by Jonathan Eig
• • •
Robinson’s apartment on MacDonough Street was better than the room at the McAlpin Hotel, but not by much. The brownstone was two stories tall, with an iron gate that opened to the stoop. It was surrounded by buildings that looked almost exactly the same and faced still more. A few small trees sprouted here and there on the block, but no grass. The California Robinsons were not used to such harsh environs. Where were the lawns, the meadows, the golf courses, the hills?
Jackie and Rachel both came from large families. They were accustomed to sharing tight quarters, but nothing as tight as this. Sixty years later, Rachel would forget how much rent they had paid, but the apartment itself remained vivid in her memory, painfully so: the tiny bedroom, eight-feet-by-twelve, at best; tiny kitchen; tiny closets; tiny bathroom, shared with Mabel Brown; the tiny slivers of sunlight poking in through the back door by the kitchen. The Robinsons were confined most of the time to their windowless bedroom. They had no desk, no table, and no chairs; just a bed, a dresser, and a wooden crib, which took up much of the room’s floor space. They made little use of the living room because Mabel Brown spent most of her waking hours there, usually in the company of her boyfriend. To escape, the Robinsons went on long walks around Bedford-Stuyvesant, down MacDonough to Ralph, over to Fulton, or along Atlantic, which was the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, past corner groceries, small churches, Laundromats, bars, diners, and tailor shops. They seldom went out at night, although they did manage to see two Broadway shows, Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon. Finian’s Rainbow was one of many mainstream entertainment vehicles taking on the subject of race in 1947. The play was mostly song and dance—the story of a leprechaun in search of gold. But it also included a character named Billboard Rawkins, a bigoted southern politician who was turned by magic into a black man so that he might learn the error of his narrow-minded ways. Sinclair Lewis tried a similar bit of racial transformation in his 1947 novel Kingsblood Royal, the story of a successful midwestern banker who discovers that he is part black and sees his life crumble as a result. Another writer, Laura Z. Hobson, published Gentleman’s Agreement, the fictional story of a white journalist pretending to be Jewish in order to document the effects of anti-Semitism. The book was turned quickly into a movie and won the 1947 Academy Award for best picture.
Though they didn’t get out much, the Robinsons knew these were special times. They were newly married and had just become parents. Now here they were, young and scared and enmeshed in something bigger than they’d dreamed. The feeling at times was one of pure exhilaration, “I think sometimes people miss that part, they’re so focused on the troubles and the stress,” Rachel recalled. “There’s this wild exhilaration that you never expected this to happen.” Many people also miss that while Robinson seemed the most solitary figure the game had ever seen, he had in Rachel a supremely powerful partner. The Dodger wives, who could be catty at times, could not help but acknowledge that Rachel possessed astonishing good looks and unflappable poise. She was smart, well-dressed, and well-spoken. She showed no fear, yet neither did she assert herself in too forward a manner. For a young woman who was new to the city, new to the big leagues, and new to the demands of fame, she seemed remarkably calm. Those who knew her well were not surprised. All her life Rachel believed she could accomplish anything she set her mind to. She was a tender and loving woman who inspired great warmth. Jack wrote her long, mushy love letters when he went on the road. She set high standards for those around her, including her husband.
Jack, a muscular figure of independence, relied on her hugely. They had no phone and no television, no distractions at all, except for the baby’s bleats and gurgles. So they talked and talked. Robinson would break down the events of the most recent game for his wife. Rachel would ask the sorts of questions any novice might: What does the catcher say to the pitcher when he visits the mound between pitches? What do the third-base coach’s signals to the batter mean? What does the manager say to the players in the dugout? Robinson explained patiently. They talked about what it would take for him to last in the big leagues. Just now he was slumping. He had no hits in three tries in the first game against the Giants, and went 0-for-4 in the second game. When the Cubs came to town for three games, he managed only one hit, a double, in eleven tries. His batting average fell, as he later described it, “like an elevator in the Empire State Building.” He told reporters that a bruised shoulder was crimping his swing. Rachel could see that more than his shoulder was bruised. He never spoke of his anxiety, but in his sleep he gnashed his teeth and tossed and turned beneath the sheets. The whole experiment, his whole life, it seemed, rode on how well he played. It was the only thing he ever admitted being worried about.
Years later, Branch Rickey would insist that Robinson’s job was never in jeopardy, but that did not appear to be the case at the time. The Dodgers had recently sent “Whistling” Ed Stevens back to the minors, but they were still carrying Howie Schultz on the roster as Robinson’s backup. Every day, when Burt Shotton filled out his lineup card, Robinson wondered if he would see Schultz’s name instead of his own. He wondered what Rachel would think if she came to the ballpark and saw another man playing first base. Then there were the reports that Rickey, flush with cash after unloading a bunch of spare players, was trying to deal for the Giants’ slugging first baseman Johnny Mize. There were even rumors that Rickey was trying to pry Stan Musial from the Cardinals. It was unlikely the Cardinals would give him up, but what message did it send to the Dodgers’ starting first baseman that the boss was trying to land a star to replace him?
Robinson worried that his big-league career might end at any moment. He felt certain he would start hitting eventually, but he didn’t know how much time he would be allowed. His biggest fear, he explained to Rachel, was that his own teammates would lose faith in him before he had a chance to prove he could help the team. He could feel their eyes on him. A great divide stood between Robinson and the rest of the men. Robinson tried to bridge it, but he did so cautiously. He was a quiet man, not quite shy, but far from gregarious. He tried chatting a bit in the dugout. He congratulated his teammates on good fielding plays. But he also kept to himself, holding a part of himself back. Such restraint was something black men and women often learned in the 1940s if they spent much time around white men and women. No doubt it was something Robinson had seen in his mother’s wary behavior all those years she worked in the homes of wealthy white families.
The rest of the Dodgers were equally circumspect. Not one of them invited Jackie and Rachel to have dinner or see a movie. Not one made an effort to help the couple learn the ins and outs of Brooklyn. Neither did the ballplayers’ wives attempt to welcome Rachel to their informal club. The other women would shop, knit, and dine together. Some of the women from small towns were frightened to stay by themselves when their husbands were on the road, so they would organize impromptu slumber parties. Rachel remained an outsider. After one game early in the season, Norma King, the wife of pitcher Clyde King, noticed Rachel standing outside the ballpark waiting for her husband to get dressed. Norma wondered why she didn’t join the other wives in the tunnel beneath the grandstand where they usually waited. “You belong in here with us,” she recalled telling Rachel. It hadn’t occurred to Rachel until then.
Rachel had dreamed of the day she would get married and have children and make her own home. She would hang curtains and pick the wallpaper and arrange the furniture just so. The Robinsons’ apartment was a far cry from the place she’d dreamed of, but at least in one important way it felt like a home. Jack’s intensity melted when he walked in the door, happy to be with his family, happy to have shelter from a world that expected him to be perfect all the time, a credit to his team and his race. He would coo at the baby and bounce him on his lap. He would read a newspaper or magazine. He would hold his wife in his arms.
And every night before turning in, he would kneel by the side of their bed and pray.
• • •
In the 1940s, black New Yorkers had low expectations in their encounters with white society. In Black Boy, Richard Wright described in 1945 the “essential bleakness of black life in America,” and wrote that blacks “have never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization.” Robinson, in his fight for dignity, supplied a morale boost of almost unimaginable consequence, and yet he never completely vanquished the fear of humiliation among his constituents. “Our approach was almost humorous, because that kind of humor was part of the culture,” recalled Colin Powell, who was ten years old and a Giants fan, living in the Bronx at the time. “We said, ‘Oh, Lord, don’t let him strike out.’ The greatest fear was that he wouldn’t do well, and that would be a mark against all of us.” Years later, when Powell became secretary of state, the highest-ranking black man in the history of United States government, things would be different. “There were still no black Greyhound bus drivers, no black airline pilots,” he said of 1947. “I still remember joking when Greyhound . . . hired its first black bus driver, ‘Oh, Lord, just don’t let him run into anything. . . . You’re living as a group through those selected individuals.”
Robinson’s shoulder ached every time he threw the ball, but he nevertheless stopped taping it before each game, perhaps hoping to convince the coaches and writers it had mended. If the Dodgers hadn’t been winning, he might already have been benched, and once benched, he might easily have been sent back to the minors. Robinson was of the opinion that even a brief return to Montreal would mark a complete and indisputable failure, confirming in the minds of skeptics “that blacks weren’t ready for the majors.” The pressure to succeed, he said later, was much greater than anything he’d ever faced. “There were times,” he wrote, “. . . when deep depression and speculation as to whether it was all worthwhile would seize me.” He assumed he would start hitting, but he had no idea whether his teammates would reject him, and that made it more difficult to concentrate on his game. “There were things some people take for granted that we couldn’t take for granted,” Rachel Robinson recalled. “Mainly whether the team would accept it. Would he become a teammate? You can’t play alone, no matter how good you are.”
At least one of his teammates spoke openly. Eddie Stanky was only thirty, but he looked older, his face all bumps and angles. He made up for his limited physical gifts by acting tough, even in his own clubhouse. Intimidation was a part of his game, a part of his life. So he may have been trying to scare Robinson when he told him, “Before I play with you I want you to know how I feel about it. I want you to know I don’t like it. I want you to know I don’t like you.”
“All right,” Robinson told Stanky. “That’s the way I’d rather have it. Right out in the open.”
Stanky might not have liked it, but then again, he didn’t pretend to like much of anything. He was a baseball man to the marrow, and any peculiar emotions that might have crept in as a result of his new association with a black teammate would not distract him from the game. From the season’s start he proved a comfort on the field to Robinson, helping to set his position before each pitch, telling him when to shade a batter toward the line and when to move toward the hole between first and second. Later, Robinson would say he was sorry for making the initial assumption that the second baseman was a bigot. “Stanky, although he was from the South, or raised down there, was a guy that took up battles, and a guy I respected. . . . He was gruff, but helpful.”
While Robinson tried to make his way among his teammates, sorting the friends from the bigots and the malignant bigots from the benign, he was fortunate to have Shotton for a manager. Shotton seemed aloof and enigmatic, but in fact, he was as easy to read as the little notepad he kept in hand during each ballgame. In the pad, Shotton kept his own crude scorecard, scratching an F for a fly ball and an O for an out. He took note when a player hit the ball hard, even if it didn’t result in a hit. “That’s a hit in my book,” he’d say, consoling a batter whose effort deserved a better outcome. Shotton’s notebook reminded him that Robinson wasn’t striking out much, and that gave the manager confidence that the hits would start to fall. “There’s no reason to get all excited,” he said of the slump, “no reason to panic.”
The hitless streak came to an end that May 1 afternoon, in the first inning of a soggy game against the Cubs. Robinson lined a Bob Chipman fastball into left field for a double. After that, the Dodgers did not play again for five days, as heavy rains pounded New York. The reprieve gave Robinson time to contemplate his tenuous position—and to rest his shoulder.
SEVEN
CARDINAL SINS
Branch Rickey never forgot anything, and he certainly had not forgotten the abortive spring training rebellion in Cuba, which had threatened to undermine his great experiment in integration. He still couldn’t bring himself to trade Dixie Walker, who was leading all of baseball with a .439 batting average, but he remained determined to show the southern mutineers that his commitment to Robinson was genuine and permanent. So, while the Dodgers waited for the rain to stop, Rickey picked up the phone and put in a call to Frank McKinney, president of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Rickey had burned every team in the league at one time or another with one of his seemingly guileless trades. He had outsmarted his trading partners so often that almost all his customers and would-be customers had grown wary. But he could still count on McKinney to return his calls. This time, McKinney believed he had the upper hand for a change. Rickey’s roster was bloated. Because of major-league regulations, the Brooklyn boss had two weeks to cut nine players or else release them and get nothing in return. McKinney offered Rickey cash for some of the players, knowing that Rickey had a fondness for fat profit margins. But he insisted that Brooklyn throw in one of its top pitchers—Kirby Higbe, Hal Gregg, or Joe Hatten.
Rickey, telling the Daily News that the Pirates had him “over a barrel,” agreed to give up Higbe, along with pitchers Hank Behrman and Cal McLish, infielder Gene Mauch, and catcher Dixie Howell. In return the Dodgers got the considerable sum of $250,000, plus a throw-in: an outfielder named Al Gionfriddo whom neither team wanted. At five-feet-six and 150 pounds, Gionfriddo was the smallest man in the majors. The New York sportswriters predicted that he would soon be the smallest man in the minors.
The deal infuriated Dodger fans. Higbe—or Higelbee, as they called him—was a Brooklyn favorite and the ace of a shaky pitching rotation. He’d won seventeen and lost only eight in 1946, and he’d already won his first two starts in 1947. He was thirty-two years old, with a lively arm that showed no signs of weakening. Rickey had a habit of trading good ballplayers at their peak, saving himself the hassle of owning them when they began to complain of aches and pains and the expenses of taking care of big families and high mortgages. But this time the fans and writers compl
ained that he’d gone too far. They said he’d let greed get in the way of smart baseball. More than one writer predicted that Rickey would look back at the end of the season and recognize that he’d traded away the Dodgers’ shot at the pennant.
Rickey did love money, and as one of the owners of the team, he would benefit directly from the sale of all those players to Pittsburgh. He held a 25 percent stake, as did each of his co-owners: Walter O’Malley, James and Deare Mulvey, and John Lawrence Smith. But what most of the writers failed to mention was that he had another powerful motivating force guiding him at all times: a sense of moral righteousness. Though none of the newspapermen made the connection, Rickey had begun trying to cast off several of his Cuban rebels. His message to the Dodgers who remained was that he intended to build his team around Robinson. It wasn’t enough to promote the rookie to the majors. He had to make sure Robinson succeeded, and that required a comprehensive strategy.
More black players were on the way. Campanella and Newcombe were too good to keep in the minors for long. Rickey knew that racial chemistry in the clubhouse would get more complicated. It made sense to remove the most dangerous elements now, in preparation for the seasons to come. As usual, he was thinking two and three steps ahead. He had committed to fighting for both justice and a pennant, at times sounding more like a politician than a baseball man. At a charity dinner that spring, Rickey warned that “poverty and distress, want and sickness” would breed discontent among the less fortunate, and possibly lead them to embrace communism. The business community must give generously to charities and pay fair wages to workers, he said. The world was changing. Everyone would have to keep his eyes on the ball.
