A Dark Arm in Time and Space: Jackie Robinson’s Value in the Universe
By Frederick B. Hudson
It is not verifiable if they ever met, these two sons of the South, one derived from a lineage so privileged that he was named for the state in which two. of his antecedents had been elected Governor and Senator,that one was Tennessee Williams; the other, Jackie Robinson sprang from the segregated fields of Georgia, the grandson of a slave and the son of sharecropper farmers.
But in a strange alchemy of thought, passion and concern, Williams conjured up a literary prototype of cosmic god who would set the world right in a cosmic upheaval that would challenge the very stars. World famous for his classic plays including Cat on a Hot Tin Root; Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana, Williams published his first poem at age fourteen and his words foreshadow the dictates of Franz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks that the quest of white and black men of conscience and character is: “to educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world….I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence…And, through a private problem, we see the outline of the problem of Action. Placed in this world, in a situation, “embarked” as Pascal would have it, am I going to gather weapons?”
Tennessee Williams wrote a poem authored in April 1941, in Jackie
Robinson’s own native Georgia, which saw a dark arm that gathers up weapons
of infinite energy. The arm belongs to a figure that approximates a baseball player whose
Dark Arm,Hanging Over the Edge of Infinity
I.
Dark arm, hanging over the edge of infinity, What have you let go of,
What are your fingers dangling empty towards? This is the moment of continued momentum
But will not continue forever.
The spheres will relax,
Will suddenly drop out of heaven,
Unless you resume your skillful manipulation. Sleeping Negro, wake up
Bestir your dark copper limbs, the rhythm is broken, there is danger in heaven.
II.
Why is everyone silent? Will there be thunder?
Will there be white milkwagons, Hurrying hurrying
Down wet darkening streets? The lot is deserted.
The weeds are tall around the baseball diamond, A spiral of dust is balanced above homeplate-
0 Mother of Blue Mountain boys,
Come to the screendoor, calling
Come in come in!
Before it gets dreadfully dark and hailstones fall
As big as goose-eggs nearly!
The spiral of dust in beginning to hear, to whisper
The runs of lost ball-players, the dark coins
Of moisture fall to the diamond.
Sleeping athlete,
III.
Dark arm, hanging over the edge of infinity,
Fingers relaxed, grasping nothing, What have you let go of? Something must have become
Of the luminous white plaything
That the fingers were made For curling around. Dreaming ball-player,
Drinker of the warm, white milk of space,
The spheres will relax,
Will suddenly drop out of heaven,
Unless you resume your skillful manipulation. Sleeping Negro, wake up
Bestir your dark copper limbs, the rhythm is broken, there is danger in heaven.
II.
Why is everyone silent? Will there be thunder?
Will there be white rnilkwagons, Hurrying hurrying
Down wet darkening streets? The lot is deserted.
The weeds are tall around the baseball diamond, A spiral of dust is balanced above homeplate-
0 Mother of Blue Mountain boys,
Come to the screendoor, calling
Come in come in!
Before it gets dreadfully dark and hailstones fall
As big as goose-eggs nearly!
The spiral of dust in beginning to hear, to whisper
The runs of lost ball-players, the dark coins
Of moisture fall to the diamond.
Sleeping athlete,
III.
Dark arm, hanging over the edge of infinity,
Fingers relaxed, grasping nothing, What have you let go of? Something must have become
Of the luminous white plaything
That the fingers were made For curling around. Dreaming ball-player,
Drinker of the warm, white milk of space,
The spheres will relax,
Will suddenly drop out of heaven,
Unless you resume your skillful manipulation. Sleeping Negro, wake up
Bestir your dark copper limbs, the rhythm is broken, there is danger in heaven.
II.
Why is everyone silent? Will there be thunder?
Will there be white rnilkwagons, Hurrying hurrying
Down wet darkening streets? The lot is deserted.
The weeds are tall around the baseball diamond, A spiral of dust is balanced above homeplate-
0 Mother of Blue Mountain boys,
Come to the screendoor, calling
Come in come in!
Before it gets dreadfully dark and hailstones fall
As big as goose-eggs nearly!
The spiral of dust in beginning to hear, to whisper
The runs of lost ball-players, the dark coins
Of moisture fall to the diamond.
Sleeping athlete,
III.
Dark arm, hanging over the edge of infinity,
Fingers relaxed, grasping nothing, What have you let go of? Something must have become
Of the luminous white plaything
That the fingers were made For curling around. Dreaming ball-player,
Drinker of the warm, white milk of space,
Prostrate Negro juggler
Skillful manipulator of a carillon, glittering spheres, Wake up, Wake up!
Suspense is ended-
Heaven is full of the sound of shattering glass.
I
I
I •
Written six years before Robinson’s historic debut as the first black major league baseball player, the poem is both an anticipation and an altar upon the’ hopes of a world which Williams communicated in a collection of short plays called American Blues. The plays have prompted scholar Cornell West to call Williams a white brother with a tragic comic sense of the blues. He noted Williams’ implicit identification of his characters with the spiritual plights of oppressed black people in American history, a history of disappointment, denial, and social, political, and economic neglect. Tellingly, the plays in American Blues connect with nineteenth- and twentieth-century American folk-song traditions- spirituals, slave songs, work songs, and the blues — that dissect the American Dream by celebrating the struggles of those teetering on life’s edge
In the midst of history’s ‘ honoring of Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier-the wearing of his uniform number, , by many players of different races, the rescreening of his film biography, The Jackie Robinson Story interviews of some living players who initially resisted his playing days, there has been scarce retelling of the court-martial of the baseball player who Williams hoped would hurl righteousness into the heavens.
On July 6, 1944, Jackie Robinson ,a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant, boarded an Army bus at Fort Hood, Texas. He was ordered by the driver of the bus to leave a seat beside a light skinned black woman who the driver perceived as white. Foreshadowing Rosa Parks’ stubbornness in Montgomery Alabama, Robinson refused. This led to Robinson’s court martial on August 2,.1944.
Robinson was not charged with the bus incident per se. White army captains claimed that while they were investigating the bus incidentthat Robinson was disrespectful and insubordinate. Two Captains who told essentially
the same story presented the heart of the prosecution’s case. As they had
attempted to ascertain the facts of the events of July 6, Robinson continually interrupted them and acted disrespectfully.
In his own testimony Robinson countered most of the accusations against him. Robinson testified that a white private had called him a “nigger lieutenant” while the investigation was under way. Robinson stated that he told the Captain,
‘If you call me a nigger, this man might have said the same thing to you …
I am a Negro, but not a nigger.”
Robinson’s lawyer stated this case was not that involving any violation of the Articles of War, or even of military tradition, but simply a situation in which a few individuals sought to vent their bigotry on a Negro they considered ‘uppity’ because he had the audacity to exercise rights that belonged to him as an American and a soldier.” The nine military judges found Robinson “not guilty of all specifications and charges.”
This incident is important in the light it sheds on the institutional racism in which Robinson’s baseball career should be seen. His court martial on trumped
up charges occurred only sixteen months before his played at Ebbets Field. America was racist to the core, even towards soldiers who had helped them win the war.
Baseball was only a narrow diamond of a universe. Even those black baseball players who followed Robinson to the major leagues had limited social consciences and followed their paychecks rather than their hearts. In The Tallest Tree, a documentary about the legendary freedom fighter, Paul Robeson, a reporter depicts a near fistfight that occurred between Robeson and Don Newcomb, one of the major league baseball players who followed Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Newcomb had bought into the white smear
tactics that smeared Robeson as a disloyal American and saw his “patriotic duty” as beating the huge Robeson to a pulp.
This lack of consciousness of the necessity for each one to teach one has affected the level of significant interaction of black baseball players into the body politic. This writer was witness to the contempt with which the black community held even Jackie Robinson when the Governor of New York sent Jackie Robinson to Buffalo, New York after a civil insurrection to calm the minority community.
Not only was he booed, but some activists actually tossed baseballs around the gym where the meeting was held, yelling, “Jackie, remember this!”
Jackie did remember the baseballs of course, just as he remembered the hated n word in the Army but the baseball was not an adequate tool for the cosmic change Tennessee Williams hoped for from the mythic baseball player. Williams used an innovative device in his play, Camino Real where the actors walked among the audience, thus making them an integral part of the play. Our
sports figures with a few notable exceptions have not done this.
Another poet of Tennessee Williams’ generation, Margaret Walker called for a more unified cosmic cataclysm in her poem, “For My People” when she calls for not one solitary mythic figure, but for a new race defined as helping to:
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky.
Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; Let a people loving freedom come to growth.
In sixty years, we are more than the second generation to be held accountable for the decline in employment by blacks even in major league baseball-from 28 percent in the mid-1970’s to 8 percent in 2006. Some commentators have even blamed the popularity of Nintendo games and the like on the failure of young men with athletic potential to develop themselves on the playing fields.
But beyond the baseball diamonds, our community is at critical risk in acquiring the tools Fanon speaks of for survival and progress. The storm that devastated New Orleans in 2005 is only part of the conflagration of scientific, political, economic, cultural, and social changes that highlight the dwindling numbers of blacks who seek the engineering and scientific training which might have prevented or ameliorated Hurricane Katrina.
The poet and dramatist Aime Cesaire of Martinique wrote of slavery’s
travail as “the men they took away knew how to build houses, govern empires, erect cities,cultivate fields, mine for metals, weave cotton, forge steel. Their religion had its own beauty, based on mystical connections with the founder of the city. Their customs were pleasing, built on unity, kindness, respect for age.”
What our times need now is not a dark arm hanging over the edge of infinity, but an enlightened consciousness, free to dream, to design ,to plan, to build. We must claim the grandmother left to rot in a wheelchair for days after Katrina’s ravages and the government’s neglect as our earth goddess. Tennessee Williams had his starry night; we must have sunrises.
