Taking a Fresh Look at Jackie Robinson

One life can tell many stories.

Examined with a wide lens and then up close in microscopic detail, what emerges is a multi-view: A story of weddings and deaths, first loves and personal victories. A story of wars and riots and marches, of time and place.

“It would be a mistake to try to understand history simply through individual men and women,” said biographer Arnold Rampersad. “However, there is something about a biography that is a wonderful way of transmitting history.”

Fifty years after Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball and nearly 25 years after his death, Rampersad’s “Jackie Robinson: A Biography” has been praised as a meticulously complete telling of Robinson’s life.

Rampersad, a professor of literature at Princeton University, will discuss his newest book Thursday at 5:30 p.m. in Kerckhoff Hall on the campus of UCLA, where Robinson was a star athlete.

Other biographies of Robinson “have primarily dealt with the public person and the athlete,” said Robinson’s widow, Rachel, who asked Rampersad to write the book. “For me it was imperative that the [writer] be able and willing to think of the total person.”

The biography is the latest evidence of Rampersad’s skill in tackling the legacies of complicated figures, said Richard Yarborough, of UCLA’s Center for African American Studies.

“His responsibility in handling this material has made him probably the leading biographer in African American studies,” Yarborough said.

But how does one go about the work of telling another’s life, moving a man from symbol to father, husband, friend?

“It’s always hard to imagine a life,” Rampersad said. “You can’t really reproduce the life exactly, but you try to capture the essence. You capture it in the way you tell the story, bringing out the facts, the unknown or ignored aspects of the life. Finally it’s a literary enterprise and you’ve got to write well in order to tell the story well.”

The Robinson biography took three years to complete and involved scores of interviews and long hours poring over documents at the Jackie Robinson Foundation in New York. Rampersad was given personal letters that had never been viewed by a writer--or even some family members, said Rachel Robinson.

Rachel Robinson said her husband wrote her every day “when I was in college, and he sent me chocolates on Friday. I wanted Arnold to read them because it would give him some insight into that side of him, his enormous capacity to love.”

Robinson has been variously cast as victim or as an angry avenger--a man at times loathed by much of the public.

“He was a very religious person, made so by his mother, confirmed so by life,” Rampersad said. “He cared very deeply about his family. He had great concern about social justice and the fate of black Americans.”

Whether telling the story of Jackie Robinson, or Langston Hughes or Arthur Ashe, Rampersad takes the approach that every stage of life is important. He was asked to do each of his three biographies. Rachel Robinson approached him after reading his two-volume biography of Hughes.

“I was very impressed with the writing, the sensitivity and his understanding of the man,” she said.

Rampersad learned to love literature in his native Trinidad, amid the classics and the works of the then new Caribbean writers, poet and dramatist Derek Walcott, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, and V.S. Naipaul.

Rampersad’s father was a reporter and columnist for the Trinidad Guardian. His mother worked as a telephone operator.

“My parents were divorced when I was an infant,” he said. “And I grew up here and there.”

Beyond that, he is reticent to discuss his own personal history. But his literary life was influenced by a wide range of writers, from Edith Wharton’s biographer R.W.B. Lewis to pioneering African American intellectual W.E.B. Dubois.

“Dubois laid out most brilliantly the case for African American culture to be seen as . . . something having its own integrity and its own identity.”