Jackie Robinson (37 page)

“
I think Durocher is right,” Jack told a reporter. “I hit too many balls to left.” As for his weight, Jack conceded that “my speed is a big asset—without that I would be lost.” He gave a solemn promise that “I’m not going to blow up like that again.… I’m going to find something to do; something that will keep me down around playing weight.” Durocher was not alone in criticizing him. In the Baltimore
Afro-American,
Sam Lacy bluntly challenged Robinson: “
After an inexcusably ‘easy’ first week in training camp, Jack settled down to hard work.” Tested furiously under the tropic sun by Durocher, Jack began to lose weight quickly, though a few excess pounds resisted his efforts. But his throwing arm went sore, and he was timid on the base paths. Only near the end of training did Jack seem to be rounding into form, when he hit two home runs against the Royals and a local all-star team.

He was buoyed, too, by his warm reception by people in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where the Dodgers also played a few games that month. In Ciudad Trujillo, he wrote, most locals were “
conscious of their color and the things they have in common with colored people of America.” Jack elicited the same reaction in Puerto Rico, where fans “
pulled and tugged on his clothes, pleaded for autographs” and greeted his plate appearances “with spontaneous applause.” Still, he was lonely away from Rachel and Jackie, and Karl Downs’s untimely death overshadowed everything else. In the March 27
Courier,
he devoted his entire column to Jackie Junior. “
I miss him very much,” he confessed freely. The “best thing” about being a major-league player “is that it gives you an opportunity to make a decent living and prepare for the future.… He’s a grand little fellow and I want to be able to give him everything possible when he gets a bit older.…
I want him to grow up in a good home, nice clothes, and some of the other things the average American kid enjoys.”

The flight back to America from Ciudad Trujillo was a nightmare, as the Dodgers’ DC-4 lost an engine and started misfiring on another. The pilot turned back. “
Sure we were scared,” Jack told reporters. A later flight took them to Vero Beach, Florida, to an old military facility acquired by Rickey as a permanent training center that would be exempt from Jim Crow. By this time Jack was down to about 200 pounds. “
I’m in good shape,” he declared gamely. “I’m ready for a big season. All I need is a little luck.” And initially he seemed to have it. In his first game at Vero Beach, before the largest crowd (about half black) to see a baseball game there, he led off for Brooklyn and hit a home run. He also did fairly well on the tour, which started in Fort Worth, Texas, and continued through Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Maryland, before ending in New York. Record crowds swollen by blacks, one reporter noted, made the turnstiles “
click like a five and ten cent store cash register on bargain day.” Encouragingly, whites seemed eager to support the black players, although along the way Robinson and Campanella, who was now a Dodger (although only temporarily), heard a few loud boos. At a luncheon in Dallas, three hundred local whites welcomed the black Dodgers. When Durocher declared that Brooklyn would not have won the pennant in 1947 without Jack, “
the jam-packed room of Texans gave Robby a rousing round of applause.”

J
ACK WAS OVERJOYED
to reunite in April in New York with Rachel, who that month drove their Cadillac from Los Angeles in the company of her younger brother, Raymond, and little Jackie. At last, Jack, Rachel, and Jackie had decent accommodations. That month, they moved into the top floor of a two-family home at 5224 Tilden Avenue, near the Utica Avenue subway stop in Flatbush. A friend of a friend had bought the house and saved the top floor (at ninety dollars a month), with its two bedrooms and a charming, white-painted front porch, for the Robinsons. “
We like it,” Rachel told the press. “The only trouble is there’s no real yard for Jackie to play in.” She didn’t mention that several residents in the overwhelmingly white area had opposed the sale of the house to a black. But a family two doors down, Arch and Sarah Satlow and their small children, Stevie, Paula, and Sena, had welcomed the Robinsons. Rachel and Sarah, the daughter of Russian immigrants, became instant friends. Fifty years later, with both Jack and Arch long gone, they were still close friends.

One day, an alarmed neighbor had called out to Sarah to warn her that a black family was moving into the neighborhood. “
Oh, isn’t that nice!”
Sarah replied, without thinking. Her neighbor slammed the window shut. Then someone brought around a petition for Sarah to sign. “I said, ‘Are you mad? Are you crazy?’ We had a huge cherry tree in the backyard, that gave the most miraculous cherries. Arch and I picked a pail and took it over. From then on we were friends.” Rachel and Sarah, who was only a few weeks younger than Jack, discovered they had things in common. Both had attended college and trained as nurses, and had a special interest in psychiatry, but had given up their careers to be wives and mothers; both loved the arts. Seeking precious free time, they helped one another by babysitting each other’s children. “Rachel got the worst of the deal,” Sarah recalled, “because she had only one and I had three. But it was nothing to her, she was such a kind and efficient person.”

They were different in some ways. Sarah’s family had been prosperous, but to her, Rachel seemed to the manner born. “She was a very demanding person, both with herself and others. Things had to be done right. In those days I dressed plainly, because everything was for the children; but Rachel dressed very well. She had discovered Saks and Bergdorf Goodman, and she had fabulous taste. She was fastidious; she had class and dash about her. She could sew; she was a wonderful cook; she baked beautifully. Her mother had taught her all these things.” Once, helping Sarah learn how to bake, Rachel wounded her feelings. “She gave me this recipe for lemon meringue pie,” Sarah explained. “It was my first meringue pie. It was a disaster, the crust turned out all soggy. I said to her, ‘What do you think happened, Rachel?’ She fell out laughing, she laughed and laughed. How was I supposed to know that you must bake the crust first? I didn’t take it as a joke, I was so hurt. I never did it again, believe me, but I baked my head off!”

To cope with Jack’s fan mail, which came by the laundry-basketful, as Rachel put it, she and Jack hired Sarah to prepare answers for Jack’s signature; Jack would go over each letter and sign it. “I just loved Jack,” Sarah said. “Because he had a gentle, bright, sharp mind, and it was always coated—the way I saw him—with a softness and a kindness, especially with children. He played so easily with children on the street, he visited Stevie in the hospital all by himself when Stevie was sick. It was something that was natural. What he did in the locker room with other men was another matter; in the twenty-five years I knew him, I always saw that softness about Jack. Of course, he could get angry, but I never heard a foul word in his mouth, except maybe once. I was in an office he was using at Rockefeller Center and he was taking a call and got disconnected. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said, and then he says, ‘Oh, Sarah, I’m so sorry.’ I said, ‘I didn’t hear you. I didn’t hear you.’ ” To her, Jack was a man “with great vision, and strong emotional feelings.”

With the Satlows nearby, Jackie Junior, who was about a week younger than Sena, the youngest Satlow, had a regular companion; a white
Sports Illustrated
reporter visiting the Robinsons was startled to see the two children, one black, the other blond, playing contentedly. Jackie at three was a warm, loving child, outgoing, easy to laugh, a charmer, showered with attention inside his family and outside, and especially as Jackie Robinson’s son. In fact, as Rachel recalled, he was “
our ambassador to the Flatbush community. He would be out on the sidewalk with his tricycle and then disappear into a backyard. Then he would reappear with cookies and pretzels. Once the people got over the shock of seeing this little black child suddenly appear, they were very nice and neighborly.” Many of the neighborhood boys, including Stevie Satlow, were thrilled to have a genuine Dodger in their midst, although some had curious ways of showing it. Rachel remembered a boy of eight or nine who lived on an adjoining lot. “He clearly admired Jack, you could see that,” she said; “but he took real pleasure in waiting for him to come home so he could taunt him about his playing. Jack took it all in stride. He might blow up on the field, at the ballpark, but not at home and not with young people. He actually liked the boy.”

And yet the Robinsons did not feel entirely at home in the Flatbush apartment, where they did little entertaining. While they rented, and divided their year between the East and California, and while Jack’s role in the baseball world unfolded, Jack and Rachel would continue to feel unrooted. Their sense of impermanence had little to do with the fact that Flatbush was unlike anything they had known before—a living, breathing Jewish community, complete with synagogues, yeshivas, kosher bakeries and butcher shops, delicatessens, and the like. Jack and Rachel liked this difference, this sense of being educated about the world, about the multiple richness of American life. “In California,” Rachel said, “we knew nothing about Jewish culture. Particular names meant nothing to me, or physical types. We were innocent, or ignorant.” So ignorant, in fact, that one Christmas they stunned the Satlows by giving them a Christmas tree. “
We didn’t know what to do,” Sarah said. “What would my parents think? Then we decided to put it up. The children liked it, and Jack and Rachel meant well.”

As the Robinsons gained more friends in the white world, they did not lose touch with the black. In fact, in 1947, as they endured life in their tenement room, Jack and Rachel had gained a satisfying complex of friendships rooted in black Brooklyn. Through Rickey and his memorable February 1947 dinner for prominent blacks, the Robinsons met another married couple, Lacy and Florence Covington, and Florence’s sisters, all single at that time, Willette, Julia, Phyllis, and May Bailey. Originally from North
Carolina, the Covingtons and the Baileys owned and shared two substantial brownstones on Stuyvesant Avenue near Fulton Street. Lacy Covington, a tall, handsome, courtly man, had been a brickmason most of his life until, responding to an old ambition, he had studied for the ministry and been ordained. Lacy and Florence, a housewife, saw themselves as servants of the community; their home became a gathering place for a variety of people. On Sundays, Florence set a large table with china, silver, and linen, much of it shrewdly purchased in secondhand shops, and offered lunch to more than a dozen of their friends, many of whom, like Rachel, regularly brought dishes prepared at home. “
There was a lot of good fellowship and good feeling in their home,” Rachel remembered. “Whatever else was happening in our lives, we’d leave there feeling very good.”

The Covingtons helped to make them see New York City as a community into which they could settle and be at ease; it was Florence who had secured for them their apartment in the Flatbush duplex. “Lacy and Florence and her sisters became like extended family to us, but true family nonetheless,” according to Rachel. “Lacy was a lovely, lovely man among all those women, and he and Florence had a graciousness that made their home a special place.” Best of all, in some respects, the Covingtons were happy to have Jackie Junior: “I could always take Jackie there and then go to the ballpark to be with Jack. And they would keep him all day until I got back, every day.” From the start, also, the Robinsons hired Florence’s sister Willette to help with Jackie. Eventually, Willette would become an important, beloved member of the Robinson household, living there but returning to her home on the weekends, with close ties to the children in particular.

The sense of tenuousness surrounding Jack’s baseball career did not push Jack and Rachel apart; rather, it brought them closer, mainly because Jack had the sense to see and admit that he badly needed Rachel’s help and advice and love as he moved into a future that was still uncertain. In public, he wanted her at his side as often as possible; she boosted his self-esteem with her reserved charm, easy intelligence, and striking looks. Jack could tell that Rachel impressed men he respected, including Rickey and Harold Parrott: “
They evidently have high regard for you Darling,” he wrote home. He had been chatting with Parrott by a swimming pool in Ciudad Trujillo, and “it pleased me to sit and listen because he spoke with respect when he mentioned your name. Darling you can’t imagine how proud I am to be able to say you are my wife. I pride in the fact that I have a person who is capable of handling herself regardless of the crowd.” On public occasions, many who came to honor Jack stayed to praise his wife. In Chicago, at a public dinner at the Savoy Ballroom, a reporter caught something of Rachel’s appealing public personality when, accepting an award from a women’s magazine, “she
rose and in cultured, yet simple words voiced her appreciation of the honor paid her husband and her surprise at the award made to her.”

Jack made a big point of giving Rachel full credit in public for his success. Rachel, he said in 1947, was “
the one person who really kept me from throwing my hands up in despair many times”; she was “my strongest support during these trials.… She always had the wise suggestion, the comforting touch, the encouragement to go on which carried me through.” “
I can truly say,” he told a gathering in 1948 at a high school in Madison, New Jersey, “that my rise to baseball fame is mainly due to my wife.” She was obviously his main confidante and advisor, although Rickey also had a special place in Jack’s life; in addition, she was the financial boss of the household. Jack turned over all sums to her, and she knew what was going out and what was falling into a reserve account about which Jack knew little. To be sure, the aura of perfection that hovered about Rachel sometimes annoyed him, but usually in little ways only. Knowing that Rachel was sensitive about her mother’s opinion of her, he sometimes used that fact. “
I hated it,” Rachel said, “when he would tease me in front of her, or my brothers, about not being perfect, about spending too much on something, or making this or that mistake. I usually didn’t mind what he was saying, but I did mind the company he said it in. Sometimes he got to me that way.”