Paul Robeson

by Martin Duberman

  … if an African finds his personal ideal best fulfilled outside African life he ought to be free to leave it.… World citizenship means in practice maximizing both liberty and variety inside every human group, whether it be family or any larger one not excluding nation and race. Liberty must obviously diminish or destroy characteristics peculiar to the group.

  To Robeson such views represented the familiar Western tendency to assign primary value to the needs of the individual rather than the community. He agreed with the ideal of enabling Africans “to become world citizens”; but he continued to hope Africans would employ their opportunities selectively, choosing—as the Chinese had—to incorporate only those aspects of the “newness” that would better help them sustain their traditional emphasis on the needs and values of the collectivity. Robeson wanted to protect an invaluable heritage, Leys to create a still “better” synthesis.40

  Through interviews and co-authored articles, Robeson further clarified and expanded his views. He did not doubt, he wrote, that Western science “worked miracles” and through its accumulated knowledge allowed growing power over “the external world.” But that kind of material power had come to be considered the only source of “good,” the “measure of all things.” In his view, the ultimate questions lay not in the realm of knowledge “but of ethics”—which is what Leys had meant in calling his approach “aesthetic” and “unrealistic.” Robeson felt the African heritage, with its concern for the inner life and for community values, had much to recommend it. He could not accept “wealth and luxury as the ultimate goal of human activity”—or the apparent equanimity of a man like H. G. Wells in suggesting (in The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind) that spiritual needs, the “mystery” of ultimate truths, were outside the bounds of everyday life. Robeson realized that many of his own people admired him, ironically, precisely to the extent that he had become successful on Western terms and had accumulated Western-prized luxuries. “They think I must be happy and proud,” but “deep down inside me I am African, and for me the African life has a much deeper significance.”41

  On the other hand, Robeson did not want to be construed as advocating a narrow nationalistic view that equated artificial geographical boundaries with the parameters for maximum human happiness. “I am not a Nationalist,” he asserted; “this belief, I know, has taken firm root in India, and the Near East, and is perhaps spreading. As for the people in that part of the world it may be a natural transition. I, however, am more profoundly impressed by likenesses in cultural forms which seem to transcend the boundaries of Nationality. Whatever be the Social and Economic content of the culture—Archaic, Clan and Tribal organization, Feudalism, Capitalism, or Socialism—this cultural Form seems to persist, and to be of vital importance to the people concerned. I realize that I am one of the very few who persists in suggesting that the African cultural form is in many respects similar to the old Archaic Chinese (Pre-Confucius, Pre-Lao-tse).… This comparison may seem much clearer if you will contrast this old Chinese form with an African form of a high level, namely, that of the Yoruba (Benin), Ashanti, Zulu or Boganda.… So, I am in no way exclusively ‘nationalist’ in pursuing my line of inquiry, and I am as interested in the problems which confront the Chinese people, as well as in those which concern, for example, Abyssinia. To me, the time seems long past when people can afford to think exclusively in terms of national units. The field of activity is far wider.”42

  As he became increasingly attracted to the socialist vision, Robeson moved somewhat away from his preoccupation with preserving African culture and toward an international perspective—from urging the primary need of asserting black values to emphasizing the overriding importance of human values. As he wrote in his notebook, he felt “certain that all races, all Peoples are not nearly as different one from the other as textbooks would have it.… Most differences [are] only superficial. History of Mankind proves this. No pure race. No pure culture. No people has lived by itself.” In the voluminous private notes he jotted down during 1936, he complained that “even in as advanced and friendly a country as Russia,” stereotypes of “savage” Africa remained, yet at the same time he was coming to believe that the concern of American Negroes “should be to make America socialist.” Moving somewhat in the direction of Norman Leys, he now began to champion the view that, “if the world is to prosper,” it must be “broadened to transcend national boundaries,” toward the “possible synthesis of, and on the other hand, constant interplay between related cultural forms.” Africa’s geographical location, he felt, “appears to have symbolic significance. She stands between East and West, and in the future must take from both.”43

  C. L. R. James has emphasized two additional corollaries to Robeson’s developing world-view. Though blacks had “special qualities” as a result of their special experience, they were “able to participate fully and completely in the distinctively Western arts of Western Civilization”—a black man might bring unique attributes to the role of Othello, but that did not disqualify him from performing Macbeth or Lear. Similarly, blacks might see the world from a somewhat different perspective from whites, but that did not make it impossible “for whites to understand blacks, or blacks to understand whites.” The “human stem”—as Robeson had written in 1934 and would continue to emphasize for the rest of his life—“was one.” Lopped off and set in separate soil, the branches of the tree would die; fastened to a common trunk and nourished equally, all would thrive.44

  At the same time that Robeson was trying to formulate a theoretical position, he was trying on a practical level to incorporate his new values into his work as an actor. Early in 1936 he agreed to record a prologue and theme song for Joseph Best’s Africa Looks Up (released as My Song Goes Forth), a documentary film about South Africa, and to make two movies with African themes, Song of Freedom and King Solomon’s Mines. He could only hope—and did his best to ensure, through contract guarantees—that these new cinema projects would better fulfill his social ideals than the earlier ones had. He worked hard on revising the prologue to Best’s documentary and in the final draft has himself as narrator say, “Every foot of Africa is now parceled out among the white races. Why has this happened? What has prompted them to go there? If you listen to men like Mussolini, they will tell you it is to civilize—a divine task, entrusted to the enlightened peoples to carry the torch of light and learning, and to benefit the African people.… Africa was opened up by the white man for the benefit of himself—to obtain the wealth it contained.” The mainstream reviewers gave My Song Goes Forth a middling reception; the London Daily Worker thought it too bland to serve a militant liberationist purpose.45

  Even as he signed for his two new films, Song of Freedom and King Solomon’s Mines, his most recent one, Show Boat, was released. Robeson had tried to get “final-cut” approval but had been turned down (as Carl Laemmle, Jr., cabled Universal Studios, “Impossible let him okay takes. Garbo doesn’t have this privilege nor anyone else”). The picture as shown rearranged and diminished the original dimension of his role—described in the ad campaign as the “lazy, easy-going husband” of the showboat’s cook (played by Hattie McDaniel). In the States most reviewers hailed the film as (in the words of the Trib’s critic) “opulent, spectacular and generally enchanting.” But the British notices were generally tepid and in some cases sardonic: James Agate in The Tatler suggested that enough money had been spent on the picture “to build and support a National Theatre,” with artistic results on the level of “oleographs on a cottage wall.… It has been said that we shall see nothing like it again for a hundred years. I sincerely hope not.” Segments of the black press, moreover, continued to berate Robeson for portraying (in the words of the California News) yet another “shiftless moron,” and Marcus Garvey’s monthly magazine, The Black Man, denounced him for using “his genius to appear in pictures and plays that tend to dishonour, mimic, discredit and abuse the cultural attainments of the Black Race.” (In a lighter vein, the dancer Bill R
obinson wrote Essie, “Tell Paul that we saw Show Boat twice; just to hear him sing and to get the new way of shelling peas.”) To add to Robeson’s discomfort, friends whose opinion he valued highly told him they thought little of Show Boat. Emma Goldman (commenting on the 1935 revival, not the film) wrote to say she thought him “magnificent,” but didn’t care for the theme. Eisenstein, commenting on the film, conveyed his continuing belief that Robeson was “a marvel,” but added that

  only in two or three shots is his face, figure and personality treated in the way it ought to: there is so much to be made out of him! Picture pretty poor, considering all possibilities in it. Illustrating “Ol’ Man River”—not the best taste: would prefer realistic treatment of Paul singing—song and singing being so marvellous by themselves.46

  Robeson had reason to hope his new screen venture, Song of Freedom, would appease his critics—and his own conscience. Based on Claude Williams and Dorothy Holloway’s The Kingdom of the Zinga, the film began shooting in the spring of 1936. It tells the story of John Zinga (played by Robeson), a London dockworker whose glorious bass voice is accidentally discovered, launching him into international success as a concert singer. In one of those remarkable coincidences on which film plots turn, Zinga learns that the mysterious carved disc he has always worn around his neck reveals him to be the legendary King of Casanga. Abandoning his concert career to return to his people, he is met with scorn and abuse from them until he bursts into sacred song, thus persuading them of his royal heritage. The film ends with Zinga’s resuming a part-time concert career in order to raise needed revenue for his people. Though inane as narrative, the film held strong appeal for Robeson. In its dockside scenes especially, it showed blacks coping within the context of ordinary life—a welcome switch from the previous stereotypes of shuffling idiot, faithful retainer, happy-go-lucky hedonist, or menacing con man. Zinga himself is portrayed in the film as a natural aristocrat, a man of charm and intelligence (as is his wife, played by Elizabeth Welch). Song of Freedom, Robeson told a reporter, “gives me a real part for the first time,” and he continued to refer to it in later life as one of only two films he made (the other was Proud Valley) in which he felt he could take any pride.47

  Elizabeth Welch remembers talking politics with him on the set—or, rather, declining to. Coming from a varied racial and ethnic background, she considered herself nonpolitical, and when Robeson talked to her about “doing something to help her people,” she responded that “all people are my people.” He let it go at that, unwilling to crowd her with polemics. Far from remembering him as insistently political, she retains the image of an affectionate, good-humored man, “modest about his acting,” satisfied with his life, content with Song of Freedom. Even the black press, this time around, agreed he should be satisfied: the Pittsburgh Courier welcomed Song of Freedom as the “finest story of colored folks yet brought to the screen … a story of triumph.” Langston Hughes wrote Essie, “Harlem liked ‘Song of Freedom.’”48

  Nineteen thirty-six was to prove the busiest year in Robeson’s film career. He had only a few months’ interval between the completion of Song of Freedom and the commencement of work on King Solomon’s Mines for Gaumont British. The interval was so brief that he decided not to accompany Essie and Pauli on their long-hoped-for trip to Africa that same summer, especially since “both the British and South African authorities opposed his going.” According to Essie, he was also concerned about protecting his voice: “He has to have the best conditions only—the best hotels and the best traveling facilities in trains.” Instead, Paul went on a short vacation alone to the Soviet Union, intending to improve his Russian, and Ma Goode traveled separately to Moscow to check on living conditions for herself and Pauli, with the possibility in mind of his attending school there.49

  Another marital crisis may additionally have contributed to Paul and Essie’s heading off in separate directions. According to Marie Seton, tension between them became so great in 1935 that Marie advised Paul to make a clean break, saying outright that Essie “was poison to him.” Political differences may have played a central role in creating the tension: Essie was trying to serve as a brake on Paul’s accelerating commitment. As regards South Africa in particular, an (aborted) effort was made in 1935 to involve Robeson in the affairs of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), which Essie did her best to resist. The effort involved a circle of interested whites that included Norman Leys, the Yorkshire novelist Winifred Holtby, her friend Vera Brittain (author of Testament of Youth), William Ballinger (the Scottish trade unionist who went to South Africa to help organize the ICU), his wife, Margaret Hodgson (who became a white representative for blacks in Parliament), and Ethelreda Lewis, later well known as the editor-writer of the Trader Horn books. When Ballinger told the press that Robeson had become more “politically minded” and was giving thought to a trip to South Africa to find out about conditions there, Essie reacted angrily, writing Winifred Holtby that her husband “was an artist and not a politician.” Holtby reported to Margaret Hodgson that “Robeson is not indifferent.… I feel that Mrs. Robeson is our real antagonist.” Vera Brittain put the matter more pointedly—“Pretty sure the annoyance, & indeed the whole attitude, is Mrs. Robeson’s, not Paul”—and described Essie as “an aggressive little woman really, determined to fight for Paul’s material interests & angry when he is led away from his purely artistic—& commercially profitable career.” Summing up to Norman Leys, Holtby described Essie as “a bit too slick & American for my taste.”50

  Essie kept Paul closely posted on the details of her African adventure. She and Pauli were gone three months, stopping at Madeira on their way down the West Coast to Cape Town (where Essie barely managed to gain entry) then working their way upcountry into Swaziland, Basutoland, Uganda, and the Belgian Congo. They went armed with letters of introduction stressing that Essie would be engaging in anthropological field work, thus easing the problem of visas and travel restrictions, which might otherwise have curtailed her freedom of movement. She was further aided by African friends who met her and Pauli at many stops, passed them through a network of loving hands, and provided them with experiences not ordinarily available to foreigners.51

  Along with attending a political convention at Bloemfontein and seeing the “frightful conditions” of the mines in Johannesburg and the slums in Cape Town, Essie at one point in the trip met and was housed by Max Yergan. Articulate and personable, Yergan was a 1914 graduate of Shaw University in North Carolina; he had been in Africa under the auspices of the International Committee of the YMCA for seventeen years and had made a brilliant career working with the Bantu of South Africa to improve educational facilities (he was awarded the NAACP’s prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1933). Yergan would shortly return to the United States, would become an intimate of the Robesons, and would figure conspicuously in their lives.

  Wherever they went, everyone seemed to have heard about “Robeson,” and when the ship landed at Cape Town the newspaper reporters crowded around to insist (as Essie wrote Paul) “you were assuming leadership—world leadership of Negroes, and were now beginning to do something constructive about it. What measures were you taking to lead your people? Was I here to start your campaign? And so on.” Essie tried to be cautious and diplomatic in her answers. “I said you were young and healthy and entirely normal and not particularly spiritual, and that you were naturally interested in the Negro everywhere. We are Negroes ourselves and as Negroes, are interested in our people, and in conditions which affect our people.” The white paper, Cape Town Argus, translated that into “My husband has never been interested in politics.… He holds no fanciful ideas about Africa for the Africans.… He is not yet 40 and has no romantic ideas about devoting his time and energies to his people.” The African trip, Essie wrote after she had returned,

  was one of those grand dreams come true. It is certainly the most interesting thing I have done, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity. Its quite a dif
ferent world and I think every Negro who can, should go and look & listen and learn. We have a grand heritage from Africa, as a race, and it is shameful that we are not interested in it, and almost wholly ignorant of it.52

  Paul and Ma Goode returned from their respective trips to the U.S.S.R. equally full of praise for the life they had found there. Paul had stayed for a few days with friends on film location at a collective farm and had had an “idyllic” time, “astonished” at how well informed the village children were about “the American Negro problem”—and how free of racial prejudice. That had been precisely Ma Goode’s impression, and Paul now made the final decision that she and Pauli would go to live there at the end of the year. Peggy and Eugene Dennis (a leading figure in the Communist Party, U.S.A.), who had left their older son, Tim, in school in Moscow and then been denied permission to take him out, warned the Robesons to leave Pauli with maximum publicity. They did exactly that: Paul announced widely to the press that they had decided to educate their son in the Soviet Union so that he would not have to undergo the discrimination his father had faced growing up in the United States.53

  On his return from the Soviet Union, Paul went to work immediately on King Solomon’s Mines. It was one of those no-expenses-spared productions—twenty-seven thousand natives in “authentic” animal skins! grass huts! erupting volcanoes!!—and replete with a corresponding number of stereotypes and anachronisms. Based on Rider Haggard’s novel, the film tells the story of Umbopa (Robeson), servant to the white man, who ultimately reveals his true identity as an African chief, regains his throne, saves the lives of his treasure-seeking white friends (Cedric Hardwicke, Roland Young), and sings his way into the inspirational sunset. Robeson sang beautifully, but the music was composed and placed with fatuous disregard for authenticity, succeeding only in confirming the cinema’s inability fully to use the range of his gifts and to respect his dignity. The black New York Amsterdam News expressed its gratitude that the film “at least doesn’t reek with the imperialistic theory of British superiority” (most viewers today find that reek palpable), but the black Pittsburgh Courier was wholly negative: Robeson “is made to sing childish lyrics to dreary tunes in the most unlikely circumstances.”54