Jackie Robinson (28 page)

He then fell into an awful hitting slump. Starting off fairly well in intersquad games, he struggled in his first two games against the Dodgers. He whiffed on the high outside fastballs that were his staple; he tripped over himself lunging at curves and change-ups. For Rachel, this was her introduction to the phenomenon of the slump, which only time ends. Jack knew about slumps, but now he had no way of knowing whether he was merely in one or finally out of his depth. “
We were literally afraid that Jack simply would not make the team,” according to Rachel, “that he would have to be cut in spring training. Every day without a hit made Rickey’s experiment seem more risky.” When the drought ended, an elated Rachel secured entry into Duff Harris’s kitchen; with fresh chickens and vegetables donated by friends at Bethune-Cookman College, she served a victory dinner to a happy gathering of the inner circle, including Wright, Wendell Smith, and Billy Rowe. Exactly when this hit occurred is unclear; but a “perfect” bunt in the seventh inning of a game on March 30, against the St. Paul Saints,
excited the
Courier:
“
ROBINSON GETS A HIT; ROYALS LOSE.” Rickey, parked in a box seat, was nonchalant: “ ‘He’ll hit,’ said Rickey, ‘and he’ll be quite a ball player. I’m sure of that.’ ”

To many blacks, watching Robinson struggle was deeply upsetting; they felt their race’s suffering in his ordeal. That month, Sam Lacy of the Baltimore
Afro-American
wrote of him as “
a man in a goldfish bowl.” “Under these circumstances,” Lacy confessed, “it is easy to see why I felt a lump in my throat each time a ball was hit in his direction in those first few days; why I experienced a sort of emptiness in the bottom of my stomach whenever he took a swing in batting practice. I was constantly in fear of his muffing an easy roller under the stress of things. And I uttered a silent prayer of thanks as, with closed eyes, I heard the solid whack of Robinson’s bat against the ball.” Lacy found himself “amazed at Jackie’s total lack of self-consciousness.” Jack was “easy-going, quiet, unaffected and intelligent. He makes friends easily.”

His enemies were also legion. On March 21, word came that Jacksonville, about fifty percent black, forbade Robinson and Wright to play in an exhibition game at Durkee Field against the Jersey City Giants, a farm club of the New York Giants. An official of the Playground and Recreational Commission explained: “
It is part of the rules and regulations of the Recreational Department that Negroes and whites cannot compete against each other on a city-owned playground.” Clay Hopper, under orders from Rickey, declared his intention of playing Robinson there “unless I get official notice not to.” When the notice came, he canceled the game—to the disappointment of the Giants, who wanted the Royals to leave Robinson home. “
We lived up to our agreement,” Rickey made clear. “The city of Jacksonville and the Jersey City Club are responsible for whatever happened.”

A week later, on March 28, when Jacksonville canceled another Royals game, its decision stiffened the backbone of other cities. On April 5, the Royals announced that they had been forced to cancel three additional games—another in Jacksonville, one in Savannah, Georgia, and a third in Richmond, Virginia. In addition, a game planned for April 10 at De Land, Florida, had to be moved to Daytona Beach; local officials claimed that the stadium lights were not working. Jack mused: “
What this had to do with the fact that the game was to be played in the daytime, no one bothered to explain.”

The reaction spread further. On Sunday, April 7, at Sanford, which previously had chased out Robinson and Wright, the Royals began a scheduled game against the St. Paul Saints before about one hundred spectators. In the second inning, Jack singled, then scored on a base hit after stealing second.
He was about to step onto the field for the third inning when the local chief of police (“
Vicious old man Jim Crow,” Wendell Smith wrote) ordered Hopper to remove Robinson or risk prosecution. Hopper replaced him.

The cancellations and disruptions were financially costly to the club and bad for team morale, but Rickey was ready to pay the price. According to the Pittsburgh
Courier,
he answered the offended cities with defiance: “
Without Robinson and Wright, there’ll be no games!” He insisted on official notification, on letterhead stationery, concerning all cancellations; he refused to take the initiative and stay away, or to find excuses to bench his black players. Instead, he pressed on. The Dodgers announced the signing of twenty-five-year-old Roy Campanella, the best-hitting catcher in the Negro leagues, and Don Newcombe, twenty-two, a tall, robust pitcher, and assigned them to Nashua, New Hampshire, in the New England League. (A barrier broke elsewhere. In March, the Los Angeles Rams signed Kenny Washington to break the color bar in football. “
That’s great,” Jack told the press. “He’s a great football player and Los Angeles will make a lot of money with him in the lineup.”)

By this time, despite only fair hitting, Jack had won a place on the Royals, as had John Wright. Early on April 15, Jack and Rachel boarded a special orange-colored train carrying the Montreal Royals to New York City. Thus ended what Wendell Smith in the
Courier
called “
one of the most unique and sensational training sessions in the history of organized baseball.”

I
N
J
ERSEY
C
ITY
, N
EW
J
ERSEY
, the Royals faced the opening of the sixty-fourth season of the International League with only modest hopes. Although Montreal had won the pennant the previous year, 1945, only three players remained from that squad. The team seemed a hodgepodge of faded Dodgers veterans and untested novices, some fresh from the war. “
Poor Hopper,” mused Bruno Betzel, Hopper’s predecessor as manager of the Royals, who was now in charge of the Jersey City Giants—“they’ve sure handed him a wrecked team.”

On April 18, under clear skies and in brilliant sunshine at Roosevelt Stadium, before a capacity opening-day crowd of just over 25,000, with jugglers and tumblers and two marching bands and a seemingly endless parade lorded over by the ebullient mayor, Frank Hague, and with the press box jammed with reporters from every New York City daily and black weekly, all eager to record the historic event, Robinson made his debut.

For him, the moment was fraught with emotion. “
I remember the parades,” Jack would recall, “the brass band’s playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and the marvelous beauty of this ‘day of destiny’ for me. Nothing
else mattered now.” He heard the strains of the national anthem “with a lump in my throat and my heart beating rapidly, my stomach feeling as if it were full of feverish fireflies with claws on their feet.” Meanwhile, Rachel roamed the stands, unable to sit still, elated by the setting but tingling with a free-floating anxiety. She knew that her anxiety was shared by the thousands of blacks who had crossed the river from Harlem or come from Newark and Philadelphia to be a part of history.

In his first at-bat, which came at 3:04 that afternoon, Jack felt weak in his knees and stomach as he heard the mild cheer that greeted his name. Working the pitcher to a full count, he then topped a weak grounder to the Giants’ shortstop, who threw him out with ease. But the next time up, in the third inning, with two men on and the left-hander Warren Sandell expecting him to bunt, Robinson exploded on a fastball chest-high and down the middle. The ball jumped from his bat and carried high and far until it dropped into the left-field stands, more than 340 feet away. As he passed third base Jack beamed at Clay Hopper, who patted him on the back; George Shuba, moving in from the on-deck circle, pumped his hand vigorously as he crossed home plate.

Next, in the fifth inning, Jack set down a dainty bunt that stunned the Giants’ infield, then flashed across first base steps ahead of the throw. He stole second, then went to third unexpectedly, on a groundout to third base. When a new pitcher, Phil Otis, entered the game, Jack teased him with feints toward home. Twice Otis threw to third; twice Jack scrambled back. Next, the catcher rifled the ball to third, but Jack was safe again. Then, as the now agitated Otis started another pitch, Jack feinted toward home again. Confused, Otis stopped suddenly. The umpire stepped in to call a balk, and Jack strolled home. “
Now the crowd went wild,” he recalled. “Not just the Negroes, but thousands of whites, including many Jersey City fans, screamed, laughed and stamped their feet.” Mr. Rickey was right about the fans: “They liked daring baseball.”

This was a day of near perfection for Robinson, a fantasy of a debut. In five at-bats, he hit safely four times, including the homer; he stole second twice and scored four runs, two of them on balks teased out of pitchers befuddled by his daring and quickness. One game was only one game, but Robinson had dealt a stunning blow to the notion of black physical and mental inferiority. Above all, his demeanor captivated the fans—his calibrated recklessness, his cheeky challenge to the white pitchers, the insolence of his base running, the grittiness of his base hits, the violence of the long ball. And, yes, Montreal had won the game, 14–1. (Unfortunately, Jack featured even in the Giants’ scoring, with an error in the fifth inning when he threw low and wide trying to complete a double play.)

After the game, Robinson took no less than five minutes to reach the locker room, the New York
Herald Tribune
reported, “
as he was mobbed trying to leave the field by fans of assorted ages, sizes and colors.” He had “completely stolen the show and the hearts of 25,000 fans” in leading the Royals to victory. The clubhouse was “
a mad scene,” with “well-wishers fighting to get in” to congratulate him, according to another report. Jack was “so excited he had to tie his necktie three or four times but he was as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.” Seizing the day, according to the New York
Times,
he had “
converted his opportunity into a brilliant personal triumph.” Two days later, the Montreal
Gazette
compared Jack’s sense of drama with that of great stars like Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, and Bobby Jones: “
Make no mistake, the man can play ball. He is big, abnormally fast for his size, and he can field.” On a double play, “his feet were right, his hands were sure, his throw was perfect and all was accomplished in the minimum amount of time.” Writing mainly for blacks, the New York
Amsterdam News
summed up: “
Thus the most significant sports story of the century was written into the record books as baseball took up the cudgel for democracy and an unassuming but superlative Negro boy ascended the heights of excellence to prove the rightness of the experiment. And prove it in the only correct crucible for such an experiment—the crucible of white hot competition.”

Opposing pitchers took note. Two days later, when the Royals beat the Giants to sweep the series, Jack drew three walks in five times at bat; he singled, drove in one run, stole two bases, and scored twice. The average attendance, twenty-two thousand, was excellent. Large crowds turned out again for the series against the Newark Bears in Newark, New Jersey, and the Syracuse Chiefs in Syracuse, New York, even as Jack’s batting average dropped steadily. The true Royals hitting star was George Shuba, with six homers; the speedy Marvin “Rabbit” Rackley was stealing bases at a record clip. Still, Robinson had shown himself a potential mainstay, if not a star, of Montreal.

However, the next series, in Baltimore against the Orioles, was a setback. Baltimore was a Southern city, below the Mason-Dixon line; two years later, a group of whites and blacks would be arrested for playing tennis together in the city’s Druid Hill Park. The local press warned about a hostile reaction to Robinson, even a possible riot, since a large influx of blacks was expected from Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. “
While it’s a ticklish problem with us,” the Baltimore general manager declared, “we don’t anticipate trouble, especially from the colored people.” A Canadian reporter got the point: “
He didn’t say so, but the inference was that white hoodlums might cause some rancour.” Only about three thousand fans
attended the first game, where Rachel sat horrified in the stands while a man behind her shouted about that “
nigger son of a bitch,” Jackie Robinson. “There wasn’t anything I could say,” she recalled, “but I took it all personally. I couldn’t be philosophical at all.” The next day, over twenty-five thousand fans showed up for a doubleheader, with about ten thousand blacks crammed into segregated and inferior seating. Again Jack was subjected to abuse from white fans. The presence of thousands of blacks, who doted on every move he made, both elated and weighed on him. “
It put a heavy burden of responsibility on me,” he later wrote, “but it was a glorious challenge. On the good days the cries of approval made me feel ten feet tall, but my mistakes, no matter how small, plunged me into deep depression. I guess black, as well as white, fans recognized this, and that is why they gave me that extra support I needed so badly.”

As the Royals headed home to Montreal, Branch Rickey’s experiment was still alive but by no means a definite success. Once home in De Lorimer Downs, however, Clay Hopper’s team began to come into its own. Its trademark turned out to be a smooth combination of speed and power, experience and youth. The team included former Dodgers stars such as Curt Davis, Herman Franks, and Lew Riggs, as well as younger players such as the left-handed pitcher Steve Nagy; the native-born darling Jean Pierre Roy, another pitcher; the fastest Royal, Rabbit Rackley—and Jackie Robinson. Clay Hopper was calm, authoritative, yet diplomatic. Steadily, the Royals began to overwhelm their opposition.

In Montreal, after about a month in a guest house, and despite an acute postwar housing shortage, Jack and Rachel found a nice apartment. Expecting the sordid resistance that would have come in virtually any white American neighborhood, she was stunned by the genteel response when she answered an advertisement to sublet half of a duplex apartment at 8232 Rue de Gaspé, in the traditionally French-speaking East End. Deliberately, Rachel had chosen the less affluent French-speaking district over its wealthier English counterpart, which she expected to be more exclusive. (Montreal had no distinctly black district.) On De Gaspé, almost everyone spoke mainly or only French, and a brown face was unusual; but the woman of the apartment received Rachel pleasantly, poured tea and talked, and quickly agreed to rent her apartment furnished, with all her own linen and kitchen utensils. Rachel was almost overwhelmed. “
The woman didn’t merely agree,” she said; “she insisted that I use her things. She wanted me to be careful—no water on the hardwood floors, that sort of thing, but she was gracious. It left us euphoric, really. All the months in Canada were like that.”