I Never Had It Made by Jackie Robinson Page A

standing together watching the team work out, when I made an unusually tricky play.
    Mr. Rickey said to Hopper that the play I had just executed was “superhuman.”
    Hopper, astonished, asked Mr. Rickey, “Do you really think a nigger’s a human being?” Mr. Rickey was furious, but he made a successful effort to restrain himself and he told me why.
    â€œI saw that this Mississippi-born man was sincere, that he meant what he said; that his attitude of regarding the Negro as a subhuman was part of his heritage; that here was a man who had practically nursed race prejudice at his mother’s breast,” Mr. Rickey said. “So I decided to ignore the question.”
    That was one of the incidents I didn’t know about, but there were others I was very well aware of because I was right in the center of them. By the time we arrived in Montreal, I had received a classic education in how it felt to be the object of bitter hatred.
    Back in spring training I had had some particularly bad experiences. A game with the Jersey City Giants had been scheduled to take place in Jacksonville. But when game time came we were confronted with a padlocked ball park and told the game had been called off. The reason was obvious, and later I learned that my participation would have violated city ordinances.
    In De Land, Florida, they announced that we couldn’t play a game because the stadium lights weren’t working. What this had to do with the fact that the game was to be played in the daytime, no one bothered to explain.
    When the Royals came up against Indianapolis in Sanford, the game had begun and the crowd in the ball park had surprised us all by not registering any objection to my playing second base. In fact, the fans rewarded me with a burst of enthusiastic cheers when I slid home early in the game. I was feeling just fine about that until I got back to the dugout. Hopper came over to me and said Wright and I would have to be taken out of the game. He said a policeman had insisted he had to enforce the law that said interracial athletic competition was forbidden.
    During the regular season similar incidents occurred over and over again. Surprisingly enough, it was during a game in Syracuse, New York, that I felt the most racial heat. The problem there wasn’t from the fans as much as it was from the members of the Syracuse team. During the entire game they taunted me for being black. One of the Syracuse team threw a live, black cat out of the dugout, yelling loudly, “Hey, Jackie, there’s your cousin.”
    The umpire had to call time until the frightened cat had been carried off the field. Following this incident, I doubled down the left field line, and when the next player singled to center, I scored. Passing the Syracuse dugout, I shouted, “I guess my cousin’s pretty happy now.”
    The toll that incidents like these took was greater than I realized. I was overestimating my stamina and underestimating the beating I was taking. I couldn’t sleep and often I couldn’t eat. Rachel was worried, and we sought the advice of a doctor who was afraid I was going to have a nervous breakdown. He advised me to take a brief rest.
    Doctor’s orders or not, I just couldn’t keep my mind off baseball. Winning the pennant was not a problem. It was virtually in the bag. But the trouble was that if I won the batting crown, people could say afterward that I had stayed out to protect my average. I just had to go back. The rest lasted exactly one day.
    At the end of that first season, I did emerge as the league’s top batter, and when we returned to play Baltimore again, there were no more taunts and epithets. Instead, I got a big standing ovation after I stole home in one of the games.
    Our team won the pennant. They also won the International League play-offs that were held every year among the top four minor league teams. The Louisville Colonels won top honors in their