by Roger Kahn
“The gang was tough. The police didn’t want to get involved. That old man could have been murdered. They said he was an accountant at Blumstein’s and they don’t like Blumstein’s.” It is the principal department store on 125th Street, free with credit, persistent with demands for payment, the very cliché of the usurious, exploitive, Jewish white.
“The militants,” Robinson said, “just want to burn. And maybe white society will have to burn, but they are hitting the wrong targets all the time, like an old man.”
“Or you?”
“Or me.”
He does not want society to burn. Burn America and you burn the achievements of Jackie Robinson. After ruinous, anarchic blaze, who will remember the brave, fatherless boyhood, the fight for an inch of Army justice, the courage in baseball, the leadership and the triumph, of a free man who walked with swift and certain strides?
It was a cold day. After lunch the wind, biting up Fifty-third Street, bothered him. He walked deliberately, and it shocked me in the street to realize that I was slowing my own pace so as not to walk too quickly for Jackie Robinson.
The noontime of the American Dream glows briefly. One is continuously being persuaded to purchase washing machines and dryers, spare television sets and youth furniture, to add a room or to move into a larger home, and then when the hardest payments have been met, and the large family is suitably housed, the children begin making their way into dormitories and shared single rooms, the world beyond the hearth.
The children were all gone from the big stone house in Stamford, which the Robinsons built in mid-1954. Jack Junior was fighting for stability, and doing well. He had stopped using heroin and joined the staff of Daytop; he talked of wanting to run a community center in a ghetto. Sharon, born in 1950, married young, was living in Washington, D.C. After a good career at Mount Hermon Prep, David has gone clear across the country to Stanford. “But we’re busy, you can be sure,” Mrs. Robinson said on an afternoon when Jack asked my wife and me to visit. “We’re both quite occupied.”
In at least one sense, the years had treated Rachel Isum Robinson kindly. She remained a handsome woman, with soft, unlined skin. Escorting guests into the living room, she bore herself elegantly, and there was a warmth to her manner, and the two, elegance and warmth, blended into graciousness.
“Won’t you sit down? Can I fix drinks?” An ebony piano stood at one side of the spacious room, which was carpeted and high-ceilinged. A window wall overlooked a bright lawn, sloping toward water, the Stamford reservoir. Opposite, gray stone arched above the fireplace. One had to look closely to notice a pride of the mason’s craft; no visible mortar interrupted the flow of stone. “The builder,” Rachel said, “was marvelous. He meant this place to be a monument; of course, we have never been sure whether for us or for him.”
She climbed two carpeted stairs into a dining alcove and returned with drinks in mugs of heavy glass. She sipped at a martini. “One thing about my background in California was that I was brought up to be as ladylike as possible. I was taught not to be aggressive. And then, marrying Jack I was in the middle of a struggle where—well, without aggressive behavior it would have failed. There was an aggressiveness to Jack’s whole career in baseball. It was a kind of objection to the white society.”
“A very mild objection.” Treading softly, on the balls of his feet, Robinson entered his living room. He found an easy chair and reclined into a graceful slouch. He wore dark slacks and a blue knit shirt with sleeves that ended in mid-bicep. “Go on, go on,” he said in a soft voice.
“How did you find spring training in the South?”
“Humiliating,” Rachel said. Jack half-closed his eyes. “One of the many mistakes we made with Jackie,” Rachel said, “was trying to shield him from the way the South was. When we just had little Jack, we lived in the barracks at Vero Beach, like some other families, but we were limited to camp, which made us different. The white wives were always going on shopping trips to Vero Beach. Black people weren’t welcome to shop there. The hairdresser said he couldn’t work with black women’s hair. Well, one day I found a black hairdresser, and telephoned Vero Beach for a taxi. I was standing with little Jack when the driver pulled up. I started in, but he said wait, he wouldn’t take us. I’d have to call the colored cab.
“The colored cab! It was a big, ugly bus. I got in with Jackie, and the driver had to swing around near the swimming pool where all the white wives sat with their children. I shrank in my seat. I didn’t want anybody to see me. But just as we were turning little Jack stuck his head out of a window and called, ‘Good-bye, good-bye.’ All the white wives looked up and saw me in this awful bus, the colored taxi, we had to ride in.
“After I was done at the hairdresser I decided instead of the bus I’d walk back the five miles. It was slow going with little Jackie. He couldn’t make it all the way. And then that colored taxi came by again, only this time it was full. It was bringing the help to serve the evening meal. The driver stopped and Jackie and I got on again. I hated to, but that was the only way we could get back to camp.
“Another time the Dodgers were playing in West Palm Beach and I took Jackie and when we got there they wouldn’t let us through the turnstile. No colored, the man said. Go around to the outfield. The colored entrance, they called it, was where they’d taken some boards out of the outfield fence. You had to climb over boards. Skirts were long then. I remember holding little Jack’s hand and helping him through.
“I never discussed any of these humiliations. I tried to pretend they weren’t there. And young Jack never discussed them with me. But he must have noticed. He had to notice, don’t you think?”
“He noticed,” Robinson said.
“My husband underplays things,” Rachel said. “That’s his style. Don’t let him fool you. What he came up against, and what we all came up against, was very, very rough.”
Robinson’s eyes remained half closed.
“He was explosive on the field,” Rachel said, “and reporters used to ask if he was explosive at home. Of course he wasn’t. No matter what he’d been called, or how sarcastic or bigoted others had been to him, he never took it out on any of us.
“After we moved up here,” Rachel said, “there was one clue to when he was upset, when things had gone particularly badly. He’d go out on the lawn with a bucket of golf balls and take his driver and one after another hit those golf balls into the water.”
Robinson sat up. His eyes grew merry. “The golf balls were white,” he said.
“We wanted this house,” Rachel said. “We lived in St. Albans, a mixed neighborhood in Queens, but we wanted something more and we began to look, and there were more humiliations, although, by this time, it was almost the mid-fifties. We answered ads for some places around Greenwich. When the brokers saw us, the houses turned out to be just sold or no longer on the market, phrases like that. The brokers said they themselves didn’t object. It was always other people. The Bridgeport Herald got wind of the trouble and wrote it up and then a committee was formed in Stamford with ministers and Andrea Simon, the wife of Dick Simon of Simon and Schuster. They asked what we wanted. We said view, privacy, water. They lined up a broker with six places. The first five houses were all bad for different reasons. Then we saw this site. It had”—Rachel smiled—“view, privacy, water.
“But we weren’t done with it. We had to find a builder, and some banks up here were dead set against us.”
Robinson had reclined again. “We lower real estate values,” he said.
“The banks had power over the builders,” Rachel said. “They could stop credit. But finally we found one builder, Ben Gunner, a bank operated by two Jewish brothers, and they’d take the chance. Ben Gunner and I used to sit out and watch the water and talk and one day I told him I’d always wanted a fireplace for the bedroom. To surprise me, he built one. Then Ben thought children should have a secret staircase. He put one in, and a firemen’s pole for Jackie to slide down and so many extra thi
ngs, for which he didn’t charge, he may have gone broke building this house for us. Nothing shakes it.”
“And in this neighborhood,” Robinson said, “real estate values up every year.”
“I’ll get strawberries and cream,” Rachel said. “Would everybody like strawberries and cream?”
The unshakable house was a pivot to their lives. Rachel enrolled at NYU and in 1957 took a master’s degree in psychiatric nursing. From Stamford she commutes to New Haven, where she is assistant professor of psychiatric nursing at Yale’s graduate nursing school. Jack commutes the other way.
Over strawberries, he said, “The baseball years seem very long ago. When I quit, I went into the NAACP, and the conservatives found me hard to take. They were men of eighty. Their attitude was: don’t rock the boat. Today militants find me hard to take. Their attitude is: burn everything. But I haven’t changed much. The times have changed around me. Now we’re coming to the black-black confrontation, extreme against moderate. After that the rough one, black and white. Blacks aren’t scared any more. If the Klan walked into a black neighborhood now, the people would rip the sheets right off them.
“Only the President of the United States can cool things, if anything or anybody can, and we have a President who surrounds himself with Mitchell and Agnew. Why the hell didn’t he make Mitchell Secretary of State?”
“World War III.”
Robinson grinned slightly. “Well, anyway, you see, the baseball years and the baseball experience not only seem long ago, they were long ago.”
“But you’re more proud of it than anything.”
“Sure. No pitcher ever made me back up. No one. And they all tried. Near the end Sam Jones—you remember him with that big sidearm stuff—brushed me and I got up and hit the hell out of his curve.”
“I’m not proud just that he performed with excellence on the field,” Rachel said. “I’m proud that as a man he had integrity and strength.” She paused. “Remember, don’t let him fool you. When I hear him talk about it to others, it always seems less devastating than it was.”
It grew late. The time was dusk. Near the door he showed me a box of candy. “I used to buy chocolates for Rachel when we were courting,” he said.
“It’s been nice talking again, hasn’t it?” Rachel said.
“I’ll try not to hit nerves writing about Jack Junior.”
“Oh,” Rachel said. “Don’t concern yourself. Every nerve has been hit already.” Then, “How are the other wives you’ve seen?”
“Well, Betty Erskine has her hands full with their boy. Dottie Reese seems to be bowling a lot.”
“See,” Rachel said to Jack. “What would you rather have me doing, bowling or working? A working wife isn’t the worst thing.”
He grinned a private grin and they exchanged soft looks as men and women do when there is love and respect and vintage between them.
We visited again, late in a cool wet May, this time by day and with our children. He had more questions now than before. How was Carl Erskine? He had enjoyed playing on the same team with him. Labine? Had Preacher really put on weight?
Rachel was away, and “Jackie got himself in a scrape last night in New Haven,” Robinson said. “He’s in bad neighborhoods working with addicts and it caught up with him. Someone hit him with a board and split his forehead. They woke me, New Haven Hospital, at 6 A.M. I’ve got to drive there and pick him up a little later.” Then Robinson was talking to my children, who warmed to this large gentle man.
When Robinson found the older boy wanted to become an architect, he showed him something of how the house was built. My younger son wanted to fish. Robinson found him a pole and baited the hook and pointed out a rock. “That’s the best place to fish from.” He was playing peekaboo with my three-year-old daughter when the time came for him to leave. “You and the children stay,” he pleaded. “I wish Rachel could see them playing. That’s what this house was built for, children.”
We meant to drive off before father and injured son returned, but the children delayed us and we had just reached the station wagon when they drove up to the house. Jack Junior stepped out of his father’s car slowly and turned so that his back was toward us. “Say hello,” Jackie said. “It’s all right.” The young man had a strong straight body. He turned. He wore a beard. Bandages covered the forehead.
He started unsteadily toward the house, resting on his father’s arm. I called, “My wife can drive our kids home, Jack. Let me give you a hand.”
Robinson put an arm around Jack Junior, and said softly, tender as Stephen Kumalo, the umfundisi, “No. Thank you. It’s all right. I can take care of my son.”
The death facts may be stated simply. On June 17, 1971, at about 2:30 A.M., Jackie Robinson, Jr., twenty-four, was found dead in the wreck of a yellow MG. He had driven off the Merritt Parkway at such high speed that the car, which belonged to his brother David, demolished four wooden guard posts. One door came to rest 117 feet distant from the chassis, which looked like a toy car, bent double by the hammer of a petulant child. Police theorized that death was instantaneous. The coroner fixed the cause as a broken neck. David Robinson identified the car and his brother’s body. Jackie broke the news to Rachel.
People at Daytop believe that young Jackie fell asleep behind the wheel. He had been organizing a benefit jazz festival, which was indeed held, but as a memorial. “Jackie was putting in very long hours,” says Jimmy DeJohn of Daytop. “He just must have got exhausted.”
The body lay in an open coffin, among floral wreaths. The family had chosen Antioch Baptist church in Brooklyn for the funeral, and June 21, the day of the services, broke with oppressive heat. Mourners crowded the church and sat beating fans.
“In Memoriam, “said the program, “Jack Roosevelt Robinson, Jr., 1946–1971.” I looked up. An open coffin downs hard and when we heard my wife gasp, Al Silverman, the editor of Sport, and I made heavy funeral gossip. There was Hugh Morrow from Nelson Rockefeller’s office. There was Don Newcombe. There was Monte Irvin, the glorious old Giant outfielder. But the coffin was open. No chattering could obscure that for long and I looked at the leonine head of the young man newly dead. His beard was trimmed. For an instant I allowed myself to think of what lay locked within the skull, Gibran and Herbie Mann and the old colored taxi at Vero Beach and night patrols near Pleiku and the narcosis of heroin and the shock of withdrawal and a father’s tender voice. And then I would not let myself think like that any more.
The family was escorted to their pew at 1:15. Rachel was clinging to another of her children. Two men had to help Jack walk. He was crying very softly for his son, his head down, so that the tears coursed only a little way before falling to the floor.
A small chorus from Daytop sang “Bridge over Troubled Water” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” A solo flutist played “We Shall Overcome.” One is prepared for music at funerals, but then something happened that surprised everyone: Monte Irvin, Hugh Morrow, the people of the parish, who had known the Robinsons twenty-five years ago as neighbors. David Robinson, who was nineteen, walked to the pulpit and read a eulogy. David had written it in a single afternoon and while riding to church that morning had asked his father if he could speak it.
“If you want to,” Jackie Robinson said.
“He climbed high on the cliffs above the sea,” David called in a resonant tenor, “and stripped bare his shoulders and raised his arms to the water, crying, ‘I am a man. Give me my freedom so that I might dance naked in the moonlight and laugh with the stars and roll in the grass and drink the warmth of the sun. Give me my freedom so I might fly.’ But the armies of the sea continued to war with the wind and the wind raced through the giants of stones and mocked his cries, and the man fell to his knees and wept.”
David wore a dashiki. He had finished his freshman year at Stanford. Soon he would travel through Africa. Jackie Junior had intended to buy the yellow MG and help David to a stake.
“He rose,” David’s voice called fro
m the pulpit, “and journeyed down the mountain to the valley and came upon a village. When the people saw him, they scorned him for his naked shoulders and wild eyes and again he cried, ‘I am a man. I seek the means of freedom.’
“The people laughed, saying, ‘We see no chains on your arms. Go. You are free.’ And they called him mad and drove him from their village.…” The man walked on, “eyes red as a gladiator’s sword,” until he came to a stream where he saw an image, face sunken in hunger, “skin drawn tight around the body.
“He stood fixed on the water’s edge and began to weep, not from sorrow but from joy, for he saw beauty in the water. He removed his clothing and stood naked before the world and rose to his full height and smiled and moved to meet the figure in the water and the stream made love to his body and the majesty of his voice was heard above the roar of the sea and the howl of the wind, and he was free.”
David hurried from the pulpit. His mother rose to embrace him. Sobs rang through the old church; it was five minutes before formal worship resumed. But even as our small group drove back to New York, wondering how to make memorial, we had seen Jackie Robinson after the services, white-haired, dryeyed and sure, as when he doubled home two runs, walking among street people outside the church, talking perhaps of the hell of heroin, touching or being touched by children, and we thought how proud his first-born son would have been, not of the ball player but of the man, had he lived, if only the insanity of the present had given him a chance.
15
BILLY ALONE
He wasn’t with us after the last part o’ May, but I roomed with him long enough to get the insomny. I was the only guy in the club game enough to stand for him. And do you know where he is now? I got a letter today and I’ll read it to you. No—I guess I better tell you somethin’ about him first.
RING LARDNER, My Roomy
The Juniata River runs down Black Log Mountain, and through the Tuscarawas its gorge curves like a bow. All the factories are shut at Cuba Mills and Mifflintown, and downstream, when the Juniata sweeps along past Newport, the hurrying waters are clean enough to fish.
