Jackie Robinson (31 page)

On March 15, the Royals flew to Panama. In this mainly black but white-dominated nation, Jack’s arrival was a civic event. White Americans, especially the military, had brought Jim Crow, complete with separate drinking fountains and schools, to the Canal Zone; to most Panamanians, the four black Royals represented a significant rebuke to this insult. A large, excited crowd turned out for Jack’s first game, against an all-black local team that had just beaten the Dodger stars. With Rickey sitting in the stands, and with the Panamanian fans praying for his success, Jack responded with a home run and a single and flawless play at first base. Campanella also homered, a reporter noted, “
but the crowd came out to cheer for Jackie.” His fine playing, including four hits in one game, continued against other local teams. Then, urged on by Rickey, he faced the Dodgers. “
I want you to run wild,” Rickey insisted, “to steal the pants off them, to be the most conspicuous player on the field.” These games were crucial: “Not only will you impress the Dodger players, but the stories the newspapermen send back to the Brooklyn and New York newspapers will help create demand on the part of the fans that you be brought up to the majors.”

Robinson’s response was electric. In his first game against Brooklyn, before six thousand fans, he had two hits and thirteen put-outs, including a “
startling” catch of a low throw at first base; three days later, he beat out two bunts and an infield hit for singles. A New York writer marveled at how brilliantly, in one at-bat, Robinson hoodwinked Dodger pitcher Ed Heusser as well as infielders Stanky and Ed Stevens. Feinting a bunt one way on a pitch, he then went the other way on the next: “
The infield was made to look foolish.” Calling time, Stanky picked up the ball and hurled it over the grandstand. Jack’s play at first base amazed Herb Goren of the New York
Sun:
“
Robinson’s movements around the bag are graceful and amazingly precise for one strange to the position.”

For Jack, facing the Dodger stars was no cakewalk. The sheer size and power of the pitchers Hugh Casey and Hal Gregg stunned him: “
When they take their stride and come down with the ball you feel like they’re standing right on top of you,” he reported; “only time will tell” if he could hit such pitching consistently. Without comment, Jack noticed something else: almost to a man, the Dodgers were cold to him. Certainly no one was encouraging. In this respect, Rickey’s plan was not working. Back in Havana, Dodgers coach Jake Pitler gamely lauded Robinson’s amazing gifts. “
It would be a crime not to let this boy come up because of his color,” Pitler told the press. “Wait till you see him in action.… He’s terrific.” Leo Durocher also spoke up. “
He’s a swell ball player,” Durocher had told Wendell Smith of the
Courier.
“He’s my type of ball player. Jackie can hit, run and field. What more can a manager ask of a player?”

But, facing the Dodgers again, this time at the new Stadium del Cerro in Havana, Jack faltered. Stomach trouble kept him out of the first game. Diagnosing an inflamed colon, a doctor urged him to rest; but Jack insisted on playing, “
because people might think I was quitting if I didn’t.” In the second game, he was “
far off his usual brilliant form, being guilty of two errors,” and he managed only one hit. He went hitless in the third game, sat out the next, then went hitless on his return. In the sixth game, perhaps delivering a message, the Dodger catcher Bruce Edwards stormed into first base as Robinson reached high for the ball, and knocked him out cold. Jack’s teammates and the trainer rushed to his side; Al Campanis fanned the air about his face. Sore and battered, he watched the last game in Cuba from the stands.

To the press, Rickey remained noncommittal about a promotion. He would say only that Robinson would go to the Dodgers before the start of the season or not at all in 1947. Several reporters believed that Rickey wanted and even intended to promote Robinson. However, “
there is also little doubt,” one wired home, that “many Brooklyn players will neglect to welcome Jackie with open arms and mind.” Jack, too, noted the chill and resented it. The previous year, he pointed out mordantly, the Royals “
did not suffer by my presence.” Then he shifted his point. The pennant had come from high team morale. “No, sir,” he said, “morale is mighty important. If the Dodgers don’t want me, there would be no point in forcing myself on them. I am in the Dodger organization and naturally I want to see them win. I wouldn’t want to feel that I was doing anything that would keep them from winning.” The reporter concluded: “The only thing keeping Robinson off the Dodgers now, plainly, is the attitude of the players.”

But few outsiders knew the full extent of the players’ opposition. Just before the start of the three-game series in Panama, a petition began to
circulate seeking to keep Robinson off the Dodgers. At the center was a core of Southern veterans: the pitchers Hugh Casey of Georgia and Kirby Higbe of South Carolina; a backup catcher, Bobby Bragan of Alabama; and Dixie Walker, also of Alabama, not only an explosive hitter and outfielder but also the most popular player in Brooklyn—“the People’s Cherce,” in the local lingo. The outfielder Carl Furillo of Reading, Pennsylvania, also backed the revolt. At least three Southerners had balked at signing. Eddie Stanky, out of loyalty to Rickey and gratitude for a fat new contract, promised to smooth the way for his boss. After three years at war, eager to play and make money, Pee Wee Reese of Kentucky had rejected the petition. “
I wasn’t trying to think of myself as the Great White Father,” he insisted—Robinson “had a right to be there too.” Pete Reiser of Missouri had a different reason. Once, searching in a strange city for a doctor for his sick young daughter, Reiser had unhesitatingly entrusted her to a black physician; why would he sign such a petition? Then Kirby Higbe, unable to keep the plan a secret, shared its details with Harold Parrott, the Dodgers’ secretary.

(Later, Walker and Bragan would deny knowledge of a petition. In his 1967 memoir,
The High Hard One,
Higbe declared that “
there were five of us that went straight to Mr. Rickey” in opposition to Robinson: Walker, Bragan, Furillo, Higbe—and Pee Wee Reese. “As Southerners,” Higbe wrote, “we had heard a lot of talk about how we abused and mistreated Negroes down South, and we knew we never had.” Reese, Higbe wrote, then changed his mind about playing with Robinson. On May 3, Rickey traded Higbe to the Pirates.)

To put down the revolt, Rickey turned Durocher loose. Practically dragging the Dodgers out of their beds in the middle of the night, the explosive Durocher denounced the plot in a tirade studded with obscenities. “
I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra!” Durocher shouted, according to Parrott. “I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich.” Summoning the ringleaders to his suite at the Tivoli Hotel in the Canal Zone, Rickey blasted their stand against integration. He heaped scorn on Furillo, whose parents had come to America from Sicily in search of a better life. In Bragan’s case, prejudice was ingrained. His father’s black workers, he would explain, always used the back door when they came to his home. “
When you’re born and raised in that kind of atmosphere, you just have a different feeling.” Bragan readily accepted Rickey’s offer to trade him. Rickey was also tough on Walker. “
He really reamed me out,” Walker conceded. “I didn’t know if they would spit on me or not,” he said of his white Alabama
neighbors and his association with Jackie Robinson. “I had a hardware and sporting goods store back home.”

Cracking the whip, Rickey was sure “
that a little show of force at the right time is necessary when there’s a deliberate violation of law.” In response to “an overt act of violence” or the “destruction of someone’s rights,” he declared, “it’s no time to conduct an experiment in education or persuasion.” On March 26, Walker requested a trade. “
Recently the thought has occurred to me that a change of ball clubs would benefit both the Brooklyn Baseball club and myself,” he wrote to Rickey. “Therefore I would like to be traded as soon as a deal can be arranged.” He had enjoyed his association with the Dodgers, but “for reasons I don’t care to go into I feel my decision is best for all concerned.” Rickey decided finally to keep Walker, who in 1946 had hit .319 and driven in 116 runs, but he had made his central point. “
No player on this club,” he declared, “will have anything to say about who plays or does not play on it. I will decide who is on it and Durocher will decide who of those who are on it does the playing.” (Eventually Rickey forgave Bragan and Walker and even employed them as coaches.)

If Robinson himself knew of the rebellion, it did not make him embittered or truculent; he kept his and Rickey’s goals, their pact, in focus. In any event, he was struggling with insults from both inside and outside the Dodger organization. Once, he was forbidden to eat in the dining room of a major hotel in the Canal Zone, as local newspapers angrily reported. Controlling himself, Jack could barely stomach the easygoing attitude of his teammate Roy Partlow, who breezed into camp late and seemed ready to blow his big chance. In the first of two reports written for the
Courier,
Jack criticized Partlow, who was “
one of the greatest left-hand pitchers in the game”; however, “at the present time he is discontented, and unless he gets the feeling that he wants to play, he may as well forget about the game … because it is a proven fact that a discontented player will never be as effective as one whose heart is in the game at all times.”

(Before spring training ended, Partlow was gone, cut by the Royals. Some observers thought that both John Wright and Partlow were intimidated by the presence of white players—or appeared to have, as Wendell Smith put it, “
a tendency to choke up while laboring among the Caucasians.”)

Jack was also irritated by the way his friend Roy Campanella seemed to accept Jim Crow. To Campanella, there was no point in chafing at poor or even unfair conditions one couldn’t change. This was a difference between the men that would only grow over the years; to many teammates, it also made Campy a better companion than the sensitive, even prickly Robinson. When Campanella at last protested, his complaint was that the ten-cent
cigars he smoked at home cost thirty-five cents in Havana. “
I tried not to notice the things that bothered Jackie,” Campanella later wrote, alluding to Jack’s stomach trouble in Cuba.

Jack’s stomach was not helped by the absence of Rachel, whom he missed badly. Fighting against his loneliness, his anger at Jim Crow, and the uncertainty about his promotion, he was eager to see Rachel and Jackie Junior again. Thus he was happy early in April when he returned to New York with the Royals for the last two exhibition games against the Dodgers. On April 9, in the New York
Times,
Arthur Daley devoted his column to the Dodgers’ return to Flatbush and “
the most delicate question of them all, Jackie Robinson.” Moving Robinson from one base to another smacked of “an old-fashioned run-around,” Daley mused, but perhaps it wasn’t. “Only Rickey knows and he ain’t talkin’.” Some reporters were sure Robinson would be called up, but “some are just as sure that he won’t be—not if the Mahatma wants to keep peace in his baseball family.”

But Rickey’s baseball family was about to be rocked. That day, at the Dodgers’ headquarters on Montague Street, Rickey, Parrott, and Durocher were meeting in Rickey’s office when Rickey took a telephone call that shook him. Following a three-week inquiry into complaints by the New York Yankees about certain newspaper articles signed by Durocher, the commissioner of baseball, A. B. “Happy” Chandler, had decided to punish both teams. (The articles, ghostwritten by Parrott, had appeared in the Brooklyn
Eagle.
) Behind the Durocher columns was a running feud between the Dodgers and the Yankees—between Rickey’s predecessor with the Dodgers, Larry MacPhail, now president of the Yankees, on the one hand, and Rickey and Durocher, who had managed the Dodgers under MacPhail, on the other. In Cuba the previous month, Durocher had publicly raised the issue of MacPhail’s sitting with alleged gamblers at a Yankees exhibition game there. After MacPhail’s bitter protests, and what the commissioner called “a series of publicity-producing affairs” involving the colorful Durocher, Chandler had decided not only to impose fines of $2,000 on the Yankees and the Dodgers and a fine of $500 on Parrott, but to suspend Durocher for one year for conduct “
detrimental to baseball.”

Durocher’s banishment shocked the baseball world and overwhelmed the talk about Jackie Robinson. However, Rickey was determined not to seem deflated or intimidated; while Chandler was making waves, Rickey would make history. Early the next day, April 10, a telephone call from a Dodger secretary roused Jack at his Manhattan hotel. He was to come to a meeting with Rickey at 215 Montague Street. Dressing quickly, he made the trip across the East River. Later that day, in the sixth inning of a game between the Royals and the Dodgers, just as “
several thousand Negroes” on
hand groaned as Jack bunted a pitch by Ralph Branca into a double play, Rickey’s assistant Arthur Mann strolled casually through the press box. To each reporter he handed a sheet of paper with a terse announcement that he himself had typed at home, in order to keep it a secret. The note was signed by Branch Rickey: “The Brooklyn Dodgers today purchased the contract of Jackie Roosevelt Robinson from the Montreal Royals. He will report immediately.”

(On March 29, Wendell Smith had reported in the
Courier
that, according to “
an unimpeachable source,” Robinson would be promoted to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the night of April 10. The newspaper was off the mark, but only by a few hours. Arthur Daley of the New York
Times
also knew in advance, but Rickey forbade him to break the story. “My boy,” Rickey told Daley, “
I must hold you to your solemn word of honor. This is the most important thing I ever did in my life and a premature leak could destroy it.”)

Reporting to the Dodgers’ dressing room, Jack was handed a uniform bearing the number 42 and promised a locker as soon as one was free; meanwhile, a nail on the wall would suffice. Dapper in his new uniform, he beamed for a photograph shaking hands with his former manager, Clay Hopper. The next morning, at 215 Montague Street, Jack signed his contract with the Dodgers, which was for the major-league minimum salary: $5,000 for the year. Then, at noon, he reported at Ebbets Field to the interim Dodger manager, his old friend Clyde Sukeforth. Jack was in a daze, and barely listening to Sukeforth go over the strengths and weaknesses of the Yankee team, when the manager asked: “
Robinson, how are you feeling today?” Jack replied that he was fine. “Okay,” Sukeforth went on, “then you’re playing first base for us today.” Jack would remember his reaction: “I just sorta gulped.”