I Never Had It Made (28 page)

If you ask Sharon today, she'll honestly admit that she felt closer to Jackie than to any of us. She attributes this, in part, to their having what she calls a “beautiful” relationship. Sharon wanted more discipline than we gave her when she was quite young. We never saw the need for it because we saw her as a model child. Sharon says that when arguments or misunderstandings arise in the Robinson household, people just clam up, unable or unwilling to express anger, disappointment, frustration. “I'm not speaking to you” is the attitude. It wasn't so with her and Jackie. When they got angry with each other, they'd go after each other verbally tooth and nail. Jackie was so harsh with Sharon sometimes that it hurt. But she liked that because she knew it was a gift of love. For her part, she didn't hesitate to tell him off when he came home for not having written after having been away for a long time. She would become so angry with him sometimes that she'd start swinging at him. Jackie would laugh at her while he held her off. Sharon's loss in Jackie's death was very profound, but she had the wisdom to sense that it could bind us closer and inspire us to carry on the work of helping others that Jackie had begun.

I too believed that there had to be a deep meaning to Jackie's being taken away from us at this particular time. Not so with Rachel. Rachel was a mother and she grieved as a mother.

On the Sunday morning preceding the Thursday of his death, Jackie had made what was fated to be his last public appearance. He gave a talk on the drug menace at the Nazarene Congregational Church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. When the Reverend Sam Varner had first approached him, Jackie had been reluctant. He wasn't sure the congregation would appreciate the kind of blunt talk Jackie felt he had to give on the subject.

Reverend Varner and Jackie met in a bar in Harlem.

“I found him quite reserved at first,” Reverend Varner told us. “I suggested that he could draw a parallel of his experiences with those of the prodigal son who landed in the gutter, broke and destitute. At first Jackie couldn't see the analogy. Then I told him that the prodigal son's father had instilled in him the belief that wherever he went, whatever he did, whether his father agreed with him or not, he would always be willing to receive him back home and do whatever he could to help him.”

At this point Reverend Varner remembers that Jackie nodded his head and said, “Yes, that's like my father. I knew I could always go back to him. But I kept running from that, trying to escape because I was still haunted by the image of being the son of a father who was a great man. So when I found I couldn't deal with him as a man and found that my father couldn't identify with me as his son, I stopped trying to find a man who wasn't there. I tried to eliminate the desire that I thought would never be fulfilled.

“Daytop helped me through discipline to find the father I had lost.”

He spared them nothing. He told them that he had lied, cheated, robbed, and dealt with prostitutes; that he had grown up with an identity crisis, in my shadow. He said that after he tried marijuana he had reached out for bigger and better thrills, egged on by his friends who called him a square for being afraid. He talked about Daytop and the love he had found there and how his family had closed ranks to help him in every way pos-sible.

He said, “My father was always in my corner. I didn't always recognize that and I didn't always call on him, but he was always there.” At the end of his talk, he appealed to kids not to be tempted by dope and to parents to keep their closeness with their children.

It wasn't until after Jackie's death that we realized the full impact of that sermon. It made us aware of how far Jackie had traveled and how solid his strength and courage had been.

David had written a poem for his brother's memorial services. We first heard it when he read it to us in the limousine that took us to Brooklyn for the services. We found it very moving because of what it said, but David was stumbling badly trying to read it, and I didn't know how he could get through it at the funeral. But Rachel asked him to read it and he agreed.

The whole block around Antioch Church was jammed and packed with people and cars. The church had been filled long before we arrived, and there were people all over the steps, crowding the sidewalk on both sides of the street. We could feel the vibrations of sympathy as we moved from the limousine up the steps. Later we were told that as we went up those steps, the crowd of people seeing our grief gave forth with a big soft “ahhhhh” of sympathy. I was so consumed with grief and with concern for Rachel, David, and Sharon that I didn't even hear it. This was the day, the day when Jackie's body would be laid to rest and with it any fantastic hope that it had all been a terrible mistake. There is nothing so final as the lowering of the body of the loved one into a grave.

The service was to be short. The honorary pallbearers were Daytop residents, buddies of Jackie's. Reverend Lacy Coving-ton, the assistant pastor at Nazarene where Jackie had spoken a few days ago, assisted Pastor Lawrence in conducting the services. Singer Joyce Bryant sang two beautiful solos. When the Daytop choir sang “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” and “Still Water Runs Deep” I could hardly bear it. I knew how genuinely these young people were going to miss our son. One of the Daytop choir kids was so overcome that they had to carry him away. Pastor Lawrence did a remarkable job of trying to keep emotions under control with a simple and beautiful service. He said he was going to present two of Jackie's brothers—one not a blood brother. The first was Kenny Williams, who spoke a few, heartfelt words. Then David came up front to read his poem. His voice was clear and resolute. There was none of the stumbling there had been in the limousine in his reading at the service. His voice grew and deepened in intensity and volume as he went along. He reached the climax, fighting back tears, and cried the words, “I am a man.” Sharon was holding me. I heard Rachel scream a sharp scream that I suppose was only a pain for her dead son and joy in her living son. And she got up and left the pew to meet and embrace David as he came back down to his seat. Reverend Lawrence paid his tribute to Jackie. It wasn't a sermon or one of those “he only sleeps” orations people so often give. He spoke of Jackie as a hero—in Vietnam and in the larger war he had to fight when he came back home.

Michael Hinton, Antioch's organist, did a lot for that memorial service. Often the music at a funeral service is sad and depressed, but as we walked out of the church in the recessional, Michael was playing a joyous version of “We Shall Overcome,” and the ladies in their white gowns were gathering the flowers to bring them out to the flower cars. As we sat in the limousine waiting for the rest of the cemetery-bound procession to be organized, we saw so many of the teenagers who had been at the service, plucking flowers from the wreaths—plucking a single flower apiece—and as the procession moved off, they marched behind it in a single file, bearing these flowers. Some people later said they thought it was disrespectful of the youngsters to pluck flowers from the wreaths. I thought it was an act of love. As Rachel and I came out of the church and moved through the crowds to our funeral car, we saw, gathered at the car, a cluster of little kids in baseball uniforms. They belonged to a Jackie Robinson fan club. I stopped and talked with them before getting into the car. For me they signified that none of the suffering had been in vain. They were the bright hope of tomorrow. They were the age that Jackie had been when I dreamed that what I was doing in baseball might make things easier for the kids of the following generations.

Six days after Jackie's funeral we held the jazz festival he had dreamed of and for which he had been working so hard when he died. It was a great success and with far more people contributing to it than we had counted on. Billy Taylor and Peter Long produced an inspiring show.

One of the artists who appeared was Roberta Flack—Jackie's idol. Jackie and Rachel used to spend hours together listening to Roberta's records, and when she had let him know that she would be present at the jazz festival, I really believed he thought he didn't have to get any other stars. Roberta gave her usual fantastic performance. But so much emotion and so many strong vibrations were in the air that she did one major piece and left the stage. Rachel followed her and asked her if she was going to sing some more, and Roberta said she didn't know whether she could or should because the emotions were getting to her and she was getting ready to really “get down” if she continued. She was concerned about our reaction to so much emotion so soon after Jackie's funeral. Rachel begged her to carry on.

“That's the kind of people we are,” Rachel said. “We're down. We're with it. No phonying up. Just like it is.”

When Roberta Flack went back onstage to continue her performance, a point came when it was too much for Rachel. The beauty of it all, mingled with the sadness of it, was more than she could bear. She was wearing one of her long, graceful African gowns and sitting near the front on the lawn. Suddenly I saw her jump up and start running up the hill toward the house. I was concerned. I wanted to run after her, but I know her so well that I knew she wanted to be alone. Then, suddenly, David running fast came from the top of the hill to meet her. Halfway up the hill he met her, took her hand, and they ran off together like a sister and a brother. I knew that Rachel would be all right.

David and Sharon were the central core of our strength during those haunting days. The practical things they did to help, combined with their sensitivity, pulled us through. The piece he had written in memory of his brother and had recited at the funeral was called “The Baptism.” I would like to quote it here as an epitaph for Jackie:

 

And he climbed high on the cliffs above the sea and stripped bare his shoulders and raised his arms to the water, crying: “I am a man. I live and breathe and bleed as a man. Give me my freedom so that I might dance naked in the moonlight and laugh with the stars as they play amongst the darkness in the sky and roll in the grass and drink the warmth of the sun and feel it sweet within my body. Give me my freedom so that I might fly.”

But the armies of the sea continued to war with the beach and the wind raced through the giants of stones which guard the coast and its howl mocked its cries and the man fell to his knees and wept. Then he rose 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 and I seek the means of my freedom.” But the people laughed at him, saying, “We see no chains on your arms, no weight on your feet. Go! You are free. Fly! Fly! Fly!” And they called him mad and drove him from their village. His soul wept, for it knew the weight of chains, and tears fell like tiny stones into the well of his loneliness, and his heart was empty as a giant hall is empty after a feast. And the man journeyed on until he came to the banks of a stream, and his eyes, red as the gladiator's sword, strained, for he saw an image dance across the stillness of that water and he recognized the figure though his eyes were now sunken with hunger and skin drawn tight around his body and he stood fixed above the water's edge and began to weep, not from sorrow but from joy, for he saw beauty in the water and he removed his clothing and stood naked before the world and he rose to his full height and smiled as the sun kissed his body and he moved to meet with the figure in the water and the stream made love to his body, and his soul cried with the ecstasy of being one, and he sent the water flying up like a shower of diamonds to the sky, and he laughed for he felt the strength of the stream flowing through his veins, and he cried: “I am a man” and the majesty of his voice echoed off the mountaintops and was heard above the roar of the sea and the howl of the wind, and he was free.

XXIII

Aftermath

S
ome of the people who have criticized me have labeled me a black man who was made by white people. They justify this by stating that I have had three fabulous, white godfathers—Mr. Rickey in baseball, Bill Black in business, and Nelson Rockefeller in politics.

These critics overlook the fact that they are talking about three of the most hardheaded, practical man who ever lived. As capable as all three of these men may be of sentiment, no one of them did what they did out of misplaced emotionalism. Of the three, the closest to me was Mr. Rickey. But even though he was motivated by deep principle to break the barriers in baseball, Mr. Rickey was also a keen businessman. He knew that integrated baseball would be financially rewarding. His shrewd judgment was proven correct.

Bill Black is a highly principled human being, but he didn't hire me because he was a humanitarian. Bill Black had built an empire from a nut stand. He was a shrewd businessman, and he believed he could have a more efficient organization and more satisfied employees if I became an official of the company. During my baseball career I had been both embarrassed and pleased to learn that people who hadn't seen the game asked each other, “How'd Jackie do today?” After Bill Black hired me I'd go into retail stores that sold Chock Full O'Nuts products, to be told that people were coming in, saying, “Give me a can of that Jackie Robinson coffee.”

It's probably apocryphal, but one of the stories that has gone around is one about a dear, very old black lady from a rural community in the Deep South who listened religiously to ball games on her radio. One day this little old lady, who was somewhat naïve about baseball language, was aroused to righteous indignation when the announcer said I had stolen a base.

“They just lyin',” she is quoted as saying. “That Jackie Robinson is a nice boy. Why, that boy wouldn't steal a thing. They just lyin'.”

 

Early in December, 1965, the message came. Mr. Rickey was dead.

As I mourned for him, I realized how much our relationship had deepened
after
I left baseball. It was that later relationship that made me feel almost as if I had lost my own father. Branch Rickey, especially after I was no longer in the sports spotlight, treated me like a son.

Often, when you are useful to people, they give you all the affection and respect you could possibly need. But after I left the game, after I had nothing left to offer Mr. Rickey in his business life, he continued to remain close to me, to be concerned about how I was doing.

I will never forget two incidents.

One occurred when I was inducted into the Hall of Fame. At the precise moment when the dream of all baseball players came true for me, I said to the audience at Cooperstown that I felt my induction should be shared with the three people in that audience who had meant the most to me—my mother, my wife, and Mr. Rickey. I asked them to come and stand by my side and they did. From Mr. Rickey's reaction, I knew it was a great moment for him.

The second was when I was in the hospital. It was not too long before his death. Doctors had assured me that my upcoming operation was important but not critical. Complications arose and I became critically ill with a staph infection. Mr. Rickey was sick himself. But he traveled to New York just to come to see me. He talked with me and made me feel better.

At Mr. Rickey's funeral I was deeply disturbed at the lack of recognition paid to him. A couple of black players were there, and one of them said that although he had not known Mr. Rickey, he felt he owed him tribute because Mr. Rickey had created the opportunity for him to play today. I could not understand why some of the other black superstars who earn so much money in the game today had not even sent flowers or telegrams.

Memories of Mr. Rickey remind me that for a couple of decades now, baseball has been increasingly the most democratic of sports—but only at the bottom level. The sickness of baseball—and it is being more and more openly discussed today—is that it exploits and uses up young, gifted black and brown talent on the playing field, then throws them away and forgets about them after they have given the best years and the best energies of their lives. Certainly handsome salaries are being paid to some of the superstars, but they are earning every penny of that money in drawing power. Baseball, like some other sports, poses as a sacred institution dedicated to the public good, but it is actually a big, selfish business with a ruthlessness that many big businesses would never think of displaying. Baseball moguls and their top advisers seem to earnestly believe that the bodies, the physical stamina, the easy reflexes of black stars, make them highly desirable but that, somehow, they are lacking in the gray matter that it supposedly takes to serve as managers, officials, and executives in policy-making positions. Some prominent personalities in the game have even said it out loud; that they do not believe the average black player has the skill to be in a command position on the field or from the dugout or in the up-front office.

New York
Post
writer Maury Allen once quoted Yankees' General Manager Lee MacPhail as declaring, “There are very few jobs in the front office of baseball. There is also a very small amount of turn-over. It is very difficult to find qualified Negroes with the right educational background for the front office job.”

When Maury wrote his piece, neither of the New York clubs had a single black man working in the front office. In April, 1969, appearing on a radio interview, I took exception to the statement reportedly made that black players can make it as players but not in the front office. MacPhail had been quoted in the press as saying this and apparently had not demanded a retraction. A week later, when I referred to the statement on the air, however, he wrote me complaining that I had attacked him unfairly and misquoted him. I replied and asked why he had been so long in denying the statement, requested that he let me know what he had really said, and that if I had done him an injustice, I would apologize publicly. MacPhail sent me a long letter in which he denied the exact quote but went on to say something very similar. He said, “In my opinion there had not been a black league manager or many black coaches or executives because, until recently, there had not been a large number of black players qualified for such jobs, who were finishing their active careers.”

He went on to say that it was his personal opinion that there were then (in 1969) many black players active in baseball who were qualified and that as these players finished their active careers, he felt sure many of them would stay in baseball in nonplaying positions. He said he had Bill White in mind, for instance, and he pointed out that the Yankees had recently signed Elston Howard as a coach. He added that Elston, the first black player hired by the Yankees, had been offered the choice of managing a minor club in the organization.

I wrote Lee a final note saying I had no desire to carry the exchange further. Later that year, I received MacPhail's traditional letter inviting Rachel and me to attend the club's twenty-third annual “Old Timers Day.” I was informed that the fans had selected me as among the “Greatest Ever” in a national polling and that I would be an honored guest. There was to be a weekend celebration that sounded quite glamorous. I wrote MacPhail thanking him for the invitation but telling him that “my pride in my blackness and my disappointment in baseball's attitude requires that until I see genuine interest in breaking the barriers that deny black people access to managerial and front office positions, I will make my protest by saying no to such requests.” I knew this would not have much effect on those who run the game, but this was my position.

I feel strongly about the hypocrisy of the moneyed club owners who try to cover up their bigotry. I am not the only one who feels that way. I quote from a feature by Associated Press sportswriter Mike Rathet who wrote from Fort Lauderdale:

 

There are 24 major league baseball teams. And there are 24 major league managers.

They are all white.

Why?

Eliminating the possibility that Negroes don't want to be managers, there are three possible answers to that sensitive question which rose to the surface again last week when Frank Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles discussed the subject.

1. No Negro has been qualified.

2. The time isn't right yet.

3. Discrimination.

To be the black athlete, particularly one with major league managerial aspirations in a world where no black athlete has ever attained that position, is to look at the color of your skin and wonder.

But no matter how much the black baseball player wonders he can't escape the one conclusion that has to be drawn:

All managers are white and have been hired by white owners: no white owner has yet hired a black man as a manager.

That inescapable conclusion was frankly stated by Frank Robinson:

“There's only one reason a Negro has never been a manager—his color,” he said. “The reason there hasn't been a Negro manager is that no one has ever given a Negro a chance to be one.”

I say that the answer is discrimination, bigotry, and racial prejudice on the part of the same kind of men who bitterly fought against Branch Rickey and who do not want to see black men in power.

I've always admired Bill White for refusing to cop out when asked what he thought about the situation. Bill has a fighting spirit, anyhow. He led the fight which brought about integration of housing and eating facilities for the Cardinals during spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Bill wrote a courageous article in
Sport
magazine, entitled “A Man Must Say What He Thinks Is Right.” He attacked the policies excluding blacks from administration in baseball and even pointed out that there were few bench warmers or second-string players in the game. The black man, he said, had to be first rate or doomed to the minors.

The day of the black manager is coming, but only because it is inevitable. It will get here when an owner finally realizes that the argument that white players will not accept advice and orders from a black is phony.

Bill Russell proved, in basketball with the Celtics, that the business about whites not being able to take orders from blacks was absurd. I was so proud of Bill after he first took command and a press guy asked him if he anticipated any trouble out of his men because he was a black boss now. Bill's answer was a quick and firm “No.” That's all he said. “No.”

I would have eagerly welcomed the challenge of a managerial job before I left the game. I know I could have been a good manager. I know that the average ballplayer then would have welcomed and accepted leadership from any fellow player who he sincerely felt could help produce a victorious team. This was proven to me during my closing years with the Dodgers. My associates in baseball over the years were men of broad and reasonable thinking. Managers don't make players. Players make managers. The best example I can think of is Casey Stengel. I like Casey, and I suppose he was good for baseball, but he was a clown and a loser with the Mets. It was fantastic to me to see the way the press protected an old man whose greatest contribution to the new Brooklyn team was sleeping on the bench during most of the game.

Baseball had better wake up. You can't keep taking all and giving practically nothing back. I'm not speaking in personal terms. I figure baseball and I are even. I got a lot. I gave a lot. I am talking about a big business which makes fortunes for a few people and which fails to concern itself with more than the size of a stadium and the price of a ticket.

I'm happy that Roy Campanella and I survived the attempts at the old business of “divide and conquer” that some people tried to use to make us enemies. It didn't work. There's no use in my pretending that we didn't have serious differences of opinion, but I think we always had mutual respect for each other. A coolness did exist between us for a number of years while I was in baseball and after I left. However, as time went by, my respect for Campy deepened, and I was convinced that his attitudes had changed. We all have to grow and learn. Not everyone is man enough, as Campy was, to admit that he might have been wrong in his thinking about the right of a black man in sports to express himself.

In 1964 Campy and I were in the office of his Harlem liquor store. He sat in his wheelchair, an intrepid athlete rendered helpless. We were reminiscing and I remember him saying, “It's a horrible thing to sit here and realize what a situation like this means to an individual—to be born an American and have to go to court to find out how much of an American he is. It's a horrible thing to be born in this country and go along with all the rules and laws and regulations and have to battle in court for the right to go to the movies—to wonder which store my children can go to in the South to try on a pair of shoes or where to sleep in a hotel. I am a Negro and I am part of this. I don't care what anyone says about me. . . . I feel it as deep as anyone and so do my children.”

Campy had broadened and deepened his view and I respected his manhood in expressing his maturity.

 

The year 1968 was the year that Mallie Robinson passed away.

It was mid-May when I received the message that my mother was dying in Pasadena. I got on the first plane to go to her, but when I reached her she was gone. After my first feeling of disbelief, I felt I couldn't go into the room where she lay. I didn't think I could bear to look upon her face. Somehow I managed to and I shall always be glad that I did. There was a look, an expression on her face, that calmed me. It didn't do anything about her hurt, but it made me realize that she had died at peace with herself. She had been out in the garden working when she was struck down. Mallie Robinson. She had been one of those strong black women you always hear about, women who have been the very salvation of the black people.