“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.