Opening Day

by Jonathan Eig

  Jack, the youngest of five, was born January 31, 1919. He lived with his family in a ramshackle cottage near the town of Cairo, Georgia, not far from the Florida state line. Jack’s father, Jerry, could neither read nor write. He knew how to farm, but he preferred not to. Fortunately for the Robinsons, Mallie was big-boned, strong, and not one to back down from a challenge. It was Mallie who raised the children, Mallie who worked the soil, and Mallie who negotiated with the plantation owner for a share of the crop instead of straight wages. “You’re about the sassiest nigger woman ever on this place,” the plantation owner once told her. She took that as a compliment.

  Yet for all her sass and strength, Mallie couldn’t overcome the crushing poverty that afflicted so many black families in the Deep South. Nor could she control her husband, who wouldn’t work, wouldn’t stay home, and wouldn’t confine his loving to one woman. “I always lived so close to God [that] He would tell me things,” Mallie once said. So when God told her to take the children and get away, she did just that, ignoring Jerry’s attempts to convince her that it was the devil talking to her. She packed her things, herded the kids out the door, and caught a train heading west. Jack was sixteen months old.

  It was an enormous gamble—truly an act of faith. She had little money and no plan. All she had, really, was a half brother in Pasadena who had bragged to her once, “If you want to get closer to heaven, visit California.” Whether it was closer to heaven or not, Mallie figured it couldn’t be worse than Georgia, where an impudent black woman might get strung from a tree if she wasn’t careful.

  She and her children arrived in Los Angeles by night, the city lights aglow, brighter and more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. In almost no time she found a job working as a maid in a wealthy white man’s household. When the boss sent her home at four in the afternoon, she didn’t know what to do. In Georgia, plantation work had been her mornings, afternoons, and nights. To quit so early seemed unnatural. So she found jobs cooking and cleaning in other homes to fill her hours and her cupboard. She worked so much in those first few years that her children seldom saw her. “She was hands caressing us or a voice in our sleep,” her youngest son recalled. It was a voice that would speak to him for years to come.

  • • •

  Pasadena in the 1920s was one of the richest small cities in the United States. It was a winter getaway for tourists, a place of wealth and culture and fine architecture, a boom town with little reason to fear a bust. The Robinsons arrived at an opportune moment, as the rich got richer and the poor got jobs. Pasadena had a few working-class neighborhoods, but nothing that qualified as a ghetto. By 1922, to the astonishment and dismay of her white neighbors, Mallie and her relatives saved enough money to buy two small houses that occupied a single plot of land at 121 Pepper Street, a predominantly white block in a working-class part of town. One exasperated Pepper Street homeowner called the police whenever the Robinson children ran or roller-skated past his house, explaining that his wife was afraid of Negroes, using the polite term of the day. Others drew up a petition to get rid of the new family. By 1930, the U.S. Census showed ten people crammed into Mallie’s little house—six children and four adults—a condition that probably didn’t help win friends among the neighbors. Not for a minute did the family feel welcome.

  Mallie, a devout Methodist, fought back with kindness. She performed chores at no charge for the richest white woman on their block, hoping to gain her loyalty and affection. She never quit trying and she never made much real progress, a fact not lost on her youngest son, who had plenty of his mother’s strength but little of her patience. That same year, 1922, the city of Pasadena built the Rose Bowl. It was of no small importance that Jack lived in a town enamored of sports, where blacks and whites often competed on the same ball fields, and where the weather let children play outdoors twelve months of the year. Jack’s schools were filled mostly with white students. In Pasadena, a black person never forgot he was part of a minority group and that the group was treated far differently from the majority. Jack saw movies seated in segregated balconies, swam in city-owned pools only on Tuesdays, and gained entry to the local YMCA only one night a week. Such humiliations taught many black boys and girls to expect little from the world, but Mallie’s children were different. They grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege and, while they were not naive enough to expect equality, they were at least encouraged to fight for whatever they could get.

  • • •

  As a boy, Jack was quick-witted and quick to anger. When he was eight years old, a white girl on his block taunted him one day with cries of “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” He responded by calling her a cracker. Soon the girl’s father stormed out of the house and started shouting. Before long, the boy and the grown man were hurling rocks at each other. Mallie Robinson never said who threw the first stone, but she did remark that her son had the better aim.

  Mallie always bragged that she instilled in her young Jack a sense of racial pride. She claimed no responsibility for her boy’s rage, however. While Mallie never bowed to white people, she seldom lost her temper. Perhaps Jack was angry because he grew up without a father in a home in which everyone tried to pretend the old man had never existed. Perhaps the rage sprouted from the rich soil of Pasadena, where he was removed from the overt racism of the South but still surrounded by razor-sharp inequities. There were no lynchings, no police roundups, no Ku Klux Klan rallies in his world. Here in Southern California, he had just enough opportunity and just enough freedom to flash his anger without fear of severe reprisal. He was smart, loquacious, and supremely confident, with a competitive streak as wide as a Pacific sunset. A white boy with such qualities might have been marked by his teachers as a future leader, but Jack’s instructors in grade school did little to encourage his ambition. He didn’t seem to care much about his grades, and he ran with a troublemaking group called the Pepper Street Gang. He treated school the way a cab driver treats traffic, as something to be endured, and not without seeking shortcuts. His teachers recommended a career in gardening. Years later, Mallie said she had the feeling that Jack never forgave the people of Pasadena.

  Even in his youth, Robinson was smart enough to notice that the jobs available to him as a boy—shining shoes and selling newspapers, to name but a couple—were not much worse than the jobs held by many black adults. Yet when he played sports, magical things happened. White kids wanted him on their teams. Coaches gushed. Teachers paid attention.

  Games provided the closest thing to equal opportunity he had found in his young life. So he played as if sports were the whole world, a world more fair and open-minded than the one in which those who lacked his grace, speed, and strength lived. “If I was good enough, I played,” he once said. “If not, I had to give way to some other kid.”

  As if to prove his theory of the superiority of the sporting universe, he watched the career of his older brother Mack, a track and field star whose swift feet and powerful legs earned him a scholarship to the University of Oregon. In 1936, when Jack was seventeen, Mack competed in the two-hundred-meter dash at the Berlin Olympics and finished second to Jesse Owens. Black Americans became heroes back home for running over Hitler’s notions of Aryan supremacy. Jack heard the cheers. He saw the silver medal his brother brought back. Yet while many of the white members of the Olympic track team went on to careers as coaches and teachers and radio broadcasters, Jesse Owens, the biggest hero of them all, found himself racing against horses at county fairs and minor-league baseball parks, one small step removed from a circus act. Mack settled for work as a street sweeper on the night shift. In what was an act of either remarkable provocation or extreme self-pity, Mack wore his Olympic jacket while he swept trash.

  The lesson was as clear to little brother as the “USA” on Mack’s jacket: Sports were a great equalizer, but games could only do so much. When the competition ended, the universe reverted to its original form. The only thing to do was keep playing.

  • • •
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  He remained Jack, not Jackie, at John Muir Technical High School. “Dusky Jack Robinson,” the Los Angeles Times called him, the adjective serving as a signal to readers who might not have been aware of his race. From Muir Tech, he went on to Pasadena Junior College, where he achieved a small measure of celebrity as an outstanding football player, and where newspaper writers began referring to him as Jackie. At about this time, he also came under the influence of the Reverend Karl Downs, a young and energetic pastor from Scott’s Chapel Church, who persuaded Robinson to quit the Pepper Street Gang and start teaching Sunday school.

  In 1939, Robinson stepped up to the University of California at Los Angeles. It was here, starting at halfback for one of the nation’s best college football teams, that he emerged as a full-blown star. “All Jackie did at Pasadena,” wrote the Los Angeles Times, in welcoming him to UCLA, “was throw with ease and accuracy, punt efficiently and run with that ball like it was a watermelon and the guy who owned it was after him with a shotgun.” All he did at UCLA from that moment on was play baseball, basketball, and football, compete in the long jump and broad jump with the track team, and dabble a bit in tennis. No matter the game, his reputation as a ferocious competitor preceded. “I was aggressive . . .” Robinson recalled years later. “Often I found myself being singled out by the other players. . . . I enjoyed having that kind of reputation.”

  Robinson on the run looked like a funnel cloud. If you were an infielder watching him spin your way, or a linebacker contemplating a tackle, or a basketball player trying to keep him from the hoop, you could never tell which direction he would go or when he might hit. You only knew there would be damage. He was big, just under six feet tall and a bit less than two hundred pounds, solid from head to toe, yet with the agility of a much smaller man. He ran with his toes pointed slightly inward, and with his arms lashing wildly, so that even when he was moving in a straight line he appeared to be going this way and that. But it wasn’t his size, his speed, or his agility that impressed people most. It wasn’t the blue-black darkness of his skin. Nor was it his high-pitched voice. The thing that struck people most strongly was something subtle, something that became obvious only after they’d come to know him. It was the fire. It seemed to burn constantly, just below the surface. It fueled his competitive spirit even as it threatened at times to undermine his accomplishments.

  At UCLA, as in Pasadena, Robinson enjoyed a relatively friendly environment. Racism was unavoidable, but it was much more subtle than in the South. It was the kind of racism white people often failed to notice, which no doubt made it all the more hurtful at times to men like Robinson. The university had no black professors. Black students could not live in the village of Westwood. Nor could they work in the college bookstore. But UCLA, eager to compete athletically with powerhouse schools such as Oregon, Stanford, and USC, had nonetheless decided to bring more black students to campus. That left Robinson surrounded by a student body that was for the most part happy to have him around. On the football team, he was joined by the great halfback Kenny Washington and the gifted receiver Woody Strode, both of whom were black. The press called them “The Gold Dust Trio.” Robinson became famous, not just in Southern California, but nationwide, with a reputation as one of the country’s finest all-around athletes. He never acquired a nickname at UCLA. Every so often a reporter would label him “the Brown Comet,” “the Black Meteor,” or “the Sepia Flash,” but none of the names stayed with him.

  As a part of the Gold Dust Trio, his life at times did seem to be dusted in gold. He was living in Southern California, cooled by the sweet Pacific breeze. When he got into a jam with the police (not for the first time), a jam Robinson attributed (not for the first time) to the bigotry of a white police officer, there were powerful people at UCLA on hand to extricate him. Still, to his friends and teammates, he seemed easily and often perturbed. Strode recalled Robinson as a loner with “steely hard eyes that would flash angry in a heartbeat.” He was not the sort of athlete who performed with a smile on his face, whose physical ease went hand-in-hand with emotional delight at play. No one would ever compare him to Babe Ruth or Satchel Paige, or Willie Mays, or any of the other great athletes who retained their childlike joy into adulthood. If he did experience pure pleasure at play, he seemed determined to make sure no one saw it.

  • • •

  Late in the summer of 1940, when he met a young woman named Rachel Isum, Robinson showed signs of mellowing ever so slightly. Rachel was tall and beautiful, and looked taller and more beautiful for the way she carried herself. She was just seventeen, slender and serene, with soft brown curls stacked cloudlike atop her head. She studied nursing at UCLA and took her school work seriously. She took most things seriously. Like Jack, she neither drank nor smoked. When her father became too sick to work, her mother found a position as a caterer, and Rachel took on two jobs: assistant to the caterer and nurse to her father. She had developed excellent skills for taking care of a family but had not yet abandoned hope of becoming a doctor or a nurse. The first time she saw Jackie Robinson on campus, she was intrigued. She admired his preference for crisp white shirts, which accentuated the dark hue of his skin. She took the fashion choice as a token of his pride. He seemed confident, strong, and yet very shy, with a smile that made her melt. While the campus knew him as Jackie, she preferred to call him Jack. He called her Rae.

  On their first date, Rachel and Jack went to the UCLA homecoming dance at the Biltmore, one of the ritziest hotels in Los Angeles. She wore a new black dress and a matching black hat with fox trim. He wore a blue suit, the only one he owned. The orchestra played “Stardust” and “Mood Indigo.” They danced awkwardly. At the end of the evening, he gave her a disappointing peck on the cheek and said goodnight. Both said later that they knew right away they were destined to be married. Robinson played only two years at UCLA, using up his football eligibility. By the end of his second season he was falling behind on class work, and none too upset about it. He stuck around for one more basketball season and then dropped out.

  Suddenly, the future seemed unclear. There were no black players in the National Football League, and none in the National Basketball League, either, or his path would have been more obvious. Instead, he went to work as an assistant athletic director at the National Youth Administration, a Depression-era job-training agency on the campus of the California Polytechnic Institute, making $150 a month. He was still living with his mother and still contemplating marriage in December 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt called the nation to war. His draft notice arrived a few months later.

  • • •

  Late one night, on July 6, 1944, Lieutenant Jack Roosevelt Robinson stepped aboard a bus at Camp Hood, the army base in Texas where he was stationed. He took a seat in the middle of the bus as it bounced toward the nearby town of Temple. He was twenty-five years old, with a bum ankle that was threatening to keep him from shipping out to Europe with the rest of his battalion.

  Robinson had quickly established a reputation as a hothead at Camp Hood. As a morale officer, he often heard complaints from black soldiers, and he rarely hesitated to take those complaints to his white superiors. When some of his peers complained that there were not enough seats for black soldiers in the post exchange, where they went for snacks, Robinson telephoned the provost marshal to bring the issue to his attention. The provost marshal, not alerted by the sound of Robinson’s voice that he was black, asked how the lieutenant would feel if his own wife wound up “sitting next to a nigger.” With that, Robinson blew. “Pure rage took over,” he recalled. “I was shouting at the top of my voice. Every typewriter in headquarters stopped.” The provost marshal hung up. Another time, when a captain refused to let him play on the Camp Riley baseball team, Robinson and the captain argued. The captain threatened to beat Robinson with a baseball bat. Robinson stepped in close and urged the captain to repeat his threat. “What did you say you were going to do?” he asked. Just then a colon
el got between the men and forced them to separate.

  But it was the incident on the bus that nearly ruined him.

  The bus had gone only five or six blocks when the driver looked in the rearview mirror and spotted Robinson talking to a light-skinned black woman. The driver, mistaking the woman for white, stopped, got up, and ordered the lieutenant to take a seat in the rear. “I didn’t even stop talking,” Robinson recalled in I Never Had It Made, one of his autobiographies, “didn’t even look at him. . . . I had no intention of being intimidated into moving to the back of the bus.”

  Robinson knew there was considerable risk in provoking a white man, even a lower-ranking one. Throughout the war, black soldiers had been beaten and killed for less. In some cases, the mere sight of a black man in uniform had been enough to inspire brutal attacks. The sense among many whites, particularly in the South, was that black men serving in the military were beginning to think too much of themselves. Later, Rosa Parks would take the same stand as Robinson, refusing to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her brave decision touched off widespread protest and earned her a place in history as the so-called mother of the civil rights movement. Robinson’s ride came eleven years earlier. It inspired few news stories, and no protests or marches.

  The bus driver shouted at Robinson. At some point he used the word “nigger,” which sent Robinson into a rage.

  The driver warned that Robinson would be in trouble if he didn’t shut up and obey.

  Robinson said he didn’t care, that he’d been in trouble his whole life.

  “I walked up and put my finger right in his face,” Robinson recalled. “I figured the best thing to do was not to shrink in a case like this, but get more bold, you know?” This was becoming a recurring theme in his life. “I put my finger right in his face and told him to leave me alone—that I didn’t want to be bothered with him and I was sick and tired of being pestered.”