4 Telling It the Right Way

Jonathan Eig

Ever heard of Johnny Van Cuyk?

The left-handed pitcher from Little Chute, Wisconsin, was a late-season addition to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ roster in 1947. He was a hard-throwing lefty, twenty-six years old. In his rookie season he appeared in only two games, allowing five hits and two earned runs in three and a third innings of work. He hung around with the Dodgers for two more seasons.

I mention Van Cuyk because in 1947 he was the only man on the Dodgers’ roster with a uniform number higher than Jackie Robinson’s 42. Van Cuyk wore 43. Harry Taylor wore 41. Erv Palica wore 40. I’ll save you the trouble of looking it up: Robinson is the only one of the four to make the Hall of Fame.

Why was Robinson lumped with Van Cuyk, Taylor, and Palica? Was he not the most exciting and important rookie in all of baseball at the start of the season? The Dodgers could have given Robinson number 2. They could have given him 4, which went to another rookie, Duke Snider. But Robinson got 42, and when he got his number, he didn’t find his uniform hanging in a locker as his other teammates did; he found it on a spike in the wall. He’d get a locker later, presumably, if he stuck with the team.

Today, 42 is the most celebrated number in baseball, the only number in the majors retired by every team. Every player in the league wears it April 15, and no one wears it the rest of the year. If baseball is a religion, as some devotees might argue, 42 is holy. Writer Will Leitch ranked it baseball’s best number, one spot ahead of its reverse, 24, the number worn by Willie Mays, Rickey Henderson, and Ken Griffey Jr.

The magic of 42 requires context. It is not numero uno simply because Jack Roosevelt Robinson wore it his whole career or because it’s been retired (we always want what we cannot have) or because Hollywood used the number as the title of the 2013 Jackie Robinson biopic or because Nate Thurmond wore it in the NBA. Forty-two matters because it’s part of Robinson’s story of overcoming incredibly long odds. The number 42, when we seek to understand it, is the kind of detail that puts meat on the too-often dry bones of history.

The problem with history, of course, is that we don’t know it’s history until it’s over. And once it’s over we know how it ends. The stories grow familiar until they become cliché. Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line. He was brave. He turned the other cheek when taunted. We all know the story. We’ve all seen the movie.

But what if you were Jackie Robinson, or his wife Rachel, and you didn’t know how it was going to end? What if failure was an option?

I didn’t know much about Robinson’s story when I first had an idea to write a book about him. To be honest, it wasn’t really my idea. A reader of my Lou Gehrig biography emailed me with the suggestion that I write a book about the friendship between Robinson and Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese. According to this man’s email and according to the often-told legend, Reese deserved much of the credit for Robinson’s acceptance in 1947. Many of the Dodgers opposed integration. Some of them signed a petition saying they wouldn’t play with a Negro. There were rumors that the Dodgers were trying to organize a league-wide walkout. They were willing to sacrifice one of the sweetest versions of the American dream—a big league baseball career—rather than accept a black man as a teammate. But according to the legend, Pee Wee Reese, a Kentuckian and captain of the team, changed his teammates’ attitudes. One story goes that Reese, while playing in Cincinnati, walked across the ballfield and put an arm around Robinson to silence hecklers who were attacking Robinson with crude racial epithets. He’s not a Negro, Pee Wee seemed to say with his gesture, according to this version of events, he’s a Dodger.

My initial reaction was that a book on Reese and Robinson would probably be too sappy. But just to learn more about their relationship, I phoned Rachel Robinson. As I asked her about that 1947 season and the relationship between her husband and Pee Wee Reese, I sensed frustration in her voice. Answers came curtly. I cast about wildly, trying to find a question she liked. She didn’t like any of them. Finally, I gave up.

“Mrs. Robinson,” I said. “I’m sorry for wasting your time. Did I do something wrong?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “You assumed that Jack made it because Pee Wee helped. I’m tired of people assuming that he needed the help of a white man to succeed.”1

I swallowed hard and said nothing.

She went on. In 1947, she said, she and Jack (she always called him Jack) did not have the support of Pee Wee Reese or anyone else on the team, at least not at first. Robinson’s white teammates were waiting to see if he would fail before they put any skin in the game. If he didn’t make the team, if the petition worked, if opposing teams refused to play, if he got hurt, if he couldn’t hit or field his position, if the Dodgers slumped and white media blamed Jack for dividing the clubhouse, he’d be sent packing, and the white players could go back to their old way of doing things. That’s why Jack and Rachel and their baby didn’t even rent an apartment—they stayed in a hotel and then switched to a rented room in Bedford-Stuyvesant, sharing a bathroom and a kitchen with the complete stranger who was their landlord. Jack didn’t have any friends on the Dodgers in 1947, and neither did Rachel. Not in 1947, anyway. This was an experiment. Most experiments fail. That’s why so few ballplayers wanted to risk getting close to Robinson and why their wives didn’t want to get close to Rachel. That and the fact that some of them were avowed white supremacists.

When Mrs. Robinson paused, I meekly asked: What about the moment in Cincinnati when Pee Wee put his arm around Jackie and silenced the hecklers?

It never happened, she said. At least not in 1947.

But there are children’s books about that moment. There’s a statue depicting the embrace in Brooklyn. You attended the unveiling, and the base of the statue is engraved with the date when this embrace supposedly occurred.

Never happened, Rachel said.

Why did you attend the unveiling?

She sighed as if to say it was complicated; I would never understand.

But I tried to understand. I spent the next two years interviewing every living member of the 1947 Dodgers, everyone I could find who lived on the Robinsons’ block in Bed-Stuy, everyone I could find who watched the Robinson experiment up close. I knocked on the door of the apartment where the Robinsons lived and measured the floor space in their tiny room, trying to comprehend how two adults and a child had possibly made it their home.

One of my favorite interviews was with Gil Jonas. Jonas was seventeen years old, a student at Lafayette High in Brooklyn, where he worked for the school newspaper. Gil had never had a meaningful conversation with a black person, but when his sister’s boyfriend said he could introduce Gil to Jackie Robinson, Gil, like any baseball-loving American boy, jumped at the chance. The interview was arranged for the day that Robinson and his family moved from the McAlpin Hotel to their Bed-Stuy apartment. Gil sat beside Robinson on the stoop and asked him how the Dodgers looked for 1947. Could they beat the Cardinals? What about the Yankees? How was Robinson making the adjustment to first base, his new position?

Later, when Jonas went to see the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, he heard white men calling Robinson horrible things. “I didn’t know people could be that cruel,” he said.2 It was only then that it occurred to him that he had failed to ask Robinson the right questions. It had never occurred to him that Robinson was much more than another ballplayer. Nevertheless, Jonas learned. The next year, when he went to Stanford University, he started a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, led a drive to integrate the campus, and went out on a date the following year with the university’s first female African American student.

That was Jackie Robinson’s influence, and it was felt in big ways and small ways all over America in 1947. Sometimes you can see history right in front of your eyes if you pay attention. White Dodger fans integrated their factory floors in 1947—not all of them, of course, but at least a few. White competitors of the Dodgers began scouting black players, trying to keep up with the competition—not all of them, of course, but some of them. White politicians began making promises to tear down the walls of segregation—not all of them, of course, but some of them, including President Truman.

Would it have mattered if Robinson had worn number 2, or number 4? Would it have mattered if his uniform had been waiting for him in a locker rather than on a hook in the wall? Would it have mattered if the Dodgers had arranged more suitable accommodations for Jack and Rachel? Would it have mattered if he’d been treated like the star college athlete and blue-chip prospect that he was?

Well, it would have been kinder, certainly. It would have been respectful. It would have sent the message that the Dodgers were going all in, that Robinson was here to stay, that baseball was integrated, and that anyone who didn’t like it could suck a resin bag. But that was not the world in which Robinson lived. In 1947, there was no such thing as a civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was still a teenage kid thinking about becoming a doctor or a lawyer. As Bobby Bragan, a backup catcher on the 1947 Dodgers, told me, he and his friends and family in Alabama were staunch white supremacists. They believed absolutely that Negro people were inherently inferior to white people, that it was a matter of science. All season long in 1947 he puzzled over how he was going to go home to Alabama and explain that he rode the bench while a Negro played every day.

By wearing number 42, by accepting without complaint being shifted to an infield position he had never played, by taking the abuse of fans and opposing players, by playing through death threats, by never reacting violently to violent encounters on the bases or to balls thrown at his head, Robinson took on the burdens, the assaults, and the insults that were a part of everyday life for African Americans. As Martin Luther King Jr. would say years later, “Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.”3

Jackie Robinson straightened his back in such a visible way that no one could miss it, day after day, through spring, summer, and fall, in front of 4.1 million paying fans. He became the biggest attraction in baseball since Babe Ruth. Railroad companies scheduled special runs to get black fans from their rural homes to the ballpark. “Jackie’s nimble, Jackie’s quick,” wrote Wendell Smith, “Jackie’s making turnstiles click.”4

Given his obvious importance, one might conclude that the Dodgers were insulting Robinson by assigning him the number 42. Or perhaps one might conclude that they were challenging him. Or one might conclude that the clubhouse manager assigning uniform numbers didn’t give a damn and wasn’t about to risk his job by assigning a plum number to a black man.

But Robinson understood. He noticed and remembered every slight. He swallowed the insults and turned them to muscle. He knew that much of white society, including many of his teammates, wanted to see him fail, and he was determined not to give them that satisfaction. He knew, because he read it in the black press, that his people were counting on him to succeed. The Boston Chronicle ran this banner headline: “Triumph of Whole Race Seen in Jackie’s Debut in Major-League Ball.”

After my initial conversation with Mrs. Robinson, I saw how wrong I had been to consider writing about the Robinson-Reese relationship, and I became more interested in the Robinson-Robinson relationship, the one between Rachel and Jack. Grudgingly, Mrs. Robinson consented to meet with me and to take part in a series of interviews. She helped me understand, as only she could, how easily this experiment might have failed and how 42 might have remained one of the least desirable numbers in baseball.

Rachel told me she didn’t know much about baseball when she married Jack. She had watched him play basketball and football at UCLA, but baseball had never been his principal sport, and only in 1947 did she begin to understand the nuances of the game. It was during that season, as she sat in the grandstand with their infant son on her lap, that she realized that Jack wasn’t playing the same way as his white teammates. He was taking bigger leads off the bases, taking wider turns on singles, stealing home. She wondered why. There were other speedy players on the team who could have done the same, or tried.

It slowly dawned on her that Jack was bringing some of the Negro League style to white baseball and that his aggressive base running was an expression of his strength and courage, that he would not go along with the expectations of white fans or coaches, that he would play with his back straight, his head high, and a cloud of dust behind him. He was sending a message. Rachel loved him for that.

In the years ahead, civil rights battles would be fought in the courts and in the streets and at the ballot box, the victories all too often offset by violent backlash. The backlash continues today.

It might seem like small consolation in today’s divided America that for one day each year, April 15, baseball players all wear 42. But it doesn’t have to be small if we tell the story the right way and remember when 42 represented a challenge, when Jack Roosevelt Robinson accepted that challenge, when he rose up against insults, rose up against hate, and played for all of us to win.