Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  In 1921, according to one account, word had reached Mallie that Jerry Robinson had died, somewhere in the South. Later came reports that, like a black Kilroy, he had been here or there; but Jerry never surfaced. Resigned to the failure of her marriage, Mallie made no attempt to learn the truth, but tried hard not to speak ill of Jerry at home. According to Willa Mae, Mallie once explained that she held back “because some of us children might decide to take after him; we might figure, Well, that is what my Daddy did, I want to be like my Daddy. So my mother decided not to talk about him.” From Edgar, however, Jack heard about nasty whippings Jerry had given him back in Georgia, and for mere trifles. “Edgar didn’t like our father,” Willa Mae knew; “he said he didn’t want to remember him.” As a child, Jack also saw contempt for Jerry in the attitude of the other boys, Frank and Mack. “We didn’t know him,” Mack said, “and we did not recognize him or ever consider him being a part of the family.” Willa Mae, too, had closed her heart to Jerry Robinson. “I just didn’t have a father,” she said. “And when I heard about him, I didn’t need him. I didn’t need a father.”

  Like Mack, Jack would later deny having had the slightest interest in knowing his father, who was a phantom from the dark, forbidding South that was now forever behind them. But Jack’s character and psychology were undoubtedly shaped in part by this loss and its denial. At least once, late in his life, Jack could be philosophical about his pain. “My father’s will and spirit,” he reasoned, “were slowly broken down by the economic slavery imposed upon him, the exorbitant costs of food and rent and other necessities.” More typically, however, he was angry and unforgiving about Jerry Robinson and what he had done: “I could only think of him with bitterness. He, too, may have been a victim of oppression, but he had no right to desert my mother and five children.”

  Mallie herself set aside any thought of marrying again, according to Willa Mae, because “she wasn’t going to have any man whipping her children.” Over the years in Pasadena she had one male friend, known to her children only as “Mr. Fowler,” with whom she was on intimate terms. But he never moved into the house, and she seemed to have no desire to marry him. “As far as I can remember, he was the only man in her life after we came out here.”

  As Jack struggled into his teens, his brothers were crucial to him, but not always much of a help. He looked at them and imagined he saw his own future, but the sight was not entrancing. His eldest brother, Edgar, was eccentric at the very least, or a mystery. Although he was “somewhat sickly sometimes,” according to Jack, Edgar did amazing physical feats on his roller skates and bicycle. Speed fascinated him. Once, police ticketed him for skating at an excessive speed; he was known to terrify onlookers by jumping in his skates over the hoods of cars; he also could outrace the bus from Pasadena to the Santa Monica Beach, some thirty miles away. He started riding a motorcycle, but so recklessly it was taken away from him. Intellectually, Edgar was also a puzzle. He had no formal schooling past the sixth grade, and mainly one intellectual interest—the Bible, from which he quoted chapter and verse with ease. However, to one of Jack’s friends, “Edgar was mentally retarded. He talked strangely, and he had difficulty with words, getting them out. He was definitely retarded.”

  Edgar, who would live to be eighty-four, never married. He lived mainly for his religion, and he died alone, surrounded by sagging shelves of books and recordings about his beloved Bible. To Jack in his youth, his eldest brother was a sometimes friendly, sometimes disturbing presence. “There was always something about him that was mysterious to me,” Jack declared in 1949. “Maybe it was the way he’d get angry once in a while and lose control of his temper. Something like the way I do.”

  Frank was far more mild and sweet-tempered; Jack remembered that he was “tall and thin and the girls liked him.” Of the three older brothers, Frank alone showed a subtle concern for Jack, who loved the fact that “he was always there to protect me when I was in a scrap, even though I don’t think he could knock down a fly.” And unlike young Jack, Frank was a smooth talker. “He could never be forcibly brutal,” Jack recalled, “and could talk me out of any trouble.” In other ways, however, Frank’s life was anything but a model for his younger brother. Frank had done his best in school but then was stopped dead by Jim Crow in Pasadena. He couldn’t find a decent job; around 1936, when he was twenty-five, he finally landed a position as a tree trimmer with the city. By this time he was a married man and a father, but he still was living at his mother’s home.

  Despite Frank’s open love of Jack, it was their brother Mack, four and a half years older than Jack, who dominated the youngest child and became his idol, particularly when Jack was in the middle of his teenage years. A star athlete in Pasadena while Jack was still a growing boy, Mack was Jack’s intimate introduction to the glory and the glamour of sports. “I remember going to track meets with him,” Jack remembered, “and watching him run and listening to the crowd yell.” Unlike Jack, Mack excelled not at team sports but in track and field. He was a sprinter with dramatic speed, especially over 200 meters or 220 yards, where he often started slowly but closed almost any gap with a supercharged rush; he was also a champion broad jumper. In 1932, when Jack was thirteen and the Olympic Games took place in Los Angeles, with some aquatic events contested at the Brookside Plunge, Mack committed himself to a relentless campaign of training. A diagnosis of heart trouble almost ended his career prematurely, but Mack pressed on until he won a place on the U.S. Olympic team in 1936. That summer, in Berlin, as the entire Robinson household heard the crackling radio broadcast of the race from Europe, Mack placed second to Jesse Owens in the 200-meter dash.

  After a triumphant post-Olympics tour on the Continent, in which he set a world record in one race, Mack returned to Pasadena. Expecting a hero’s welcome, he got nothing of the kind. Pasadena had a way of ignoring its many sports heroes, black or white. In 1938, a Pasadena Post columnist would list several Pasadena sports stars—including Ellsworth Vines, then the world’s top tennis player; Charles Paddock, a white Olympic gold-medal sprinter; and Mack and Jack Robinson—and declare: “In many places they would be given the key to the city. Here we take them in stride, for granted. Never have they received their just due, from their own home citizens.”

  Unquestionably, racism played a big role in what happened to Mack after Berlin. When he applied for a job, the city treated him like any other Negro; it gave him a pushcart and a broom and the night shift as a street sweeper. Mack then irritated a number of white people by sweeping the streets decked out in his leather U.S.A. Olympic jacket. Some saw this act as provocative, but he brushed off the criticism: “When it was a cold day, it was the warmest thing I owned, so I wore it.” He stayed on the job, unhappy but with few options, for about four years. A handsome man, Mack was said by a few people to be sometimes sullen and difficult; certainly he lacked his mother’s calm in facing racism. Her faith in religion never took hold of him. Mack’s relationship with Jack was also troubled. Mack encouraged his brother but perhaps saw him at times as competition to be crushed. Here, again, he was to be disappointed. As a runner, Jack never had Mack’s great speed, but his legs were at least as powerful. Eventually, Jack would soar past Mack’s best distance in the broad jump. Still later, his baseball fame would overshadow Mack’s silver strike at the Olympics. Eclipsed, Mack tried to be gracious but could not hide his sense of hurt. “I think he thought Jack got some breaks that he should have had,” a friend guessed. Mack himself denied ever being jealous; whatever a family member went through, “we was right there pushing for them, pushing for them and rooting for them to get along.” Jack, he said, “learned by being the youngest of the family to fall into the line of being an individual who was, I guess, following after his brothers.”

  In 1940, Mack’s wife, Grace, gave birth to their second son, Phillip. Because of either a congenital defect or a childhood illness, Phillip was mentally retarded and never learned to speak. When his family moved to put the boy into an ins
titution, Mallie stopped them. “I will take care of him,” she announced—and she did, until she died. Within a few years of Phillip’s birth, Grace Robinson was dead. In his own days of triumph, Jack would speak cryptically of events in Mack’s past that had “soured him on life completely, I guess.” That way was not for Jack himself. “I sort of look back at my brother’s experience every once in a while,” he said in 1949, “and resolve to make the best of things.”

  In the turmoil of his adolescence, Jack unquestionably felt more and more guilty about his relationship with his mother. He felt guilty that she worked so hard and in such menial jobs to support him and so many others. Then and later he was often impatient with her; he found some of her ways hard to accept: her almost compulsive generosity to relatives, friends, and even strangers; her incessant talking about God; and perhaps other things. At some point in her life Mallie had lost the use of her right eye. Some people said one of the older children (no one knew which one) had poked it out by accident; in any event, it gave her at times a fearsome aspect. As a teenager, Jack understood as praiseworthy many aspects of his mother’s moral heroism, but that heroism came clothed in a shabbiness that seemed unlikely to end, when he himself wanted to have more. Jack’s sense of discomfort, his mixture of affection, guilt, and perhaps even a degree of shame, did not mean that he failed to love his mother, only that he was young, a boy striving to understand the true nature of the pact Mallie had made with the world. Decades later, just after her death in 1968, he would look back on her with a lifetime of experience and open eyes: “Many times I felt that my mother was being foolish, letting people take advantage of her. I was wrong. She did kindness[es] for people whom I considered parasites because she wanted to help them. It was her way of thinking, her way of life.” In her life, he came to understand, “she had not been a fool for others. She had given with her eyes as open as her heart. In death, she was still teaching me how to live.”

  Whatever his reservations about his mother, she offered him unstinting maternal love and encouragement. In 1935, when he graduated from Washington Junior High School, her pride and joy at his achievement brought tears to his eyes. “Through some miracle” (as he put it) Mallie had managed to secure for him as a graduation gift something he badly wanted—his first dress suit. “I remember I cried a little when I saw it,” Jack wrote. As always, Mallie gave all credit to God for everything. “My mother said she always believed the Lord would take care of us,” Jack went on. “Right then and there, I never stopped believing that.” This was not literally true. Jack’s real religious awakening would come about three years later. But the way to his rebirth as a believer had been paved assiduously throughout his life by his remarkable mother.

  AS HE GREW OLDER, Jack turned naturally for his closest companionship away from his older brothers to neighborhood boys nearer his own age. These included youngsters like his cousin Van Wade, a powerful hitter who was often a teammate in baseball; Sid Heard, from his earliest days at the Cleveland School; the brothers Woodrow and Ernest Cunningham, who lived only a block away; and Ray Bartlett, who would play sports with Jack from kindergarten to college and beyond. In addition, Jack’s circle included Japanese-Americans, like the brothers George, Frankie, and Ben Ito, and Shig Kawai, an excellent football and baseball player; Tim and Bill Herrera, who were Mexican-Americans; and such white pals as George Spivak and Danny Galvin, a little fellow, younger than Jack, who was one of the most relentless scorers in Pasadena basketball.

  Ernie Cunningham remembered that while Jack took a particular liking at one time to him and Ben Ito, Jack himself was not always liked. “At that time,” he claimed, “Jackie wasn’t a very likable person, because his whole thing was just win, win, win, and beat everybody.” Some, but not all, of these friends resolved themselves at one point into what passed into local lore as the “Pepper Street Gang.” Exactly when, and for how long, the gang operated is not clear—or even how democratic it was. “Our gang was made up of blacks, Japanese, and Mexican kids,” Jack wrote just before his death; “all of us came from poor families and had extra time on our hands.” But others, such as Eleanor Peters Heard, who lived near the gang’s favorite street corner, would recall white members, including Danny Galvin. Another white friend of Jack’s, Warren Dorn, who later became an influential political leader as mayor of Pasadena and a Los Angeles County commissioner, also claimed to have been a member of the gang.

  Only its harshest critics thought the gang dangerous; for a city of its size, Pasadena’s juvenile delinquency rate was well below average. “There was no drugs, no smoking, no liquor, no beating up anybody, nothing of that nature,” recalled Ray Bartlett, who knew everyone in the Pepper Street Gang but was forbidden by his mother to be a member. “We never got into vicious or violent crime,” Robinson insisted, but indulged instead in pranks and petty theft. They threw “dirt clods” at passing cars, “snatched” balls on the golf course and often sold them back to the players; “swiped” fruit at produce stands; “snitched what we could” at local stores. Such activity was enough to make some parents wary, and to bring Jack into direct contact with the police. His first, but not his last, brush with the law came when he was once “escorted to jail at gunpoint by the sheriff” for taking a swim in the city reservoir, which he felt justified in doing because of the rules at the Brookside Plunge. In fact, partly because of his local fame as a schoolboy athlete, the Pasadena police came to know Jack fairly well; at one point, he seemed likely to become, as he himself said, “a full-fledged juvenile delinquent.”

  “Hardly a week went by,” Jack wrote, “when we didn’t have to report to Captain Morgan, the policeman who was head of the Youth Division.” Given the degree of racism and segregation in Pasadena, he was lucky in having to deal with Hugh D. Morgan. “About nine feet tall,” as Ernie Cunningham remembered him, the burly, cigar-smoking former football player from Louisiana State University had migrated to Pasadena and joined the force in 1924. A student of juvenile delinquency control at the University of Southern California, Morgan relied on psychology and diplomacy rather than threats or brute force. “He was always ready to give us advice,” Jack wrote in 1949, “and maybe a dollar or two if he thought we hadn’t had any breakfast that morning.” Willa Mae remembered Morgan coming to the house often, but not only to scold Jack; Mallie recalled going down to his office “often” to bawl him out, as she put it, when she thought he was too hard on the boys. “I think he did a good job at really keeping things in hand,” Ray Bartlett judged (he would become Pasadena’s second black police officer), “and actually pointed kids in the right direction.” Despite a bad habit of quietly urging members of each ethnic group to avoid members of the other ethnic groups as being beneath them, he carefully avoided showing racial prejudice. In 1939, as protests grew over Jim Crow at the Brookside Plunge and segregation in housing, he publicly defended young blacks in Pasadena against the charge that they posed any special problem as delinquents.

  Morgan was one of several male figures of authority, especially his coaches, to whom Jack responded well, as a good son might to his father, even as he muddled through his adolescence. Another such person was a black man named Carl Anderson, who challenged Jack to move beyond the inanities of the Pepper Street Gang. “He made me see,” Robinson later wrote, “that if I continued with the gang it would hurt my mother as well as myself.… He said it didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different. I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me.” Only seven years older than Jack, Anderson worked as a car mechanic near the intersection of Mountain and Morton, where members of the Pepper Street Gang often loitered. As one of the unofficial leaders of the local black community, he tried hard to undo the psychological damage done to black youngsters by Jim Crow. When the local Boy Scouts refused to integrate their units, Anderson founded the first black troop in northwest Pasadena. “He also organized a special group for us kids, that he called
the Friendly Indians,” Sid Heard remembered. “We’d go over to his house every Friday night and listen to him tell stories and the like. He really liked young people.”

  With each passing year, the cheering Jack heard at football and baseball games contrasted poorly with the pain of knowing what it meant to be black in Pasadena. At first, as a boy, he took Jim Crow in his stride; then he began to see and feel more intensely. “I always thought Pasadena was a great place,” he recalled, “until I got more experience of life.” One episode involved the YMCA, which had fine sports facilities but refused blacks as members, and stalled and frustrated Jack when he applied for membership. Another was the Brookside Plunge: “During hot spells, you waited outside the picket fence and watched the white kids splash around. I honestly think the officials didn’t think the Negroes got as warm and uncomfortable as white people during the Pasadena heat.” Jim Crow dogged him in the movie houses, where blacks were forced to sit in one section only. At the Pasadena Playhouse, empty seats, if available, quarantined black patrons from whites. “At the Kress soda fountain, you could sit at the counter and wait and wait and no one would serve you,” one friend would recall. “The same thing at Schrafft’s. You could work in the kitchen, but you couldn’t eat there, at least not without a hassle.”

  The veteran Los Angeles Times sports journalist Shav Glick, who as a fellow Pasadena Junior College student would cover Jack’s exploits for the Pasadena Post for some years in the 1930s, wrote in 1977: “The Robinson the world came to know, competitive and combative, aggressive and abrasive, impatient and irascible, was tempered on the streets, the schoolgrounds and the playing fields of Pasadena.” But Glick stressed that this process of tempering went on inside, and was kept inside, by Robinson. The face Jack presented to the world, especially after high school, was on the whole calm. And then, as well as later, he almost never brought his anger home, as Willa Mae and others would attest. Jack could not and would not use profanity in his mother’s home, or rebel against her or his sister and brothers. “The only curse word he would ever use,” Sid Heard recalled with amusement, “was ‘Dadgummit!’ When he said that word, that was it. Yessir, ‘Dadgummit!’ Then he’d go and beat your brains out!”