Jackie Robinson by Arnold Rampersad Read Free Book Online

the legacy of slavery. “I remember she told me once,” he said, “that when the slaves were freed they wanted no part of freedom. They were afraid of it.” Years later, at one of the most perilous moments of his life, when his future hung in the balance with his military court-martial, he would also recall what his grandmother had told him more than once about the word “nigger,” and her insistence to him that no matter what ignorant whites said, he was not one. On July 25, 1933, when Jack was fourteen, Edna Sims McGriff died at Cora Wade’s home at 972 Cypress Street. She became one of the first of the Georgia migrants to be buried in the Mountain View Cemetery in Pasadena.
    Family was vital to Mallie, but God was supreme. For her, as she tried to make her children see, God was a living, breathing presence all about her, and she seeded her language with worshipful allusions to the divine. “God watches what you do,” she would insist; “you must reap what you sow, so sow well!” Faith in God meant not onlyprayers on one’s knees each night, and Scott United Methodist Church on Sunday, but also a never-ending sensitivity to God’s power, an urge to carry out the divine will as set out in the Bible, and a constant appeal to Heaven for aid, comfort, and guidance. Through all his years living with Mallie, Jack was witness to his mother’s unshakable attachment to religion, the entirely willful way she delivered herself and her fortunes to God without becoming fatalistic or withdrawing from the world. If anyone questioned the durability of the link between prayer and belief, Mallie had a forthright answer. “Prayer,” she often told her children, “
is
belief.”
    C RAVING HIS MOTHER’S COMPANY , Jack as a small boy slept downstairs at 121 Pepper Street with her and refused to leave her bed. When she offered him a quarter a week to move out, he turned her down. Finally, after Jack dreamed one night that an intruder had climbed in through the window, he then fled upstairs to the large bed his older brothers shared.
    With Mallie at work, Jack passed his early childhood mainly in the care and company of his sister, Willa Mae. “I was the little mother,” she recalled; “I was Jack’s little mother.” Jack agreed: “When I was eight years old and she was ten, you would think she was a hundred the way she could talk tome when everything was blue.” In his childhood, Willa Mae bathed, dressed, and fed him almost every day. Prompted by Mallie, who had no choice in the matter, she even took Jack with her to her school. There, sympathetic teachers allowed him to play in a sandbox outdoors while Willa Mae sat in class and watched him through a window.
    He was a handsome, charming child. A boyhood photograph of him at four or five, perhaps his earliest portrait, caught him relaxed and insouciant, sitting on a rocking chair with a leg drawn up. Evidently he was more than a little mischievous. His lifelong friend Sid Heard remembered the day in 1925 when he first met Jack. It was Sid’s first day at Cleveland Elementary School, a red brick building a few blocks from 121 Pepper Street. Sid and a friend, Timothy Harrison, were standing outdoors, waiting for their mothers, when they felt something hitting them. At first, they thought that acorns were falling from a tree arching overhead—“but it was only this little young guy, sitting on the edge of the sandbox, shooting small acorns like marbles at us, and smiling. That’s how I met Jack.”
    His teachers, too, seemed to like him. Starting out at Cleveland Elementary in 1924, he was lucky in his first two teachers, Bernice Gilbert in kindergarten and Beryl Haney in the first grade. (All his teachers were white.) On some days, he recalled, he and Willa Mae “would get to school so hungry we could hardly stand up, much less think about our lessons.” But Miss Gilbert and Miss Haney “always had a kind word for us—and a couple of sandwiches.” According to