Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  After receiving his degree in late February 1923, he let himself drift for a bit, not actively seeking a job. This worried Essie. “Lolling about” offended her style of brisk efficiency. She mistrusted introspection as a form of malingering, a self-indulgent substitute for action—which to her was a cure for thought rather than, as for Paul, the product of it. Essie was never sure anything would happen unless she went out there and made it happen. Paul, more secure in his sense of mission, of ultimate purpose, could afford to wait—a reflection of confidence, not (as Essie was prone to call it) “laziness.” Characteristically, she mistook surface appearances for the entire truth, equating Paul’s outer behavior with his inner attitude and missing, in her overattentiveness to words, the underlying message of his feelings. With someone as interior as Paul, this could result in fatal misunderstanding—in confusing equanimity with idling.

  His brother Ben, more cogently, realized that Paul had a habit of moving by “inner revelation,” had the ability to wait confidently until he felt his path had been illuminated and then “in a moment” to sense it and to “seize upon it with zest.” Until then he was as “stubborn as a mule. He simply does nothing. He will go for months just hanging on—temptation after temptation to violate his orders to wait may come, but he lingers. To the unspiritual soul this is laziness, hardheadedness, the height of folly. To him it is life, and peace and joy. He will tell you that all of the battles of his life have been and are waged at this center.” Following this intuitive process, Paul deflected a political-job offer from Tammany Hall, sensing it would bind him to the wrong kind of loyalties. By June, after three months of biding his time, he bent his instincts a bit and accepted work in a law office. “There are times,” his brother Ben wrote, in a veiled, disapproving allusion to Essie’s influence, “when for the sake of peace he is hurried into things.”16

  The offer came from Louis William Stotesbury, a Rutgers alumnus (class of 1890) and trustee and, at one point in his career, adjutant general for the state of New York, who had frequently lent a helping hand to the school’s graduating athletes. Still, the offer to Robeson was special: he would be the only black in the Stotesbury and Miner law office, secretarial staff included—and in a country where even the handful of Afro-American banks and insurance companies were loath to hire lawyers of their own race. The firm specialized in estates and was currently involved in litigation over Jay Gould’s will; Stotesbury assigned Robeson the job of preparing a brief for it.17

  He worked away diligently (indeed, when the Gould case came to trial, his brief was used) but not comfortably. His color (along with his prepossessing physique) made him a conspicuous presence in the office, and it was commented on, in unfriendly asides, from the first. After a few weeks, the covert mistreatment blossomed into open ugliness: when Robeson buzzed for a stenographer to take down a memorandum of law, she refused—“I never take dictation from a nigger,” she purportedly said, and walked out. Robeson took the matter to Stotesbury, who genuinely commiserated. The two men discussed the situation frankly and fully. Stotesbury expressed admiration for Robeson’s abilities but told him straight out that his prospects for a career in law were limited: the firm’s wealthy white clients were unlikely ever to agree to let him try a case before a judge, for fear his race would prove a detriment. Stotesbury said he might be willing to consider opening a Harlem branch of the office and put Robeson in charge of it, but Paul decided instead to resign. The profession of law, never that inviting, now seemed a decided dead end. (A decade later, after more reflection, Robeson concluded he could never have entered “any profession where the highest prizes were from the start denied to me.”) He never took the bar exam, never again practiced as a lawyer. He told Essie that, once more, he would “wait a little.… Something will turn up.” He had decided on a stubborn retreat to instinct, to hold himself inactive in the presence of things that did not interest him, to await an intuitive signal that some worthwhile opportunity was at hand.18

  He let himself drift through the fall of 1923—and then came alive. A note arrived, penciled in the margin of a form letter thanking Robeson for subscribing to the Provincetown Players, from its director, Kenneth Macgowan: “I want very much to talk with you about Eugene O’Neill’s new play, which we will give in February. Have you a phone?” The new play was All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Within two days an appointment had been set up. Bess Rockmore, an assistant to the Provincetown director (and the first wife of Robert Rockmore, later to become Robeson’s attorney and friend), was present when Paul first read for the Provincetown people. Sixty years later she recalled the impact he made: “All I remember is the audition—and this marvelous, incredible voice.… I can tell you, he was a most impressive personality. Even in those days, he was flabbergastingly impressive.… He was built so beautifully. He moved so gracefully. He was simply a very attractive man.… [There was] something unavoidably present about him.” Paul got the part.19

  The 1923–24 season at the Provincetown was the first under the new leadership of the “Triumvirate”—with Macgowan, O’Neill, and Robert Edmond Jones, the scenic designer, as associate directors. The three men took over from the original group of inspired amateurs headed by George Cram (“Jig”) Cook and his wife, the playwright Susan Glaspell, who had founded the Players but retired from the scene following protracted internal bickering that ranged from divisions over artistic purposes to disagreements on casting.20

  The Triumvirate planned to open with All God’s Chillun. To foster the entirely professional image at which the new regime aimed, the theater was freshly painted, the tiny stage enlarged, seats numbered for the first time, the “free list” for tickets curtailed, and eight-page playbills substituted for the colored sheets previously used. But Chillun had to be postponed briefly; a delay in the play’s publication in George Jean Nathan’s and H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury forced the Playhouse, because of O’Neill’s contract with Nathan, to await the published version in the magazine’s second issue, of February 1924, before producing the play. Paul and Essie now at least had time to mull over the printed version of Chillun as it appeared in the Mercury (they “reread and discussed it endlessly,” according to Essie, “profoundly impressed” with its “beauty”), and also the chance to see the Provincetown’s interim production of Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata (“Didn’t know what in hell it was all about,” Essie confessed in her diary, salty directness momentarily upstaging elegance—a shift in tone on call throughout her life).21

  When the Provincetown formally announced a spring production of Chillun, press commentary on the play began to build—and with it Paul’s notoriety. His period of “drift” gave way abruptly to intense activity. Suddenly he was in demand. A record company approached him. Raymond O’Neill of the Ethiopian Art Theater (organized in Chicago by O’Neill and Mrs. Sherwood Anderson and recently shifted to Harlem) asked Paul to be a “leading man,” an offer he turned down after he and Essie saw the troupe’s opening night of Salome at the Lafayette Theater—“wonderful gathering, terrible, terrible performance,” Essie wrote in her diary. Responding to a variety of other invitations, Paul “sang songs by Negro composers and authors” at the Brooklyn YWCA, “sang and made [a] speech” at the banquet of the St. Christopher basketball team, attended a dinner for W. E. B. Du Bois at which he neither sang nor spoke, and went to hear the drama critic Heywood Broun lecture (and “had a nice chat with him after,” discovering that he talked the way he wrote—“very witty … dry sort of fun”). The Robesons also started to attend NAACP functions, at one of which Paul—at the request of Walter White, one of its officers—sang. In between these proliferating contacts and events, Paul and Essie faithfully continued their round of Greek sorority-fraternity functions and their trips to concerts and the theater: Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes (“Think his voice beautiful in the light lyrical things,” Essie wrote in her diary, “but lacking in the robust numbers.… Am all inspired now for Paul’s voice”), a production of The Changeling,
and Walter Hampden’s Cyrano.22

  In March, shortly before rehearsals for Chillun were to begin, Paul acquired additional experience by acting in a revival of Roseanne, by the white playwright Nan Bagby Stevens. The play, about a transgressing black preacher in the South saved from his “avenging congregation” by Roseanne, had first been produced in 1923 with a “burn-corked” all-white cast (despite the acclaim Charles Gilpin had received in 1920 in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, the long-standing practice of whites playing black roles in blackface remained widespread). But the revival at the Lafayette in Harlem in 1924 had an all-black cast, headed by Robeson as the preacher and Rose McClendon in the title role. The Lafayette presented Roseanne as one in a series of “colored plays,” each for a limited run, designed in part to offset criticism leveled by Harlem intellectuals like Theophilus Lewis, drama critic for A. Philip Randolph’s then radical publication The Messenger. Lewis had argued that the Lafayette Players—an all-black company founded by Gilpin, and performing before all-black audiences—did the community a disservice by focusing on revivals of popular Broadway shows rather than on producing black plays about black life (though others had countered that few black plays existed and that the Lafayette served the singular function of providing black performers an opportunity to appear in “legitimate” fare and black audiences the chance to see them in something other than musical comedy).23

  Roseanne played for one week at the Lafayette in Harlem and then for a second week at the Dunbar in Philadelphia. The audiences were small but enthusiastic. A black critic in Philadelphia hailed the performances (but not the play) as being “essentially Negro art, robust, asking for enormous and spontaneous vitality,” Robeson’s voice rolling “out of him like a vibrant tide.” It would be “extremely interesting,” the critic thought, to see what Robeson could do with the role of the Emperor Jones, or that of Jim in All God’s Chillun. He was about to see just that—not merely Jim, but Brutus Jones as well.24

  The course, though, was not smooth. No sooner had rehearsals for Chillun begun than Robeson’s costar, Mary Blair (at the time married to Edmund Wilson), fell ill, leading to another month’s postponement. The continuing press buildup caused added uncertainty. In the three-month period between the play’s publication and its eventual opening in May, negative reaction to the play’s theme of miscegenation had mounted, with Hearst’s American and the Morning Telegraph leading the protest.25

  A full eight weeks before the opening, the New York American carried an article headlined “Riots Feared from Drama.” Thereafter it printed a succession of comments solicited from the forces of reaction—from conservative church groups, from the Society for the Prevention of Vice, from disgruntled rival playwrights, ex-Confederates, and assorted other champions of Nordic purity—a series so relentlessly inflammatory in its dire predictions of mob violence as to seem designed to provoke it. Producers should not put on plays, the American thundered in an editorial, “which are, or threaten to become, enemies of the public peace; they should not dramatize dynamite, because, while helping the box office, it may blow up the business.”26

  Mary Blair was quoted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as saying, “I deem it an honor to take the part of Ella. There is nothing in the part that should give offense to any woman desiring to portray life, and portray it decently.” Her comment was itself considered inflammatory by the manifold legions of racial purists and shortly made still more so when a national news syndicate, emphasizing one transient moment in the script, sent out a rehearsal photograph of Blair entitled “WHITE ACTRESS KISSES NEGRO’S HAND.” The photo was republished dozens of times, leading the New York drama critic Burns Mantle to parody the heightening scandal: “Miss Mary Blair, as the wife of a young colored law student, played by Paul Robeson … will kneel in gratitude at his feet and kiss his honest but heavily pigmented hand.”27

  As the uproar intensified, so did the demand for official intervention. Initially the licensing commissioner deflected it by pointing out that the Provincetown was an unlicensed establishment open only to subscribers—and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of City Hall. But instead of quieting protest, the ruling rechanneled it; the demand now arose for Mayor Hylan to keep the play from opening in order to prevent a race riot. Eugene O’Neill decided to issue a statement to the press. It began with appropriate truculence: in responding to criticisms of the play, O’Neill said, he was not acknowledging that they “honestly deserve any comment whatever”—since they “very obviously come from people who have not read a line of the play. Prejudice born of an entire ignorance of the subject is the last word in injustice and absurdity.” O’Neill was, of course, being disingenuous, knowing as he did that some fair share of the criticism came from confirmed bigots who had read the printed version of the play and been directly incited by its indirect appeal for an end to racial bigotry.28

  “As for the much discussed casting of Mr. Robeson in the leading part,” O’Neill went on, “I have only this to say, that I believe he can portray the character better than any other actor could. That’s all there is to it. A fine actor is a fine actor. The question of race prejudice cannot enter here.” The whole matter was “ridiculous,” he continued in fine indignation, for “right in this city two years ago” Robeson had played opposite the white actress Margaret Wycherly in Taboo, and in the play’s “African scene” he had been cast as the king and she as the queen: “A king and queen are, I believe, usually married.” Robeson had then gone on to play the same role in England opposite Mrs. Campbell, and “There were no race riots here or there. There was no newspaper rioting, either.” Interviewed a few days before the opening, O’Neill, in a last-ditch effort to quell violence and therefore in a somewhat more compromising spirit, acknowledged, “There is prejudice against the intermarriage of whites and blacks, but what has that to do with my play? I don’t advocate intermarriage in it. I am never the advocate of anything in any play—except Humanity toward Humanity.”29

  That was advocacy enough. Far from diminishing, the outcry accelerated. And the Provincetowners became—realistically—fearful. The pile of newspaper articles grew so large that the total bill from the press-clipping service ultimately exceeded the cost of the play’s sets. And the mail became so vitriolic at one point that Chillun’s director, James Light, decided to withhold the more obscene letters—“the largest part”—from Mary Blair and Robeson. An anonymous bomb threat put a further edge on backstage tension.30

  In an effort to deflect the public’s attention while accommodating the tight schedule caused by Mary Blair’s illness, the Provincetown, in April, filled in with a double bill of Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner (in a “dramatic arrangement” by O’Neill) and Molière’s George Dandin. It was not a success, and a planned four-week run had to be cut short. As a substitute, while Chillun entered its final rehearsal period, the Triumvirate came up with the idea of reviving The Emperor Jones for a week—with Paul Robeson in the lead. Jones would open May 6, Chillun May 15—an astonishing burden (and of course potential opportunity) for any actor, let alone an untried actor already carrying on his head the curses of one race and the hopes of another.31

  Rehearsals for Jones began in late April—two weeks before its scheduled opening. The seemingly offhand way Paul approached the script alarmed the methodical Essie, though she had begun to realize that what seemed like “downright, laziness” in Paul was in fact “a natural repose.” He read over the script of Jones for what seemed to her “ages,” saying innumerable times, “I must commit these lines to memory”—and then didn’t. Suddenly one day he “fell to work in earnest,” according to Essie, “put his whole heart and soul into memorizing his part; for days and nights eating, sleeping, walking, talking, he would be learning his lines; he even dreamed them.” Essie held the script, and the two of them would run lines when they went to bed, when they got up, when they ate—to the point where Ma Goode, who was for the time being living with them, announced that she had now memorized half the script.
Sometimes the lines came out too much like an oration or a declamation, and Paul went back to work, phrase by phrase, word by word, “digging down to the meaning of every single comma”—until the speech came out sounding natural.32

  To help the process of memorization, he and Essie would sometimes play games with the lines. Instead of saying, “You can bet your last penny,” they substituted the Brutus Jones line “You can bet your whole roll on one thing, white man”; if noise in the apartment woke Paul up, he might be likely to say “Who dare whistle dat way in my palace? Who dare wake up de emperor?”; if they missed a bus or a streetcar and decided to walk, it was to the cadence of “Well, den I hoofs it. Feet, do yo’ duty”; in place of the usual goodbye he might substitute, “So long, white man; see you in jail some time, maybe”; and if Essie forgot to kiss him goodbye, “he would drum on the wall with his knuckles, making a sound like the tom-tom in the play, and say ‘Well, if dey aint no whole brass band to see me off, I sho’ got de drum part of it.’”33