Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  The four spent a lot of time together, and often May would play the piano while Paul sang. As Frankie recalled sixty-five years later, he “had a beautiful, wondrous voice,” though in May’s opinion an “undisciplined” one, and they pressed him to seek training and to find more opportunities for singing in public. May’s struggling mother had somehow managed to buy her a piano, and Paul would practice at her apartment, with May accompanying him—“the lyric type of song, something between opera and the spirituals, the popular song ‘Oh Danny Boy’ and things of that sort.” May’s mother let her travel locally with Paul to play for him at the small recitals he began to give in churches, schools, and the private homes of wealthy whites. Occasionally the guest list was racially mixed, but even then, spirituals were not in demand; as Chinn later put it, “The cultured, well-educated Negro in many incidents asked us not to sing the spirituals in audiences in which there would be white people,” because they “brought us down” to the level of “the slave people” among whom the songs had originated, and confirmed whites in their assumption that the spirituals “were the only thing in music we could do.”5

  On one of their trips outside of the city, Paul spent all his money buying the two of them dinner on the train; fortunately, May’s mother had given her emergency carfare, and their New Jersey hostess loaned Paul his—an episode, in May’s opinion, typical of Paul, of his generosity, his “very gentle, very gracious” nature, his “vagueness about time and money: the material things didn’t mean anything to him.” Spontaneity was part of Paul’s good nature. Accidentally running into Frankie on the street one day, he talked her into going up to New Haven with him that same afternoon to see the Yale-Harvard football game. Though afraid she might lose her job (she didn’t), Frankie let his enthusiasm catch her up, and the two spent an “exciting” day—she was astonished at how many people in the stadium recognized and greeted Paul.6

  Robeson’s Rutgers coach, Foster Sanford, helped to pay his law-school tuition in return for Paul’s traveling to New Jersey every Saturday morning to tutor Sanford, Jr., in Latin. To augment his income further—and in part for love of the sport—Paul continued his football career after graduating. He helped coach at Lincoln University with Fritz Pollard, the black All-American halfback from Brown; he joined the Columbia scrub-team practice against its varsity; and he played professional football for Frank Nied’s Akron Pros and for the Milwaukee Badgers. The Pros, with Pollard and Robeson on the 1920–21 teams, had an unbeaten streak of eighteen games, and while on “Bo” McMillan’s Badgers squad in 1922 Robeson scored both touchdowns before seventy-five hundred fans in the famed 13–0 duel with Jim Thorpe’s Oorang Indians. Akron, a factory town employing many white Southern migrants, was known for its overt, unapologetic racism. Fritz Pollard later remembered the raucous boos of the fans, the inability to get a hotel room or a meal in a restaurant, and the need to dress for games in Frank Nied’s cigar factory. According to another legendary black player, James Milo (“Ink”) Williams, who “had the pleasure of playing with Robeson and the displeasure of playing against him,” their relationship with white players was “very poor in some instances.” Sitting in a hotel in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Williams and Pollard were “paged out of the dining room,” then taken to the office and told, “We don’t allow colored people to eat in our hotel.” In Canton, Ohio, seated with some white players, Williams was allowed to go on eating—the management simply put a screen around the table. If nothing else, the money was good—as much as a thousand dollars a game, which was top dollar in professional football in the 1920s.7

  During one game Robeson sustained a serious injury to his thigh muscle and was rushed to New York’s Presbyterian Hospital for an emergency operation. Henry A. Murray, the young assistant surgeon on duty (and later known as a pioneer in motivational theory), recalled sixty-five years later that he had been astounded at the extent of the injury—“what was exposed when you looked in there was a great cavern, a hole like an excavation”—and the difficult operation became “a surgical event,” the talk of the hospital. The operation was a success, but Robeson had to remain at Presbyterian for several weeks in severe pain. Harry Murray became immensely taken with his patient (“He was like a king, of an ancient civilization, as it were; he had a posture and a look and a presence that were absolutely unforgettable”), and he hit on an idea for making Paul’s convalescence more pleasant. Murray had gotten to know and like a young black woman, Eslanda Goode, who was working as a pathology technician in the surgery lab, and he decided to take her to Robeson’s bedside for an introduction. What Murray didn’t know was that Essie had previously spotted Paul on their mutual rounds of Harlem parties, had met him casually, and had been looking for a chance to extend the relationship.8

  Eslanda Cardozo Goode, called by everyone “Essie,” came from distinguished lineage of mixed racial stock. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Nuñez Cardozo, came from a Spanish-Jewish family of considerable wealth that had emigrated to America in the late eighteenth century. He fell in love with an octoroon slave in Charleston, South Carolina, and married her, though maintaining the fiction—since state law forbade intermarriage—that she was his mistress, an alliance considered socially acceptable.9

  Essie’s grandfather Francis Lewis Cardozo, one of six children of that union, graduated from the University of Glasgow and became pastor of a Congregational church in New Haven. Referred to after the Civil War by Henry Ward Beecher as “the most highly educated Negro in America,” Reverend Cardozo, through the American Missionary Association (the most important of the organizations assisting the freedmen), was granted ten thousand dollars to establish a secondary school for blacks in Charleston—which became the famed Avery Institute. Cardozo appealed to the South Carolina legislature for the right to enroll white as well as black children, but was turned down.

  Within a few years Cardozo became a prominent racial spokesman and entered state politics. In 1868 he was elected treasurer of South Carolina for two terms, then secretary of state for one, before resuming the office of state treasurer. But his burgeoning career was abruptly halted during the presidential election of 1877. Refusing to abandon the party of Lincoln, and ignoring both physical threats and attempts to bribe him, Cardozo worked strenuously to hold the black vote for the Republican candidate, Hayes. When the latter squeaked into office in a contested (and probably fraudulent) vote count, the state’s Democratic leaders indicted Cardozo for embezzlement and jailed him.

  Cardozo refused to plead guilty in exchange for a pardon, and only a public campaign in his behalf, and the election of a new governor in South Carolina, finally secured his freedom a year later. President Hayes received him in Washington and, as a token of gratitude for his support during the campaign, offered him a janitorial job in the Treasury Department building. When the scholar-statesman refused it, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts secured him a clerkship. In 1878 he accepted an offer from a committee of prominent black citizens to take charge of the black high school, and in that post he again fought—again unsuccessfully—against segregation.

  Cardozo was ahead of his time not only as an educator and a civil-rights activist, but also in encouraging strength of mind in women. His daughter Eslanda (mother to Essie—there was an Eslanda in every generation) was her father’s great companion and under his tutelage developed into a forceful, independent, and (so her legion of detractors claim) imperious woman, whom some members of the family nicknamed Queen Victoria. Beautiful as well as clever, the light-skinned Eslanda was popular in Washington’s fashionable black circles. That is, until she announced in 1890 that she would marry a dark-skinned War Department clerk named John Goode, who had a degree from Northwestern. Black society expressed its shock: “Essie Cardozo has married a dark man; her children will be dark.”

  Two of them, John and Frank, were. The third and youngest, Eslanda, like her mother, had cream-colored skin, black hair, and Mediterranean features—with a slightly Oriental look around the eyes
that gave her the overall aura of being a foreigner rather than a black. When Essie was only four, John Goode, Sr., died from alcoholism, leaving his family nearly without means. Ma Goode, as Essie’s mother was called, attacked the problem of earning money, as her daughter later wrote, with an “almost masculine intelligence.” She had taught before marriage, but that option was now closed, because married women were not welcome in the schools. The genteel female trades of dressmaking and millinery did not appeal to her. Finally, she decided to take up beauty culture, and did so with characteristic vigor.

  Passing as white, Ma Goode investigated the best beauty shops in Washington, found them “old-fashioned” and “unhygienic,” and decided to move her family to New York so she could study “the latest and most scientific methods.” There she learned osteopathy from a physician, conferred with chemists about creams and lotions, read the scientific literature in the medical library, put her combined knowledge into the formulation of her own system, opened a private practice at high fees, and promptly became a success, attracting a wide clientele that included wealthy society figures like Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer and Mrs. George Gould.

  With energy to spare, Eslanda Goode closely supervised her children’s lives. She would hear their daily lessons and, if monthly report cards were good, treated the children to theater or gave them a party. Almost every Saturday night the family played whist together (for money, a family tradition), mother and daughter against the brothers, the two Eslandas (in the daughter’s words) fighting “hard to score a feminine victory.” Essie went everywhere with her brothers, playing almost exclusively with them and other boys. (“I was freed from the usual inter-sex diffidence.… Man, as man, has never made me have dizzy spells, and spots before my eyes.”) When her mother asked her why she didn’t play with girls, the self-styled “tomboy” impatiently answered, “Oh, who wants to sit on the steps all afternoon and giggle and whisper and play jacks?” When, at age nine, Essie was enrolled for swimming instruction with a lifeguard at Asbury Park, he canceled after the first lesson: Essie had asked to learn how to dive, her apprehensive coach had reluctantly obliged by placing her on a wooden piling to watch him demonstrate the proper technique—and she had impatiently jumped straightaway into the deep water in imitation, giving him a thorough scare.10

  In 1912 Ma Goode took over a beauty shop in Chicago, and Essie finished high school there, graduating at the age of sixteen. Placing third on the statewide competitive exams, she won a full four-year scholarship, tuition-free, to the University of Illinois. Aminda Badeau (later Mrs. Roy Wilkins) remembers that, when she moved into the rooming house Essie had just vacated, the landlady bored her by endlessly singing Essie’s praises as “the ideal young woman.” Essie registered at the university in domestic science but soon discovered it was the science part she cared about and became a chemistry major. Deciding she wanted to work in a lab in New York City, thinking she might eventually become a doctor, she transferred to Columbia for her senior year. On graduating in 1917, she accepted an offer as histological chemist at Presbyterian Hospital, becoming the first black employed there in a staff capacity (though the hospital did enjoy a good reputation among black patients for its comparative lack of racial prejudice). She liked to describe herself as “a girl scientist, working in a great white institution,” but her job consisted primarily of preparing tissue slides for pathological diagnosis, with no authority to make diagnoses herself.11

  When the young surgical intern Harry Murray met Essie at Presbyterian in 1920, he was immediately struck by her quick intelligence, her energy and spunk, her “definitely English” air, her superb efficiency (at times “too efficient, too officious, too bossy”)—and her beauty. “Well, now, Paul, you really have to see what we have in this hospital,” he enthusiastically told the convalescent; “I very much praised her,” he remembers, though “I’d known her just a few months.” When the two took to each other, Murray became “empathically romantic,” even while realizing that the match might not be one made in heaven—depending on whether one believes happiness in a union hinges on the similarity (rather than the complementarity) of the partners. Paul, in Murray’s opinion, “gave a definite impression of being natural,” while Essie “was contriving. He let things happen, and she tried to make them happen.” He seemed “like a Billy Budd”; her essence was that of an “impresario”—the “innocent” versus the calculator. Murray considered Paul deeply sensuous, whereas “there wasn’t much sensuousness” about the practical-minded Essie (“In a symposium on achievement versus love, she’s on the side of achievement—Paul would be very strong in both of them”). Where he was genuinely warm, she was merely effusive. Paul was interior, self-referring; Essie was more studied and more superficial, concerned with accoutrements and acclaim. Where she was “obvious,” meticulous, and purposeful, he was laid back, affable, self-contained—“It was all in the manner. He’s not an unnecessary duplicate. He’s a unique, separate, superior man.… A person could buy everything that Essie had, and couldn’t buy anything that Paul had. He had something that’s inside.”12

  Essie, like Murray, saw essential differences in temperament between herself and Paul, but regarded them as complementary, rather than as sources of potential antagonism. Ten years later, during a time of hurt and alienation, she expanded on her view of those differences in emphatic, even exaggerated detail:

  His education was literary, classical, mine was entirely scientific; his temperament was artistic, mine strictly practical; he is vague, I am definite; he is social, casual, I am not; he is leisurely, lazy, I am quick and energetic.… [He is] genial, easily imposed upon, mildly interested in everybody and very impractical; Essie [is] pleasant to a few people, affectionately and deeply devoted to a very few, and entirely unaware that anybody else existed; she [is] mildly tactful, but if there [is] the faintest suggestion that anyone was to impose on her she [is] distinctly rude.… It is doubtful if Paul could be rude or say no to anyone; Essie could relish being rude to anyone who deserved it.… He likes late hours, I am an early bird; he likes irregular meals, they are the bane of my life; he likes leaving things to chance, I like making everything as certain as possible; he is not ambitious, altho once having undertaken a thing he is never content until he accomplishes it as perfectly as possible; I am essentially and aggressively ambitious, I like to undertake things.”13

  Those words, written in the early 1930s, were designed to rationalize and lessen the pain of a separation which then loomed, its immediate anguish heightening the dichotomies in Essie’s description. Still, the personality differences between Paul and Essie were marked and obvious from the beginning—though at the time Essie saw them as essential ingredients of their mutual attraction, “wonderfully ideal complements” for a shared partnership designed (in Essie’s phrase) for “shooting the rapids.”14

  Their courtship did not proceed rapidly, although Essie, who was essentially guiding it, did her best to pilot a straight course. She knew what she wanted, he was ambivalent; as she proved all her life, Essie was a systematic and shrewd strategist, clever enough to recognize when caution was called for. Robeson was besieged by attractive young women who had set their caps for him—part of the appeal of Gerry and Frankie, perhaps, was that they had not. Essie (in her own words) “applied her brains to this problem exactly as she applied them to her problems in chemistry; she surveyed the situation as a whole, decided upon a course of action and pursued it religiously.” She arranged her dinner hour at the “Y” to coincide with his. She was careful to wear her most attractive clothes if she thought she might run into him. She saw to it that they would “happen” to walk home together from the university, and would meet frequently at Harlem parties. She took care to be well informed about matters that interested him—sports especially; he was surprised and charmed by her knowledge of the comparative strengths of big-league baseball teams, her predictions about the outcome of intercollegiate football games, her attendance at Forest Hills tennis matches, her own
skill at swimming, basketball, and ice skating.

  By the winter of 1920–21 they were spending long evenings together discussing the law cases he was studying, or the chemistry of nutrition. “She would explain to him what became of the protein and carbohydrates he ate” and the anatomy of the body’s muscles and bones—“as an athlete he was greatly interested.” Their contrasting habits of mind and temperament produced “deliciously” heated arguments, made more “thrilling” still because (according to Essie) they managed to reach “the same conclusion by widely different paths,” usually discovering they “liked the same plays, books, people.” As they became more intimate, Essie took care (so she later, unconvincingly, claimed) “to keep the rapidly growing friendship well outside the danger zone of sex”; knowing that Paul and Bud Fisher had been “sowing their wild oats,” she wanted “this particular friendship” to be “a little different from his others.”

  From Essie’s perspective, matters proceeded smoothly until the summer of 1921, when Paul stopped coming around with the same frequency. Hurt at his neglect and ascribing it to the sudden appearance at the Columbia Summer School of “some very attractive girls” who “began to vamp Paul first in fun and then rather seriously,” Essie decided, with “common sense and directness,” to fight fire with fire. She “resorted to the old game”—meaning she began being seen around with a young man named Grant Lucas, and made a conspicuous public display of her apparent interest in him. Due notice was taken; Essie’s new attachment (so she later claimed) became the talk of their crowd and within a month a contrite Paul appeared at her door to say he had come to his senses, had been made to realize how much he loved her, and had decided to propose marriage.