I Never Had It Made (27 page)

XXII

“. . . And He Was Free”

J
ackie Robinson, Jr., was killed in the small hours of the morning on Thursday, June 17, 1971. He was driving up the Merritt Parkway to our home in Connecticut. He was twenty-four years old, and when he died he was totally involved in a project that was going to be the most important one he had ever undertaken. He had fought his way back up out of the hell of drug addiction. His surrogate father, Kenny Williams, the director of the Seymour, Connecticut, Daytop, was proud to say that “he had been clean for three years.” On that Thursday morning, Jackie was coming home in his brother David's 1969 MG Midget. The car spun out of control, slammed into an abutment, severing guard rail posts and crashing to a halt, leaving Jackie pinned under the wreckage, his neck broken, his life swiftly fading when the state police arrived a little after two o'clock that tragic morning.

Rachel was out of town, in Massachusetts, attending a conference. Sharon was in from Washington, D.C., to spend the weekend. David, Sharon, and I had dinner out together, and I remember Sharon saying she had some things she wanted to talk over with Jackie. Jackie had been putting in long hours and intense work on his project. He was putting together a jazz benefit that was ten days away. Among the things he had been doing during that day he was killed was attending a meeting in New York where he had been lining up the musicians who were going to perform. All the family was helping him, but it was clearly understood that the benefit, to raise $15,000 for the Daytop program, was his baby. In recent years, we had opened up our home to give benefits—for Dr. Martin Luther King's SCLC, the Urban League, and the NAACP. We had been fortunate in getting top stars to help us raise something like $100,000 for these causes. The backbreaking job of making these events a success had been done mainly by Rachel and our close friends Marian Logan, George Simon, and Bea Baruch. This time, however, we respected the importance of letting Jackie take the entire responsibility on his shoulders—contacting the stars and making the one thousand and one arrangements such events call for.

Jackie had responded to the challenge like a champion. In fact, although we had been keeping it to ourselves, we were concerned as to whether he was putting too much of himself into the job. His desire to make the affair a success was so great he couldn't sleep. But we were happy that he was taking the benefit seriously and trying in a small way to repay what he saw as his great debt to Daytop.

We had turned in early that night. Sharon had an appointment to go to the graduation exercises of a friend at Radcliffe and her friend's father was to come by and pick her up at the crack of dawn.

Normally, I had been sleeping lightly. Jackie had been keeping some very late hours, and while I was trying not to be overprotective of a twenty-four-year-old son, I didn't sleep too well until I heard him come in. He was aware of this and often he would call softly, “It's me, Dad.” I think he was a little amused and secretly pleased rather than irritated at my concern.

That Wednesday night, however, I fell into a very deep sleep. When I heard the doorbell and woke up to realize that it was still dark outside, I had no sense of threat because I figured it was Dr. Allen calling to drive Sharon to Radcliffe. Sharon must have thought so too because she was already at the door. Looking over her shoulder, I saw a policeman—not Dr. Allen. I was instantly aware that something was terribly wrong. The uniform, the hour, but most of all the policeman's manner, told me his visit meant that something dreadful had happened. He didn't know how to break the news to us as gently as he wanted to. We heard him saying that we must come over to Norwalk Hospital right away. It was Jackie. Jackie had been in an accident.

I had to ask the question. “Is he all right? Is it very serious?”

“I'm afraid so,” the officer said, and from the way he said it, I knew. Jackie was dead. Someone would have to go and identify the body.

By this time David had joined us.

I had gone weak all over. I knew that I couldn't go to that hospital or morgue or whatever and look at my dead son's body. David wasn't about to allow me to take that awful responsibility. “I'll go,” he said.

My next thought was Rachel. I had to get to her before someone heard the news over a radio or read it in a newspaper. Sharon and I got into my car and drove to Massachusetts. Rachel was in her hotel room, just getting ready for breakfast when we arrived. We knocked on her door, and she called out asking who it was.

“Sharon,” our daughter said.

“Sharon?” Rachel repeated in a surprised tone.

She opened the door. One look at Sharon's face and a glance at me standing there with her caused Rae to cry out.

“What's wrong? Has something happened to Joe?” Joe is Sharon's husband, our son-in-law of whom we are all very fond.

Sharon couldn't hold out any longer. She couldn't answer and she began to cry.

“It's not Joe, Rae,” I said huskily. “It's Jackie.”

“Jackie?” Rae repeated dazedly. “What about Jackie?”

“He's gone, honey,” I said.

“Gone? Gone where?” she demanded.

“He's dead, honey.”

She collapsed. Sharon and I picked her up and carried her to the bed. When she was able to move, she got into the back of the car with Sharon and we drove home.

David had come back home. His strength was magnificent. I knew that the death, Sharon's and his mother's grief—and mine—were almost more than he could bear, but he has so much compassion, so much understanding love that he was able to put on a great front. He had gone through the ordeal of identifying his dead brother, seeing the twisted mass of rubble the car had become and taking care of the rest of the grim details.

I was spending my time trying to comfort Rachel, who couldn't stop crying.

David switched on his radio and turned it up as loud as he could. It was playing soul music and David was cleaning the house. I knew that he had to do these things. Later he told me he looked out the window and saw the pastor of the local Congregational church coming up to our door. He knew the good reverend would never understand all that loud soul music at a time like this. So he turned it off.

Then the phone calls began to come in. People began to fill up the house. It's so difficult at a time like this. You appreciate the sympathy and concern, and you can't tell whether your need for the knowledge that these people care is greater than your need to be alone and bear your sorrow privately. People say they're sorry, but they feel miserable saying it and you feel miserable acknowledging it. Some people say they know how you feel and you know that they can't possibly, but you are as gracious as you can be. Somehow sorrow gives you extra grace. Some people are awkward in what they say. Several days after the funeral, when the wound was still a very open one, I was engaged in conversation by a man I didn't know too well. He talked about a couple of subjects, then he said casually, as if he were referring to news that I had lost a ball on the golf course, “By the way, I heard you lost your son the other day.”

That grabbed me inside. Instinctively, I knew that he meant no wrong, but I replied. “It's true, and I don't want to hear another word about it.”

He apologized and walked away.

Then there are the religious and sociological philosophers who either assure you that “he's in the arms of God” or that “he's better off.” There are the nonbelievers who couldn't accept the fact that Jackie had been able to stay clean for three years. They murmured consolations that “what with the drugs and everything” perhaps it was all for the best. You couldn't hide the resentment sometimes and you had to retort that drugs had nothing to do with your son's death, but all the time you were aware that these were people clumsily trying to communicate an empathy with your sorrow.

Not all of them have that kind of goodwill, however. I still wince to hear Sharon tell about an experience she had had at Howard University where she was recently capped as a nurse. She was in a small group one day when some slob shot off his mouth and introduced the subject of the death of “Jackie Robinson's addict son.” He didn't know that Sharon was Jackie's sister.

The day of the accident I couldn't take all the people sitting around being sorry and discussing Jackie anymore. I was terribly frustrated. I left the house alone, got into the car, and the next thing I knew, I was on my way to the hospital where Jackie's body was. There was one security guard on duty who began telling me the routine procedure one is supposed to follow in order to view the corpses there. When I explained how my son was killed and said I just wanted to come and sit with him for a little while, he told me to follow him. He was taking me to the morgue. He began moving down the corridor about two feet ahead of me at first, then I began to realize that I was slowing down until he was perhaps fifteen feet in front of me. I made myself follow him, however, but, as fate would have it, when we reached the dreaded place, I was relieved to find the body had been released to the funeral director.

I could go back to the house now. One of the reasons I had to leave was that I had begun to feel so helpless about Rachel. She couldn't believe, wouldn't accept Jackie's death. We just couldn't stop her from crying. When she wasn't engulfed by her grief, she was caught up in bitterness. She didn't want to hear about God “knowing best” or any of the other clichés that people use to make you feel better. God had taken her son just at a time when he had begun to help a lot of other youngsters less fortunate than he had been. I didn't know what to say to her, didn't know how to lift her up out of the deep emotional valley into which she had fallen. Once, during those few days, she began to run around, crying, and I almost couldn't stand it. But there was my tall nineteen-year-old ready to do anything he could to ease our pain.

“Go get her, David,” I said.

And he did. And he took her hand and they went running off into the woods, running together like a couple of children, running off grief. I shall never get over the loss of Jackie, but at that moment I had a special prayer of thanks to God for David.

During those sad hours after Jackie's death, we learned about the kind of influence Jackie had had with others, most of them his peers, some of them older than he. The letters, telegrams, and phone calls came in; people came by, genuinely brokenhearted because he was gone. A great many famous people sent us sympathy, and although we appreciated that very much, we were more impressed with the response from ordinary people, the kids, and the young people who testified to Jackie's great concern for others. He had let them know he cared, given them the benefit of his mistakes, and tried to keep them from making the same kind of mistakes.

There was Bootsie. That's the only way I'll identify him. Bootsie was like Jackie's blood brother. He had been Jackie's best friend for a number of years. They'd been in trouble together all their lives. When Jackie found himself, he tried to pull Bootsie up with him, up out of the shadows. The night before Jackie died, he had gone to Bootsie's home to visit his kids. He promised that the next time he came by he would bring a ball and glove and take them out to the park to play. Bootsie was in jail, but we hoped that we could talk to the parole people about letting him come home for the funeral. We called the Cor- rections Department and learned that it wouldn't be possible to arrange. We had a letter from Bootsie that touched us so that we just had to make some sort of contact. We finally got permission to speak with him on the phone. He broke down and cried right in front of the officers there, and he told us he didn't know what he would have done if he hadn't had the chance to talk with us. He told us, sobbing, that now that Jackie was gone, he would have something to strive for, to live for, for Jackie and for himself.

There was another one of Jackie's friends, the kind of young activist the papers call a militant. He had a fantastic following in New Haven at one time. He came all the way from Atlanta so he could talk to us and attend the memorial service. He came, not even knowing how he would get money to pay his way back.

The Daytop family was inconsolable. Kenny Williams summed it up. “He was tired,” Kenny said. “He had helped people a lot.”

One of the people Jackie had helped said, “I'm thirty-three and he was twenty-four. But often, when we were having a dialogue, I got the feeling like he was thirty-three and I was twenty-four.”

A forty-year-old member of the Daytop house wrote eloquently to say what it had meant to him in terms of being black to have Jackie working with the program.

After the memorial services, we learned that not only Daytop, Incorporated, but some other drug programs had received donations along with letters saying the gifts were being made in honor of Jackie. We were notified that a tree is being planted in Israel as a tribute to him. Some Catholic people held special masses.

All this made us realize how far Jackie had come, and it drew us together. Sharon, who not only loved Jackie as a big brother but also learned to respect him as a young black man, put it this way. She said that perhaps Jack's death was meant to bring us closer together. After being the shy, sweet, no-problem girl who chose to spend most of the time in her room when she was an adolescent, Sharon had grown into her phase of teen-age rebellion. When I say she was a no-problem youngster, what I mean is that she was no problem to us. She certainly had problems of her own, and in her own way she suffered from the same kind of identity crisis that had hurt Jackie. Sharon has the same kind of sweetness but the same kind of strength that is characteristic of Rachel. As a child, Sharon had been unselfish enough to keep her problems from us, but as she got into early teens, she began to feel as though she had been too sheltered, too protected. She wanted to establish her independence by doing what she thought we didn't want her to do and not doing what she felt we wanted. Her nature didn't allow her to get so carried away as to do anything really bad. Just foolish things. Just things to help her to break out of the parental cocoon.