Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  The three-game exhibition series against the Yankees was an extraordinary coming-out party as ecstatic black fans helped to swell attendance for the games at Ebbets Field to over eighty thousand, about double the record for any previous three-game exhibition series between the two teams. “He’s certain to continue as a magnet,” the Times noted of Robinson, “at least until the novelty of the situation wears off.” On the field, under intense scrutiny, Jack held his own. In the first game, on Friday, April 11, he went hitless but drove in three runs with two deep fly balls; at first base, he handled fifteen chances without an error. The next day, his single to left field drove in the only Dodger run in an 8–1 loss. On Sunday, he singled to right. Over the three games, he drove in five Dodger runs, and played error-free ball at first base.

  The next day, Monday, Jack was at Idlewild Airport to meet Rachel and Jackie, who had flown in from Los Angeles to rejoin him. After a separation of almost two months, their reunion was profoundly sweet; the horrors of the previous year—the rude bumping from airplanes, the bus ride from Pensacola to Daytona Beach, the rout from Sanford, the lockouts at Jacksonville and the like—all seemed far in the past. From Idlewild, the Robinsons rode a cab into Manhattan to the McAlpin Hotel in the heart of Manhattan, where Sixth Avenue and Broadway cross 34th Street at Herald Square. (The Dodger organization regularly used the McAlpin.) Despite his promotion, the tenuousness of Jack’s place on the Dodgers made a hotel room seem just about right. Jackie Robinson was now one of the more famous names in America, but many a flaming star of spring training had burned out before summer in the major leagues. “We were scared,” according to Rachel. “One room was fine, really. We would have been terrified in a suite, because how would we keep it up?”

  Again, as in setting out for spring training one year before, Jack faced the moment with confidence but also with a sense of foreboding. The brilliant year in Montreal had erased any doubts he had ever had about his ability to succeed ultimately as a player in the majors. Others had their doubts, but Jack had none, really. The opposition of whites, including his teammates, also had no immobilizing effect; Jack’s boyhood among whites had given him a vision of the racial future, and he knew that it could be made to work. By this time, too, his faith in Rickey was set virtually in stone. Above all, this moment was more than an individual’s opportunity, a passing gesture against segregation. It was the fulfillment of a prophecy that was not so much personal to Jack as rooted in the promise of American history—that blacks would one day be free, that the grand national ideals of equality and democracy would one day be writ so large as to include the grandchildren of slaves, of whom he was chosen to be the living embodiment. But the moment was not completely free of foreboding. His religion had taught him that the line between confidence and Satanic pride is a fine one; and chance—a twisted ankle, a turned knee—might yet intervene to reassert the inscrutable ways of Providence. The drama would unfold; he would be both spectator and the man at the plate; God would decide the outcome.

  The next morning, Tuesday, April 15, Jack awoke early and set out for Ebbets Field. On a bitingly cold day, a large crowd turned out for the season opener against the Boston Braves. Rachel was in the stands, worried as much about Jackie Junior as about his father. “I was determined not to miss the game, after all we had been through,” she recalled; but getting to Ebbets Field was hard. Jackie was sick with diarrhea from the change of water; getting him and herself ready to travel was an ordeal, as was finding a cab that would go to Brooklyn. Finally she made it to the park, where she found a hot dog vendor willing to heat her infant’s formula. Settling into her seat, she suddenly realized that his light coat, fine for Los Angeles, was inadequate here. Then a black woman sitting next to her, whom she would remember as the mother of Ruthe Campanella, Roy’s wife, took Jackie and placed him inside her fur coat. Rachel could turn her attention to the field.

  Out there, Jack too had his problems. Today there would be no repeat of his fairy-tale opening in 1946 in Jersey City. Facing the Boston Braves and one of the most feared curve-ball pitchers in the major leagues, Johnny Sain of Arkansas, who had won twenty games in 1946, Robinson was baffled to the brink of embarrassment. “I did a miserable job,” he wrote later. “There was an overflow crowd at Ebbets Field. If they expected any miracles out of Robinson, they were sadly disappointed.” Called out at first base by an eyelash in his first at-bat, he never came close to a hit again. He flied out weakly to left field, hit into a double play, reached base on an error when his bunt was mishandled, and then was taken out for defensive purposes. “If they’re all like this,” he muttered unhappily about Sain’s pitches, “I’m going to have a tough time making this league.”

  The next day, he managed his first hit in the major leagues, a “perfect” bunt off Glenn Eliot in the fifth inning. On Thursday, rain washed out play; but the Dodgers, sparked by Pete Reiser’s brilliant hitting, had won both games.

  Action then shifted on Friday across the river to the Polo Grounds in Manhattan for a series against Brooklyn’s archrivals, the New York Giants. Now the Dodgers had a new manager. In a surprise move, Rickey had summoned out of his Florida retirement the sixty-three-year-old Burt Shotton, in baseball since 1913 and once the manager of the Phillies. While Shotton, who had arrived without knowing Rickey’s intentions, quietly settled in, his team lost both games. But Jack’s bat flashed into form with five hits in the series, including his first home run, off the left-hander Dave Koslo. In his first week in the major leagues he had played four games, gone six-for-fourteen, and scored five times; at first base he had made thirty-three put-outs without an error. Both on and off the field, Jack seemed sharp and poised. “Robby [Robinson] has supreme confidence he’ll make the grade,” Dick Young wrote in the Daily News—although, as Jack said, “you have to keep thinking and hustling every minute up here, or else you’re lost.” “The muscular Negro minds his own business,” Arthur Daley noted, “and shrewdly makes no effort to push himself. He speaks quietly and intelligently when spoken to and already has made a strong impression. ‘I was nervous in the first play of my first game at Ebbets Field,’ he said with a ready grin, ‘but nothing has bothered me since.’ ”

  With blacks thronging the park and excitement among whites also high, attendance soared. More than ninety thousand fans saw the two-game series at the Polo Grounds; an overflow crowd of just over fifty-three thousand was the largest crowd ever to attend a single game there on a Saturday. “They came to see Jackie Robinson,” the Dodger radio announcer Red Barber later asserted. “He became the biggest attraction in baseball since Babe Ruth.” Fans, white and black, cheered when he stepped to the plate or took his position on the field (while scattered but unmistakable boos greeted Dixie Walker), and hundreds waited patiently after the games for Robinson to emerge from the dressing room, then mobbed him for autographs. After one Yankee exhibition game, Wendell Smith had written of “a thousand people” awaiting Robinson and of their “deafening roar” as they “surged upon him.” Despite a squadron of police, Jack “was absorbed into a sea of slapping hands” as flashbulbs exploded with “machinegun” rapidity “and the whole world seemed to be screaming in unison: ‘Jackie Robinson!’ ”

  At the McAlpin, fishing for a fresh angle on the top story in baseball, writers stumbled over one another in the Robinsons’ cramped room as Rachel strove to maintain order. Compounding her troubles was Jackie Junior’s diarrhea; his diapers hung like pennants everywhere. A hot plate, stowed under the bed when not in use, warmed his meals, while Jack and Rachel took turns leaving the room to eat in a nearby cafeteria. “We never thought of room service,” Rachel recalled; “it was just not something we thought we could afford to do.” For the first time, she was on her own with a sick child and a husband in the limelight; she found the whole experience thrilling but also a burden. Jack, basking in his celebrity, turned down few requests from the press. With a woman reporter, he chortled about the fact that Rachel’s father had opposed him as a suit
or (“I don’t know what you see in that great big ugly boy,” Mr. Isum had said). Rachel tried gamely to respond but found it hard always to hit the right note. Her “restrained manner” and her “finishing-school poise and charm,” the reporter decided, were not of “the Brooklyn baseball fan variety.” Pressed about Dixie Walker and the opposition to her husband, Rachel kept cool. “Living and eating and traveling together will straighten that out. It’s inevitable. And anyway, there’s always a Dixie Walker.”

  As messages poured into Ebbets Field, Jack was gratified to find most white letter-writers friendly. “Hi, Black Boy!” opened a cute note from Portland, Oregon. “Glad to read that you have arrived. Had good idea that you had the stuff and would make the grade. You are a credit to your race—the human race, son. Very glad to see you in the big leagues. Good luck. Sincerely: WHITE BOY.” A few messages were critical, but far more asked for Jack to attend dinners, parties, and the like. Rickey beamed in pleasure for a while, then exploded. “He’s not a ballplayer!” he shouted at one news conference. “He’s a sideshow attraction! If I had my own way, I’d place a cordon of police around him—give him protection so that he might be a ballplayer!” Lamenting Robinson’s “5,000 invitations to attend all sorts of events,” he barred any appearance not sanctioned by the Dodger front office.

  Meanwhile, among his teammates, Jack’s position was probably not helped by the booing of Dixie Walker (who publicly denied that he had ever disapproved of Robinson). But the white players’ opposition to his presence was embedded. Loud cheers from the stands and “I’m for Jackie” buttons blossoming on lapels were met in the clubhouse by a chill. Few players openly voiced their objections, although the Daily Worker reporter Lester Rodney said he heard Carl Furillo mutter more than once, “I ain’t going to play with no niggers.” But a few teammates backed Jack. The infielders stuck together almost from the start. The promotion of his Royals teammate at third base, John “Spider” Jorgenson, added an ally; Reese at shortstop was always polite; at second, Stanky knew that team unity was essential at the ballpark. But other players were snide and contemptuous. To the press, Jack revealed none of this coldness. The Dodgers were “a swell bunch.… We work together swell, all of them—Reese, Higbe, Stanky—they’re wonderful guys to play ball with.” Keeping to himself, he brooded and waited for whatever time would bring.

  A two-game series in Boston, against the Braves, was lost to falling snow. The maddening weather and enforced idleness darkened his mood. Visiting him in his room at the Kenmore Hotel, a white writer found a somber scene, or described one: “Jackie is sitting on his bed. The room is dark, the shades are halfway and here is a lonely guy. His head sunk in his hands. He feels friendless.” The two men talk about baseball but not at all about race. “Jackie smiles and seems to brighten. It’s nice to talk to somebody even if it is only a baseball writer he never had met before.” The writer leaves, satisfied to have his story “but concerned, too, because it’s no fun to see a man fighting against odds that seem almost insurmountable.” About this time, in an often-echoed line, Jimmy Cannon of the New York Post called Jackie Robinson “the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.”

  On April 22, the Dodgers returned to Ebbets Field for three games against the Philadelphia Phillies. When they played the Braves and the Giants, the opposition had been so restrained that Rickey’s warnings about the abuse that would be heaped on the first Negro player began to seem overblown, even unwarranted. Suddenly, with the Phillies, all that changed. The Alabama-born manager, Ben Chapman, had decided to make Robinson’s color an issue and encouraged at least three of his men to do the same. On a bitingly cool day, with the temperature hovering near 45 degrees when play began, Chapman started in on Robinson. As Jack would later write, Tuesday, April 22, 1947, “of all the unpleasant days in my life, brought me nearer to cracking up than I ever had been.”

  Starting to the plate in the first inning, I could scarcely believe my ears. Almost as if it had been synchronized by some master conductor, hate poured forth from the Phillies dugout.

  “Hey, nigger, why don’t you go back to the cotton field where you belong?”

  “They’re waiting for you in the jungles, black boy!”

  “Hey, snowflake, which one of those white boys’ wives are you dating tonight?”

  “We don’t want you here, nigger.”

  “Go back to the bushes!”

  Those insults and taunts were only samples of the torrent of abuse which poured out from the Phillies dugout that April day.

  Chapman’s campaign brought Jack crashing down. Particularly pressing was the fact that it occurred at home, in New York City, and from a Northern team—not St. Louis, which he had feared, or Louisville or Baltimore, which he had endured in 1946. “I felt tortured and I tried just to play ball and ignore the insults,” he would recall, in language overheated by his ghostwriter. “But it was really getting to me. What did the Phillies want from me? What, indeed, did Mr. Rickey expect of me? I was, after all, a human being.… For one wild and rage-crazed minute I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment.’ … To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create. I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all.”

  But Jack remembered his pact with Rickey, and his unspoken pact with his people, to do what was necessary to make the experiment work. In a 1–0 Dodgers victory, he singled, moved to third on an error, and scored on a hit by Gene Hermanski. (But on that same day, after forty-seven chances as a major leaguer, Jack also made his first error, in the eighth inning.) To his further relief, the next two games also went to the Dodgers for a sweep of the series. Gradually Jack pulled out of his gloom. A few days later, when he wrote about the episode in a column, “Jackie Robinson Says,” in the Pittsburgh Courier, he was nonchalant. “The things the Phillies shouted at me from their bench have been shouted at me from other benches and I am not worried about it. They sound just the same in the big league as they did in the minor league.”

  By then, he had other reasons to feel better. Chapman’s abuse had angered the white Dodgers. Eddie Stanky took up the challenge: “Listen, you yellow-bellied cowards,” Jack remembered him screaming at the Phillies dugout, “why don’t you yell at somebody who can answer back?” Even Dixie Walker was upset by Chapman, a good friend, and told him so. Pushed by the white players, writers picked up the story and revived charges of anti-Semitic remarks allegedly made by Chapman when he was a coach with the Yankees. In his national radio broadcast, the powerful journalist Walter Winchell chided him. In the Daily Mirror, Dan Parker hailed Robinson as “the only gentleman among those involved in the incident.” In addition, the veteran Philadelphia infielder Jeep Handley, disgusted by his manager’s behavior, apologized to Robinson. Rickey, who had anticipated both the abuse and the response, later commented: “Chapman did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men.… Chapman made Jackie a real member of the Dodgers.”

  Surviving one assault, Jack encountered another, different challenge. After managing a few hits at the start of the season (he batted .225 in April), he began a streak of futility that saw him go zero for twenty at one point. Hanging over his head, despite his Montreal record, was the 1945 evaluation by perhaps the dominant pitcher then in baseball, Bob Feller, that Robinson would never hit major-league pitching consistently. Jack began to hear whispers of criticism behind his back—but not from his coaches, who remained unflappable. His manager, Burt Shotton, in his retiring style, shrugged off suggestions that he might bench Robinson. (With his white hair and steel-rimmed glasses, Shotton seemed to personify self-effacement; he even declined to wear a baseball uniform and thus could not set foot on the field during a game.) The coaches could see that Jack was hitting the ball hard but straight at fielders. In addition, his r
ight shoulder was heavily taped, the result of an on-field collision. They waited for him to come around.

  When the Giants arrived from Manhattan to clear the air after Chapman’s departure, their manager, the future Hall of Fame player Mel Ott, was civil to Jack, as was his team. Better still, after rain washed out one game, the Dodgers beat the Giants twice to move improbably into first place in the standings. The mood in the clubhouse was now a little more congenial. At the second game, on Sunday, an incident showed how much the Brooklyn community itself was taking Jack to its heart. A buzz of approval greeted the arrival of Joe Louis as he took a seat in the stands, then burst into rich applause as Jack went over and shook Louis’s hand. “Photographers sprang up around them like rain lilies after a cloudburst,” according to Red Barber; following on the heels of the sordid episode with the Phillies, here was “a full ball park roaring approval” of two black men. “This was a turning point.”

  However, Jack was still in his batting slump. Some thought he was lunging at the ball, others that his bat was too heavy. He decided to change nothing. On April 30, he went hitless again in a loss against the visiting Chicago Cubs. But the next day, May 1, the slump ended when he lined a fastball from Bob Chipman, unbeaten thus far that season, into left field. Next, he sent the Cub outfielder Andy Pafko back against the wall with a sacrifice fly that drove in one run. The Dodgers won, to hold on to first place. Rain washed out two series against the visiting Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates, but the respite gave Jack’s shoulder time to heal completely. Then Jack’s confidence was tested again, when the defending World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals came to town.