Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  Such, at least, was Essie’s version of the culmination of their courtship. Possibly it represented all that she knew at the time, more likely all that she was willing to admit. Throughout her year-long campaign to snare Paul, he was apparently playing his own, more concealed game, and was far from being a mere dupe in her plot. Essie liked to think of herself as an irresistibly clever manipulator, but in fact her studied moves were entirely readable. Paul, by contrast, rarely tipped his hand. His easygoing affability served to conceal the actual intricacy of his personality—indeed, encouraged the view that he was merely good-natured. Yet, if Essie could noisily connive, Paul could laconically dissemble, his moves far less detectable than hers. Possibly, in the end, she did force his hand—not by seeing another man but by telling Paul that she was pregnant with his child. In later years he came to believe, or claimed to believe, that he had been tricked into marriage, yet finally the evidence for believing that Essie had resorted to the ruse of a pregnancy is not impressive, let alone conclusive. Besides, nothing in the passionate (and believable) love letters the two exchanged in the first few years of their marriage suggests that they had decided to wed in the summer of 1921 for any essential reason other than love, however much Essie may have plotted its course and outcome and however convoluted were some of the twists and turns it took.15

  It’s unlikely Essie knew all the convolutions afoot. Paul had given up seeing Frankie after meeting Essie, but his deeper attachment to Gerry Neale had not only continued but, if anything, intensified. Indeed, the impulsive proposal of marriage to Essie in August 1921 may have resulted not from her calculations but, rather, from Gerry’s.16

  In the fall of 1919, Gerry had gone to Atlantic City to teach mentally retarded children. She and Paul corresponded and occasionally he visited her. During her second year there—by this time Paul was seeing Essie—Gerry decided to enroll at Howard University to work toward a degree. Before beginning classes, she returned home to Freehold, New Jersey, for the summer—the same summer that “something happened” (in Essie’s words) to deflect Paul’s attention. That “something” was Gerry.

  In August, Paul went to see her at Freehold, shortly before she was due to leave for Howard University. They talked all day and into the night, and Paul again asked Gerry to marry him. She told him she “was going to have a career and probably might not marry.” They discussed Essie briefly. Paul said Essie wanted to marry him, and that he “admired” her, thought her “bright and capable.” Mutual friends had already filled Gerry in, telling her that Essie was “brilliant, well educated, successful in her work, aggressive, sophisticated, knew the ways of the world,” loved Paul very much—and, yes, they said, “was determined to marry him.” Gerry’s one direct contact with Essie had been favorable. At a fraternity dance in New York, they had “exchanged pleasantries” and Gerry had seen her do something that she thought boded well for Paul’s future: the weather that night was foul, and Essie had gone out in the sleet to find a cab for herself and Paul, leaving him inside the building. The gesture impressed Gerry; she felt Essie was taking the needed precautions “to protect Paul’s voice”—and was “devoted” enough “to defy convention.” That night in Freehold, Gerry conveyed her favorable impression of Essie to Paul. He returned to New York.17

  Essie’s account picks up the story. Early on the morning of August 17, 1921, she answered the doorbell to find a “somewhat disheveled” Paul standing there. He said he’d been thinking about “how much he liked her and what a great pal she was” and had realized, after she started to see someone else, “that he was very much in love with her.” “He suggested quite simply that they go out and get married that day.” Essie “pinched herself” and “with a wildly beating heart calmly told him” that she thought marriage “was an excellent idea.” Since Paul still had to finish law school and such a precipitate step might be difficult to explain to their families, they decided not to go to City Hall (since all licenses obtained there were announced the following day in the newspapers). Instead, they headed up to Greenwich, Connecticut, the usual destination for elopers in those days, stopping to pick up Hattie Boiling, Essie’s close friend, in case they should need a witness. Told in Greenwich that as out-of-state residents they would have to wait five days, they headed dejectedly back to New York on the interurban streetcar. As they passed through one village, Paul spotted a “Town Clerk” sign, and off they jumped at Portchester, where, thanks to New York State laws, they were married in fifteen minutes.18

  Back in the city, they continued their previous bachelor living arrangements. Paul went on sharing a flat with Jimmy Lightfoot, and Essie went on sharing a studio apartment on Striver’s Row with her lifelong friend and confidante, Minnie Sumner, a good-natured, tough-minded, dark-skinned young woman who had begun to make her way as a “modiste.” When Lightfoot was out of town with his band, Paul and Essie had that place to themselves. When Lightfoot was in town, Essie and Minnie would have Paul over for dinner (Minnie doing most of the cooking), along with a young lawyer recently arrived in the city in whom Minnie was deeply interested (and would briefly marry), William L. Patterson (“Pat”), a future leader of the Communist Party and in later years a close associate of Robeson’s. After dinner the four would play whist, which Paul at first disliked. Essie persuaded herself that she eventually managed to interest him in the game by inviting in “another young man to make a fourth,” while Paul sat by and studied—an arrangement he “soon tired” of.19

  Essie took credit for persuading Paul to continue in law school, while she returned to her $150-a-month job at the Presbyterian lab, abandoning thoughts of a career in medicine. Though “uncomfortable about his wife working,” Paul agreed reluctantly. By December they decided to make their marriage public, choosing for the occasion the national conventions (to which both were delegates) of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha (the oldest black fraternity in the country), and her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. Ma Goode was pleased with the news, but Paul’s family, scarcely knowing Essie, gave only guarded approval. (Earlier, Paul’s brother Ben had counseled him against marrying Essie; she somehow saw that letter and held it against Ben ever after.) Essie had embossed announcement cards printed at Altman’s and sent them out to friends. The couple moved into the top floor of a private house, which they furnished with wedding presents and purchases on installment.20

  Married life now began in earnest—and its adjustments. With her usual systematic agenda, Essie set about to make “the best and most” of her husband. Since he was already “the sweetest, most intelligent, most gifted and attractive man” she had ever known, she proceeded to implement the needed minor improvements; Essie’s attitude toward him, one of her relatives later said, was that “this great handsome hulk of man needs me to refine him.” First she “solved” the problem of his appearance. He didn’t seem to care about clothes and would absent-mindedly wear the same ones until they wore out, when he would buy new ones—giving him, toward the end of the cycle, a somewhat “untidy” look. Similarly, he would go into an ordinary shoe store, purchase the largest-size shoes in stock, which never proved large enough, and complain vaguely that they cramped his feet. With characteristic thoroughness, Essie set matters right. She went through most of the men’s shops in New York until she finally learned that Wallach’s and Rogers Peet carried the best selection of extra-large clothing and John Ward stocked size 12½ shoes. She purchased only “lovely and becoming colors”; people told Paul he was “growing handsome,” and he pronounced Essie “a miracle worker.” She had somewhat less success adjusting their conflicting timetables. Essie’s clock ran from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Paul’s from noon to 3:00 a.m. She “thought it rather wicked laziness” to sleep after eight in the morning and persuaded Paul to try getting up earlier. He did his best, only to wander around in a daze, kiss her goodbye blindly—and go back to bed. Even Essie could occasionally acknowledge defeat. She relented, calling off at least one of her campaigns.

  Their life was bus
y. Essie worked daily at Presbyterian Hospital; Paul shuttled between full-time law school, part-time athletics, and occasional singing engagements or public appearances (among them a “seat of honor” at the Columbia senior-class dinner at the Hotel Astor). Evenings, they saw an ever-widening circle of friends—Minnie and Pat, Hattie and Buddy Boiling, Essie’s old friend Corinne Cook and her new husband, Louis Wright, the brilliant young physician and civil-rights activist who became the Robeson family doctor. Occasionally there would be a trip to one of the cellar cabarets, like Eddie’s, that were springing up all over Harlem, or a boat-ride excursion up the Hudson. But for the first year of their marriage, the Robesons were essentially a struggling, upwardly mobile young couple, “primarily concerned with ourselves,” as Essie later wrote, “with our own future,” not yet at the glamorous epicenter of the Harlem literary renaissance or its burgeoning racial politics.21

  Back in 1920 Paul had become involved with the Amateur Players, a group of Afro-American students who banded together under the direction of Dora Cole Norman, sister of Bob Cole (one of the great forces in turn-of-the-century black theater). The Players wanted to “attempt to produce plays of their race,” a goal that led Mrs. Norman to stage a revival at the Harlem YWCA of Ridgely Torrence’s drama Simon the Cyrenian, the story of the black man who was Jesus’s cross-bearer. She had finally prevailed on a reluctant Paul to play the leading role of Simon; according to an account he gave to a newspaper six years later, his apartment was next to the rehearsal hall and the Players would “waylay him and dragged him in whenever he passed,” until he “gave up the fight.”22

  Paul treated the show as a lark, but several whites influential in the theater happened to catch his performance, were impressed, and subsequently recommended him for his first professional role, the lead in a play about voodoo entitled Taboo. It was the initial writing effort of Mary Hoyt Wiborg, the fashionable young white socialite “Hoytie,” daughter of wealthy financier Frank Wiborg, and sister to Sara (wife of Gerald Murphy of Lost Generation fame). The melodramatic plot of Taboo centers on a plantation in antebellum Louisiana. Severe drought conditions threaten the crop, and some of the superstitious plantation slaves, blaming the lack of rain on “a curse” placed on the mistress’s mute grandchild, decide to sacrifice the boy. A wandering minstrel, Jim—the part offered Robeson—intervenes, and after several hundred turns in the plot, including an African flashback in which Jim transmogrifies into a voodoo king, rainfall descends at the crucial moment and all ends happily.23

  Paul was again inclined to refuse the part, preferring to concentrate on law school, but Essie, with Dora Cole Norman backing her up, kept at him. After much discussion, and having determined he could continue his law studies simultaneously, Paul agreed to take on the role: “I knew little of what I was doing, but I was urged to go ahead and try.” The production, at the Sam Harris Theater, was an elaborate one. The great black actor Charles Gilpin helped to coach the cast; Augustin Duncan, Isadora’s brother, directed; the famed Clef Club Orchestra accompanied; and Margaret Wycherly, most recently associated with the Provincetown Players, starred opposite Robeson. The major critics saw little merit in the play, and nearly as little in the performances. Robert Benchley in Life roasted the playwright, and Alexander Woollcott in The New York Times roasted the star (Wycherly “gave a monstrously stagy and sepulchral performance”). Robeson’s press was generally positive—he “dominates the play,” his voice is “rich, mellow”—but Woollcott, though impressed with Robeson’s strong presence, advised him that he belonged almost anywhere but on a stage. (Having met Robeson during the play’s run, Woollcott later wrote, “I never in my life saw anyone so quietly sure, by some inner knowledge, that he was going somewhere.…”) Wycherly immediately gave notice, and the production came to an abrupt end after four matinee performances.24

  Hoytie Wiborg was not discouraged. She had the financial resources and theatrical contacts to back up her self-confidence, and within two months of Taboo’s closing in New York had arranged for a production in London. It was to star none other than Mrs. Patrick Campbell, one of the legendary figures of the English stage, who had often stayed at Hoytie’s Fifth Avenue home and was given to doing favors for her amateur-playwright friends. Hoytie offered Robeson the chance to re-create his role opposite Mrs. Pat.25

  He hesitated, but Essie had begun “to set her mind and heart” on encouraging Paul to explore his singing and acting skills further, with a serious eye toward a career in theater as an alternative, or at the least a supplement, to law. She had sat in on every rehearsal of Taboo, carefully going over her performance notes with him, buying them tickets to more and more New York shows, and herself becoming convinced that his race would be less of a hindrance to a distinguished career in the theater than in the law, where at best he was likely to end up, after years of struggle, with “a small political job” or “a good and remunerative practice.” Neither prospect, she decided, would be sufficient reward for her husband’s extraordinary gifts. Essie was ambitious for something far more spectacular than mere security.26

  The young black singer Harold Browning further helped to nudge Robeson toward a career in the theater. Browning was a member and the manager of The Four Harmony Kings, a black quartet then playing in the Broadway smash Shuffle Along, the epochal musical that had opened in the summer of 1921—the first entirely black production since the memorable early-twentieth-century contributions by Will Marion Cook, Bob Cole, Bert Williams, and George Walker. When the bass singer of the Harmony Kings unexpectedly left, the quartet’s job in Shuffle Along was put in jeopardy. A chance encounter on the street between Harold Browning and Robeson, who had just closed in Taboo and finished his second-year law-school exams, led to Robeson’s being hired as the bass replacement. After one day of rehearsal, he joined the cast of Shuffle Along.27

  His debut performance got off to a shaky start. Jauntily balancing his smart new straw hat and cane, preoccupied with the excitement of the night, Paul tripped over a board while bending to get through the narrow door leading onstage—and nearly fell. Essie, sitting in the audience, “closed her eyes in horror,” fearing Paul had stumbled onstage with such force that he had knocked down the three other quartet members “like ninepins.” When she opened her eyes, all four were smilingly erect and singing lustily—Paul’s trained body had instantly recovered itself. Eubie Blake, the show’s composer and conductor, later recalled that for an instant he feared the huge new “King” was going to fall right into the orchestra pit. “That boy will bear watching,” Eubie said; “anybody who can nearly fall like that and come up with a million-dollar smile has got some personality!” For toppers, Paul’s solo rendition of “Old Black Joe” brought down the house. With the omens so auspicious, he decided to accept Hoytie Wiborg’s offer to go to England with Taboo.28

  But first he took the occasion of a recital in Washington, D.C., to pay a visit to Gerry Neale at Howard University. According to Gerry’s recollection many years later, Paul’s visit was unexpected. A call came into the women’s dormitory saying a guest was waiting to see her in the reception room. It was Paul. “I was glad to see him. We talked about where his career was going and about what I was doing.” To her surprise, he returned the next day. “I somehow shortened the conversation and would not let it get personal.” The following evening a friend persuaded Gerry to go to a YWCA dance. “Who was there as big as life but Paul … and we danced and talked and danced and talked. He said he believed Essie wanted him to be happy and he was sure she would give him a divorce if I would promise to marry him. I mustered the strength and resolve to say to him that he must go back and work hard to make his marriage work. We said goodbye again.”29

  Paul still wasn’t ready to give up, even though Gerry told him she was seriously dating Harry Bledsoe and even though her beau made it clear, when he heard of Robeson’s visit to the campus, that “he would be no part of an eternal triangle.” In 1924, after graduating from Howard, Gerry and Bledsoe d
id marry, although, like Essie and Paul earlier, they kept it a secret. Bledsoe went to Detroit to complete his last year of law school, and Gerry went to Bordentown, New Jersey, to teach in the Industrial and Training School. During that year, Paul came to give a concert at the school, and Gerry attended. They talked briefly at the reception, not having seen each other since his visit to Howard. The next day, after assuming Paul had returned to New York, Gerry got a call from the principal’s wife asking her to come to their home. Paul was there. When the two were left alone, they “talked and talked” and Gerry again said “he must make his marriage work.” Unnerved at his persistence, she decided it was time to send out a formal wedding announcement—and included Paul and Essie on the list. “He wrote me a heartbreak letter saying, How could I do this to him? Why had I not waited?” By now—if not earlier—Essie was aware of Paul’s continuing involvement. When their paths twice crossed with Gerry, at a party and a dance in December 1924, Essie confided to her diary that Paul had been “too attentive” to Gerry, “vamping her before my very eyes”—“Paul not loyal to me for first time.” Thereafter—whether because of Essie’s feelings or her intervention is unknown—the involvement did finally cool. Once in a great while in later years, Paul and Gerry renewed contact, their passion by then having distilled into cordiality.30

  CHAPTER 4

  Provincetown Playhouse

  (1922–1924)

  Paul sailed for England in July 1922 aboard the S.S. Homeric. The tentative plan was for him to test the waters and, if the temperature seemed inviting, to send for Essie; if not, to return to the States and rejoin The Harmony Kings; and in either case to return in the fall to complete his last year in law school. On the eve of his departure, Essie took ill and her doctor said an immediate operation for adhesions from an old appendectomy was needed. She kept the news from Paul, not wanting to “worry him to death” and “spoil his work and his trip.” At the pier Essie gaily bade him goodbye, postdated twenty-one letters to him, arranged for friends to mail them off at intervals, sent him a cheery cable at sea—and checked herself into Presbyterian Hospital.1