of this catalog of troubles, he had arrived thirty pounds over his ideal playing weight. Working hard under the tropical sun, Jack began to shed this flab as he made ready for the crucial test: twelve games between the Royals and the Dodgers before the major-league season. Three games were to be played in Panama, seven in Cuba, and the last two at Ebbets Field.

As the Royals prepared to fly to Panama, the second baseman faced a new challenge. One day, without warning, the Royals’ general manager,
Mel Jones, paid a clubhouse custodian fifteen dollars for a used first baseman’s mitt and tossed it to Jack. Taken aback by this move, Robinson balked; he had never played first base competitively. But when Jones informed him that the idea was Mr. Rickey’s, Jack dutifully slipped on the mitt and caught a few throws. Did it fit? “
I honestly wouldn’t know,” he answered. “I never had one on before. All I know is that the balls stick in there pretty good, and that’s all that counts.”

By this time, most likely, he had caught on to Rickey’s reasoning. With the Dodgers, Pee Wee Reese was a fixture at shortstop; at second, Eddie Stanky ruled. The vacancy in the Dodgers’ infield was at first. (In fact, Rickey had made the move after consulting with the Dodgers’ manager, Leo Durocher.)