Jackie Robinson (34 page)

Next, the Dodgers rolled on to St. Louis, where the Cardinals were in last place but, with hitters like the extraordinary Stan Musial (who was always friendly to Jack) and pitchers like Harry “the Cat” Breechen, still to be feared. Rain washed out the first game, at night; but Brooklyn beat Breechen to take the second. Off the field, Jack had to put up with being barred at the city’s elegant Chase Hotel, where the Dodgers usually stayed. Instead, he registered unhappily at the black DeLuxe Hotel.

Although such humiliations drew no protest from the white players themselves, Jack’s relationship with them steadily improved. In one play against the Cardinals, at first base, he stopped a hot smash with his glove, then comically lost sight of the ball between his feet while the infielders yelled at him to make a throw; later, his teammates, including veterans like Hugh Casey, ribbed him in a way that told him that they were now starting to see him as one of them. On the train, sometimes he played cards with Spider Jorgenson and Marvin Rackley, or Ed Chandler, a pitcher; sometimes he sat casually around the regular bridge game that included Sukeforth, Parrott, and Casey. At one of these games Casey almost curdled Jack’s blood by breezily sharing with him his secret for changing his luck at cards down home in Georgia: “
I used to go out and find me the biggest, blackest nigger woman I could find and rub her teats to change my luck.” Casey then rubbed Jack’s hair. In the shocked silence that followed, Jack swallowed hard, dug down deep, and said nothing. Ironically, Casey was one of the older players who liked to help Robinson in practice; he was also quick to back him more than once that season in rough episodes with opposing players. Dixie Walker had also come around. The same player who rudely rebuffed Duke Snider when the rookie outfielder asked for help in learning a certain play—“
Find out for yourself, kid”—gave Jack tips about hitting.

At mealtime—the witching hour of race relations—Jack often ate alone, or with younger teammates like Snider. Growing up in Compton, California, Snider was in junior high school when he began to marvel at Jack’s gifts: “
I had been a Jackie Robinson fan long before most of the world heard about him.” To other players, eating in public with a black man was an embarrassment not to be endured. Still, the clamorous interest of whites and blacks in Robinson only grew. Wendell Smith, who roomed with him on one trip, recalled the telephone jangling incessantly with invitations. “
Robinson is now paying the price of fame, just as Joe Louis has been doing for years,” Smith declared. “He seldom has a moment to himself. He is the
target of well-wishers, autograph hounds and indiscreet politicians who would bask in his glory to win prestige for themselves.” Late in May, the
Courier
complained about black fans who “
displayed too much enthusiasm over Jackie, cheered every time he did so much as walk out on the field.” Later, it confessed to “
fears and apprehensions that some unlearned and untutored buffoons would attempt to put on their act and create a scene” over Jack. But to these fans, Robinson was their shining black prince, and they wanted him to know that he could count on their love and admiration in his time of struggle.

Roger Wilkins, a fifteen-year-old black boy in Grand Rapids, Michigan, would comment years later: “In 1947, Jackie Robinson was as important to me and other blacks, especially young blacks, as a parent would have been, I think. Because he brought pride and the certain knowledge that on a fair playing field, when there were rules and whites could not cheat and lie and steal, not only were they not supermen but we could beat ’em. And he knew what he was doing. He knew what the stakes were every time he danced off a base. If he failed, we failed. Every steal he made could have been a bonehead play: ‘Stupid Nigger!’ He was not a dumb man, doing what came naturally. He knew what he was trying to do. And this man, in a very personal sense, became a permanent part of my spirit and the spirit of a generation of black kids like me because of the way he faced his ordeal.”

And an ordeal it was in those first few weeks, when many pitchers seemed determined to baptize the black rookie by fire. In the thirty-seven games played before the end of May, Jack was hit by pitches six times; in the entire 1946 season, no National League player had been hit by pitches more than six times. “
But as he had promised Rickey,” Red Barber noted, “he said nothing, just took his base, licked his wounds.” While Robinson’s color was almost certainly a factor in these blows, it only compounded the tendency of pitchers to throw at rookies. Robinson was hit by pitches but three more times over the rest of the season. He had passed a key test of courage, one that broke many a young ballplayer. Besides, hitting Robinson meant putting him on base, and few pitchers wanted him dancing and prancing on the base paths while they tried to do their job.

In the last week of May, after his first complete round of all the other teams in the league, he was happy at last to be back “
in dear old Brooklyn.” To celebrate his return he had three hits in four at-bats against the Phillies. His batting average rose sixteen points to a respectable .283; on May 25, he also hit his second home run of the season. He was learning the rhythms of the season, its constant demand for vigilance. If he had found out anything about the major leagues thus far, Jack wrote, “
I have learned that you can never stop thinking and that all the time you’re in the ball game you have
to keep hustling.” He was sure now that he was up to this challenge. On the last day of May, the Dodgers were only two games out of first place.

B
Y THIS POINT
, Jack and Rachel were now living in Brooklyn itself. After about two weeks at the Hotel McAlpin, a woman had showed up unannounced with an offer to share with her an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant. They accepted the offer sight unseen, but soon regretted it. At 526 MacDonough Street, at the corner of Ralph Avenue, they found not the stylish building they had imagined but a tenement infested with roaches. The Robinsons rented a back bedroom, and their landlady had one to the front; but she had a regular visitor who parked himself every evening in the living room. Without a car, the Robinsons found their freedom sharply curtailed. For recreation, they often took the baby and rode the buses about the city. (Their arrangement was not so unusual; that year, Snider and Gil Hodges, then a backup catcher, were sharing a room in a private home in Flatbush and walked to work at Ebbets Field. “
Times were simpler in 1947,” Snider would explain.)

Under such pressures and the demands of a small child, the Robinsons’ room inevitably pulsed with simmering little tensions that were not eased by the unwillingness of both Jack and Rachel to talk much about their most private needs, and by her wish not to add to Jack’s troubles. In those months, according to Rachel, Jack’s worries “
were eating at his mind, for he would jerk and twitch and even talk in his troubled sleep, which was not like him.” Sometimes he would raise his voice in anger, but anything more violent was out of the question. Aware of his ordeal, she tried hard to make their home a haven, which Jack appreciated; he had little interest in going out with the boys. Once at home, however, he felt both contentment and the usual irritations, which he understood only imperfectly, because he was not much given to doubting himself. Around the house he helped a little, but only a little; he had a traditional attitude to what was man’s work and woman’s work. With Jackie he would change a wet diaper but never one soiled; he would feed his son but could not be scheduled to help. He expected peace and quiet as he buried his head in his beloved newspapers, and mornings he wanted a loving send-off as he headed to the park.

For all the tensions, he was sure that he loved his wife and that she loved him. One day in March, on board a Pan American Clipper flying the Royals to Panama, Jack had poured out his feelings for Rachel and also hinted at the tensions between them. “Darling,” he wrote in a short letter, “
As we fly through the air with what seems to be the greatest of ease my thoughts as usual drift back to you and I am again reminded that I love you so very
much that life without you would seem empty indeed. I have never in my 28 years been so very happy and I feel that I have just about all in my life a man can ask for.” He knew well enough, he admitted, that his temper was sometimes sharp and that his edges were still rough. “I have loved you very much,” he insisted, “even the times I was angr[y]…. I know I don’t show it but darling these last few weeks away from you proves that my life when you are near is the closest to heaven I have ever been. I have no desire to even look at anyone else because when I do they all seem very sad and I get disgusted.” Now that they had a child, “it is really a wonderful life. I can hardly wait to see you and show you how much of your love I have missed.”

The moments of anger had been relatively few. One explosion had come in Los Angeles the previous year, near the end of Rachel’s pregnancy. Jack had decided to go to his cousin Van Wade’s wedding in Pasadena but would not hear of Rachel’s traveling in her ninth month. When he left the house, Rachel collapsed onto her bed and cried and cried. Of Jack’s not showing his love, according to Rachel later, “
he was not yet the kind of man he would become. He wasn’t yet the man who would send me flowers at the least opportunity. He was still inclined to be closed and tight. And I had a certain reticence as well, because that’s the way I had been brought up. But I always knew he loved me.”

Rachel had other trials as she learned to be Mrs. Jackie Robinson. At first, she had no contact with the other Dodger wives; she waited outside the park for Jack and wondered where the other wives were. Then one day, Norma King, the young wife of the pitcher Clyde King, introduced herself and showed Rachel the usual gathering place, under the stands. Some tension among the wives was inevitable, since their husbands were often in competition with one another, sometimes for the same job. But slowly some friendships formed, especially with Gil Hodges’s wife, Joan, and Pee Wee Reese’s wife, Dottie. (Later, after Carl Erskine joined the club, his wife, Betty, would also be a good friend.) The wife of Vic Lombardi, the diminutive pitcher in his last Dodger year, was always pleasant. “
I’ve met most of them now,” Rachel gamely assured a reporter later that first season, “and they’re all congenial. When they gossip I join right in and gossip with them. Of course, they’re more intimate by themselves.”

Far easier was the Robinsons’ relationship with the local fans; both Jack and Rachel fell in love with Brooklyn. “
The feeling in Brooklyn was very supportive, very rich, and we loved it,” she recalled. “Some places on the road I hated, their total intolerance; but Brooklyn was the opposite, and Jack loved it, too.” From the start he made it his business to be kind to fans, especially at home. “He had his favorites, he especially loved to talk with the little old ladies; he would hug them and pat them and chat with them very patiently.
He would keep me waiting, and I would wait, because it was important to him and it was nice to see. We all waited for Jack.” Aware that she needed an interest outside baseball and beyond Jackie Junior—and with an eye to the home they expected to have one day in California—she completed a course later in the year at the New York School of Interior Decorating.

I
N
J
UNE, A LONG
home stand against St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cincinnati saw the Dodgers fight back into a tenuous hold on first place in front of record-setting crowds in Ebbets Field. Against Cincinnati, after Rachel and Jackie Junior received a thunderous ovation when the public-address system announced their presence, Jack responded with his fourth home run of the season. In another game he went four-for-four, in his best hitting day thus far, with two doubles, a triple, and a single. After losses against the Cardinals, Brooklyn rebounded on the strength of Shotton’s cool managing, its splendid infield, and fierce hitting led by Robinson, who batted .381 in June. In St. Louis, the Cardinals seemed friendlier—or so Jack carefully chose to describe them. In the
Courier
he saluted Joe Medwick, Stan Musial, Joe Garagiola, and the manager, Eddie Dyer, as “
a swell bunch of fellows.… They treated me so nice I was actually surprised.”

Now Wendell Smith reported that Robinson was “
definitely one of the Dodgers. He is ‘one of the boys’ and treated that way by his teammates.” In Danville, Illinois, on an off day, Smith reported a remarkable sign of progress. Out on the golf course after lunch at a local club, Reese saw Smith and Robinson trailing his own foursome. “Why don’t you two join us?” Reese asked. “There is harmony and unity on the Brooklyn club,” Smith reported, “and Jackie is a part of it. He is no longer a player apart from the rest of them. He is no longer a curiosity.”

With such gestures, Reese played an important role in Rickey’s project. Perhaps his most telling single act was sensational, given the racism of that time: at one point, in full view of the public, he dared to put his white hand on Robinson’s black shoulder in a gesture of solidarity. Exactly when and where this moment came is uncertain. It happened either in Boston (as Robinson recalled) or in Cincinnati, just across the river from Reese’s native Kentucky (as others saw it). Robinson more than once placed it in 1948, but others remember it as happening in 1947. (In
Jackie Robinson: My Own Story,
published in 1948, Jack makes no mention of the incident.) Much later, Robinson would tell of Reese’s hand touching him, but his earliest published account, filtered through a writer in 1949, does not include physical contact. Opposing players were abusing Reese “
very viciously because he was playing on the team with me.… They were calling him some
very vile names.” Because Robinson knew that the nasty words were meant for him, each epithet “hit me like a machine-gun bullet. Pee Wee kind of sensed the sort of hopeless, dead feeling in me and came over and stood beside me for a while. He didn’t say a word but he looked over at the chaps who were yelling at me through him and just stared. He was standing by me, I could tell you that.” The hecklers fell silent. “I will never forget it.” According to Joe Black and others, Reese over the years became Robinson’s closest friend on the Dodgers, although Jack would also feel deeply about other players, including Carl Erskine, Gil Hodges, Ralph Branca, Billy Loes, Don Newcombe, Black himself, and—much later—Junior Gilliam.