Jackie Robinson (26 page)

At first, the Robinsons were to travel by train. Then they decided to fly, via New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida. The deadline for reporting to camp was firm: midday on March 1.

Jack faced his coming challenge with a mixture of confidence and foreboding. His confidence came from three sources mainly. In the first place, whites
were no mystery to him, as they might have been to a young black player plucked from a rigidly segregated background and thrust among people foreign and hostile to him. Second, Jack had enormous faith in his versatile ability to meet almost any physical or mental test in sport; he had been the best of the best so often that he had virtually no doubt now that he would succeed as a player. Third, he had already begun to believe not only in Rickey’s integrity but also in his wisdom and foresight. Robinson’s foreboding came mainly from his vivid personal experience of humiliations in the South, especially in his court-martial. But he also believed finally that destiny was on his side, that the hand of God was visible in the strange circumstances that had brought him to this moment, and that he, and Rickey, would emerge victorious from the coming ordeal.

Late on February 28, after Jack played a round of golf in Los Angeles, a small, excited group of friends and family, including their mothers, gathered at the Lockheed Terminal in Los Angeles to see the couple off. To Rachel’s mortification, Mallie, who had never flown, pressed on them a smelly shoebox of fried chicken and boiled eggs for the airplane ride. Rachel was dressed to kill; she wore the dyed three-quarter-length ermine coat that had been Jack’s wedding present to her, a matching black hat, and the brown alligator-skin handbag he had bought for her in Venezuela. Although the weather hardly called for fur, “
that piece of ermine was my certificate of respectability,” she would admit. “I thought that when I wore it everyone would know that I belonged on that plane, or wherever I happened to be.”

She flew out with twin fears: a dread of the Jim Crow South and a dread, also, of what Jack’s defiant spirit, and perhaps even her own, provoked by unaccustomed Jim Crow, might cause. “
I couldn’t be sure what was going to happen,” she would say. “I worried that something might happen, some incident, and we would be harmed, or killed.” But the first leg of the journey went smoothly; they reached New Orleans around seven o’clock in the morning. Strolling through the airport, Rachel now saw Jim Crow signs for the first time in her life. With Jack looking on uneasily, she decided to make her own small protest. “Very deliberately, I drank from a water fountain marked ‘White.’ Nothing happened. I wasn’t killed. So then I walked into the Ladies’ Room marked ‘White.’ The women stared at me, but nobody said or did anything. I sort of liked the women staring at me. I felt very strong.” Jack had misgivings about what she was doing, but he did not try to stop her.

Then, around ten o’clock, reality began to set in. They had been “bumped” from the eleven o’clock flight. Disappointed but calm, they accepted the promise of seats on a flight one hour later. Then that flight left
without them, and without an adequate explanation. Angry now, they were also hungry. Jack went scouting for food. “
Blacks could not eat in the coffee shop,” he found out. “We asked where we could find a restaurant. We learned there was one that would prepare sandwiches provided we did not sit down and eat them there.” He felt rage surging in him. “
Jack almost exploded at this suggestion,” according to Rachel. “The pride in both of us had rebelled, so under no circumstances would we accept food on this basis.” Now they understood why Mallie Robinson, in her wisdom, had packed that shoebox for her children.

The black couple’s pride mattered little or nothing to the airline authorities; the Robinsons should go into town and wait to be called when a flight became available. They agreed to go. From an earlier visit on a barnstorming tour, Jack was sure he knew of a hotel that would have them. A taxi driver then took them to a building of appalling shabbiness, a “
dirty, dreadful place” of cobwebs and grime, Rachel recalled, and a bedroom with plastic mattress covers, from which she recoiled: “lying on the bed was like trying to sleep on newspapers.” Hurt and degraded, she was further upset because Jack seemed satisfied. Meanwhile, no call came from the airline. When Jack finally telephoned, he was told to return at once to the airport. At seven in the evening, some twelve hours after their arrival, Jack and Rachel secured seats on a plane and left for Pensacola.

As they touched down at Pensacola, they heard themselves being paged: Jack and Rachel Robinson were to report to the ticket counter. When Jack left for the terminal, a flight attendant advised Rachel: “
You’d better get off, too.” To their indignation, they could not continue on the flight. First they heard that a storm was coming and the plane had to be made lighter, for extra fuel; next, after white passengers took their places, that the New Orleans authorities had not left room for persons booked out of Pensacola. Vigorously Jack argued their case, but he understood what was happening: whites wanted to fly and blacks had to wait. He was “
ready to explode with rage,” he later wrote, “but I knew that the result would mean newspaper headlines about an ugly racial incident and possible arrest not only for me but also for Rae.” Rachel now understood, as she looked at Jack, what white power meant in the South. “
I could see him seething. I thought he might hit somebody in his rage and then where would we be? I felt frightened now, I was scared, terrified.”

When Jack revealed at last his link to the Dodgers organization, the officials became more solicitous; they offered the Robinsons a limousine into Pensacola. The white driver knew of no black hotels in the city; at a whites-only hotel, bellhops provided him with the address of a black family who rented out rooms. Stopping at a small frame house, he deposited their
luggage on the front porch and sped off. Inside, the woman of the house was sympathetic, but Rachel could see that “the family was using the living room to sleep in, and it was obvious that there was no place for us.” She and Jack made a decision. Giving up on the airline, they would take the next bus leaving for Jacksonville. After a hurried long-distance telephone call to the Dodger camp, they boarded the bus.

They were dozing in reclining seats to the rear, certain that they were complying with Jim Crow law, when at one stop the white driver, with a wave of his hand, ordered them back to the last, fixed row. Jack roused himself from sleep but was alert enough to keep himself under control. “
I had a few bad seconds,” he would recall, “deciding whether I could continue to endure this humiliation.” By now, Rachel had lost all her nerve; “
I made sure that we moved to the back.” The bus ride lasted sixteen bitter hours. Jack fell asleep, but Rachel found that she could not. “I buried my head behind the seat in front of me and started to cry.” She was crying more for Jack than for herself, but in the end she was crying for them both. She saw how Jim Crow customs sought to strip her black husband of his dignity and turn him into a submissive, even shuffling creature: “I finally began to realize that where we were going with Mr. Rickey’s plan, none of us had ever been before. We were setting out on something we really didn’t understand. And right in front of me, it was changing my life, changing who I was, or changing who I thought I was.”

Just after dawn, the Jim Crow section of the bus began to fill up with black working men and women, many on their way to the fields, their dresses and overalls torn and soiled, heads wrapped in country bandannas. With many seats empty in the “white” section of the bus, the blacks took turns sharing the few back seats among themselves. What the laborers made of the strange couple—the man asleep in his rumpled suit and tie, the lady with her massed curls and her ermine coat and alligator bag—Rachel could only imagine. She could see clearly, however, their kindness to one another. In the humiliation she shared with these poor Southern blacks, “I really felt the beginning of a new understanding on my part. Now I understood about how black folks living under those terrible conditions really had to look out for one another, or we would all of us go down. I began to feel a great bond I had never felt before. I took comfort from those people, because I could tell they wanted to comfort me. And I needed comfort badly at that time.”

When they pulled into Jacksonville, the bus station only added to their misery. The building was hot and fly-ridden, its Jim Crow section crowded and stinky as they waited for a connection to Daytona Beach to the south. Aside from apples and candy bars, once Mallie’s shoebox was empty, they
had eaten nothing on the journey by air and bus from New Orleans. Jack himself would have bought food from the holes in the wall where blacks were brusquely served, but Rachel refused to eat that way: “
I wouldn’t do it, and he said he would go along with me if I felt that way.” Rachel remembered, “I had never been so tired, hungry, miserable, upset in my life as when we finally reached Daytona Beach.” But she would also believe that her descent with Jack into the Jim Crow hell of the South “had made me a much stronger, more purposeful human being in a few hours. I saw the pointlessness, the vanity, of good looks and clothes when one faced an evil like Jim Crow. I think I was much more ready now to deal with the world we had entered.”

On Saturday, March 2, in the late afternoon, after thirty-six hours of travel, Jack and Rachel at last stepped off the bus at Daytona Beach. On hand to greet them were three men sent by Branch Rickey. One was Wendell Smith, Jack’s champion from the Pittsburgh
Courier;
another was Billy Rowe, an enterprising
Courier
photographer and writer who, the year before, had covered the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS
Missouri.
In an agreement with the
Courier,
which thus had the inside track on the baseball story of the century, Rickey had put Smith and Rowe on the Dodgers’ manifest, picking up their expenses. Their task was to stick with the Robinsons, to be protectors and advisors and friends, and a liaison with the local black community.

The third man was John Richard Wright, another black player signed by Rickey. In 1943, the quiet, lanky twenty-seven-year-old from New Orleans had won thirty games and lost only once in league play with the Homestead Grays of the Negro National League. In the Navy, he once beat a Chicago White Sox team and, in Ebbets Field, had pitched six shutout innings against a major-league all-star group.

Bitter, Jack reached Daytona Beach ready to return to California. “
I never want another trip like that one,” he told Smith and Rowe. But the writers worked quietly to bring his mind back to the job at hand. Jack could also see that his arrival had created a sensation in the bus station. Blacks and whites pressed forward to glimpse the man who had already rocked the world of white baseball, who would challenge Jim Crow in his own lair. In a phenomenon that would be repeated over the coming months and even years, few paid much attention to any other black ballplayer with him. The focus was on Jackie Robinson.

Luck is the residue of design, Branch Rickey had declared; and his design was almost everywhere in evidence, starting with the choice of Daytona Beach for the major phase of spring training. (To the press, Rickey had blamed Robinson’s absence from camp on “
bad flying weather in the
vicinity of New Orleans.”) After Jack and Rachel’s harrowing experience, Daytona Beach, where the Halifax River flowed into the Atlantic, was a distinct lift. City leaders, including Mayor William Perry, seeing a financial windfall in having the Dodgers in town each spring, had agreed to welcome black players; Perry had known of Robinson’s coming even before he signed with Montreal. “
No one objects to Jackie Robinson and Johnny Wright training here,” the mayor announced boldly. “We welcome them and wish them the best of luck!”

Compared with almost all other Southern towns, Daytona Beach was a liberal community. Here, some blacks were allowed to drive public buses and even to try on shoes—though not clothing—in local stores. One major reason was the influence of a black leader, Joe Harris, to whose home on Spruce Street Wendell Smith and Billy Rowe drove the Robinsons that afternoon. Harris, a pharmacist, was also an energetic organizer who could deliver the black vote on election day. A few steps from the home of Harris and his wife, Dufferin, was Bethune-Cookman College, whose founder and president, Mary McLeod Bethune, then seventy years old, was one of the best-known blacks in America. A tireless educator, Mrs. Bethune was a particular friend of Eleanor Roosevelt; after the President’s death, his cane arrived as a gift to her. On Spruce Street, Duff Harris, “
a dear, sentimental romantic,” as Rachel recalled with affection, received them warmly. Squeezing the “love birds,” as she liked to call them, into her idea of a honeymoon nest, a tiny room at the head of the stairs, she promised them their privacy. There Jack and Rachel unwound after their ordeal.

The following day, Sunday, according to plan, they moved forty miles south to the little town of Sanford for a week of spring training. Since February 1, Sanford had been the site of the Dodgers’ baseball school, or “Rickey University,” as writers had tagged it. More than 150 athletes, most of them returning soldiers, had matriculated; then, on March 1, the Dodgers and the Montreal Royals officially started spring workouts. In Sanford, Jack and Rachel again went to a private home, the spacious white house of a prominent local black couple, Mr. and Mrs. David Brock, while the white players stayed at the lakefront Mayfair Hotel, which would not accept blacks. Branch Rickey had checked out the Brock home in person. Before Jack and Rachel’s arrival, he had lolled in a wicker chair on the verandah and pronounced the choice fine: “
If we can’t put them in the hotels, then they should stay some place that represents something. This is the type of home.”

On Monday, March 4, Jack’s first morning in Sanford, he dressed carefully at home in the gray baseball uniform of the Montreal Royals. Then he set off with Wright, Rowe, and Smith for the park. Rachel said goodbye on the
porch: “
I felt so protective I had to consciously restrain myself from following Jack to the car.” As he entered the clubhouse, he felt a terrible sense of foreboding, a disquiet about how he would be received. In fact, the previous week Rickey had publicly warned the white players that he expected them “
to be the gentlemen you have shown yourselves to be” when the two black men arrived; they should be seen as “two more baseball players” and given “the same treatment accorded all other players.” At the same time, avoiding any impression that he was challenging the South on moral grounds, Rickey told the press that he had signed the blacks “
because of my interest in winning a pennant.” He went further. “If an elephant could play center field better than any man I have,” he insisted, “I would play the elephant.”