Jackie Robinson (29 page)

They moved in without incident. Later, when she began to show, an informal delegation of local women visited her to offer not only advice and
friendship but also coupons from their ration books, so she could buy any scarce foodstuffs she needed or craved. With the language barrier and the demands of the Royals’ schedule, Jack and Rachel could make very few friends in the neighborhood; but upstairs were the Méthots, with seven or eight children who brightened the house. Rachel and Jack came to know Edgar Méthot and his wife, who had just had a baby; twenty-seven years later, the Méthots would recall the Robinsons as “
such good people.” Their closest friends, however, were a Jewish couple, Sam and Belle Maltin. Sam, a Canadian and a socialist, wrote on sports for the Montreal
Herald
but was also a stringer for the Pittsburgh
Courier;
like Rachel, Belle was pregnant at the time. Knowing of Rachel’s love of classical music, the Maltins took them to outdoor concerts on Mount Royal that reminded Rachel of visits to the Hollywood Bowl. Belle introduced Rachel to Jewish cooking and also knitted her a sweater she still wore fifty years later. The Maltins had another black friend, Herb Trawick, a football player with the Montreal Alouettes, and the Robinsons got to know him as well.

On the whole, however, the Robinsons aimed for a subdued life when Jack was home. Rachel’s day was bound up in going to the ballpark to watch him. When he was away, sometimes she traveled with him (although the club frowned on wives on the road), but mostly she stayed home and sewed clothes for herself and the coming baby, or worked on a crochet tablecloth she was making for her dream home in California. She got to know some of the neighborhood children because they followed her on the street or carried her groceries home; she also tempted the children living upstairs by leaving a door open and a bowl of fruit in plain sight. Rachel could say little to most of the adults—she had taken Latin but no French—but they remained friendly and protective of her. She liked to watch them come out onto their balconies to take the sun in the lazy summer afternoons; they, no doubt, admired her brown-skinned beauty and grace. In May, an
Afro-American
woman reporter, recalling Rachel’s night of abuse in Baltimore, wrote admiringly of her unusual calm and poise: “
The only person I know who can equal her is that first citizen of the world, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt.”

By early June, Jackie was an established presence in Montreal; on June 4, he was dubbed “
the Colored Comet” in an illustration in the local
Gazette.
(His life story was also illustrated in April in
Picture News,
published by Comic Magazines.) His .356 batting average led the league, and his only important setback was a leg injury that put him
hors de combat
for a week. Jack then spent several days at Joe Louis’s training camp near Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, as Louis prepared for a title fight against Billy Conn at Yankee Stadium. Perhaps this visit was behind Jack’s first tentative step,
soon withdrawn, into political action—into placing his newfound national fame in service of progressive politics.

Jack’s success on the field made him more than a passive symbol of integration; more and more people wanted to acknowledge, and share, or exploit it. Some calls on his time were about money, as the first of the sweet-sounding offers and deals arrived that would tease him for the rest of his life. Some calls were charitable, as when hundreds of wounded servicemen gave him a star’s welcome on the grounds of the Montreal Military Hospital, where he helped to umpire a softball game between the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and an all-star YMHA team. Other invitations were more freighted. Appealing to his conscience, and thus possibly to his vanity, they sought to draw him away from the perceived shallows of sport toward a grander purpose. Late in May, the New York State organizing committee of the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America asked Jack to be its chairman; the national honorary commander of UNAVA was Joe Louis. On the committee, Jack would be associated with such popular political leaders as Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, State Assemblyman Hulan Jack, and Councilman Benjamin Davis Jr. Accepting the invitation, Jack agreed to speak on June 9 at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem with Powell, Jack, and Davis. “
I consider it a great honor to serve as chairman,” he wired the committee. “The burning problems of discrimination in housing, employment, education and on-the-job training facing Negro veterans demand an immediate solution.”

On June 9, however, Jack was not at Powell’s famous church in Harlem. In general, Branch Rickey forbade his players to deliver public speeches or attend public dinners during the season. More important, Rickey, a Republican and a strong anticommunist, would never have approved of the leftist source of Jack’s invitation. That spring, Rickey had flown to Fulton, Missouri, to help give a hero’s welcome to Winston Churchill at Westminster College, where Rickey was a trustee. On that occasion, Churchill had delivered his celebrated “Iron Curtain” speech about the evils of Soviet communism.

In any event, Robinson hardly needed a greater canvas than the ballpark to express himself politically. On the road, he was constantly aware of the price of being a martyr, as abuse came in forms from the subtle and patronizing to the crude and hostile, while he held his peace in compliance with his agreement with Rickey. At Syracuse, a rival player threw a black cat from the dugout onto the field as Jack waited to hit: “
Hey Jackie, there’s your cousin.” Jack doubled to left, then scored on a single to center. As he passed the Syracuse dugout he offered his own taunt: “I guess my cousin’s pretty happy now.” He could count on a uniformly warm reception only at home,
in De Lorimer Downs. “
I owe more to Canadians than they’ll ever know,” he said later. “In my baseball career they were the first to make me feel my natural self.” Robinson would write later about one French-accented rooter who “used to shout from the bleachers, if things were bad, ‘Jackie, ’e’s my boy!’ The man had lungs of brass, a voice of iron, and a heart of gold.”

But the support of the Montreal crowds, and the black crowds elsewhere, could not make up entirely for the hostility he faced; besides, Jack both liked and disliked being special—he longed simply to play ball like any other Royal. But he
was
different. In a midsummer game at Syracuse, while one of the worst disturbances of the season raged at home plate, Jack rested stoically at second base. “
I’ve reminded him several times,” Clay Hopper told the press, “ ‘Jackie, you stay out of the arguments no matter what they are.’ ” Opposing pitchers threw repeatedly at his head; several base runners, according to Al Campanis and others, aimed their spikes at his flesh whenever they could. To the press, Jack offered hardly a murmur of complaint, but the Royals’ general manager, Mel Jones, knew differently. “
He came into the office more than once,” Jones later revealed, “and he’d say, ‘Nobody knows what I’m going through.’ ” At year’s end one Montreal journalist looked back: “
Because of his dark pigmentation Robbie could never protest. If there was a rhubarb on the field … he had to stay out of it. Otherwise there might have been a riot.”

What he was going through would have brought many another man to explosions of rage and perhaps even patterns of psychopathology, and it did not leave Robinson utterly unscathed. The psychological and also the physical cost of so much pent-up indignation is hard to measure. Some things are certain. Anger, which can powerfully inhibit athletic ability, did not make Jack less effective as a player but seemed indeed to intensify his concentration and propel him to greater feats. Rage and hurt did not drive him to the usual, often destructive therapies—alcohol, tobacco, sexual adventuring: with Rachel’s help, Robinson was able to stay on the straight-and-narrow course he had set for himself a long time before. But even such self-discipline carried its price and must have exacted a heavy toll in terms of inner peace and equilibrium of mind. Later, when Jack saw himself as released from Rickey’s prohibitions, his response would sometimes seem excessive to some people, including some of those disposed to admire him. Such people perhaps underestimated or undervalued the depth of feeling he had dammed up in these early years in order to serve the greater cause of freedom and social equality.

The Royals stayed atop the league, but Jack continued to find his burden heavy. Writing of the infamous black-cat incident in Syracuse and the vile namecalling in Baltimore, he admitted that “
the toll that incidents like
these took was greater than I realized. I was overestimating my stamina and underestimating the beating I was taking. I couldn’t sleep and often I couldn’t eat.” Rachel’s pregnancy added to that pressure. It was both a disruption of their brief new life together and a source of anxiety when he took to the road without her. At some point, he began to find it hard to sleep; his eating, usually hearty, dropped off. Finally, a doctor examined Jack, found nothing wrong physically, and prescribed rest; even the sports pages were to go unread. The Royals granted him five days off. Three days later, when the team started to lose, he was back.

Meanwhile, Rachel had her own worries and problems but tried to keep almost all of them to herself. As she became bigger with child, the trips became more dangerous, but Rickey understood what she meant to Jack on the road. “
Rachel’s understanding love,” as Jack later put it, “was a powerful antidote for the poison of being taunted by fans, sneered at by fellow-players, and constantly mistreated because of my blackness.” She tried to shield Jack even when a mysterious problem crept into her pregnancy. Starting in her fifth month, she became feverish in the last two weeks of each month; her temperature soared as high as 103 degrees. Her obstetrician, baffled, took blood cultures but finally could only prescribe sulfur. She kept her illness to herself: “
I never told Jack about the fever, I never told my neighbors, I couldn’t risk upsetting him. He would call at night from the road and I would say, ‘Everything’s just fine.’ When he got back, I would be better. I had to make the sacrifice, because I had begun to think that I was married to a man with a destiny, someone who had been chosen for a great task, and I couldn’t let him down.”

Protected in this way, Jack flourished on the field despite his periods of gloom. Typical was a game in Baltimore when he led an injury-ridden Royals team to a 10–9 victory, after Montreal went ahead 8–0 only to have Baltimore tie the game. Jack not only got three of the Royals’ seven hits but also stole home. Such feats made him a lion to his teammates, and to his manager, Hopper, who was now almost a complete convert to Rickey’s view of Robinson. In
Newsweek,
Hopper saluted Jack as “
a player who must go to the majors. He’s a big-league ballplayer, a good team hustler, and a real gentleman.” Race now meant less to other baseball men. “
I’d like to have nine Robinsons,” Bruno Betzel, the Jersey City Giants’ manager, declared. “If I had one Jackie, I’d room with him myself and put him to bed nights, to make sure nothing happened to him.”

“
I’ve had great luck and great treatment,” Jack told
Newsweek
modestly. “This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.” By September, when the regular season ended, he had completely vindicated Rickey. Robinson became the first Royal to win the league batting crown; his average of
.349 also eclipsed the Royals’ team record, set in 1930. Hitting only three home runs, he nevertheless drove in 66 runs; he also scored more runs, 113, than anyone else in the league. His 40 stolen bases put him second only to his teammate Marvin Rackley’s record-setting 65. At second base, he ended the season with the highest fielding percentage in the league. With one hundred victories, the highest number in team history, the Royals won the pennant by eighteen and a half games. They also played before the largest crowds at home and away—more than eight hundred thousand people—in the history of the club.

In the playoffs, the Royals won two tough seven-game series, first with the Newark Bears and then with the Syracuse Chiefs. Against Syracuse, in the deciding game, Jack went four-for-five. Then, late in September, the Royals traveled to Louisville, Kentucky, for the Little World Series against the Colonels of the American Association. For many of the Louisville players, officials, and fans, Robinson’s presence was the most urgent single consideration; the series brought integrated baseball to Louisville for the first time. The Colonels, who had agreed only reluctantly to his playing, underscored their opposition by sharply limiting the number of seats for blacks, many of whom were left to mill about in confusion outside the park. Some who made it inside probably regretted their luck. “
The tension was terrible,” Robinson wrote, “and I was greeted with some of the worst vituperation I had yet experienced.”

The series opened with three games in Louisville, during which Jack slumped, going one for eleven. His failure only fed the rage of many white fans in the cheaper seats. “
The worse I played,” he recalled, “the more vicious that howling mob in the stands became. I had been booed pretty soundly before, but nothing like this. A torrent of mass hatred burst from the stands with virtually every move I made.” As Jack suffered, Montreal dropped two games after taking the first. The abuse was so great that the white Louisville
Courier-Journal
felt obliged to deplore the “
demonstrations of prejudice against Montreal’s fine second baseman, the young Negro, Jackie Robinson,” as well as the “brusque refusal” of the park to accommodate more black fans. However, when the series moved to Montreal, the local fans repaid the Colonels. A storm of abuse, unprecedented at a Royals game, descended on the visitors. Down 4–0 at one point in the first home game, the Royals stormed back to win 6–5 in the tenth inning on a single by Robinson. In the fifth game, Jack doubled and, just after Louisville tied the game 3–all, hit a towering triple; then he laid down a bunt in the eighth inning “
which really settled the fate of the Colonels,” according to the Montreal
Daily Star.
“This was a really heady play, a beautifully placed hit.” With Al Campanis, he also executed superb double plays
to kill off Louisville scoring threats. Finally, on October 4, before an ecstatic crowd, the Royals defeated the Colonels once again, 2–0, to win the Little World Series. Robinson, who finished the series batting .400, also scored the last run.