Stealing Home

The Story

In so many ways, Sharon Robinson's childhood in the 1950s was typical of the privileged suburb where she grew up - the apple of her father's eye, she went on shopping trips to New York to pick out expensive party dresses, lived in a beautiful home in Connecticut, joined exclusive social clubs, even had a pony. However, in at least one important respect, her life was utterly extraordinary: Her father was the great Jackie Robinson, the man who broke the color barrier in baseball. Stealing Home is her story of growing up in the shadow of a hero, and it offers a remarkable portrait of an African-American family who embodied the American Dream of the 1950s. This is also the story of a man who changed the world, and of the true complexity underneath the superficial perfection of the family immortalized in the pages of Life magazine. Sharon reveals how even the Robinsons weren't able to buy a house in the exclusive Connecticut suburbs without the intervention of white friends, and the often painful alienation of living in two worlds, black and white. Candid and loving, Sharon writes of her father's tireless work for civil rights, as well as his seemingly contradictory political associations and his eventual disillusionment with a system that used him for its own purposes. She also describes the anguish of her older brother, struggling under the weight of being 'Jackie Jr., ' who sought escape first in the army, then in heroin addiction. And finally she tells her own story: how, like so many women of her generation, she left her father's home for her new husband's, only to find that somewhere along the way she had lost her own identity.