“The guy was in the army, right?” Sonny said. “Well, f’ my money, if he can fight for his country he oughtta be able to play in the major leagues. Case closed.”
“Why would he want to go where he ain’t wanted?” Jimmy said.
“Because he can!”
They knew from the newspapers that Robinson had played the 1946 season for the Montreal Royals, the number one Dodger farm team, and tore up the league. Down in Cuba, he was still on the Montreal roster. The Brooklyn Eagle and the Daily News said the Royals would play a series of exhibition games against the Dodgers during spring training and then Branch Rickey, the boss of the Brooklyn team, would decide whether to bring up Robinson. But the newspapers were full of a word that was new to Michael and his friends: dissension. The sports writers used the word as if it were the name of a fatal disease.
“This thing, this dissension, you know, it could ruin a ball club,” Sonny said.
“What do they need it for?” said Jimmy. “Why don’t they just leave things alone and win the pennant? Last year, we was tied for first on the last day of the season. That’s a pretty good team.”
“Not as good as the Cardinals,” Michael said. “The playoffs, suppose Robinson had played. The second game, he gets a triple, steals a couple of bases, maybe forces a third game. Then in the third game he homers in the ninth, and we go to the World Series in Boston, not the Cardinals.”
“I don’t like that dissension,” Sonny said.
Dissension was all about the new colored player. The newspapers were reporting that Dixie Walker, “the People’s Cherce,” had asked to be traded if Jackie Robinson joined the team. Dixie Walker was a southerner. From Alabama or Georgia or someplace. “You know,” Sonny said, “down there where they had that slavery all those years.” Everybody on Ellison Avenue thought that Dixie Walker was also the greatest right fielder in Dodger history. The boys knew that Walker had won the batting championship in 1944, when he hit .357, and Dodger fans weren’t used to their players winning much of anything. But the newspapers now said Dixie Walker had caught the terrible dissension disease. And he wasn’t the only one. There were others, including Eddie Stanky, the second baseman.
“That ain’t dissension,” Sonny said. “He’s worried about his job.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jimmy.
“He’s a second baseman, Jimmy! And Robinson’s a second baseman!”
“Jeez, I never thought about that.”
“Think, Jimmy, think. Some of these guys got angles!”
Walking along the parkside, under the dripping trees, they talked about what position Robinson would play and how the manager, Leo Durocher, would never replace Stanky with a rookie. But maybe Robinson could play first, and there was always third, where the Dodgers were weak. And hey, maybe this wouldn’t happen at all. Maybe dissension would get so terrible that Durocher would go to Rickey and say that as the manager, he couldn’t do it, it was tearing the team apart, and Jackie Robinson would stay in Montreal. How could Dixie Walker put his arm around Jackie Robinson and say all for one and one for all?
At night, Michael struggled to make sense of this. He wished that Jackie Robinson was white, like everybody else. If he was white, they would bring him up and make him the goddamned first baseman and that would be that. No dissension. No trouble. No spring training in goddamned Cuba. Why did Jackie Robinson have to be colored, for Christ’s sake?
But he was. And down on Ellison Avenue, they were predicting race riots at Ebbets Field. If Jackie Robinson struck out or dropped a ball or was hit by a pitch, it would be worse than Harlem in 1943, or the riots in Detroit or Los Angeles, where people were shot and stabbed by the hundreds. They said there’d be muggings at the ballpark. They said Robinson would ruin the Dodgers with dissension and they’d be lucky to finish fifth. Michael wondered if maybe Dixie Walker knew more about all this than he did. Maybe Dixie was afraid that more and more colored people would come to the big leagues and pretty soon even the white players would be calling each other motherfuckers.
Michael felt ignorant about the whole subject of Negroes. Except for Ebony in The Spirit and Fat Stuff in Smilin’ Jack, there were no colored people in the comics. There were no colored people in the movies, except for Rochester and that guy in the comedies who was always seeing ghosts and saying, “Feets, get moving.” There were no colored cowboys and no colored secret agents and no colored pilots. There were colored guys in the Tarzan movies, but they were natives, chasing Tarzan through the jungle; they weren’t from places like Brooklyn.
There was only one colored man in the parish, a janitor who lived in the basement of an apartment house across from the park. He was tall and bony and his skin was very black, and they would sometimes see him setting out the garbage cans in the mornings. He had no wife and no children and never said anything, not even good morning, and certainly never motherfucker. But he worked very hard. None of them knew his name. He was a man in gray overalls with black skin.
For an hour on this rainy night, Michael tossed and turned, wracked with his own ignorance. Finally he got up, turned on the light, slipped into the living room, and found the volume of the Wonderland of Knowledge marked Min-Pea. Back in his room, he read the one-page entry about Negroes. He knew they had been slaves, of course, knew that Arab traders had captured them and shipped them across the Atlantic. But he didn’t know that the slaveholders would not let them go to school.
The Negro entered America by the back door, and when freedom came to the slaves of the South, it brought with it innumerable problems that have not yet been entirely solved. The worst problem, the book said, was that many Negroes weren’t educated, and this hurt them when they started moving to northern cities after the Civil War. But Michael thought: That’s a problem around here too; Frankie McCarthy isn’t going to be a professor or work in an office. Neither are a lot of other guys. In settling in the Northern cities, the Negroes occupied neighborhoods that had already been lived in by others, creating problems of housing that have become critical in recent years. That’s like us too, Michael thought. We live in neighborhoods that were already lived in by others, and we have problems too, especially since the veterans came home and found out there’s not enough places for them to live. Last year, in a house on Saracen Place, the roof fell in, the building was so old, and three people were killed. There are rats in a lot of buildings. There are six apartments in this building and only one of them has a gas stove and there’s no steam heat. So what’s the big deal? Life in New York isn’t just hard for Negroes; it’s hard for lots of people.
But even with such bad educations, the book said, Negroes had added a lot to the culture of America. The native rhythm of the highly emotional Negro race has become a vital force in American music; and modern music, of which jazz is a form, has been profoundly affected, if not inspired, by the spirituals and “blues” which are entirely different from anything else found in music.
That paragraph made him wonder. Suppose Count Basie couldn’t play in America? Or Duke Ellington? Or Louis Armstrong? What if somebody said that they could only sell their records in Negro neighborhoods? What if Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton weren’t allowed to play in Benny Goodman’s band because they were Negroes? If they followed the rules of baseball, Negro bands would play for Negroes and white bands for whites and the musicians could never play with each other. Roy Eldridge couldn’t play with Gene Krupa. That would be nuts.
But maybe baseball is different.
No, that’s even more nuts.
Michael closed the book and returned to bed. He whispered: Trying to figure this out is one huge pain in the ass. I wish Jackie Robinson was white. But Jackie Robinson isn’t white. And he can play ball. And he could help us win the goddamned pennant. Period. Case closed, as Sonny says.
Besides, skin color was skin color, right? It was just the color of your goddamned skin. There was nothing anybody could do about that. You were born with it. Like some people were born with big feet or blue eyes. You
didn’t make the choice. Your parents did. Or God did. God made Jackie Robinson a Negro. God made the choice, not Dixie Walker. What was it Rabbi Hirsch said?
Vos Got get iz gut…. What God gives is good…
In Michael’s drowsy mind, they began to merge into a group: Jackie Robinson, the Jews, the Catholics in Belfast, Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, Gene Krupa and Roy Eldridge, Rabbi Loew and Dvorele. And coming out of the smoke, sneering and hard, the goddamned Nazis and Brother Thaddeus and Frankie McCarthy swaggering around with the Falcons.
Vos Got get iz gut….
Mumbling his borrowed Yiddish, longing for the dazzling clarity of summer, he fell into sleep, dreamy with images of Jack Roosevelt Robinson playing second base under the sun of Havana.
15
Each day for a week, spring rains slapped against the stained-glass windows of Sacred Heart and the stained-glass windows of the synagogue. Each day, steady sheets of advancing rain, monotonous and soft, were followed by sudden twisted columns of water, skirling and dancing, destroying umbrellas, lifting hats off skulls, spattering the newspapers on the wooden stand outside Slowacki’s until Mrs. Slowacki came out to cover them with a sheet of oilcloth held fast with a piece of angle iron. Basements flooded. Sewers backed up. Tree limbs snapped off and crashed into the yards. Shoes were ruined, their soles flapping like black tongues. Fungus seemed to sprout in clothes. In the apartments on Ellison Avenue, where the rain came pounding from the harbor like liquid ice, tenants stuffed towels into the sills of the kitchen windows and talked in the wet halls about how the weather was all different, wilder and fiercer, since the atom bomb.
For Michael, the raging spring weather was like something from a movie about the South Seas: a monsoon movie, a movie about hurricanes. With Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour, and the evil prison guard, John Carradine, who looked like Emperor Rudolf of Prague. The power of the storms tested him, as it had tested Jon Hall, but it didn’t feel like punishment. The storms had such a radiant brightness to them, such a newness, that they made Michael Devlin happy. He wanted to run through them, to dive into the little rivers along the curbs, to splash and roll and laugh and dance.
The snow was soon gone, washed down the Brooklyn hills to the harbor. On the radio, Michael listened to Red Barber broadcasting the Dodger games from Cuba through invisible barriers of distance and static. The words coming through the tiny speaker of the leatherette radio were often unclear, gouged, scratched, crunched, making abrupt loops and bends in the air. But when he could hear Barber, the announcer’s voice was full of blue skies and palm trees. He never mentioned Jackie Robinson unless Robinson did something. There wasn’t much argument about Robinson in those radio accounts of distant games, no alarm or anxiety, no mention of dissension; radio was not the same as the newspapers. But Barber’s serene drawl was itself a guarantee that the season lay directly ahead of them. A season in which everyone knew that Jack Roosevelt Robinson would make history, just by showing up.
“I’ll tell you why I want Robinson to come up,” Michael said to his friends one afternoon. “Because it never happened before.”
“There was never an earthquake in Brooklyn before either,” Sonny said. “You want that to happen too?”
“Hey, maybe Frankie McCarthy would fall down a crack,” Michael said.
“I wish he’d fall down the crack of his ass,” Sonny said, and they all laughed.
Then one rain-drowned evening when his mother wasn’t working at the movie house, Michael came upstairs and into the kitchen and saw a large cardboard box off to the side and his mother beaming. The room was loud with Al Jolson singing “April Showers,” and though it wasn’t yet April there had been a lot of showers, and Jolson made their annual arrival sound like an occasion of joy. While Jolson promised that the showers of April would bring the flowers of May, Kate Devlin pointed in the direction of the voice, and on a shelf between the kitchen and the first bedroom, shaped like a small cathedral, was a new Philco radio.
So keep on lookin’ for the bluebird, Jolson was singing, An’ listenin’ to his song, as Michael’s mother joined for the last triumphant line, Whenever April showers come along….
“Up the Republic!” she shouted, as she always did when she was delighted. She had saved and saved and here it was: a new radio, and a Philco at that. An aerial emerged from the back of the radio and snaked around the wall molding to dangle out a window into the yards. No static distorted the voices; the sounds of human beings were as clear as water. The radio also had shortwave, and the names of distant places were printed in tiny letters on the glowing dark yellow dial. Copenhagen. London. Dublin. Paris. Moscow. And there, yeah, would you look at that? Prague!
“It’s beautiful, Mom,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”
“Neither can I,” she said. “It was a real bargain down at Ginsberg’s.”
He didn’t ask how much she had paid; he knew better than to try to get her to talk about money. Instead, he turned away from the new radio, listening now to Les Brown and His Band of Renown, and saw the peeling face of the leatherette Admiral, lying on its side on a chair beside the gas stove. The cord and plug dangled uselessly a few inches off the linoleum floor. The old radio looked as sad as a man without a job.
“What are you going to do with the old one, Mom?” he asked.
“God, who knows? Give it to the St. Vincent DePaul Society, maybe. Maybe some poor soul will find it there.”
A pause.
“Can I give it to Rabbi Hirsch?”
“Och, Michael, it’s a terrible oul’ heap of junk. The rabbi might be insulted.”
“No, no. He’d be—Mom, he’s poor. He has almost no money. I know he wants to hear music. So…”
She smiled. “Do what you like,” she said, and moved the dial in search of the Lux Radio Theater.
The next day, there was no rain. Michael rushed home after school, dropped off his books, picked up the old leatherette Admiral and went back up the hill to the synagogue. When Rabbi Hirsch answered the door, the boy handed him the radio.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for you,” Michael said. “It’s not the greatest, but it works.”
The rabbi held the radio in both hands and for a moment didn’t move. It was as if he were receiving something holy. Michael imagined him in the café in Prague when he was young, listening with his friends to the many languages of Europe.
“A sheynem dank,” he said. Thank you very much. He hugged the radio to his chest as if it were a treasure, and Michael saw his eyes water and his face tremble with emotion. “A sheynem dank.”
“You’re welcome, Rabbi. Nishto far vos.”
“Come,” Rabbi Hirsh said, his voice cracking slightly. “We listen to some music.”
He moved some books and placed the radio on the bookshelf beside the photograph of his wife, Leah. They found an outlet and plugged in the cord. Then they stared for a moment at the Admiral. The rabbi gestured with a hand, urging Michael to turn it on. Michael was puzzled; this was not Shabbos, and besides, turning on a radio couldn’t possibly be considered work.
“You turn it on, Rabbi,” Michael said, putting his hands behind his back.
“Neyn, no, you do it, boychik.”
“I refuse,” Michael said. “It’s your radio now, so you turn it on.”
“Someday I want to tell somebody that a kid camed here and gave to me a radio and put music in my world.”
“Okay. Just tell them you turned it on.”
The rabbi sighed and reached reverently for the knob, the way Father Heaney might reach for a cruet.
And suddenly music filled the low-ceilinged room.
Bing Crosby.
Let me straddle my own saddle
Underneath the Western skies…
Michael started singing with him, the way his mother sang with Al Jolson.
On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder
’Til I see the mountains rye-iiiiiise…
The rabbi h
opped around, raising his leg, slapping his thigh, laughing, shouting, “Vos iz dos? Vos iz dos?” And Michael shouted, “ ‘Don’t Fence Me In!’ Bing Crosby!” And sang:
Let me be by myself in the evening bree-ease,
Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood tree-ease,
Send me off forever but I ask you pleee-ease,
Don’t fence me in….
More whoops, more jigs, and then Bing Crosby was gone. Michael had never before seen the rabbi so happy. They moved from station to station, hearing Nat Cole and Perry Como and Doris Day. Michael couldn’t find Benny Goodman or Count Basie, but he showed the rabbi the numbers of the good music stations and how to find the news and the baseball.
“Again I want to hear Bing Crosby,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “About don’t put a fence around me.”
Michael tuned in WNEW and heard the Goodman band. A trumpet player was offering “And the Angels Sing.” The rabbi’s head nodded to the rhythm. And then his face shifted into deep concentration.
“This music?” the rabbi said, his eyes widening. “This I know. From Prague, I know this. At weddings, we play this, only slower. And dance.”
Michael glanced at the photograph of Leah. “Did you dance to it at your wedding?”
The rabbi’s face twitched. “No. We never got to dance.”
Michael suddenly pictured his father dancing with his mother. To “And the Angels Sing.” A slow jitterbug, his father singing, You speak, and then the angels sing…, and his mother laughing. He wished he could have seen them dancing and happy, and then tried to imagine the rabbi in the same way, with Leah. There was a hint of sadness in the air. Michael talked past it. He told Rabbi Hirsch the name of the song in English and explained that the trumpet player’s name was Ziggy Elman.
“He’s Jewish?” the rabbi asked, brightening.
Michael didn’t know, but Ziggy Elman was in Benny Goodman’s band, and he did know that Benny Goodman was Jewish. He had read that in some newspaper story. He told the rabbi that Goodman played the clarinet and his band was almost as great as the band of Count Basie, who definitely was the greatest. Goodman even had Negroes in his band long before baseball got around to it. Lionel Hampton. Teddy Wilson. The rabbi smiled and nodded to the music.