Rickey and Robinson (3 page)

Robinson closed the book gently and handed it back to Rickey. “I understand,” he said.

Chapter Two

Pasadena: The Making of an All-American

Jack Roosevelt Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia, on January 31, 1919, the fifth and last child of Mallie and Jerry Robinson. Mallie’s father had been a slave, and the feel of those times was always close by. Her mind often tarried in the vestibule of bondage. Jerry earned $12 a month for his labors on the Jim Sasser plantation near the Florida border. His wages were barely enough to feed the young family.

One December day, Jerry came home late after his hogkilling chores were completed. “Just liver, lights, and chitterlings,” Mallie shouted at her husband. “Butchering all day and that’s what they let you bring home. No tenderloin, not even a neckbone?”

Jerry reminded her that he was forbidden to take home anything but the organs of the hogs.

“We’re no better off than slaves,” Mallie said furiously. “Things have got to change around here.”

Mallie and Jerry argued for days. Jerry felt strongly about keeping his place and accepting what the plantation owner allowed. But Mallie was a proud, deeply religious woman who was profoundly influenced by the stories of slavery her father had told her. She prevailed. Jerry would ask to become a half-cropper and split the profits of his labor with the white plantation owner. Sasser was unwilling to lose a strong and capable worker; angry and with reservations, he consented.

Ironically, the new arrangement doomed the marriage. With each passing month, flushed by the extra money he was making, Jerry spent more and more time away from Mallie and the children. He purchased dress-up clothes and made his way into Cairo, a town of three thousand, where he mingled with the crowd questing after the sporting life. Jerry and Mallie now bickered constantly.

On July 28, I919, when Jack was six months old and Mallie was thirty, Jerry boarded train #230 with someone else’s wife and ran away to Florida. The family never saw him again. ‘When our father passed away, I was in high school,” says Mack Robinson, Jack’s older brother. “We never saw him. We knew nothing of him. When my mother got a telegram from some relative telling us he had passed, it wasn’t traumatic for us; we had no recognition of him.”

With Jerry gone, Jim Sasser ,lost no time in getting Mallie and her children off his land. He had always disliked the spirited young woman and quickly found a new family to come in and do the work. And so Mallie and her children—Jack, Willa Mae, Edgar, Frank, and Mack—moved into the home of a family that Mallie had worked for as a domestic before her marriage.

The 1920s and 1930s were a time of the great Negro exodus west. “If you poor Georgia folks want to get a little closer to heaven,” Mallie heard, “come on out to California.” The Robinsons lived through another blazing Georgia summer, a rainy autumn, and a chilling winter. But with the coming of spring in 1920, they packed their belongings in baskets, boxes, frayed suitcases, and straw bags and filed onto a dirty Jim Crow coach with hundreds of other blacks heading west to California and a new beginning.

‘When we first came out,” recalls Willa Mae, Jackie’s older sister, “we all lived together in an apartment with my mother’s sister Mary Lou and Uncle Burton, their kids, and a cousin. With the six of us, there were about thirteen altogether. We were poor, but we made it. My mother worked as a domestic for a lady who had four girls. I dressed well. I would get four dresses at a time.”

The apartment had no hot water. There was no sink in the kitchen. The family lived on a diet of day-old bread and sweetwater, a liquid substance made from sugar and milk. Mallie’s wages from domestic work and some aid from the welfare department kept the Robinsons going.

Jack had many moments alone in the evenings with his mother. They would sit in the glow of the flickering light of the oil lantern, and he would look into her face, a young face but one carved and written on by the hard years. She would tell him the old stories about the slaves and their masters. He learned about the time the slaves were given their freedom and how they were afraid to take it, fearing both of freedom and their masters at the same time.

Mallie was not afraid. By 1923, her domestic wages, hand-me-down clothing from employers, welfare department aid, and some prudent budgeting made her realize that it might be possible to move the family out of their crowded apartment and into a house.

The house Mallie purchased was at 121 Pepper Street, a modest two-story home in the comfortable but spare northwest section of Pasadena, an all-white neighborhood. Mallie bought the house from a black man. He had acquired it through the efforts of his niece, who looked white.

Most of the Pepper Street residents reacted to their new neighbors with annoyance, hostility, and open prejudice. There was a plan to circulate a petition to force the blacks out. When the petitioners learned that what they were attempting was illegal, they switched tactics. They tried to raise money to buy the house from Mallie. This too was unsuccessful, for the potential buyers argued among themselves as to who should put up the money. Even if they’d raised the money, Mallie would not have sold. She considered herself lucky to have obtained the house for such a low price and was glad to have a piece of land on which to raise her children.

With the legal and financial schemes aborted, residents resorted to harassment. There were complaints about Frank. His roller skating on the sidewalks provoked one neighbor to call the police, complaining about the noise he made. Mallie cautioned Frank and the other Robinson children to watch their behavior but not to be ashamed of who they were.

Each morning, Mallie rose very early and left her sleeping children to go to work for her white employers; She made that family’s breakfast while her own children fended for themselves, many mornings going without breakfast. Many evenings they waited with hope and hunger for the leftovers their mother might manage to bring home. To take care of the family, each child became a surrogate mother or father for the next-youngest child.

Mallie Robinson was not only a supportive mother for her own children, but “she was motherly to all of us kids in the neighborhood,” recalls Sidney Heard, Jackie’s childhood friend. “We’d come over to the house, and she’d be good to us, share with us what she had. She remembered certain parts of slavery times that had been told to her by her folks. She had no bitterness, though—maybe a little, but not enough to notice. She believed in doing to you like she wanted done to her.”

“She was something else,” says her son Mack. “She had a way of saying and doing things that brought out the best in all of us.” Without a father and with a mother working most of the time, rambunctiousness characterized the Robinson children’s behavior. At times, Mallie became angry with the rebellious Mack. “I used to tease Mom a little bit,” he says. “She used to tell me I was the worst child she had. Jack was the baby of the family. She was really proud of him.”

When Willa Mae started kindergarten at the Grover Cleveland School, it posed a problem for the entire family. By this time there was no one left at home to care for Jack. Mallie reasoned that the best arrangement would be for Willa Mae to bring Jack to school with her each day. The school authorities did not approve of this plan at first. “If I stay home and take· care of him, I’ll have to go on relief,” Mallie argued. “It’ll be cheaper for the city if you just let him come and play.” The authorities agreed, and every day for a year Willa Mae brought her younger brother with her and placed him in the schoolyard sandbox under the blue California sky. At the end of her school day, Willa Mae would come out and take him home.

At first Jack played in the sand and with small toys, but then he began to mingle with other children at recess. “I told my mother to save money by not fixing food for me,” Jackie recalled later. ‘1 was the best athlete there. The others brought me sandwiches and dimes for the movies so they could play on my team. You might say I turned pro at an early age.”

Sidney Heard and Jackie became friends in the early years of elementary school. Their families had come to Pasadena from Georgia at about the same time. “I began to notice that Jack had something that the rest of us did not have,” recalls Heard. “He was just an average student, but he loved games and sports. And he could do things in games and sports that the other kids could not do. We played dodgeball. One by one kids would be eliminated when they were hit.by the ball. Every time we played, he was left. And the game had to stop because nobody could hit him. That’s when I really began to notice him.

“As time went on we got into other sports and games, and there was nothing he could not do. When marble time came, he played marbles. We would get up early in the morning and play marbles from eight o’clock to five o’clock. He didn’t even take his lunch. We used to draw a big circle, which we used to call a ‘Boston.’ We would draw a little circle and put the marbles in it and put the agates in. Those were petrified wood almost crystallized and harder than rock. Those were precious marbles—almost like diamonds in those days. We used to put several diamonds, as we called them, in the middle of the circle surrounded by marbles until we cleaned them out and got to the agates. Boy, that dude Jackie, he cleaned us out. He could concentrate. He could concentrate better than any of us.”

All through the year, there were outdoor games. The weather in California was almost always good. Pepper Street was about a mile from the Rose Bowl Stadium site, and Sid Heard’s father and Jack’s brother Edgar were construction workers at the football stadium. “When it was a half bowl,” Sid remembers, “we would go down through the bowl site area and chase rabbits.” But Jackie yearned to play one day in the football stadium that was just being built.

“We played games we invented ourselves on the vacant lot on Pepper Street,” continues Heard. “We played ‘Over the Line.’ I do believe that’s what made Jackie a pull hitter. We had six players in the game—three on each side. There were two left fielders and a shortstop that took care of second and third base. The batter on the other team had to hit the ball between second and third, and it had to go over the line—an imaginary line. It couldn’t bounce over the line. It had to be hit over. You had to travel around first and get as many bases as you could before the fielder threw the ball back over the line. That ability of Jack to hit was no mystery to me. I know where he developed that swing. Sometimes we played the game using a rag ball. You had to hit it with tremendous power, with a tremendous amount of power to get it over the line.

“Playing jacks the regular way was too easy for him. He wouldn’t even use a ball. He used the jacks. He threw them up and caught the jacks before they came down.

“He was the one who chose sides. I was the other one. He’d always pick the younger kids and play the older ones and then he’d figure out a way to beat us older boys with the younger boys. . . . He was some competitor, and he figured it out so that we all got to play.

“There were so few blacks in Pasadena at that time that we were just like a family. If you wanted to borrow something, you would borrow it and say later that you borrowed it. We knew where we could go—we knew where people were prejudiced. We knew how far we could go downtown. We used to go down to Brookside Park where the whites were and play their teams for ice cream and cake. We’d beat them. Jack loved that. We used to get an awful lot of ice cream and cake.”

Pasadena, set in the shadows of blue mountains, with its sweet air and wide boulevards, was a lovely place to live. Yet Jack never felt completely comfortable. As a child he had been taunted with shouts of “nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger.” He remembered a taunt—“Soda cracker’s good to eat, nigger’s only good to beat.”

Pasadena had many of the same restrictions as the rural South the Robinsons had fled. Blacks were allowed to swim in the municipal pool only on Tuesdays—that was the day the water was changed. They were allowed in the YMCA only one day a week. They could view the Saturday matinees in the movie theaters only from the segregated balcony.

“If my mother and brother and sister weren’t living in Pasadena,” Jack would observe many years later, after his retirement from baseball, “I would never go back. I’ve always felt like an intruder there—even in school. People in Pasadena were less understanding in some ways than southerners, and they were more openly hostile.”

It was sports that sustained him, that gave him succor, that provided an outlet for his pent-up fury. The youngest in a family of gifted natural athletes, he was nourished by sports.

Mack remembers an incident from his youth: “We were raising some horses for a man, and I took a horse by the house one day. My mother came out. She got up there and rode the horse side-saddle. She rode the horse better than I did, and I was astride the horse. She went galloping up the street. I would assume she was about forty years old at the time. But she had native athletic ability.

“All of us grew up playing together, and each one improved the other. Edgar, the oldest, was a fantastic roller skater on street skates, and a fine softball player and bicycle rider. Frank, next to oldest, was like a father to Jack. He was a sprinter. He was faster than I was in the hundred-yard dash, and I was a tenth of a second off the world record in those days. Willa Mae made first-string on everything girls could play back then—basketball, track, soccer. She was also a top sprinter in her day.

“Jack got his start in long jumping from me. You think of his speed, but it was his deception on the base paths, his timing, his starting and stopping, his faking abilities—those were the things that made his speed great. He was a combination athlete. He was great in all four major sports. I saw this from the time he was in junior high school.”

Jackie attended Washington Junior High School. Sidney Heard went to Cleveland Junior High School. The two schools used to meet every year for the championship. “We could never beat them,” Heard recalls. ‘We were always second because of Jackie. He made their teanl’s something else.

“We tried to get him mad, but we soon found out that the madder you made him, the better he played. We soon stopped getting him mad. . . . He never used any cuss words, he only used to say ‘daggummit this’ and ‘daggummit that.’ . . . He was interested in the games, in winning, not in anything else. He never did start a fight. He could fight, but he would never take advantage of anyone . . . and he would never put himself in a position where he would be hurt.”