Jackie Robinson (6 page)

Not the least of his good luck was the accident of growing up in northwest Pasadena, which was a paradise for sports lovers. An easy walk from home was the cliff looking down on the natural wonder of Arroyo Seco. Within its expanse was the only public golf course in Pasadena, laid out in 1928, when Jack was nine. There, too, was Brookside Park, with its fine array of sporting facilities for baseball, basketball, tennis, and swimming, with only the Brookside Plunge restricted by Jim Crow. Crowning Arroyo Seco like a trophy was the Rose Bowl itself, the most storied arena in California football. Early, Jack began to hone the skills that would make his phenomenal local reputation not simply as an individual star but as a team player. “
When I was in third grade,” he later recalled, “we got a soccer team together that was so good we challenged the sixth grade and beat them. After that, we represented the school in matches.” Completely accurate or not, the story will do to mark the rise of his local reputation as a sportsman, of gifts both physical and mental, from which all the important achievements of his life would flow in time.

But sports could not save him from all distress. He entered his perilous teenage years at the lowest point of the Great Depression. Black Pasadena, including the household at 121 Pepper Street, felt its pain at once. Few white
people could now afford to keep servants, and then seldom at the old pay; moreover, Mallie was now the only reliable wage earner in the household, since white men were snapping up jobs they once had left in disdain to blacks and other colored folk. To Jack’s dismay, Mallie also insisted on trying to help other people. Living with her at 121 Pepper Street, in addition to her five children and Frank’s wife, Maxine, and their two children, were her niece Jessie Maxwell, the young daughter of Mallie’s sister Mary Lou Thomas Maxwell, who had died prematurely soon after migrating from Cairo. Other relatives and friends came and went, drawing on Mallie’s strength and kindness, often moving on without much of a thank-you, as Jack saw it.

To help her, he took whatever jobs he could manage. He had a paper route, mowed grass for neighbors, and sold hot dogs at ball games in the Rose Bowl. None of these jobs lasted a long time. Young Jack Robinson was not lazy, but he did not like such work; all his life he would not enjoy manual labor. He also began to neglect his studies. For a while, he had loved reading; years later, veteran staffers at the La Pintoresca branch of the Pasadena Public Library would remember him as “
a constant user.” But Willa Mae recalled that by junior high school he began to rush into the house after school, drop his books on a table near the telephone, and hurry out to play. The next morning, he would pick up the books, unread, on the way out to school. By Jack’s high school years, as a star athlete, he was coasting as a student, as his friend Ray Bartlett recalled, perhaps too severely: “
I used to be a pretty good student. Jack wasn’t a good scholar at all. He wasn’t worth a damn. They just carried him through.” In time, Jack would regret this inattentiveness to his studies and try to make up for the lost opportunity.

In other ways, too, he began to change. Despite his success in sports and the adulation it inspired, as he grew older he became less and less open. Outside of his tight circle of close friends, his boyish charm cooled uneasily with adolescence into a sometimes awkward shyness, which he covered more and more with a show of truculence. Now, at a time when many boys of his age were warming to girls, he wanted nothing to do with them. “
I guess I was a little afraid of my ability to cope with women,” he would recall at thirty. “I can’t tell you for the life of me why I worried about it so much.” When the prettiest girl (or so he thought) at Washington Junior High, Elizabeth Renfro, approached him, he rebuffed her. “I was too bashful to start conversations,” he would recall, with some embarrassment. “All I did the first time she talked to me was tell her to go jump in the lake! Imagine that!” In his late teens, Jack had become an adolescent mixture of, on the one hand, overweening confidence reinforced by rare exploits as an athlete and, on the other, fragile self-esteem.

His nagging self-doubt probably had much to do with the way he was living. Jack knew he was poorer than most of his friends, and fatherless, and the knowledge hurt. Almost all of his black friends, and some of the whites and Asians, were poor; but nearly all had a father in the house, and most homes had fewer mouths to feed. Jack tried to strut and pretend that money didn’t matter, but “
to tell the truth, I think that behind all this sort of pride was the knowledge that we were very poor.” His cousin Van, the son of Sam and Cora Wade, sensed that Jack “
didn’t have the things that normal families had.” Because Mallie was out all day at work, her household had at best an erratic routine. “We had a dinner time, a breakfast time,” Van recalled; “I don’t think he had that. We got new clothes at Christmas, on birthdays, Easter, when school started, that sort of thing. He didn’t have that. But I think he was really unhappy because he didn’t have a father, and his mother did day work.”

In 1921, according to one account, word had reached Mallie that Jerry Robinson had died, somewhere in the South. Later came reports that, like a black Kilroy, he had been here or there; but Jerry never surfaced. Resigned to the failure of her marriage, Mallie made no attempt to learn the truth, but tried hard not to speak ill of Jerry at home. According to Willa Mae, Mallie once explained that she held back “
because some of us children might decide to take after him; we might figure, Well, that is what my Daddy did, I want to be like my Daddy. So my mother decided not to talk about him.” From Edgar, however, Jack heard about nasty whippings Jerry had given him back in Georgia, and for mere trifles. “Edgar didn’t like our father,” Willa Mae knew; “he said he didn’t want to remember him.” As a child, Jack also saw contempt for Jerry in the attitude of the other boys, Frank and Mack. “
We didn’t know him,” Mack said, “and we did not recognize him or ever consider him being a part of the family.” Willa Mae, too, had closed her heart to Jerry Robinson. “I just didn’t have a father,” she said. “And when I heard about him, I didn’t need him. I didn’t need a father.”

Like Mack, Jack would later deny having had the slightest interest in knowing his father, who was a phantom from the dark, forbidding South that was now forever behind them. But Jack’s character and psychology were undoubtedly shaped in part by this loss and its denial. At least once, late in his life, Jack could be philosophical about his pain. “
My father’s will and spirit,” he reasoned, “were slowly broken down by the economic slavery imposed upon him, the exorbitant costs of food and rent and other necessities.” More typically, however, he was angry and unforgiving about Jerry Robinson and what he had done: “
I could only think of him with bitterness. He, too, may have been a victim of oppression, but he had no right to desert my mother and five children.”

Mallie herself set aside any thought of marrying again, according to Willa Mae, because “
she wasn’t going to have any man whipping her children.” Over the years in Pasadena she had one male friend, known to her children only as “Mr. Fowler,” with whom she was on intimate terms. But he never moved into the house, and she seemed to have no desire to marry him. “As far as I can remember, he was the only man in her life after we came out here.”

As Jack struggled into his teens, his brothers were crucial to him, but not always much of a help. He looked at them and imagined he saw his own future, but the sight was not entrancing. His eldest brother, Edgar, was eccentric at the very least, or a mystery. Although he was “
somewhat sickly sometimes,” according to Jack, Edgar did amazing physical feats on his roller skates and bicycle. Speed fascinated him. Once, police ticketed him for skating at an excessive speed; he was known to terrify onlookers by jumping in his skates over the hoods of cars; he also could outrace the bus from Pasadena to the Santa Monica Beach, some thirty miles away. He started riding a motorcycle, but so recklessly it was taken away from him. Intellectually, Edgar was also a puzzle. He had no formal schooling past the sixth grade, and mainly one intellectual interest—the Bible, from which he quoted chapter and verse with ease. However, to one of Jack’s friends, “
Edgar was mentally retarded. He talked strangely, and he had difficulty with words, getting them out. He was definitely retarded.”

Edgar, who would live to be eighty-four, never married. He lived mainly for his religion, and he died alone, surrounded by sagging shelves of books and recordings about his beloved Bible. To Jack in his youth, his eldest brother was a sometimes friendly, sometimes disturbing presence. “
There was always something about him that was mysterious to me,” Jack declared in 1949. “Maybe it was the way he’d get angry once in a while and lose control of his temper. Something like the way I do.”

Frank was far more mild and sweet-tempered; Jack remembered that he was “
tall and thin and the girls liked him.” Of the three older brothers, Frank alone showed a subtle concern for Jack, who loved the fact that “he was always there to protect me when I was in a scrap, even though I don’t think he could knock down a fly.” And unlike young Jack, Frank was a smooth talker. “He could never be forcibly brutal,” Jack recalled, “and could talk
me
out of any trouble.” In other ways, however, Frank’s life was anything but a model for his younger brother. Frank had done his best in school but then was stopped dead by Jim Crow in Pasadena. He couldn’t find a decent job; around 1936, when he was twenty-five, he finally landed a position as a tree trimmer with the city. By this time he was a married man and a father, but he still was living at his mother’s home.

Despite Frank’s open love of Jack, it was their brother Mack, four and a half years older than Jack, who dominated the youngest child and became his idol, particularly when Jack was in the middle of his teenage years. A star athlete in Pasadena while Jack was still a growing boy, Mack was Jack’s intimate introduction to the glory and the glamour of sports. “
I remember going to track meets with him,” Jack remembered, “and watching him run and listening to the crowd yell.” Unlike Jack, Mack excelled not at team sports but in track and field. He was a sprinter with dramatic speed, especially over 200 meters or 220 yards, where he often started slowly but closed almost any gap with a supercharged rush; he was also a champion broad jumper. In 1932, when Jack was thirteen and the Olympic Games took place in Los Angeles, with some aquatic events contested at the Brookside Plunge, Mack committed himself to a relentless campaign of training. A diagnosis of heart trouble almost ended his career prematurely, but Mack pressed on until he won a place on the U.S. Olympic team in 1936. That summer, in Berlin, as the entire Robinson household heard the crackling radio broadcast of the race from Europe, Mack placed second to Jesse Owens in the 200-meter dash.

After a triumphant post-Olympics tour on the Continent, in which he set a world record in one race, Mack returned to Pasadena. Expecting a hero’s welcome, he got nothing of the kind. Pasadena had a way of ignoring its many sports heroes, black or white. In 1938, a Pasadena
Post
columnist would list several Pasadena sports stars—including Ellsworth Vines, then the world’s top tennis player; Charles Paddock, a white Olympic gold-medal sprinter; and Mack and Jack Robinson—and declare: “
In many places they would be given the key to the city. Here we take them in stride, for granted. Never have they received their just due, from their own home citizens.”

Unquestionably, racism played a big role in what happened to Mack after Berlin. When he applied for a job, the city treated him like any other Negro; it gave him a pushcart and a broom and the night shift as a street sweeper. Mack then irritated a number of white people by sweeping the streets decked out in his leather U.S.A. Olympic jacket. Some saw this act as provocative, but he brushed off the criticism: “
When it was a cold day, it was the warmest thing I owned, so I wore it.” He stayed on the job, unhappy but with few options, for about four years. A handsome man, Mack was said by a few people to be sometimes sullen and difficult; certainly he lacked his mother’s calm in facing racism. Her faith in religion never took hold of him. Mack’s relationship with Jack was also troubled. Mack encouraged his brother but perhaps saw him at times as competition to be crushed. Here, again, he was to be disappointed. As a runner, Jack never had Mack’s great speed, but his legs were at least as powerful. Eventually, Jack would
soar past Mack’s best distance in the broad jump. Still later, his baseball fame would overshadow Mack’s silver strike at the Olympics. Eclipsed, Mack tried to be gracious but could not hide his sense of hurt. “
I think he thought Jack got some breaks that he should have had,” a friend guessed. Mack himself denied ever being jealous; whatever a family member went through, “
we was right there pushing for them, pushing for them and rooting for them to get along.” Jack, he said, “learned by being the youngest of the family to fall into the line of being an individual who was, I guess, following after his brothers.”

In 1940, Mack’s wife, Grace, gave birth to their second son, Phillip. Because of either a congenital defect or a childhood illness, Phillip was mentally retarded and never learned to speak. When his family moved to put the boy into an institution, Mallie stopped them. “
I will take care of him,” she announced—and she did, until she died. Within a few years of Phillip’s birth, Grace Robinson was dead. In his own days of triumph, Jack would speak cryptically of events in Mack’s past that had “
soured him on life completely, I guess.” That way was not for Jack himself. “I sort of look back at my brother’s experience every once in a while,” he said in 1949, “and resolve to make the best of things.”

In the turmoil of his adolescence, Jack unquestionably felt more and more guilty about his relationship with his mother. He felt guilty that she worked so hard and in such menial jobs to support him and so many others. Then and later he was often impatient with her; he found some of her ways hard to accept: her almost compulsive generosity to relatives, friends, and even strangers; her incessant talking about God; and perhaps other things. At some point in her life Mallie had lost the use of her right eye. Some people said one of the older children (no one knew which one) had poked it out by accident; in any event, it gave her at times a fearsome aspect. As a teenager, Jack understood as praiseworthy many aspects of his mother’s moral heroism, but that heroism came clothed in a shabbiness that seemed unlikely to end, when he himself wanted to have more. Jack’s sense of discomfort, his mixture of affection, guilt, and perhaps even a degree of shame, did not mean that he failed to love his mother, only that he was young, a boy striving to understand the true nature of the pact Mallie had made with the world. Decades later, just after her death in 1968, he would look back on her with a lifetime of experience and open eyes: “
Many times I felt that my mother was being foolish, letting people take advantage of her. I was wrong. She did kindness[es] for people whom I considered parasites because she wanted to help them. It was her way of thinking, her way of life.” In her life, he came to understand, “she had not been a fool for
others. She had given with her eyes as open as her heart. In death, she was still teaching me how to live.”