Jackie Robinson

by Arnold Rampersad

  JACK WAS OVERJOYED to reunite in April in New York with Rachel, who that month drove their Cadillac from Los Angeles in the company of her younger brother, Raymond, and little Jackie. At last, Jack, Rachel, and Jackie had decent accommodations. That month, they moved into the top floor of a two-family home at 5224 Tilden Avenue, near the Utica Avenue subway stop in Flatbush. A friend of a friend had bought the house and saved the top floor (at ninety dollars a month), with its two bedrooms and a charming, white-painted front porch, for the Robinsons. “We like it,” Rachel told the press. “The only trouble is there’s no real yard for Jackie to play in.” She didn’t mention that several residents in the overwhelmingly white area had opposed the sale of the house to a black. But a family two doors down, Arch and Sarah Satlow and their small children, Stevie, Paula, and Sena, had welcomed the Robinsons. Rachel and Sarah, the daughter of Russian immigrants, became instant friends. Fifty years later, with both Jack and Arch long gone, they were still close friends.

  One day, an alarmed neighbor had called out to Sarah to warn her that a black family was moving into the neighborhood. “Oh, isn’t that nice!” Sarah replied, without thinking. Her neighbor slammed the window shut. Then someone brought around a petition for Sarah to sign. “I said, ‘Are you mad? Are you crazy?’ We had a huge cherry tree in the backyard, that gave the most miraculous cherries. Arch and I picked a pail and took it over. From then on we were friends.” Rachel and Sarah, who was only a few weeks younger than Jack, discovered they had things in common. Both had attended college and trained as nurses, and had a special interest in psychiatry, but had given up their careers to be wives and mothers; both loved the arts. Seeking precious free time, they helped one another by babysitting each other’s children. “Rachel got the worst of the deal,” Sarah recalled, “because she had only one and I had three. But it was nothing to her, she was such a kind and efficient person.”

  They were different in some ways. Sarah’s family had been prosperous, but to her, Rachel seemed to the manner born. “She was a very demanding person, both with herself and others. Things had to be done right. In those days I dressed plainly, because everything was for the children; but Rachel dressed very well. She had discovered Saks and Bergdorf Goodman, and she had fabulous taste. She was fastidious; she had class and dash about her. She could sew; she was a wonderful cook; she baked beautifully. Her mother had taught her all these things.” Once, helping Sarah learn how to bake, Rachel wounded her feelings. “She gave me this recipe for lemon meringue pie,” Sarah explained. “It was my first meringue pie. It was a disaster, the crust turned out all soggy. I said to her, ‘What do you think happened, Rachel?’ She fell out laughing, she laughed and laughed. How was I supposed to know that you must bake the crust first? I didn’t take it as a joke, I was so hurt. I never did it again, believe me, but I baked my head off!”

  To cope with Jack’s fan mail, which came by the laundry-basketful, as Rachel put it, she and Jack hired Sarah to prepare answers for Jack’s signature; Jack would go over each letter and sign it. “I just loved Jack,” Sarah said. “Because he had a gentle, bright, sharp mind, and it was always coated—the way I saw him—with a softness and a kindness, especially with children. He played so easily with children on the street, he visited Stevie in the hospital all by himself when Stevie was sick. It was something that was natural. What he did in the locker room with other men was another matter; in the twenty-five years I knew him, I always saw that softness about Jack. Of course, he could get angry, but I never heard a foul word in his mouth, except maybe once. I was in an office he was using at Rockefeller Center and he was taking a call and got disconnected. ‘Oh, shit!’ he said, and then he says, ‘Oh, Sarah, I’m so sorry.’ I said, ‘I didn’t hear you. I didn’t hear you.’ ” To her, Jack was a man “with great vision, and strong emotional feelings.”

  With the Satlows nearby, Jackie Junior, who was about a week younger than Sena, the youngest Satlow, had a regular companion; a white Sports Illustrated reporter visiting the Robinsons was startled to see the two children, one black, the other blond, playing contentedly. Jackie at three was a warm, loving child, outgoing, easy to laugh, a charmer, showered with attention inside his family and outside, and especially as Jackie Robinson’s son. In fact, as Rachel recalled, he was “our ambassador to the Flatbush community. He would be out on the sidewalk with his tricycle and then disappear into a backyard. Then he would reappear with cookies and pretzels. Once the people got over the shock of seeing this little black child suddenly appear, they were very nice and neighborly.” Many of the neighborhood boys, including Stevie Satlow, were thrilled to have a genuine Dodger in their midst, although some had curious ways of showing it. Rachel remembered a boy of eight or nine who lived on an adjoining lot. “He clearly admired Jack, you could see that,” she said; “but he took real pleasure in waiting for him to come home so he could taunt him about his playing. Jack took it all in stride. He might blow up on the field, at the ballpark, but not at home and not with young people. He actually liked the boy.”

  And yet the Robinsons did not feel entirely at home in the Flatbush apartment, where they did little entertaining. While they rented, and divided their year between the East and California, and while Jack’s role in the baseball world unfolded, Jack and Rachel would continue to feel unrooted. Their sense of impermanence had little to do with the fact that Flatbush was unlike anything they had known before—a living, breathing Jewish community, complete with synagogues, yeshivas, kosher bakeries and butcher shops, delicatessens, and the like. Jack and Rachel liked this difference, this sense of being educated about the world, about the multiple richness of American life. “In California,” Rachel said, “we knew nothing about Jewish culture. Particular names meant nothing to me, or physical types. We were innocent, or ignorant.” So ignorant, in fact, that one Christmas they stunned the Satlows by giving them a Christmas tree. “We didn’t know what to do,” Sarah said. “What would my parents think? Then we decided to put it up. The children liked it, and Jack and Rachel meant well.”

  As the Robinsons gained more friends in the white world, they did not lose touch with the black. In fact, in 1947, as they endured life in their tenement room, Jack and Rachel had gained a satisfying complex of friendships rooted in black Brooklyn. Through Rickey and his memorable February 1947 dinner for prominent blacks, the Robinsons met another married couple, Lacy and Florence Covington, and Florence’s sisters, all single at that time, Willette, Julia, Phyllis, and May Bailey. Originally from North Carolina, the Covingtons and the Baileys owned and shared two substantial brownstones on Stuyvesant Avenue near Fulton Street. Lacy Covington, a tall, handsome, courtly man, had been a brickmason most of his life until, responding to an old ambition, he had studied for the ministry and been ordained. Lacy and Florence, a housewife, saw themselves as servants of the community; their home became a gathering place for a variety of people. On Sundays, Florence set a large table with china, silver, and linen, much of it shrewdly purchased in secondhand shops, and offered lunch to more than a dozen of their friends, many of whom, like Rachel, regularly brought dishes prepared at home. “There was a lot of good fellowship and good feeling in their home,” Rachel remembered. “Whatever else was happening in our lives, we’d leave there feeling very good.”

  The Covingtons helped to make them see New York City as a community into which they could settle and be at ease; it was Florence who had secured for them their apartment in the Flatbush duplex. “Lacy and Florence and her sisters became like extended family to us, but true family nonetheless,” according to Rachel. “Lacy was a lovely, lovely man among all those women, and he and Florence had a graciousness that made their home a special place.” Best of all, in some respects, the Covingtons were happy to have Jackie Junior: “I could always take Jackie there and then go to the ballpark to be with Jack. And they would keep him all day until I got back, every day.” From the start, also, the Robinsons hired Florence’s sister Willette to help with Jackie. Even
tually, Willette would become an important, beloved member of the Robinson household, living there but returning to her home on the weekends, with close ties to the children in particular.

  The sense of tenuousness surrounding Jack’s baseball career did not push Jack and Rachel apart; rather, it brought them closer, mainly because Jack had the sense to see and admit that he badly needed Rachel’s help and advice and love as he moved into a future that was still uncertain. In public, he wanted her at his side as often as possible; she boosted his self-esteem with her reserved charm, easy intelligence, and striking looks. Jack could tell that Rachel impressed men he respected, including Rickey and Harold Parrott: “They evidently have high regard for you Darling,” he wrote home. He had been chatting with Parrott by a swimming pool in Ciudad Trujillo, and “it pleased me to sit and listen because he spoke with respect when he mentioned your name. Darling you can’t imagine how proud I am to be able to say you are my wife. I pride in the fact that I have a person who is capable of handling herself regardless of the crowd.” On public occasions, many who came to honor Jack stayed to praise his wife. In Chicago, at a public dinner at the Savoy Ballroom, a reporter caught something of Rachel’s appealing public personality when, accepting an award from a women’s magazine, “she rose and in cultured, yet simple words voiced her appreciation of the honor paid her husband and her surprise at the award made to her.”

  Jack made a big point of giving Rachel full credit in public for his success. Rachel, he said in 1947, was “the one person who really kept me from throwing my hands up in despair many times”; she was “my strongest support during these trials.… She always had the wise suggestion, the comforting touch, the encouragement to go on which carried me through.” “I can truly say,” he told a gathering in 1948 at a high school in Madison, New Jersey, “that my rise to baseball fame is mainly due to my wife.” She was obviously his main confidante and advisor, although Rickey also had a special place in Jack’s life; in addition, she was the financial boss of the household. Jack turned over all sums to her, and she knew what was going out and what was falling into a reserve account about which Jack knew little. To be sure, the aura of perfection that hovered about Rachel sometimes annoyed him, but usually in little ways only. Knowing that Rachel was sensitive about her mother’s opinion of her, he sometimes used that fact. “I hated it,” Rachel said, “when he would tease me in front of her, or my brothers, about not being perfect, about spending too much on something, or making this or that mistake. I usually didn’t mind what he was saying, but I did mind the company he said it in. Sometimes he got to me that way.”

  Jack continued, even with his growing fame in the aggressive world of male professional sports, to exert tight self-discipline about alcohol, tobacco, and sex. On the subject of affairs outside marriage he was rigid, as when he chastised a young admirer from Akron, Ohio, who propositioned him in a letter. “I want you to love me just once,” she had pleaded. “Just once and then I might be satisfied. I know that you’re [a] married man and that you have a son but you don’t have to be an angel.… Your wife would never know about it.” To which Robinson replied sternly: “When I married Mrs. Robinson, I exchanged vows to love, honor and cherish her for the rest of my life.”

  Although sex was a strong force in Jack, his principles and inhibitions probably prevented him from ever being completely comfortable coping with its demands. On the road, he burned with such longing for Rachel that he sometimes apologized for the steaminess of some of his letters—“but they are meant only for you to read and were written to let you know that regardless of how long I am away no one else can ever be seen.” If sex was a strong drive, love and companionship were at least as important, and he was ready to say so. A roommate would remember with a sense of wonder the intensity of Robinson’s frequent telephone calls home. “When he’d be on that phone talking to Rachel,” Joe Black said, “I mean, you could feel the excitement exuding through his body. You could feel the love going from his voice to [her], flowing to her. I mean, he was trying to caress her with his voice.” The weeks of separation, Jack wrote to Rachel from the Caribbean, had only “increased my love for you more than one could anticipate. I never dreamed I loved you so very much. I knew my love was very strong but until now I did not realize that I love you so very much that it hurts terribly to be away from you.” Jack shared with Rachel his fear that they were too much the Puritans with one another. “We have not loved each other the way we are capable of loving or better than that we have not expressed our love as it should be. Both of us seem to wait for the other and as a result we are not able to get the most out of our love. Loving you Darling,” he wrote, alluding specifically to his brother Mack and his wife, “makes me realize how awful it must be for two people to be married and not really be in love.”

  At times, Jack seemed to be on the verge of suggesting that Rachel was not as spontaneous as he wanted her to be; but finally he put it differently. “Darling,” he wrote her, “if only you loved me as I love you then I would really be happy. I am satisfied with you loving me as you do now, however, because it would be impossible for two to be in love as much as I am with you. I wish there were ways I could prove it to you.” For all these fine words, he was also well aware that he was not as mature and unselfish as he expected Rachel, as his wife, to be; he was a man, and in many things he did what he wanted and left her to clean up. What set him apart from many other men was his willingness, at least from time to time, to admit his failings and beg her to see that he truly loved her: “It seems my habits make you sometimes doubt me but there is no question in my mind that my marriage is the greatest thing that could have happened to me. All the other honors are really secondary and Darling someday I’ll prove it. I hope it will be soon. I will do everything to prove it.”

  WHEN THE 1948 DODGER SEASON opened at the Polo Grounds, against the Giants, Jack was the picture of confidence. “We think we have a better club now than we had this time last season,” he proclaimed. But the Dodgers, including Jack, tripped coming out of the gate. Although he was now installed at his preferred position, second base, a sore right arm, a nagging back, and a tender knee made him uncomfortable everywhere on the field.

  He was still too fat to be truly effective, as reporters quickly noted. He knew this was true, and yet when he read one day that he had “waddled” after a ground ball, he found the insult hard to take. With his acutely pigeon-toed gait and top-heavy physique, Jack usually walked with an odd, ducklike stride; somehow, awkwardness fell away as the great body accelerated or feinted sinuously or shuddered to a swift stop. When he was not in shape, the oddness of his stride was more pronounced. But the word “waddled” hurt him to the core. “He fought against tears,” Arthur Mann stated (perhaps going too far). “No one wrote of how he had worked and was working; how he was undergoing the torture of hunger again in order to diet. His temper flared.” When Jack met Gus Steiger, the author of the remark, his tongue “lashed out in reprisal,” according to Mann; the next day, another newspaperman wrote that Robinson “was developing a swelled head to match his midsection.”

  When Jack’s bat stayed cold and his injuries mounted, Durocher removed him from the lineup. Some blacks were dismayed, but Jack would not allow his skipper to be blamed for his own failings. Durocher, he told his readers, was “a good manager and a fine person.… I sat on the bench because of my arm and not because he didn’t like me.” Then Robinson seemed to return to form. On April 30, in a 2–1 victory, he drove in both runs with singles; the next day, he hit his first home run of the season. But something was not right. His flash and fire running on the bases, his unusual style and daring, were missing. Five weeks into the season, although he was now batting over .300, he had not yet stolen a single base. Late in May, he was sure he was back: “I think I’m ready for a rough, tough season.” In June, however, as the club struggled, in a shocking but largely symbolic move Brooklyn placed him on waivers; technically he was available to other clubs. In the Couri
er, Wendell Smith, conceding that Robinson was no longer “the dashing, daring base runner of 1947,” ventured wickedly that Rickey hadn’t forgiven Jack “for his porky-pig appearance last spring.” The New York Daily Mirror quoted Rickey on Robinson: “He has been overweight, sluggish and never has shown the abandon and speed on the bases that caused the opposition nervous spells.” Stunned to be placed on waivers, Jack nevertheless brushed off its import in public. Yes, he wanted to stay in Brooklyn; but he would play just as hard for another club. As for his weight in the spring—“I’m not worried about that fat anymore. I’m fit as a fiddle and ready to go.”

  But by the middle of June, he had still not stolen a base, and his batting average was only .270. At last, on June 24, in a doubleheader at home against Pittsburgh, he pulled out of his slump. In the opener, with two men out in the bottom of the ninth, he broke a tie with a grand slam off Mel Queen, “the first time in my life that I ever hit a grand-slam homer anywhere.” In the second game, he had three more hits, as his batting average jumped from .279 to .306. He also stole his first base of the season. A few days later, after stealing home for the first time in 1948, he flashed his old speed with an inside-the-park home run against the Giants. Jack’s reawakening helped to fire up the Dodgers just as Roy Campanella, who had been sent down to St. Paul in May, returned to Brooklyn with a vengeance. In his first three games, Campanella had nine hits in twelve tries, with two home runs.

  Next, Rickey shook up baseball by completing an amazing deal that sent Leo Durocher to manage the Giants; Burt Shotton returned to the Dodgers. Despite the tension between them, Jack was sorry to see Durocher go. In the Courier he contrasted Durocher, “a human dynamo” who “loves nothing better than a fighting ball player,” to the mild-mannered Shotton, but expressed no preference for one over the other. But Harold Parrott saw a loss: “What the black man needed behind him was Durocher’s bark and brass and bellow—and in front of him too, to keep the umpires off him.” To some observers, however, Jack’s late-inning, three-run homer in a victory over Cincinnati seemed a celebration of Shotton’s return. In last place on July 2, the Dodgers piled up seventeen victories in twenty-one games at one point as they pursued the league-leading Boston Braves. Late in August, Brooklyn edged into first place for the first time with a win in which Jack hit his eighth home run of 1948 and scored three runs; then the Dodgers slipped backward again. Another charge recaptured the top spot; in a doubleheader against St. Louis, Jack hit for the cycle—a single, double, triple, and home run—in the first game and then went two-for-four in the second. However, the Dodgers’ effort was in vain. Late in September, the Braves pulled ahead of the pack to claim the pennant. Brooklyn finished a disappointing third.