Before My Life Began (14 page)

My mother turned her back to us and began banging her forehead against the wall. “Now are you satisfied?” she asked. “Is this what you want?” She reached sideways, grabbed onto the moldings around the door—she was facing the narrow width of wall that separated their room from mine—and whacked her forehead against the wall again.

“That's very brilliant, Evie,” my father said. “Oh that's really smart. I mean, you're really helping the situation a lot.”

There was a small red circle on my mother's forehead, as if she'd been hit by a baseball.

“So why should I wait for somebody else to break my head? You tell me that. Why should I wait for somebody else?”

“You're exaggerating, Evie, the way you always do. If you follow my instructions there'll be no trouble. I'll speak to you at least once a day. If there's a problem, you buzz the downstairs door four times. That will be the signal. I give you my word that I didn't look for trouble.”

“Not much. Sure. Tell me another one.”

“If I don't take care of things they'll only get worse for us all. They made a mistake, you see, and they have to be shown what the mistake was, so that they don't repeat it. They should not have touched a member of my family.”

My father brought in a washcloth and my mother lay down on the sofa. “The problem is that everyone's already dead for you, Abe, don't you see?” she said. “First Momma and Poppa and then your friends in the Army and now Sheila and soon yourself, if you keep going in the same direction. But when they call on the phone to tell me you're dead too, it won't be a big surprise, see? All it will be is a chance for people to say what a big shot you are now, below ground.” She lifted the wash-cloth. There was a tiny piece of white paint stuck to her forehead. “If you were really smart, you wouldn't give them the satisfaction, that's all I been trying to tell you. Sometimes you win by losing, yeah? Only you're too stubborn to see that. Like always. So why be against California? In California we could start all over. In California we could live without being scared for our lives all the time. Only you're too pigheaded to do it, even though you know I'm right, that it's our only chance. Even though…” Nobody spoke. “Don't anybody see that I'm right? Don't anybody care?”

“California,” my father said. “That's all she got on her brain since she's back. California. The Promised Land. Sure.”

“So tell me something, Abe darling—is there a law that says we can't be happy too while we're still alive?”

Abe didn't answer. Instead he bent down and kissed me on the cheek.

“I'm sorry about before,” he said.

“That's okay.”

He went into the foyer and opened the door. Turkish Sammy was on the landing, waiting for him.

4

B
EAU JACK
was the only person who knew how much I loved Jackie Robinson. Whenever I could get out of our apartment—while Abe had our building guarded—I'd go down to Beau Jack's and stay with him and we'd talk about Jackie and speculate on how much greater Jackie might have been if he'd been white, if he hadn't had to wait until the age of twenty-eight to become the first black baseball player in the history of the major leagues.

I'd begun following Jackie's career the year before when he was in the minor leagues with Montreal, where he led the league in batting with a .349 average. Beau Jack kept lots of newspaper clippings, and his favorite told about how, long after the final game was over—Montreal beat Louisville in the Little World Series, with Jackie scoring the winning run—when Jackie was the last player to leave the dressing room, the crowd was still there, waiting for him. They hugged him and kissed him and cheered for him and chased him through the streets of the city. It was probably the first time in history, Beau Jack said, that a black man had run from a white mob, not because it hated him, but because it loved him.

Sometimes Beau Jack would tease me.

“You think just because I'm a colored man and Jackie's a colored man that I care more about him than the other players, don't you?”

“I suppose.”

He'd wait a few seconds. “Well,” he'd say, a faint smile on his lips. “You know what?”

“What?”

“You're right. I care more about that pigeon-toed black man than any player ever lived!”

I knew everything about Jackie Robinson there was to know. He was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia. His full name was John Roosevelt Robinson and he was the youngest of five children. For many years Jackie told others that his father died a year after he was born, but the truth was that Jackie's father, who worked as a sharecropper for twelve dollars a month, ran off with a neighbor's wife six months after Jackie's birth. The plantation owner blamed Jackie's mother and ordered her off the land, so she sold what possessions they had and took her family across the country to California, where she had a brother, Jackie's uncle Burton. In her new life, washing and ironing for white people, Jackie's mother was up before daylight and home after sundown. Sometimes the family lived on nothing but old bread and Sweetwater. During these years, Jackie's mother sustained herself with the dream that all her children might one day be able to go to school.

When Jackie was a boy he belonged to a gang made up of blacks, Japanese, and Mexicans called the Pepper Street Gang. They weren't allowed to swim and play ball where whites could. Instead they roamed the streets, stealing from local stores, getting into trouble with the police. By the time Jackie was in high school he had few friends his own age. He was close to three older men, though: his minister Karl Downs, who took him out of gangs and brought him into church life and athletics; and his two brothers—Mack, who was a great track star and Jackie's coach, and Frank, who was his best friend.

In 1936, despite a heart condition, Mack went to Berlin and came in second to Jesse Owens in the Olympics. Soon after, while starring in football, baseball, basketball and track at Pasadena Junior College, Jackie broke Mack's broad jump record. Dozens of four-year colleges recruited him but he decided to go to U.C.L.A. so that he could be close to home. In the fall of 1938, however, shortly after he enrolled there, Frank was killed in a motorcycle accident. Not long after that Jackie met Rachel Isum. Although he fell in love with her at once—they became especially close during the months following the death of Rachel's father—they did not marry until almost a decade later.

In all the articles I read, Jackie rarely spoke of his feelings. It bothered me that I knew so much about his athletic career and so little about the rest of his life. I wanted to know what he'd felt when he was a boy my age. I wanted to know what he felt during all the years he had to hold back his true feelings—during all the years he had to live, day after day, believing he would never reach the major leagues. But whenever I'd ask Beau Jack about Jackie's childhood, hoping he could fill in the details of what it was like to be a young black boy growing up in America, he would never say much.

Beau Jack had no trouble talking about the facts of Jackie's career, or about the Negro Baseball Leagues and the great players he'd seen, or even about his life as a soldier during World War I. Although he could give me all the details I wanted about what the war had been like—stories of trench warfare and hand-to-hand combat, of cantonment cities and potato-masher grenades and mustard gas and redoubt lines and bolo knives and rolling barrages—he never talked about his life before the First World War. I had the feeling that he didn't want to live through those years—not even in his memory—ever again, and that nothing in his adult life could ever be as painful as an ordinary day of his childhood had been. How helpless and ashamed he must have felt, I thought.

He spoke in a slightly slurred way that made me think he grew up in the South, but I didn't know for sure. He never mentioned any family he had, or friends; he never had visitors or went on trips. And yet I knew this was a large part of what made it so easy for me when I was with him. He seemed to have come from nowhere. He was the only person I knew who needed no other life than the one in which he was living.

It made him happy, too, to have me come down and visit with him, even if we just sat in his kitchen together doing nothing, just being quiet with one another. We'd listen to ball games on the radio, or talk about Jackie, or about different people in the building, or he'd ask me about school, or I'd ask him to tell me about the First World War—but when we weren't talking it never bothered me to just sit with him and sip a Coke and pet Kate and let time drift by.

Sometimes, if he had to go to an apartment to put up a cabinet, or fix a refrigerator or a sink or a toilet, or if somebody's door buzzer was jammed, he'd leave me by myself. I'd take off my sneakers and rest my bare feet on Kate's warm body and I'd feel far away from everything and everyone. Sometimes when he was gone I wondered if Beau Jack was real, or if I'd merely invented him. I thought often of asking him to let me draw his portrait. Sometimes when I stared at him, tracing the bones under his skin with my eyes, I ached to be able to make his face come to life on a piece of blank paper. I loved all the different colors I saw in the brown of his skin. What I couldn't figure out, though, was how to transform those colors into grays and whites. When I thought of trying to get everything I saw into a portrait—all the different hues: the slight redness, like sunburn, at the cheekbones; the purple that seemed to lie beneath the brown like grape-stain; the pitted black pockmarks along his cheeks and chin; the flat orange-brown near his hairline; the marbled tans and pinks around his missing ear; the smooth gleaming chestnut of his neck—I worried that I would just wind up with a dark, confusing mess. I wanted to be able to draw each pore of his skin, each hair, each wrinkle—to see what no painting or photograph could see—and because I didn't see how it would ever be possible, and because I even began to wonder if what I saw inside my head was actually
there
, I chose to do nothing. I knew I could have drawn his features and gotten them right, the same way I copied out pictures of Jackie from magazines—Jackie's full, thick lips, his lamb's wool hair, his broad, flat nose, his dimpled chin, his soft almond eyes—but without shading in the skin I was afraid I would never be able to suggest the way the darker colors underneath shone through to the surface.

After U.C.L.A., where Jackie was an All-American basketball player, the N.C.A.A. broad jump champion, and, in football, the leading ground-gainer in the country with an average of twelve yards a carry, he went to Hawaii and worked for a construction company near Pearl Harbor while playing football for the Honolulu Bears. In the spring of 1942 he was drafted into the Army and sent to Fort Riley, Kansas, where he went to Officer's Candidate School and became a Second Lieutenant, a Morale Officer in charge of an all-black truck battalion. He was transferred from Fort Riley to Fort Hood, in Texas, and then to Camp Breckenridge in Kentucky, where a friend who'd been a member of the Kansas City Monarchs, in the Negro Baseball Leagues, told Jackie that the Monarchs were looking for players.

After Jackie received his honorable discharge in November 1944, he wrote to the Monarchs. They gave him a tryout, then offered him a job at four hundred dollars a month. Jackie was happy. When the season began in 1945, though, and Jackie saw what his future would be like—a fatiguing, humiliating life of traveling from city to city by bus, of never eating or sleeping well, of never getting the rewards and recognition that white players received in their leagues—he became bitter and discouraged. But if he left baseball, where could he go, and what could he do to earn enough money to help his mother, or to be able to marry Rachel?

The answer came in August 1945, when Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, sent Clyde Sukeforth to see Jackie. Sukeforth, one of Rickey's scouts, told Jackie that Rickey was looking for players for a Negro team to be called the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers and he persuaded Jackie to come to Brooklyn for an interview.

“The truth,” Rickey said, the first time he and Jackie met, “is that you are not a candidate for the Brooklyn Brown Dodgers. I've sent for you because I'm interested in you as a candidate for the Brooklyn National League Club. I think you can play in the major leagues.”

They talked more and Rickey, an elderly, churchgoing man who didn't smoke or drink or swear and who would not even attend his own team's games on Sunday, told Jackie a story.

In 1910 Rickey was a coach for the Ohio Wesleyan team. The team went to South Bend, Indiana, to play against Notre Dame, and the hotel refused to let one of the team's players, a black named Charley Thomas, register. There were no black hotels in South Bend and Rickey talked the hotel manager into letting Charley Thomas sleep on a cot in Rickey's room. Instead of sleeping, Charley Thomas sat without speaking on the edge of the cot. Then he began to cry and shake, to tear at one hand with the other, as if he were trying to scratch his skin off with his fingernails. Rickey asked him what he was doing.

“It's my hands,” Charley Thomas sobbed. “They're black. If only they were white, I'd be as good as anybody then, wouldn't I, Mr. Rickey? If only they were white!”

“Charley,” Rickey said. “The day will come when they won't have to be white.”

Rickey told Jackie that he would have to play for Montreal in the International League for a year. He told him that he knew Jackie was a fierce competitor. He liked that. But if the great experiment, as he called it, was to work, Jackie would have to control his temper and take a lot of abuse. He would be the object of beanballs and spikings, curses and name-calling.

“Mr. Rickey,” Jackie asked angrily, “are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?”

For the first time, Rickey exploded. “Robinson,” he replied, “I'm looking for a ball player with guts enough
not
to fight back.”