Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography

by Long, Michael G.

  plans to go to church together the following Sunday.

  13

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  Mallie’s father said his daughter would be available for dating only when she was allowed to lower her dress below her knees, adding, “I

  ain’t turned you out yet.”2

  Her parents wanted her to date a young man living in “the best

  house” on the Sasser plantation, but Mallie was fiercely independent and determined to continue dating Jerry. Despite the efforts to break them up, the young couple married in November 1909, just before

  the plantation’s hog-butchering season. “I loved my husband very

  much,” she later recalled. “I said, ‘Now let’s prove to the world what we can do.’ ”

  But moving onto the Sasser plantation proved difficult for Mallie.

  She was accustomed to better living conditions than those Sasser provided for his black employees.

  As a plantation laborer, Jerry Robinson earned twelve dollars a

  month, barely enough to feed him and Mallie, let alone any children on the way. And economical shopping on the plantation was impossible.

  Sasser owned the store where his workers had to purchase overpriced

  basic goods, often against the next year’s salary.

  Mallie grew especially upset when she discovered during butcher-

  ing season that Sasser would not allow his black workers to take home anything except the hog’s lungs, liver, and other organs. “Slavery is over,” she told Jerry, vowing to change the plantation’s oppressive economic system.

  A turning point for the Robinsons occurred less than two months

  after their wedding. Unable to make ends meet as Christmas

  approached, Jerry asked to borrow fifteen dollars, more than a month’s pay, against his salary in the new year. Sasser readily agreed—such

  borrowing and lending served his plan to keep workers bound to the

  plantation—but Mallie was far from agreeable when Jerry handed her

  five dollars from next year’s paycheck to spend for this year’s Christmas. “My husband worked for wages for years,” she recalled, “and did not have anything to show for it at the end of the year.”

  Stuck in poverty and debt, Mallie concocted a plan. She knew her

  hardworking husband was an extremely valuable laborer on the Sasser

  plantation. “So I asked him to try and farm for himself,” she said.

  It took some convincing and prodding on her part, but Jerry even-

  tually informed Sasser he would leave the plantation unless he could half-crop—keep half the crops he farmed on the owner’s land.

  Unwilling to face the loss of Jerry’s contributions, Sasser relented, granting Jerry sharecropper status and freeing him and Mallie to start

  “I Put My trust In God and Moved”

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  their own farming venture and climb out of debt. “Well,” Mallie

  recalled, “we made fine crops, plenty of everything, so I was a happy woman [with] a fine farmer for a husband.”

  Although Jackie Robinson never knew his father, he grew up inti-

  mately familiar with his mother’s story of Jerry’s transition into sharecropping, and as an adult Jackie shared the story publicly to praise his mother’s faith and explain his own spiritual roots.

  In Jackie’s version, his father was “too afraid” to approach Sasser

  with Mallie’s plan because he knew Sasser could throw him off the

  land for even daring to make such a bold request. Mallie conceded the same possibility. “In spite of this knowledge,” Jackie recounted, “she had that strength and determination which has been characteristic of so many Negro women of the South. She had faith and trust in God,

  and she believed that God wants human beings to work and speak for

  the freedom and equality which is rightfully theirs, even if they must suffer because they do this.”3

  The faith of Mallie Robinson, as her son attested, was not the type

  of faith that encouraged slaves to be obedient to their masters or that stressed the need to be content with one’s earthly status. That counsel was far from helpful. Nor was it the passive type of faith that waited for divine action to make things right or that merely prayed for the second coming of Jesus to free the oppressed from their bondage.

  Mallie Robinson’s faith was an active faith that took its cues directly from the biblical Jesus who declared at the outset of his ministry that he had come to set the oppressed free. Unlike submissive Christians

  waiting for “the pie in the sky,” Mallie fervently believed that those who follow Jesus must act right here and now—that they must fight for the freedom and equality that God desires for everyone, even if doing so requires suffering along the way. In her view, the people of God will no doubt suffer as they confront oppression, but if they keep their eyes focused on God’s will, they will see that suffering can be redemptive—

  it can redeem individual lives and establish freedom and equality.

  “My mother’s faith paid off,” Robinson said. After Sasser granted

  his father’s request, “there was more food for the Robinson family,

  more clothes and a lot more respect.” Her faith, he said, “changed my father from a slave worker into a man of pride.”4

  But the uptick in finances and pride came with a price. As Mallie

  herself put it, Jerry proved too weak when the extra food and money

  attracted female attention. “He could not take it,” she said, “he began to neglect, gave away what we had, until things began to get bad.”5

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  Mallie felt unstable. “I talked and prayed and begged him to

  change,” she said. When a lack of funds meant she and Jerry could not hire the extra help required for farming, she and their five children—

  Mack, Willa Mae, Edgar, Frank, and Jackie—took to the fields, with

  the older children pulling crabgrass and catching insects that would damage the crops.

  It was far from ideal, and when the weather wore down the chil-

  dren, Jerry suggested they all move into town. “Nothing doing,” Mallie replied, suggesting that it was difficult enough keeping watch over her straying husband on a rural farm, let alone in a busy town.

  “So things went on,” Mallie recalled. “I had a fine chicken crop,

  turkey, lots of hogs. We were just living as I wanted to live, only his love [was] drifting away.”

  Jerry had been straying for some time over the course of their nine-

  year marriage. “We been separated three or four times,” Mallie recalled,

  “and every time we go back together, I got another child.” Jackie arrived during one of those brief periods of reconciliation.

  With Jerry’s love adrift, Mallie relied on the one constant in her life.

  “I always lived so close to God till he would tell me things, what

  would happen,” she explained.

  Mallie’s God was not the immortal and invisible God that white

  Christians sang about. Her God was not wholly other—transcendent,

  inaccessible, and unmovable. Mallie’s God was always close by; he traveled with her, next to her, even inside her.

  And she certainly did not need an ordained priest or minister, let

  alone sacraments in expensive fonts and chalices, to access her closest companion; she just needed to listen. Mallie’s God spoke to her

  directly—in conversations, in prayers, in dreams.

  Mallie believed that through her dreams God was telling her that

  serious trouble was ahead, that Jerry would soon be leaving her and

  their family. “I would tell [Jerry] about it,” she explained, “and he would say that was the Devil, not God.” But Mallie had the perfect

  reply. “Well, if the Devil loves me that
good as to warn me of trouble,”

  she said, “I had the Devil and God both on my side.”

  Her recurring dreams were troubling enough, but far worse was

  Jerry’s very real wandering. Six months after the birth of Jackie, Jerry announced he was going to visit his brother in Texas, that he wanted to take their daughter Willa Mae with him, and that he would later send for the rest of the family. In the meantime, Mallie was to finish farming and use funds from the hay harvest to meet the family’s needs.

  “I Put My trust In God and Moved”

  17

  “Well, I did not fall for that,” she recalled. She had discovered that her husband was not planning on going to Texas but rather that he had promised to go away with another woman and begin a new life with

  her. “I was warned in my dreams about all of this,” Mallie explained.

  Armed with God’s warning, Mallie had had enough, so she opened

  the door and invited her husband to leave. “I finally decided for him to go, only I told him he was not going to Texas. I knew just what

  he was up to, so I got his suitcase packed, and then I said, ‘Now let’s go and make a lunch.’ ” Mallie made sure her departing husband had

  something to eat as he walked out the door; she would not be vengeful in their last moments together.

  On July 28, 1919, Jerry Robinson hopped aboard train number 230

  and went to Florida with another woman.

  Jerry left in the middle of the crop year, and Mallie was now in

  dire straits. Her brother offered to help harvest the crops so that she could get her fair share, but Sasser was too angry to talk about sharing anything and faulted Mallie for the loss of one of his best farmers. “You might as well go,” Sasser declared. “I ain’t gonna give you nothing. You knew he was leaving [and] didn’t tell me.”

  Sasser eventually suggested that Mallie become a cook in his house,

  but she refused the offer because of her inability to arrange for child care. When she failed to accept another unattractive job offer, Sasser punished her.

  He kicked her and the children out of their house, forcing them to

  move to a dilapidated property on the plantation. “I cried, but that did not do any good,” she recalled. “So the neighbors came and helped me,

  [and] I got that fixed very nicely.” But Sasser evicted her out of that one too, telling her she would have to move into “a house at the sawmill where lots of men lived.”

  Unable to bear the thought of rearing her children in such a cramped, dirty place full of men, Mallie resolved to leave the Sasser plantation for good. As she walked off the land, she lost her fair share—four bales of cotton, fifteen hogs, four barrels of syrup, and acres of peanuts, peas, beans, and potatoes—but not before delivering a biblical warning to

  Sasser: “Ye shall reap what ye sow.”

  “Well, I put my trust in God and moved,” Mallie recalled. Though

  fraught with peril and uncertainty, walking away from Sasser left her feeling exhilarated and empowered, and she happily shared that taste of freedom in her prayers.

  “No one, God, can outdo me,” she prayed.

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  In her mind, she had successfully battled the forces of evil. “I was a lucky lady—out of the hands of the Devil,” she said.

  Mallie Robinson was free at last. And poor. Although she found work

  as a domestic among wealthy whites, living conditions were incred-

  ibly difficult for her and the children. Coupled with their horrible economic circumstances was a marked rise in racial violence throughout

  the South. The Ku Klux Klan was conducting terror campaigns with

  impunity, lynching was an accepted form of white justice, and race

  relations in the form of Jim Crow laws were increasingly vicious.

  Mallie sensed nothing but a dangerous future in Georgia and believed that the time was ripe to escape the South. She became inspired all the more when her half brother, Burton Thomas, visited her and encouraged her to move to the land he had migrated to a number of years

  earlier. “If you poor Georgia folks want to get a little closer to heaven, come on out to California,” he said.6

  Mallie took his advice to prayer, and after long talks with God she

  resolved to put her faith in action again, this time by moving her young family about as far from the South as she could get without leaving the country. On May 21, 1920, an inspired Mallie and her five children,

  along with members of her extended family, headed to Cairo to catch

  a train to New Orleans and from there to California. She called it the Freedom Train.

  Jerry Robinson, back in Cairo, was not pleased when he learned

  of the planned exodus. He was so upset that he called the local police and asked them to try to block Mallie’s departure. The police were not accustomed to responding to requests from local blacks, but they could easily make an exception when asked to harass “uppity” blacks daring to leave behind white plantations and the Southern way of life. So they went to the station, kicked a few suitcases, and checked and double-checked tickets, but in the end they opted not to prevent Mallie and her children from boarding the midnight train. Deeply relieved, Mallie settled her tired children, including Jackie, one year and four months old, for the long trip west.

  As an adult, Jackie marveled at his mother for demonstrating such

  faith-filled courage and resolve, describing her move to California

  as rooted in the same spirit that had liberated his father from virtual slavery. “This same spirit,” he said, “gave her the courage to take her family out of the South, even though she was penniless and had no

  guarantee that she would be able to earn a living on the West Coast. In

  “I Put My trust In God and Moved”

  19

  a sense, she was like those courageous pioneers who went into the West in search of a new life.”7

  Robinson had no doubt that his mother’s quest for freedom had

  effectively transformed his life too. “I often wonder,” he said, “what would have happened to the baby in whose ear she whispered on a

  January day in 1919, if she hadn’t had that spirit—if she had been

  afraid to break away from a land of hopelessness and to go forth to a place where there was a better chance of survival.”8

  But she did have that spirit—a spirit of liberation fueled by her

  belief that God wants people to fight for their God-given freedom and equality, even if they must suffer along the way.

  The Robinson clan certainly did not escape suffering when they

  arrived in Pasadena, California, in June 1920. Their first apartment had three rooms and a kitchen, but because they had to share the space with other relatives, Mallie and her five children slept in just one room.

  As the youngest, lucky Jackie got to share the bed with his mother, and the other children scattered here and there on the floor.

  Three days after arriving, Mallie found employment as a domestic

  with a wealthy white family. Accustomed to working from sunup to

  sundown, she was shocked when she learned her work hours ran only

  from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. But the job did not last long; the wealthy family soon moved away, and Mallie was deprived of her salary of eight dollars a week.

  Desperate for work, she decided to place an employment advertise-

  ment in the Pasadena Star-News, and on the long walk there she stopped for directions in a building with a sign saying “Welfare.” After Mallie described her situation, the woman behind the counter explained that not only could the welfare office help feed and clothe the Robinson

  children during this difficult period but also that Mallie could right then and there help herself to the clothes she needed. Shocked, relieved, and grateful, Mallie walked home wearing a fur-lined coat.

&nbs
p; The welfare office helped considerably, but Mallie was a worker at

  heart, and it did not take her long to find stable employment with

  another white family, the Dodges, for whom she would work for the

  next twenty-seven years. With ongoing assistance from public welfare, she saved as much as she could, and just two years after arriving in Pasadena, Mallie became part owner of a large house at 121 Pepper

  Street. The house had five bedrooms, two baths, and, perhaps best of all, a yard with fruit trees and plenty of space for chickens and a garden.

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  JACKIE ROBINSON

  One of the earliest struggles Mallie faced in the new home was

  getting Jackie, now around three years old, to stop sleeping with her in her first-floor bedroom. She tried offering him twenty-five cents a week to make the move upstairs, but Jackie was uncooperative, finding his mother’s warmth too difficult to surrender. Characteristically, Mallie turned to prayer. “Lord,” she said, “You never failed me yet. It’s time for Jackie to stop being a baby.”9

  Not long after her prayer, according to Mallie, Jackie woke up in

  the middle of a nightmare. “Mama,” he said, “I dreamed a man came

  through the window to steal me.” Mallie prayed again, “Lord, you’re

  answering my prayer,” before telling Jackie, “The best thing for you is to go upstairs. Nobody could climb up there, and if they did, your brother Edgar is such a light sleeper he’d wake up.” Little Jackie agreed, adding, “And Edgar’s strong. He could knock out anyone.”10

  But a much larger problem than Jackie’s sleeping preference loomed

  outside, in her pretty new neighborhood. While Mallie and her chil-

  dren were delighted with their new home, the neighbors on the all-

  white, working-class block were not.

  Pasadena was no stranger to race-related tension in the 1920s. Jim

  Crow customs had established firm boundaries between blacks and

  whites. White-owned businesses, white-run trade unions, and white-

  friendly public policies made blacks into second-class citizens. One of the more painful policies experienced by the Robinsons was the Jim

  Crow rule that allowed blacks to swim in the public pool only one day a week, after which it would be drained and refilled for whites for the rest of the week. Pasadena’s police department also firmly resisted calls to hire black officers, even though nearby communities had begun to