Jackie Robinson (5 page)

If Pasadena could now claim to be the Athens of southern California, its white citizens increasingly saw only one flaw in all this perfection: the presence of blacks. Crime was not an issue; black crime was insignificant. But Negro residents on any street drove down property values, as Pasadena whites looked with envy on nearby communities such as Eagle Rock, South Pasadena, and San Marino—but especially on Glendale, which had had the foresight not to employ blacks as domestics and now boasted that not a single Negro lived within the city limits. As one of Jack’s friends remembered about Pasadena in the 1930s, the boundaries for most nonwhites were strictly drawn, although there were also scattered exceptions: “
You couldn’t live east of Fair Oaks. You couldn’t live north of Washington Boulevard. And you couldn’t live west of Lincoln Avenue.”

Far more devastating were the restrictions on where blacks might work. By 1940, a year before Jack Robinson’s departure from Pasadena, the city had not yet hired, as one editorial indignantly put it, “a single [black] policeman, fireman, regular day-time school teacher, meter-reader, or any other type of employee for the utilities; no, not even a janitor or an elevator boy in the City Hall.” Pasadena employed some blacks in the park, street, and refuse departments, and then only as laborers, never as clerks. At some point, the post office began to hire blacks, and a county office gingerly broke the Jim Crow rule; but most businesses did not, and all trade unions scorned blacks as members. The result was chronic unemployment and poverty and a growing despair. In 1924, after the city rebuffed a petition to appoint a black policeman (by then Los Angeles had a black detective and several black patrolmen and firemen), the
Eagle
summed up its concern: “
The condition of affairs surrounding the racial issues in Pasadena is nothing less than nauseating.”

The white house at 121 Pepper Street, once the site of a local post office, was large; with five bedrooms and two baths spread over two floors, it offered for the first time a measure of comfort and privacy to the Robinsons and the Wades. Within the Robinson family it came to be known as “the
Castle,” not least of all because it was their fortress against an often hostile world. The lot was shady with a variety of fruit trees. “
We had apples, oranges, peaches, and figs,” Willa Mae recalled, “just about six or eight different kinds of fruit trees, and my mother put up cans of fruit during the summer that lasted us through the winter.” Mallie also put in a large garden. She planted bright-blooming flowers to make the house beautiful, but in addition raised vegetables, “things we could go out in the garden and pick and eat.” As in Georgia, Mallie also raised, at one time or another, turkeys, chickens, ducks, rabbits, and even a flock of pigeons.

Even so, the Robinsons were relatively poor and sometimes hungry. Late in life, Jack would write of his boyhood as marred by stretches of real hunger: “
Sometimes there were only two meals a day, and some days we wouldn’t have eaten at all if it hadn’t been for the leftovers my mother was able to bring home from her job.” He also recalled “other times when we subsisted on bread and sweet water.” But Jack’s earlier interviews about Pasadena apparently never mentioned such extreme poverty, and his sister, Willa Mae, denied it. She blamed the emphasis on poverty on the desire of writers to foster a rags-to-riches myth once Jack had become a star. Perhaps the truth is in between, but the Robinsons doubtless struggled to earn money in the 1920s, despite the purchase of their “Castle,” and continued to struggle throughout the Great Depression.

Jack and Willa Mae disagreed about hunger but not about bigotry on Pepper Street. “
We went through a sort of slavery,” she recalled, “with the whites slowly, very slowly, getting used to us.” At first, angry whites tried to buy out Mallie and Sam Wade; but Mallie’s kindness won over the only person on the street with the means to buy her out, Clara Coppersmith, a widow who lived alone next door. After Edgar Robinson, at Mallie’s behest, did various chores for her without pay, she gave her vehement support to her black neighbors. Still, resentment remained deep. Someone burned a cross on the front lawn. Down the street, an elderly white couple scurried indoors in terror if any Negroes approached. The police responded to complaints about the children, especially Edgar and his noisy roller-skating. “
The police were there every other day,” according to Willa Mae, “telling my mother that she had to keep us in the yard.” Refusing to give up, Mallie also tried to look on her foes with charity. “
My mother never lost her composure,” Jack later wrote. “She didn’t allow us to go out of our way to antagonize the whites, and she still made it perfectly clear to us and to them that she was not at all afraid of them and that she had no intention of allowing them to mistreat us.” Once, when he and some friends, in retaliation against a white man on Pepper Street, spread tar on his lawn, Mallie ordered them to repair the damage; she supervised the job as they
cleaned the lawn with kerosene and rags and carefully snipped blades of grass with scissors.

The worst episode on Pepper Street touching Jack directly occurred when he was about eight years old. One day, he was sweeping the sidewalk when a little girl from the poorest house on the block, almost directly across the street from the Robinsons’, began to taunt him: “
Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” Incensed, Jack answered in insulting kind. Her father, a surly, shiftless fellow, stormed out of the house to challenge Jack. Soon stones were flying between boy and man until his wife came out to scold him for fighting with a child.

Eventually the Robinsons were accepted on Pepper Street, in large part out of respect for Mallie. At one point, she even made the Robinson home a kind of relief center. On Saturday evenings, a bakery nearby allowed her boys to take away leftover baked goods; and daily, at the end of the milkman’s run, he gave what was left to the “Robinson Crusoe” household, as he called it, rather than let it spoil. Generously, Mallie included her neighbors in distributing this largesse. “
My mother divided with them because it was too much for just our family,” according to Willa Mae, “so all the neighbors—even the one that was throwing rocks and fighting—they got some too. And then we got to be real friends and all in the neighborhood. They found out we were human, too; the color didn’t do anything to them.”

To many people, Mallie’s job as a domestic servant, along with her black skin and her gender, fully defined her. In fact, she had a keen imagination and a radiant spirit, as well as abilities and interests that sometimes surprised even her children, who had not known her when she was a young woman starting out, with the world before her. As one of her daughters-in-law recalled, “
Mallie loved to sit on her porch with people about her and spin stories endlessly. She would act out the various parts, the different characters, in an animated way, and she had a really vibrant sense of fun and pleasure.” Her son Mack was astonished one day to see her impulsively climb up on a horse and happily gallop off sidesaddle with a skill and confidence he never expected. For all this whimsical aspect, Mallie also had her stern side. “
We knew that we had to do what we had to do,” Willa Mae recalled, “or we got spanked, punished; she would pick a switch and come after us.” She worked hard to instill in them the key values she herself had learned growing up in Georgia, about the importance of family, education, optimism, self-discipline, and, above all, God.

Tenaciously, Mallie tried to preserve her family ties to Georgia even if it meant helping several relatives and friends there escape to California. In 1927, following the death in Georgia of her father, Wash McGriff, Mallie welcomed her mother, Edna Sims McGriff, who lived for a while with
Mallie, then with her son Burton, and finally with her daughter Cora. Near seventy in 1927, gnarled and feeble, she made a vivid impression on her grandson Jack. “
I remember sitting by the flickering light of an oil lantern,” he would recall, “and watching her face, which had a thousand wrinkles in it.” Far more than Mallie, it was Edna McGriff, born a slave, who embodied for Jack the fearsome aspect of his Southern heritage, including the legacy of slavery. “I remember she told me once,” he said, “that when the slaves were freed they wanted no part of freedom. They were afraid of it.” Years later, at one of the most perilous moments of his life, when his future hung in the balance with his military court-martial, he would also recall what his grandmother had told him more than once about the word “nigger,” and her insistence to him that no matter what ignorant whites said, he was not one. On July 25, 1933, when Jack was fourteen, Edna Sims McGriff died at Cora Wade’s home at 972 Cypress Street. She became one of the first of the Georgia migrants to be buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Pasadena.

Family was vital to Mallie, but God was supreme. For her, as she tried to make her children see, God was a living, breathing presence all about her, and she seeded her language with worshipful allusions to the divine. “
God watches what you do,” she would insist; “you must reap what you sow, so sow well!” Faith in God meant not only
prayers on one’s knees each night, and Scott United Methodist Church on Sunday, but also a never-ending sensitivity to God’s power, an urge to carry out the divine will as set out in the Bible, and a constant appeal to Heaven for aid, comfort, and guidance. Through all his years living with Mallie, Jack was witness to his mother’s unshakable attachment to religion, the entirely willful way she delivered herself and her fortunes to God without becoming fatalistic or withdrawing from the world. If anyone questioned the durability of the link between prayer and belief, Mallie had a forthright answer. “Prayer,” she often told her children, “
is
belief.”

C
RAVING HIS MOTHER’S COMPANY
, Jack as a small boy slept downstairs at 121 Pepper Street with her and refused to leave her bed. When she offered him a quarter a week to move out, he turned her down. Finally, after Jack dreamed one night that an intruder had climbed in through the window, he then fled upstairs to the large bed his older brothers shared.

With Mallie at work, Jack passed his early childhood mainly in the care and company of his sister, Willa Mae. “I was the little mother,” she recalled; “
I was Jack’s little mother.” Jack agreed: “
When I was eight years old and she was ten, you would think she was a hundred the way she could talk to
me when everything was blue.” In his childhood, Willa Mae bathed, dressed, and fed him almost every day. Prompted by Mallie, who had no choice in the matter, she even took Jack with her to her school. There, sympathetic teachers allowed him to play in a sandbox outdoors while Willa Mae sat in class and watched him through a window.

He was a handsome, charming child. A boyhood photograph of him at four or five, perhaps his earliest portrait, caught him relaxed and insouciant, sitting on a rocking chair with a leg drawn up. Evidently he was more than a little mischievous. His lifelong friend Sid Heard remembered the day in 1925 when he first met Jack. It was Sid’s first day at Cleveland Elementary School, a red brick building a few blocks from 121 Pepper Street. Sid and a friend, Timothy Harrison, were standing outdoors, waiting for their mothers, when they felt something hitting them. At first, they thought that acorns were falling from a tree arching overhead—“
but it was only this little young guy, sitting on the edge of the sandbox, shooting small acorns like marbles at us, and smiling. That’s how I met Jack.”

His teachers, too, seemed to like him. Starting out at Cleveland Elementary in 1924, he was lucky in his first two teachers, Bernice Gilbert in kindergarten and Beryl Haney in the first grade. (All his teachers were white.) On some days, he recalled, he and Willa Mae “
would get to school so hungry we could hardly stand up, much less think about our lessons.” But Miss Gilbert and Miss Haney “
always had a kind word for us—and a couple of sandwiches.” According to Willa Mae, Jack and these teachers formed “
a deep, embedded friendship” that lasted the rest of Jack’s life, long after he became famous. This affection existed despite the fact that the idea of white supremacy was entrenched in the school system. In a confidential survey of Pasadena schoolteachers (still all white) in 1940, almost half would express a preference for schools with no black students at all; not surprisingly, more than ninety percent of the black parents in the same survey believed that their children were not treated fairly in the schools. Eleanor Peters Heard remembered that while Lincoln Elementary School, which she attended, had been fully integrated, in Washington Junior High “
they put all of the blacks together.”

After two years at the Cleveland school, Jack transferred in September 1926 to another elementary school, Washington Elementary, still only a stroll away from home. This change followed a rezoning of the Pasadena school districts when a rise in the black and Hispanic population in northwest Pasadena threatened to leave some schools with white minorities. Then, in 1931, at twelve, he left Washington Elementary and enrolled, as expected, in Washington Junior High School, which shared the same city block. His official transcript at Washington Elementary shows grades of B
and C over the years, but with a decline in quality between the fourth grade and the sixth grade, his last year there. The transcript also includes a simple note made by a school official about his likely future occupation: “
Gardener.”

Jack’s precociousness as an athlete undoubtedly helped him to negotiate the traps of racism early in his life. “
He was a special little boy,” his sister recalled, “and ever since I can remember, he always had a ball in his hand.” Whether the game was marbles or soccer, he wanted to win, and usually won. Why he needed to win so early in his life is impossible to say, but the desire to surpass and the discipline to achieve this goal were there. “
We used to play a game in the schoolyard with everyone in a circle, and you had to dodge the ball thrown at you,” Sid Heard recalled. “Jack would always be the last one left. They’d have to stop the game.” Whites as well as blacks bowed to his gifts; indeed, most of Jack’s classmates seemed able to like and accept one another easily, without much anxiety about differences in race or social standing. He and other gifted young athletes in Pasadena, black or white or Asian-American, competed against one another without allowing race to drive a permanent wedge of hatred or resentment between them. After the democracy he had known as a boy among boys and girls in Pasadena, nothing could convince Robinson that Jim Crow in any sport—or in any other aspect of American life, for that matter—was right or natural.