Testing the Ice

Written by the daughter of baseball legend, Jackie Robinson, Testing the Ice tells the story of how Jackie Robinson routinely put himself in danger to "test the ice" for others, making sure that they could safely go about their lives.  He did this most famously by breaking the race barrier, integrating Major League Baseball.

This famous story is retold in part.  One day, Dodgers General Manager, Branch Rickey, approached Robinson, with an offer to join the team.  Rickey warned Jackie that integrating into MLB would require a lot of determination, long suffering, and courage.  These things he had.  Sharon Robinson rehearses the well known manifestation of these virtues (his MLB career), but then tells a heartwarming true story of how Jackie displayed these same character traits as a watchful father.

This story is set, decades removed from Jackie's early baseball career.  Jackie's children gather with friends (both black and white) at their comfortable lake house, listening wide eyed to stories of this walking legend.  The children regularly bounce from Jackie's trophy room to playing in the lake.  Jackie never joins them because he doesn't know how to swim and is scared of the water.  One winter day, the children beg to go out and skate on the ice.  Wanting to ensure that they are safe, a much heavier Jackie ventures out carefully onto the ice, testing its strength, putting himself in danger to make sure that others are safe.

Not only does Sharon Robinson share a beautiful childhood memory, but she creates a wonderful metaphor for breaking the color barrier. As she said in an interview on National Public Radio, "[This story] so perfectly defines Jackie Robinson the athlete, Jackie Robinson the husband, the father, the loving, the courageous, the caring... I wanted children to understand the totality of this man and how consistent he was in both his public persona and his personal one."


Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=hCBoskYx3Is&app=desktop
http://atyourlibrary.org/sports/author-sharon-robinson-champions-legacy-her-father-jackie
http://www.sharonrobinsonink.com/books/
http://www.sharonrobinsonink.com/media/