Jackie Robinson (27 page)

Jack’s nervousness lifted a little when he saw the familiar smiling face of Clyde Sukeforth. His tremors returned, however, when he looked out over the green fields and saw some two hundred players, all white, going through their paces, running, fielding, throwing, “
keeping up a constant barrage of the chatter,” he would tell a writer, “that seems to go with Baseball.” Then several of the players noticed him and Johnny Wright, and the chattering died. “It seemed that every one of those men stopped suddenly in his tracks and that four hundred eyes were trained on Wright and me.” From affable Babe Hamburger, the Dodgers’ equipment manager, they collected bats and balls and his advice to take it easy on the first day. But Jack found it impossible to relax; his stomach remained a knot. “Well,” he told Sukeforth in the doorway, “
this is it.” At almost exactly 9:30, he and Wright stepped onto the field and, as the
Daily Worker
reported, “
became the first two Negroes to crack modern organized baseball’s Jim Crow.”

Before the pair had gone far, reporters were on top of them. Most questions went straight to Jack; he was seen as the groundbreaker, the first. “
Jack, do you think you can get along with these white boys?” “What would you do if one of these pitchers threw at your head?” Jack fielded the questions easily. “I’ve gotten along with white boys in high school, at Pasadena, at UCLA, and in the Army. I don’t see why these should be any different.” If a white pitcher threw at his head, why, “I’d duck!” Laughing, the reporters probed a little deeper. The most popular player on the Montreal Royals was the French-Canadian shortstop Stan Bréard: “Do you think you can win the shortstop job?” Jack stepped lightly: “I just mean to do the best I can.” “Do you hope to play for Brooklyn some day?” Again, he was deft: “Of course I do, just like all these other players out here!” Then the trap rattled. “So you’re after Pee Wee Reese’s job?” “I can’t worry about Brooklyn,” he feinted. “I haven’t made the Montreal team yet.”

With the newsmen, Jack acquitted himself well, as Rickey knew he would do. Next he met Clay Hopper, the new Montreal manager. In a deep
molasses drawl redolent of magnolias and mint juleps, Hopper murmured pleasantries about the spring, but Jack heard mainly the undertone of a threat. In reality, Hopper was both a prisoner of history and a good soldier. The owner of a Mississippi plantation, he had opposed Rickey’s signing of Robinson. To Hopper, Robinson’s presence on the Montreal team would put the manager in a delicate position among friends and neighbors down home. But Rickey had prevailed on him, and Hopper greeted Robinson with an outstretched hand that was itself a good sign. “
In those days,” Jack would recall, “great numbers of southerners would under no circumstances shake hands with a Negro.”

Robinson could hardly guess the depth of his manager’s feelings. Some days later, after Rickey praised a particular play by Jackie as superhuman, Hopper was shocked. “Mr. Rickey,” he asked, his lips quivering with emotion, “
do you really think a nigger’s a human being?” Rickey ignored him.

For two days, Jack practiced hard. One basic task was to lose some weight; he had reported at 195, at least ten pounds over his prime football weight. As he slimmed down, he also had to earn his spot on the Royals roster. He had to hit well, but he also had to find a place other than shortstop in the Royals infield. Not only was his arm questionable at that position, but the Dodgers organization was deep in talent there, from Bréard in Montreal to the superb Reese, just back from the war, in Brooklyn. Montreal was weak at third base, but that did not seem to be Robinson’s natural spot; and he had never seriously played second or first. Could he beat out seasoned players at those positions? “
I never saw these fellows play so I can’t say just how much chance I think I have,” he conceded. “Certainly I would be willing to go to a lower class league, but I want to make this club.”

Despite the pressures, his first two days in Sanford passed fairly smoothly. Then, suddenly, on March 5, Jack and Rachel, as well as Wright, were hustled out of town. According to later reports, they were at dinner with Wright, Rowe, and Smith at the Brock home when a series of phone calls to Smith from Rickey ended with a command: the Robinsons and Wright were to pack and leave at once. In fact, a large delegation of hostile local whites had called on the mayor of Sanford and demanded the ouster of the two black players. A march on the Brock home was rumored, and probably not to seek autographs. Exactly when Wright and Robinson had been scheduled to leave Sanford is unclear. The New York
Times
had reported they would stay until the weekend; the
Daily Worker
would report that they were to leave Sanford that day. In any event, the Robinsons fled Sanford for the safety of Daytona Beach.

Arriving in Daytona Beach, Jack was upset further when he and Rachel found themselves back in their tiny room at the Harrises’ while the rest of
the players (apart from Wright) stayed at the Riviera Hotel on the ocean. The Riviera was grungy after its wartime use, but he wanted to be with the other players. “
We disliked this distinction,” he later wrote, “almost as much as we resented being chased out of Sanford, but we knew that there could be no protest. Mr. Rickey had made it clear that, for the success of our venture, we would have to bear indignities and humiliations without complaint. He had said that I would have to be ‘a man big enough to bear the cross of martyrdom.’ ”

At Kelly Field in Daytona Beach, where the Dodgers camped, he found it hard to field and hit. The cross he was carrying weighed him down as he tried to shine at shortstop with dazzling scrambles and accurate, quick, strong throws to first; it hampered him as he swung at pitches in his unorthodox batting style. Desperate to shine, he succeeded only in throwing his arm out; he awoke one day to find it burning and throbbing. The Dodgers’ trainer applied hot compresses, Rachel, the trained nurse, applied cold; but only time would heal the arm. In these first few days, between Jack’s injury and the pressures on him, he was unimpressive. Writing in the Montreal
Gazette,
the respected columnist Dink Carroll reported to Canadians what the sportswriters were murmuring in Florida: “
that Mr. Rickey has played up Infielder Jackie Robinson but Pitcher John Wright is the better prospect of the two colored players.” Roscoe McGowen of the New York
Times
openly doubted that either Robinson or Wright would make the Royals. Another, less courteous, white writer looked at Robinson, and at Rickey’s experiment, and said: “
If he was white they’d have booted him out of this camp long ago.”

Away from the baseball field, in their temporary home on Spruce Street, Jack and Rachel worried a little but talked and played cards and made love and talked some more and made more passionate love as they waited for the month to unfold. (Jack loved and even studied card playing; Rachel was an indifferent player “except when I was playing him, and then I wanted to win.”) On Spruce Street, their isolation was made worse because, despite Duff Harris’s effusions, she would share her kitchen with nobody. Jack and Rachel had each other and their room; they had to take their meals in local black restaurants, all of them humble. They were seldom apart, since Rachel also attended practice every day. “
Day after day,” she recalled, “I would go out to the ball park and sit in the Jim Crow section to watch.” She made it her business to be with Jack at the ballpark while he toiled; each morning, they set out for work together. (For the next twelve years, or until he retired from baseball, she would attend virtually every one of his home games. “
How could I miss them?” she asked. “That’s where the action was. That’s where the drama was.”)

With this closeness, Jack began to think and talk, as many observers would note over the years, not in terms of “I” but most often about “we”—as in “We hit a home run that day.” Unlike Rachel, he had never been one to look inward, except in prayer, or to doubt himself, or to dwell on the past. Now, however, he found himself sharing more of his thoughts with her and starting to crave the experience. A sense of themselves as a couple, strong in unity and purpose, began to grow. As Rachel would say: “We began to see ourselves in terms of a social and historical problem, to know that the issue wasn’t simply baseball but life and death, freedom and bondage, for an awful lot of people who didn’t have the rewards that came to us. At the same time, we had to remember that we were only two young people, who didn’t know much. Nothing in California had quite prepared us for what was happening, how we were growing.”

Something else was growing. Before March was over, Rachel knew she was pregnant. Aware of what Jack was going through, she kept the news from him until June. “
I was disappointed,” she recalled. “Jack was delighted, thrilled, but I had hoped for a year of travel and freedom. I also knew what my mother would say, and she said it: ‘Oh Rachel, I thought you would wait.’ As the weeks passed, of course, I became very happy to be bearing our child; but Jack was happy from the start.” Indeed he was. “
My Dearest Darling,” he would write to her later, while on the road,

If Jack and Rachel were a couple, Rickey and Robinson were also a pair, as Sukeforth dubbed them. Rickey inspired confidence; he was a revelation. He yawned at questions about Jack’s ailing arm; while it mended, as he knew it would, he stepped up work on the rest of the body. Deserting some
of his other duties, he became Jack’s personal coach and cheerleader. “
Rickey would show up at the field wearing this odd little beat-up hat,” according to Rachel, “and he would push and prod Jack: ‘Go after that pitch! Take a lead! Be bold! Make them worry!’ ” Sensing Jack’s need, Rickey did not waver; he was imperturbable in the face of lapses and miscues. “And Jack truly needed that support,” Rachel remembered. “He was nervous and tense and needed the phone calls; and they came regularly. I was on the outside, but I didn’t question it, because it was helping Jack beyond words. Rickey’s relationship with Jack became very personal, very intimate. It was paternal—not paternalistic, but paternal. And it gave Jack deep support when he badly needed it.”

To blacks, the intimacy of the relationship, the sense of two men, black and white, adrift on a raft together, touched a nerve. In the
Courier,
Wendell Smith noted its intimacy. Rickey “
has been giving Jackie personal instructions and advice. Friday morning, for instance, Rickey took his ‘baby’ over to the sidelines and spent considerable time instructing him on how to stretch and how to tag.” Facing doubters about Jack’s place in the infield, Rickey was tough. If necessary, he made it clear, Robinson would play at first base: “Anyone with any mental capacity can handle first base. Robinson has shown that he is no dumb-bell. He is apt and learns things exceptionally fast. He may turn out to be Montreal’s first-baseman.” About this time, Mexican baseball was a real alternative for American players. But when a Mexican agent (a “
swarthy señor,” the
Courier
revealed) offered Jack a handsome sum to play ball over the border, an irate Rickey chased the man away, as the New York
Times
reported: “The Mahatma told the Senor to get out of his ball park, out of his hotel and out of the city.” (Jack himself was cool to the offer: “
I’m not interested. There’s too much at stake here. These people are my friends.”)

While his arm healed, Jack moved from shortstop to second to first, then back to second. He learned to play the new positions with a swiftness that amazed his teachers. “
He had the greatest aptitude of any player I’ve ever seen,” another Royals infielder, Al Campanis, later judged; “in one half hour he learned to make the double play pivot correctly.” Jack had “some limitations,” including his arm strength and his range to his left; but he “overcame both deficiencies because he was such a great athlete and applied himself to the game with such intensity.”

Some white players were cool, but a few tried to help him. In the
Daily Worker,
Bill Mardo reported as “
forever blasted to oblivion” the “hoary old lie” that white players wouldn’t accept blacks. Although Jack felt isolated, some players reached out. Lou Rochelli, his leading rival at second base, worked hard to help Robinson there. “
Lou was intelligent and he was a
thoroughbred,” Jack said later in tribute. Stan Bréard was also solicitous; at their first meeting, Jack posed for a picture between Bréard and his wife—a brave gesture on Bréard’s part, given the situation. Campanis, too, was quite helpful.

On Sunday, March 17, as reporters noted, Jack made organized baseball history again. He became the first black man in this century to take the field alongside whites in a scheduled exhibition game for which admission would be charged. The game, at City Island Park in downtown Daytona Beach, was between the Royals and the Dodgers. Despite his progress, Robinson faced the game with some trepidation. How would the public receive him? How would he perform against major leaguers like Reese, Cookie Lavagetto, Gene Mauch, Pete Reiser, Gene Hermanski, Eddie Stanky, Dixie Walker, and Billy Herman, all of whom would play that day? For once, he could not count on the support of Rickey, who refused to break the Sabbath even for his prize recruit. The game drew four thousand fans, one of the largest crowds ever for such a contest. Of these, more than one thousand were blacks drawn by the magic of history. Forced into the cramped Jim Crow section of the bleachers, they spilled onto the grounds and were then penned in beyond the right-field foul line. Jack’s sensitive ears caught both their resolute cheering and “
a few weak and scattered boos” when his name was first called. In five innings, he fielded flawlessly, stole a base, and scored a run; but he went hitless in three trips to the plate. “
Playing under terrific pressure,” the white Daytona Beach
Evening Journal
judged, “Robinson conducted himself well afield during his five-inning stint. He handled two chances aptly.” Once on base, and “running like a scared rabbit,” he scored easily.