Although there was a steady flow of hate mail, no actual performance was disrupted—no catcalls, no titters, no incidents. But outside the theater the story was different. Early on in the tour, the tone was set for much of what followed. In Boston, the Ferrers went out one night with a classmate of Joe’s from Princeton who was then a vice-president of the Statler chain. Complimenting him on the liberality of Statler hotels in admitting people of all races, they expressed puzzlement over their inability to get served in a Statler restaurant when they were with Paul. “You can go into any restaurant you want,” their friend replied. “Here’s what will happen. You’ll ask for dinner, and if the dining room is empty, you’ll be told there are no tables. If you complain, you will wait. Finally they will seat you. Next to the kitchen. Then you will wait forty-five minutes for a menu. Then you will wait forty-five minutes for your first course. And it will be burnt. And before long you will leave, and you won’t come back again.” His tone, as Hagen remembers it, was utterly matter-of-fact. But, as she soon learned, racism in Boston did not always wear a bland face. One day she and Paul were descending in the hotel elevator, her arm linked through his, when the door opened and a woman got on, took one look at them, and actually spat in Uta’s face—“It was so unexpected that I didn’t do anything about it, and neither did Paul.”17
Soon after, the company manager announced that he was canceling an upcoming stop in Indianapolis. He had been unable to get Paul a hotel reservation, and complaints were being made there about desegregating the theater. Paul had a clause in his contract barring any performance in a Jim Crow house, so the Indianapolis engagement had come to seem like more of a hassle than it was worth. Paul intervened; he told the company manager to forget about the hotel—it was more important that Indianapolis see the play. Then a mixup with plane tickets raised a new obstacle. After the rest of the company had gone ahead from Dayton to Indianapolis, the Ferrers and Robeson found themselves still in Dayton with only two available seats on the flight out. Joe volunteered to take the train, but Paul insisted that he stay behind—it would be unwise for him to travel alone to Indianapolis with a white woman. Paul won the argument, but the Ferrers felt nervous about leaving him. Dayton was not a hospitable town for blacks—Paul had told them about a racial incident when he had last been in Dayton, some twenty-five years earlier, playing professional football—and, besides, the only available transportation for him to Indianapolis turned out to be a 4:00 a.m. bus.18
The next morning the Ferrers sat around the bus depot in Indianapolis anxiously awaiting Paul’s arrival. When the bus finally did pull in, the exhausted trio went off to a hotel where desegregated facilities had finally been found—except that Paul’s room turned out to be nonexistent: the hotel had put him into a back office, hastily assembling a dresser, a fan, and a cot. Joe told the desk clerk that the room was unacceptable—which set the clerk to grinning with pleasure: “Then Mr. Robeson will not be staying here?” Paul immediately accepted the room. After a few hours’ sleep, all three moved out to stay with friends of Paul’s, but they did so with a flourish: the Ferrers gave Paul their key, announcing to the desk clerk that “Mr. Robeson is taking our room.” None of them slept in it again, but once a day Paul would arrive at the hotel, check in, use the toilet, wash his hands, come out again—and return to his friends. Occasionally racism took a comical turn. In Sacramento, after yet another snarl with room reservations had finally been cleared up, the bellboy, who had been pleasant and sympathetic, came in to where Joe, Paul, and Uta had been waiting, looked at their luggage, and said, “I beg pardon. How would you like me to segregate the luggage?” “Son-of-a-bitch,” Paul said, as the three of them broke up with laughter, “now they’re doing it to the luggage.”19
When the tour reached Montreal, Uta was startled at how respectfully people treated Paul, and the difference it made in him—“It was like somebody took the weights off his shoulders; he was like an open, free, normal human being, without having to prove himself, without being ‘charming.’ He just was.” But tension did not entirely subside. One night at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, panic developed onstage when it suddenly seemed that part of the audience had risen from its seats and was moving toward them—not to commit mayhem, it turned out, but to escape from smoke, which was seeping into the theater from a faulty furnace. In Winnipeg, Canadian hospitality reached its apogee: after they missed a connection, the mayor arranged for the royal railway car to be attached to a troop train passing through, and they sailed across the continent in high style—only to “regain our racial tensions in Seattle.”
Uta was intrigued by the way Paul handled the race issue. He seldom lost his temper, and in public almost never. Faced with bigotry in a social situation, he would alternately turn on the charm or the “old jigaboo stuff”—enjoying the spectacle of confusion on the perplexed white faces unable to decided if Robeson was putting them on or putting them down. “He had eighteen roles that he played on different occasions, totally aware of what he was doing,” of the impression he was creating, doubling Uta up with silent laughter at his expert performances. He could play a variety of roles among blacks, too. When the company performed in Cleveland, they were entertained by the wealthy black community—“unbelievable snobs,” in Uta’s opinion—and Paul alerted her in advance to watch how he handled them; he played their own game, as if he were one of them, but later mocked their pretensions. (“It was certainly never boring,” Uta added.) On the other hand, at a postperformance party in Indianapolis at the home of Ted Cable, with attorneys Charles Chandler, Henry J. Richardson, Jr. (later an attorney for the NAACP), and (in Richardson’s words) “other satellites of intellect and culture,” Paul became genuinely absorbed in the conversation, sitting around until the early hours of the morning talking “in a communitive social session … [about] the fundamentals of our social order.…”20
Robeson’s need to test himself, to rise to the challenge of dislike or disdain, to win over everybody through charm, sometimes became compulsive. For example, the Ferrers had a black woman from the South named Frances working for them who, on first hearing Robeson was coming to dinner, slammed the door and retreated to her bedroom. When finally coaxed out, she refused to cook or serve during Robeson’s visit: “We niggers don’t wait on each other!” Good as her word, Frances stayed in her room the whole time Robeson was there, and Uta cooked the dinner. Subsequently, on a train trip to Boston, Frances was part of the traveling group that included Paul, the Ferrers, and their baby daughter, Letty. When they reached the station stop, Paul walked up to Frances, took her bag and Letty’s toys, and carried them down onto the platform. “It had become his cause to win her around,” Uta believed, and he succeeded: “Frances was hooked. By the time we left Boston, he was her idol!”
Uta was hooked, too. The more time she spent with Paul, the more deeply she fell in love. She idolized him without idealizing him. He was “brilliant and exciting—but no saint, that’s for sure.” At times he could be “unbelievably selfish,” “insanely possessive,” downright “cruel.” At one low ebb, frightened and guilty about her own infidelity, depressed that her relationship with Paul was not going anywhere, missing her daughter on the road and wanting another child, Uta briefly reunited with Joe and became pregnant. According to Uta, Paul “went insane,” got very drunk, and in a room in Seattle hit her—which, in her view, contributed to her eventual miscarriage. Afterward, she says, he wept with remorse and begged Uta to understand that he had lost his head because he loved her so much and couldn’t bear the thought that she might be carrying another man’s child. (Perhaps he “went insane,” too, because being told of a pregnancy might have brought to mind Essie’s announcement in 1921—or at least the fear of being “trapped” into marriage.) Uta forgave him, but not without wondering whether he did accept full responsibility for his behavior or was using the excuse of “passion” as a rationalization. It was not the kind of question, she decided, that Paul was likely to ask himself.
For all his unorthodox ways, he was a “traditional male” in his expectations of his mate—she was supposed to be there for him: “He wouldn’t have said it, but if I was going to be with him, that would have been my life.”
It was a decision that Uta at the time was perfectly willing to make. She realizes in retrospect that she would “never have had my own life” if she had stayed with Paul, but nonetheless, not being conventionally ambitious, she would “definitely” have “gone anywhere and done anything” to be with him, would have been willing “to follow him around.” She had never known a more enchanting man, for all his faults. “There was nothing smug or arrogant or know-it-all” about him. He had an insatiable curiosity and a scholar’s passion for knowledge, and lost all interest in mere one-upsmanship when any true discourse was possible; if he enjoyed charming people, he preferred convincing them (and in Uta’s words, he “was as persuasive as a Jesuit.”) He and Uta would spend hours together reading Pushkin and Chekhov, listening to music, studying the etymology of language, his “wonderful ear for sound” and his ardor combining to make those times magical for her. When he didn’t know something, he “was always the first to acknowledge it, dying of curiosity to find out more”; she found his open eagerness “unbelievably endearing.” And, always, he made you feel that “you were the center of his mind and his imagination.” He had the “remarkable ability to concentrate on you at the seeming expense of everybody around,” confirming the fantasy that no one else mattered, or mattered nearly so much. “That was his power.”
At Chicago, the last stop on the tour, Essie came out from New York with Bob and Clara Rockmore to see the opening and to celebrate Paul’s forty-seventh birthday. It was not a happy occasion. News of President Roosevelt’s death came during the Chicago run. The cast dedicated a performance to his memory, and Robeson made a curtain speech that night that, according to Studs Terkel, moved many to tears; the President’s death, Robeson predicted, would alter things, and not for the better, for many years to come. Until Chicago, the production had been receiving brilliant reviews; Uta thought Paul was better on tour than he had been on Broadway, working more internally, less for outer form. But in Chicago the show was off—perhaps because of distress over Roosevelt’s death—and the critics were merely lukewarm. Essie’s indignation focused on the offstage show.21
She had only agreed to go to Chicago, she later wrote Paul, at Bob Rockmore’s suggestion: “He thought Freda might be there [she was not], and I would be a bulwark.” But on arrival Essie found herself first put in “a travelling salesman’s bedroom” in the Sherman Hotel and then shifted to “a back apartment with a fire-escape, from which I was robbed,” while Bob and Clara had “a lovely corner suite” and Paul was “elegantly housed in the penthouse apartment with Joe and Uta.” Taking the high ground, she admonished Paul for the damage to his own public image: “Your white lawyer and his wife were elegantly housed. Your colored wife was put in first one dump, and then another. What do you think the hotel personnel thought of that one? I was embarrassed for you, Honey, because that sort of thing is beneath you. The few dollars you saved weren’t worth the loss of general dignity, nor the personal insult to me.” Henceforth, she wrote Paul, she would reserve—and pay for—her own room. She would also make “a careful note” of the fact that Paul had not invited her to Chicago, that she therefore “had no right to be there at all, at all,” and would “never make that mistake again.” Perhaps, she concluded, “I’m unduly sensitive. I doubt it. Could be I take my dignity, and your dignity, too seriously. I doubt it, but could be. Anyway, that’s the way I am.” She shared a private laugh about his dignity with Larry Brown: “I love the new title for the Boss. His Moorship. That’s very good.”22
Essie was feeling her worth. Over the previous two years she had been holed up in Enfield, eschewing the glamorous life she had previously clamored for, in order to attempt, once again, to make an independent career for herself. It had not been an easy time. Paul, Jr. (as he was now known), had gone off to study engineering as an undergraduate at Cornell, and she had been left alone at Enfield with her aging and ever-more-querulous mother. Within a few years, Ma Goode would become increasingly delusional, and Essie would have to put her into a nursing home in Massachusetts, but even now, as she wrote her son, “She is proving more and more difficult.… No, she hasn’t cracked up, but is just ‘more so’ of everything she was, if you know what I mean.” Nonetheless, Essie found enough leftover energy to make a major effort in her own behalf and to turn out a considerable body of work. Late in 1943 she had enrolled in the Hartford Seminary Foundation (where Paul’s Rutgers classmate Malcolm S. Pitt was dean) as a candidate for a Ph.D. in anthropology, attending classes on Africa, India, and China three days a week (“You are a born academician,” Van Vechten wrote her). By the end of 1944 she had not only completed her doctoral thesis, but was also revising Goodbye Uncle Tom, the play she had labored over intermittently for ten years (and earlier called Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and reworking the notes she’d taken during her trip to Africa in 1936 for publication as a book.23
For a time she had high hopes her play would finally find a producer, her spirits soaring each time a favorable reading suggested a possible production—but none materialized. Her book on Africa had quite a different outcome. When she finished the manuscript (initially called African Material, then changed to its publication title, African Journey) she sent it around widely for comment—including a copy to Earl Browder. “I would not like—however inadvertently”—she wrote Browder in a covering note, “to say anything about my favorite subjects (Africa, and the Color Problems) which would in any way contradict what we all believe.” She asked him to let her know “privately, not for quotation in any way, what you think about its possible implications or repercussions.” Browder read the manuscript immediately, found it “not only interesting, but sound,” and advised her to publish it. “What a grand relief,” she wrote back—and included for his further scrutiny her doctoral dissertation and the script of her play (“I know this is a terrific nerve on my part … [but] I feel you are interested in these problems, and would not like me to make any mistakes in my handling of them”). Published in August 1945, African Journey (illustrated with photographs Essie herself had taken) was well received by the critics and quickly sold out its first printing. Reading The New York Times’ review (“an extremely attractive and natural book”) in an airport, Paul called Essie and told her he’d “got the thrill of his life” from the review; “He’s a Sweetie-Pie,” Essie commented to the Van Vechtens.24
She was thrilled at the book’s reception and at the follow-up requests for public appearances, and made no bones about her excitement. “Quite frankly,” she wrote Larry Brown, “I don’t know whether I’m coming or going,” and thanked him for “having been my loyal fan for lo these many years. And especially because you always encouraged me when I was down, and nobody paid me any mind.” To the Van Vechtens she reported that even Ma Goode had taken to deferring to her “with incredible respect.” Adding still further to Essie’s sense of worth was the active role she began to play locally in politics. Speaking widely in the Connecticut area on race relations, she proved highly effective, and quick, sharp, and forthright in spontaneous question-and-answer exchanges with her audiences. After hearing Essie speak on one occasion, a close friend of Larry Brown’s wrote him, “Mrs. Robeson was a tremendous hit here. The only lecturer able to hold students in their seats during the entire lecture series. She was terrific. And stunning. Improved 100% in appearance.” In 1945 the National Council of Negro Women selected her as “one of twelve outstanding women in American life.” Bob Rockmore had a different view of Essie’s accomplishments, speculating archly in a letter to Larry Brown as to whether Paul had conferred with Essie about “competing” with her as a public lecturer and whether having two rival speakers “within one hearth” might “disturb the family harmony. (Ha ha).” Rockmore’s patronization of Essie further fed her well-established
dislike of him.25
In the 1944 presidential campaign, Paul and Essie had both stumped for Roosevelt, Paul on the national level, Essie on the state one. On radio station WHK on election eve, Paul had praised the President as one who “rightly believes the rights of man more important than the rights of private property.” On election day, Essie had written Earl Browder, “I’ve just come home from casting my straight Democratic vote, and feel very elegant indeed.” In both her pre- and postelection appearances she expressed political views closer to those of Paul than had earlier been the case. In “The Negro and Democracy,” one of her standard talks, she praised the lack of discrimination in CIO unions like the National Maritime Union, characterized the Soviet Union as having “solved” (“thoroughly, completely and very successfully”) the minority problem, and in strong terms decried the continuing prejudice against blacks in the United States; she even expressed the view—an advanced one for the mid-forties—that only “legislation and force will settle this thing.” When Essie wrote Ben Davis, Jr., about a “practical plan” she and Pearl Buck had started to work on for federal guarantees of civil rights, he responded that her activity “was confirmation of my long-held view of your capacity to make independent contributions to the people’s movement in this country.” And when she subsequently sent Davis some unspecified “information … in regard to Paul,” he replied, “It seems a confirmation of your course of action. Don’t be provoked into deviating from that course, for every sort of provocation is bound to rise. It is the penalty for being the wife of a great man—one of the great men of the day. And he is fortunate to have such a strong and realistic mate.”26
That cryptic exchange almost certainly referred to one, or several, of Paul’s concurrent affairs. The Communist Party apparently advised Robeson at several different points in his life—the word carried through Ben Davis, Jr.—that it felt his divorce from a black woman to marry a white one would be a mistake, that it would inflame his black constituency, alienate his white one, decrease his prestige and political clout. As a close friend, Davis probably knew the usual course of Paul’s love affairs at least as well as Essie did, and realized that, since Paul’s breakup with Yolande in the early thirties, he had not again seriously contemplated divorce and remarriage, preferring his freedom to a binding relationship, however lonely that freedom sometimes made him. But just in case Paul might once more be tempted to remarry, Davis probably thought it wise to confirm Essie in her already well-settled intention to rise above Paul’s affairs, to pursue an independent course—and to remain married to him. It was a strategy she had adhered to from the mid-thirties on, though now and then, under special provocation (such as when given “inferior” accommodations in Chicago), she would take to lecturing Paul about her entitlement and the danger of his compromising his public image.27
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