Jackie Robinson by Arnold Rampersad Read Free Book Online Page B

flow in time.
    But sports could not save him from all distress. He entered his perilous teenage years at the lowest point of the Great Depression. Black Pasadena, including the household at 121 Pepper Street, felt its pain at once. Few whitepeople could now afford to keep servants, and then seldom at the old pay; moreover, Mallie was now the only reliable wage earner in the household, since white men were snapping up jobs they once had left in disdain to blacks and other colored folk. To Jack’s dismay, Mallie also insisted on trying to help other people. Living with her at 121 Pepper Street, in addition to her five children and Frank’s wife, Maxine, and their two children, were her niece Jessie Maxwell, the young daughter of Mallie’s sister Mary Lou Thomas Maxwell, who had died prematurely soon after migrating from Cairo. Other relatives and friends came and went, drawing on Mallie’s strength and kindness, often moving on without much of a thank-you, as Jack saw it.
    To help her, he took whatever jobs he could manage. He had a paper route, mowed grass for neighbors, and sold hot dogs at ball games in the Rose Bowl. None of these jobs lasted a long time. Young Jack Robinson was not lazy, but he did not like such work; all his life he would not enjoy manual labor. He also began to neglect his studies. For a while, he had loved reading; years later, veteran staffers at the La Pintoresca branch of the Pasadena Public Library would remember him as “a constant user.” But Willa Mae recalled that by junior high school he began to rush into the house after school, drop his books on a table near the telephone, and hurry out to play. The next morning, he would pick up the books, unread, on the way out to school. By Jack’s high school years, as a star athlete, he was coasting as a student, as his friend Ray Bartlett recalled, perhaps too severely: “I used to be a pretty good student. Jack wasn’t a good scholar at all. He wasn’t worth a damn. They just carried him through.” In time, Jack would regret this inattentiveness to his studies and try to make up for the lost opportunity.
    In other ways, too, he began to change. Despite his success in sports and the adulation it inspired, as he grew older he became less and less open. Outside of his tight circle of close friends, his boyish charm cooled uneasily with adolescence into a sometimes awkward shyness, which he covered more and more with a show of truculence. Now, at a time when many boys of his age were warming to girls, he wanted nothing to do with them. “I guess I was a little afraid of my ability to cope with women,” he would recall at thirty. “I can’t tell you for the life of me why I worried about it so much.” When the prettiest girl (or so he thought) at Washington Junior High, Elizabeth Renfro, approached him, he rebuffed her. “I was too bashful to start conversations,” he would recall, with some embarrassment. “All I did the first time she talked to me was tell her to go jump in the lake! Imagine that!” In his late teens, Jack had become an adolescent mixture of, on the one hand, overweening confidence reinforced by rare exploits as an athlete and, on the other, fragile self-esteem.
    His nagging self-doubt probably had much to do with the way he was living. Jack knew he was poorer than most of his friends, and fatherless, and the knowledge hurt. Almost all of his black friends, and some of the whites and Asians, were poor; but nearly all had a father in the house, and most homes had fewer mouths to feed. Jack tried to strut and pretend that money didn’t matter, but “to tell the truth, I think that behind all this sort of pride was the knowledge that we were very poor.” His cousin Van, the son of Sam and Cora Wade, sensed that Jack “didn’t have the things that normal families had.” Because Mallie was out all day at work, her household had at best an erratic routine. “We had a dinner time, a breakfast time,” Van recalled; “I