by Dan Gutman
“Mr. Robinson’s room, please?” Bankhead asked the desk clerk politely. He looked at us disgustedly. Bankhead still had some blood on him, and he was pretty messed up. But the desk clerk told him the room number anyway and we walked upstairs.
Bankhead stopped in front of the door and did his best to straighten himself up, brushing his clothes in a futile effort to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice hollered from inside.
“Danny,” Bankhead replied, winking at me, “and a friend.”
The door cracked open and I could see the face of a black lady. She struggled to get the door open without dropping the tiny baby in her arms. The lady appeared to be in her early twenties.
“Danny, what happened to you?” she asked, alarmed. “And who’s your young friend?”
“I’ll be fine, Rachel. This fine young man wants to meet Jackie.”
The bedroom door opened, and out strolled a man with a pigeon-toed walk I had seen only in photos. For the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the color of my skin. Here I was, meeting the great Jackie Robinson. The Jackie Robinson who was not only a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, but also one of the most famous and important Americans of the twentieth century.
Goose pimples rose on my arms. I could hardly wait to get back home and start writing my report.
“Danny, who did this to you?” Jackie asked, ignoring me for the moment.
His voice was a shock. He was a big, strong man, but he had a high-pitched voice like a boy.
“I didn’t catch their names,” Bankhead replied.
The old photos of Jackie Robinson don’t do him justice. He was a very handsome man. His skin was dark, so dark it was almost black. He was wearing gray slacks and a white shirt, which made his skin seem even darker. He was a little shorter than Dan Bankhead, but more muscular. His eyes were deep, intense. He turned toward me and stared right at me. He gripped me with his eyes.
“Who’s the kid?” Jackie asked.
“Joe Stoshack,” I volunteered, grabbing for his hand. “Everybody calls me Stosh. It’s a pleasure and honor to meet you, Mr. Robinson.”
“Everybody calls me Jack, Stosh.”
Mrs. Robinson handed the baby over to Jackie while she took Bankhead to the kitchen to tend to his wounds. The baby didn’t like being jostled and let out a yelp.
“Shhh,” Jackie cooed, “it’s way past your bedtime, sugar lump.”
I couldn’t tell if the baby was a boy or a girl. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing and offend anybody.
“What’s the baby’s name?” I asked, playing it safe.
“Jackie,” Jackie replied.
Big help! Jackie could be a boy’s name or a girl’s name.
“He’s nineteen weeks old,” Jackie said, glancing at the bags I had brought with me. “Where’s your mama, son?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I was hesitant to tell anyone the whole story of how I traveled back through time. It was too unbelievable. They might think I was putting them on. Or that I was crazy.
“Where’s your mama, Stosh?” Jackie repeated.
“Home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Louisville, Kentucky.”
“My word! Are you a runaway?”
“No.”
“In some kind of trouble?”
“No.”
“Did your mama send you here?”
“Not exactly.”
“Son, I don’t have time for guessing games,” Jackie snapped. His steely eyes flashed from warmth to anger in an instant. I could see he had a quick temper, like me. I made a mental note to try not to make him angry again.
Mrs. Robinson came back out of the kitchen with Dan Bankhead. I guessed that she must be a nurse, like my mom. Bankhead was all cleaned up and fresh bandages had been expertly applied to his wounds.
“Jack,” Mrs. Robinson said, “Danny says this boy may have saved his life.”
That softened Jackie a bit. He thanked me with his eyes. Bankhead said he had to go, and Jackie led him to the door. Bankhead thanked me again for helping him and said goodnight. Then Jackie cooed to Jackie Jr. that it was time to go back to sleep as he carried him into the bedroom.
“Your mama packed enough food for an army,” Mrs. Robinson said, putting my cooler on the counter. “Where were you planning to sleep tonight?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it, ma’am.”
“A young boy like you just shows up at somebody’s house at night with a suitcase, and you have no idea where you’re going to sleep?”
“It—it’s a long story, ma’am,” I stuttered, backing toward the door. “Maybe I’d better be leaving.”
“Don’t be crazy,” she replied. “You can sleep on the couch. Tomorrow we’ll try to find your mama.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“It’s the least we can do after what you did for Danny,” Jackie called out from the other room. “Our house is your house.”
While Mrs. Robinson put sheets and covers on the couch in the living room, I looked around the place. It was tiny, certainly not a place I would expect a big star like Jackie Robinson to live. The couch took up a big part of the living room. There was no TV set. Bottles and diapers and baby toys were scattered around.
Time travel is exhausting. As soon as Mrs. Robinson finished making the couch up for me, I dove into it.
“What’s today’s date?” I asked before she turned off the light.
“Monday, April 14th.”
“Nineteen forty-seven?”
“Of course 1947,” she replied, looking at me curiously. Then she flipped off the light.
I couldn’t sleep. Can you blame me? Here I was, more than fifty years into the past, sleeping on Jackie Robinson’s couch, and I had somehow been turned into a black kid! I was too nervous and scared to sleep.
It would have been impossible to sleep anyway, because Jackie Jr. kept waking up and crying every few hours during the night. The first time, Mrs. Robinson tiptoed out to the kitchen to warm up a bottle and feed it to the baby. The next time, Jackie did the honors.
Sometime in the middle of the night, after he fed the baby, I saw Jackie tiptoe back into the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of milk, then spooned some sugar into it and stirred it up. Then he took a bag of bread out of the refrigerator and took out a slice. He sat down, dunked the bread in the milk, and bit off a piece.
“Can’t sleep, huh?” I whispered.
Jackie jumped out of his chair, almost spilling the milk all over himself. He must have forgotten I was sleeping on the couch.
“Opening day jitters,” Jackie said, sponging milk off the table.
“Baseball season starts tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“I hope you get some hits.”
“It’s not just about hits, Stosh,” he said softly, looking at me with those eyes.
“What’s it about, then?” I asked.
Jackie took a long time before answering.
“My grandfather was a slave in Georgia. My father was a sharecropper. All their lives, they never had a chance to better themselves. They were never allowed to better themselves because they were Negroes. Now I have a chance. Not just to better myself, but to make things better for every Negro in this country. If I’m successful, young Negro boys like you won’t have to fight so hard. You won’t have to put up with what my grandfather, my father, and I had to put up with. But if I fail…”
His voice trailed off. He looked like he had taken the weight of every African-American in the country on his shoulders.
“You won’t fail,” I assured Jackie. “You’re going to be great.”
“You sound pretty sure, Stosh.”
I wasn’t planning to tell Jackie or anybody else that I had come from the future. But as he stared at me with those piercing eyes, I felt compelled to tell the truth.
“Mr. Robinson,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I know y
ou’re not going to believe this…but I come from the future.”
“Excuse me?” Jackie asked, as if he might not have heard what I said.
“I traveled back in time more than fifty years to meet you.”
“You did, eh?” Jackie chuckled, then went to look out the window. “Funny, I don’t see your spaceship parked outside. I hope the police didn’t tow it away.”
“I didn’t use a spaceship,” I said, feeling a little angry that he was making fun of me. “I use baseball cards to travel through time.”
“Baseball cards, you say?”
“Yeah. You see, I’m actually a white kid. I sort of turned black during the time travel procedure. I came here because I’m doing a report on you at school for Black History Month.”
“Wait a minute,” Jackie said, holding up one hand and clutching his stomach with the other. “I can accept that traveling through time may be possible. I may even be able to believe a white kid could turn black. But Black History Month?”
At that, Jackie let out a loud guffaw that woke the baby.
“You’ve got to be kidding! White kids from Kentucky studying our history? Now I know you’re crazy!”
“You don’t have to believe me,” I told Jackie. “But because of people like you, there are going to be a lot of changes over the next fifty years. You’re going to win the Rookie of the Year award this year. I’ll bet you on that.”
“That’s a bet I’ll take any day,” Jackie said, thrusting out his hand to shake mine. “There’s no such thing as a Rookie of the Year award!”
Jackie chuckled some more as he came over to tuck me in. “I like you, Stosh,” he said. “Hey, do you want to go to the game tomorrow? You know, keep me company?”
“Sure!” I replied. “Who are you playing?”
“The Braves.”
“Atlanta?”
Jackie looked at me with the same expression his wife had when I asked her the year. I realized instantly that there were no Atlanta Braves in 1947. The Braves played in Milwaukee before they moved to Atlanta.
“I mean Milwaukee,” I quickly corrected myself. “The Milwaukee Braves.”
Jackie kept staring at me, the same puzzled expression on his face. “I guess you don’t follow baseball,” he said.
Of course I do! Before they moved to Milwaukee, they were the Boston Braves! How could I be so dumb? I’d have to be a lot more careful in the future…and in the past.
7
THE NEW BATBOY
I WOKE TO THE GENTLE SOUND OF JACKIE JR. SCREAMING his head off. Once the Robinsons calmed him down, we shared some cornflakes together and looked at the newspaper. The game wouldn’t start until two o’clock, but Jackie wanted to get out to the ballpark early. Mrs. Robinson picked up Jackie Jr. and walked us outside. It was a cold, cloudy day.
“You should have brought a jacket,” Mrs. Robinson told me.
Moms. They’re all the same.
“I’ll come out to the ballpark as soon as he wakes up from his nap,” Mrs. Robinson said as she kissed Jackie good-bye. “You’re going to be great, Jack.”
“I know,” he replied, gesturing toward me. “The kid already told me.”
Jackie didn’t have a car. We walked to the nearest subway stop. Jackie went through his pockets and came up with a couple of nickels. Five cents for a ride! Not bad. He gave me a nickel and we pushed our way through the turnstile.
The train wasn’t crowded. There were about a dozen people sitting around us, most of them white. I didn’t want to get into any trouble, so I tried not to make eye contact with anybody. A few people were staring at Jackie as he looked at a newspaper. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was black, or because they knew he was one of the Dodgers.
He was nervous, he told me. He had played second base for the Montreal Royals in the minor leagues. But the Dodgers needed help at first and asked him to play that position. It would be a learning experience.
We had been on the subway for about fifteen minutes when Jackie told me we would be getting off at the next stop. The train screeched to a halt, and when the doors opened I could see a sign that said PROSPECT PARK/BOTANICAL GARDENS.
When we got out of the subway, Ebbets Field was nowhere in sight. The street sign said EMPIRE.
Jackie knew where to go, and I followed. We walked down Empire for a couple of blocks until we reached Bedford Avenue. We made a left at that corner. I looked up and saw the sign…EBBETS FIELD.
There it was. The mythical baseball shrine. It had been torn down long ago, I knew, but it existed for me. I was standing outside it. My heart beat faster.
There was a gas station across the street from the ballpark, and an automobile dealership next to it. They were selling DeSotos, a kind of car that I had never heard of.
There it was. The mythical baseball shrine. It had been torn down long ago, but it existed for me. My heart beat faster.
There were no fans at the ballpark yet. Jackie led me through the center-field gate. We walked up a long ramp, which ended with a small opening. When we reached the opening, I could see the field for the first time.
New York had been a lot of concrete so far, so the overwhelming greenness of the field took me by surprise. It was a beautiful sight.
The ballpark actually seemed smaller than what I was expecting. The seats were really close to the field, so close that parts of the upper deck hung out over the playing field. Fans could look right down on the players.
The outfield walls were completely covered with advertising signs. VAN HEUSEN SHIRTS. EVER-READY SHAVING BRUSHES. BULOVA WATCHES. LIFEBUOY SOAP. BOTANY TIES. Guy products. A skinny horizontal sign read HIT SIGN WIN SUIT.
It looked like an impossible shot. The sign was only about four feet high and low to the ground, right behind where the rightfielder would be positioned.
The GEM RAZOR and ESQUIRE BOOT POLISH signs were against the right-field grass and leaning back slightly. The enormous scoreboard, with a big SCHAEFER BEER sign on it, stuck out about five feet into right center field. Playing the outfield with all those crazy angles must be a nightmare, I thought.
Jackie and I walked through a door marked CLUBHOUSE: PLAYERS ONLY. The Dodger locker room was a big, rectangular room with a line of windows close to the ceiling. It was hot in there, and I didn’t think it was because the air conditioning hadn’t been turned on yet. The place had no air conditioning.
The outfield walls were completely covered with advertising signs.
Lockers, each about the size of a phone booth, lined the walls. A clean uniform hung in each one. I scanned the names above the lockers—PEE WEE REESE…CARL FURILLO…DIXIE WALKER…PETE REISER…COOKIE LAVAGETTO…AL GIONFRIDDO. I knew these names from reading baseball books and hearing old stories.
Jackie found his locker. While he put on his uniform with the big 42 on its back, I took a walk around.
When I walked into the trainer’s room, I was surprised to see a white kid about my age in there. He had his feet up on the massage table, and he was reading a magazine called Amazing Stories. The kid was wearing a Dodgers uniform.
“Whaddaya want?” he asked brusquely.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“You the new batboy?”
“Uhh…” I certainly wasn’t the new batboy. But he obviously didn’t know that. And if the Dodgers needed a batboy, well, I figured, I can do that as well as anybody else. It could be kind of cool to be the batboy for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“Yeah,” I said, doing my best to look like I was telling the truth.
“Well, is you is or is you ain’t?”
“I is!” I said more assertively. “I mean, I am. I’m the new batboy.”
“I’m Anthony,” the kid said. He didn’t offer his hand, so I didn’t put mine out. “Call me Ant. Everybody does.”
“Joe,” I said. “Joe Stoshack.”
“What’s a colored boy doin’ with a Polack name?”
“I don’t know. My folks gave it to me.”
&nb
sp; I didn’t like the Polack crack, but I had promised Mom I’d be on my best behavior, so I didn’t slug him.
“How come you don’t talk colored?”
“I talk the way I talk.”
Ant looked me over, sizing me up. Usually when I meet new kids, they give me the benefit of the doubt. They don’t hate me or like me yet, but they check me out to see if I’m okay. This Ant, I could tell, didn’t like me the second he set eyes on me.
I had been careful to wear a plain old T-shirt and blue jeans so it wouldn’t be obvious that I came from the future. But Ant was pretty observant.
“Where’d ya get dem dumb sneakers?” he asked.
I looked at my feet, then at Ant’s. I was wearing a pair of Nikes, the cheapest ones they make. There was nothing fancy about them. I mean, they weren’t Air Jordans or anything. But I guess my sneakers looked strange to Ant. He was wearing black canvas high tops. Their label said KEDS.
“I wore out my Keds,” I said. “These are…new.”
Ant took a uniform out of the closet and tossed it to me. It was heavy, much heavier than my Little League uniform. It must have been made of wool or flannel. The word Dodgers stretched across the chest, with the “Do” on one side of the buttons and “dgers” on the other.
I turned the uniform over to see what number I had been given. I was hoping for something in the forties, like Jackie. But across the back of the uniform was the word BATBOY.
Ant led me back to the main clubhouse and pointed at the locker where I was supposed to change my clothes and stash my stuff. Jackie was sitting and reading some letters in front of his locker in the other corner.
As Ant walked away, he mumbled under his breath, “I can’t believe I gotta work with a nigger.”
I had heard the word before, but never directed toward me. The “N word” most people in my time call it. I knew it was about the worst word you could say to an African-American, though it never really meant much to me.
Now I felt angry and humiliated. Ant had already called me a Polack and now he was giving me the N word. The blood rushed to my face. Ant was on the other side of the clubhouse now, about to go into the trainer’s room. I went after him. I was going to bust his face in.