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Jackie Robinson had already learned, by a lifetime's practice, the lesson another Robinson—soft-shoe dancing Bojangles* —once laid down while acting as the unofficial Mayor of Harlem. Bojangles' formula: "Do the best you can with what you've got . . . and get along with the white folks." Jackie had no desire to be a martyr for his race; he was just a young fellow anxious to make a living as a ballplayer. Though he barely knew Joe Louis, he sought him out for advice. He got an earful which boiled down to three words: "Don't get cocky."
Jackie lives a long way from Harlem's high life, in a five-room, second-floor flat on Brooklyn's McDonough Street, in a Negro neighborhood. His name is not on the door, and he knows few of his neighbors. How he feels about them shows through the guarded brevity of his speech, which sometimes carries a suggestion of dryness. Says he: "I don't want to bother with too many people who want to be my relatives."
Jackie's idea of a fine way to spend a night off is to go to bed early. He averages ten hours' sleep. He likes neither music nor dancing. "You know," he says, "colored people do not like music and dancing any better than white people . . . the white people just think they do." At home, he carefully takes his vitamin pills, spends a lot of time baby-sitting with his nine-month-old son, and according to his wife (whom he met at U.C.L.A.), always has his face buried in a paper. Like most ballplayers, he soaks up every word in every newspaper in town that concerns him and his team. His reader reaction: "Some reporters write nice things about me and mean them, and others write nice things and don't mean them. I can always tell."
So that Jackie would have company when the Dodgers were on the road, Rickey persuaded a Negro newsman, Wendell Smith, to travel with the club. In two cities, Jackie said, he had hotel trouble; he was not welcome at the Chase, where the Brooklyn club stays in St. Louis, or at Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin. ("They fooled me," said Jackie. "I thought it would be St. Louis and Cincinnati.")
No Help at First. Branch Rickey's do's & don'ts strangely enough, did not include any instructions on how to play baseball. Although Jackie had played second base or shortstop all his life, he was handed a first-baseman's mitt and sent out to sink or swim at a new position —first base. Being right-handed was no help: first base is a left-hander's position. It is easier for a left-hander to throw from first to any other base, and easier to pick a man off the bag. Only a few great first basemen (among them the Cubs' Frank Chance and the Giant's George Kelly) were righthanded. But Robinson, with a tricky "scissors" pivot, manages to get rid of the ball as quickly as any southpaw first baseman in the league.
His biggest difficulty is trying to forget that he is a shortstop. Fielding ground balls, he scoops them up as if he had a quick throw to make. And because he does not crouch down to block the ball, a lot of grounders dribble between his legs. He also can't seem to break his habit of catching put-out throws two-handed. The Cardinals' Stan Musial, for example, gets a far longer reach by taking throws singlehanded.