Paul Robeson (22 page)

Notices for Robeson himself ranged from good to ecstatic. “He towers high above the play,” wrote Burns Mantle, sounding a theme reiterated by most of the other critics. Several expressed gratitude that the script called for Robeson to sing twice, allowing welcome relief from having to listen to the authors' words. The worst said about Robeson was that he started slowly; the best outdid even a press agent's vocabulary of superlatives: “A truly great actor”; “A figure of tremendous, Samsonic force”; a performance “perhaps greater than his performance in ‘The Emperor Jones,' and that is superlative praise.”
⁴⁷

But the widely read black paper the Pittsburgh
Courier
regretted that a Broadway show had, yet again, presented a portrait of the Negro as an “ignorant, perverse child … [by whites who] evidently know … extraordinarily little of the psychology of Aframericans [sic].” Robeson himself, a decade later, after his politics had matured, outlined the play's deficiencies as a portrait of black life: “The negro couldn't say in it all that he really lived and felt. Why, the white people in the audience would never stand for it. Even if you were to write a negro play that is truthful and intellectually honest, the audiences, in America at least, would never listen to it.”
⁴⁸

The play drew poorly and closed within a few weeks, sending Robeson back to the concert circuit. He continued to search for appropriate stage roles, but their scarcity confined him, for the next year and a half, to
singing. He told one newspaper interviewer that he dreamed “of a great play about Haiti, a play about Negroes, written by a Negro, and acted by Negroes … of a moving drama that will have none of the themes that offer targets for race supremacy advocates.” But as he evaluated the serviceability of a given script for meeting such high purposes, Robeson's vision could occasionally be compromised by his desire for commercial success, and further distorted by the sanguine Harlem Renaissance lens through which he viewed his art. When he was offered Paul Green's new play,
In Abraham's Bosom
, late in 1926, he turned it down, fearing it was too negative thematically and too risky commercially: “… there's hardly a note of hope in it. I'm afraid it wouldn't be popular and I can't afford to be going into plays that are foredoomed to fail.” The play was indeed somber, but so were many aspects of black life. James Weldon Johnson thought the script “closer and truer to actual Negro life” and more deeply probing of it “than any drama of the kind that had yet been produced.” Starring Rose McClendon, Abbie Mitchell, Frank Wilson, and Jules Bledsoe,
In Abraham's Bosom
went on to win the 1927 Pulitzer Prize.
⁴⁹

In January 1927, two months after
Black Boy
closed, Robeson and Brown set out on another singing tour, this time going as far as Kansas and Ohio. The stop in Kansas City proved unexpectedly eventful. Roy Wilkins, a young black reporter for the thriving weekly the Kansas City
Call
(and later head of the NAACP), was part of a small local group that had organized a black concert company. Robeson was the first performer they had sought to engage, but his standard fee had seemed beyond their means. At the time—according to figures published in
Variety
—Robeson's guarantee for a one-night performance in cities with a population of three hundred thousand was $1,250; in this he ranked twentieth in a listing that put John McCormack at the top ($5,000) and Roland Hayes, the only other black artist to make the list, in the middle ($3,200). That fee was more than the Kansas City group could afford, but, because the organizing group was made up of amateurs with little working capital, Robeson agreed to appear for $750.
⁵⁰

Wilkins and friends made arrangements to hold the concert in the Grand Avenue Temple, a large white church in downtown Kansas City. The leading newspaper, the
Star
, agreed to carry an advance notice of the Robeson concert—but without an accompanying picture, for as a matter of policy it did not print photographs of blacks. Since this was coupled with the announcement—again contrary to local custom—that no separate section would be reserved at the concert for whites, advance sales went poorly and the box office threatened to fall short of Robeson's guaranteed fee. The organizers feared he might refuse to perform, but he reassured Wilkins: “Don't worry.… I will sing for my people.” The concert proved a success—“White folks,” Wilkins later wrote, “decided they couldn't stay
away.” Kansas City saw one of the largest integrated audiences to date, and Robeson got his guarantee, with $300 to spare.
⁵¹

Protest over the concert, however, emerged within the black community. A local music teacher wrote to the
Call
expressing her feelings of “humiliation” as a black at Robeson's confining his program to “slave songs” and omitting “classical” selections, which could have demonstrated a more advanced “musical technique.” Her letter set off a lively debate in the columns of the
Call
, which continued into three issues, producing a few additional denunciations of Robeson for “commercializing our backwardness” by devoting his repertory exclusively to Sorrow Songs, but in general leaning toward the opinion that it was time for blacks to end their enslavement to white cultural standards and—like Robeson—to champion the artistic heritage of their own people.
⁵²

When Paul returned to New York in February 1927, Essie told him that she was pregnant. She later wrote that he “received the news with mixed feelings” and ascribed his ambivalence to concern for her health. When she had earlier broached the subject of having a child, he had said that, “since a child had not just happened … perhaps it was best to leave well enough alone.” Now that Essie had taken the decision into her own hands and presented Paul with a
fait accompli
, he accepted it, though with a residue of resentment. Essie, by her own account, “grew fat and sparkling, her cheeks flushed with good health and her eyes shining with happiness and eagerness.” Six months into the pregnancy she was so large that (as she wrote Van Vechten) “I am not sure whether the person answering to Essie is me or not.” With an “immense” baby on the way, she added, “Poor Angel will have to put his shoulder to the wheel.”
⁵³

He did. He signed with Walter K. Varney, the white impresario who had managed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, for a year's concert tour in Europe with Larry Brown, to begin in October 1927. That would put Paul out of the country when Essie was due to give birth, but she strongly urged the contract on him. She even took it upon herself to write to various people, including Frank Harris, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce, urging them to attend the inaugural concert in Paris on October 29—and asking them to invite their friends. In the summer preceding his departure, Paul and Essie took a cottage for the month of August at Oak Bluffs, the black bourgeois watering hole on Martha's Vineyard, with Paul concertizing locally. “I have a great tan,” he wrote Van Vechten, “am really so much
darker
—I'm still visible under a strong light.” At the last minute he had a telegram from the Theatre Guild offering him the part of Crown in DuBose and Dorothy Heyward's play
Porgy
, which was due to open on Broadway in October 1927, but to his regret he had to turn it down because of the European tour. That same summer, his old friend William Patterson joined a picket line in Boston to protest the imminent execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a protest that enlisted a number of others who later became Robeson's
friends—Ella Reeve Bloor (“Mother Bloor”), John Howard Lawson, Mike Gold, Rose Baron, and Vito Marcantonio. The event proved a milestone in Patterson's political pilgrimage, and he began to talk to Paul increasingly about Communism and the Soviet Union. For now, “it went in one ear and out the other.” Robeson's political milestones still lay ahead.
⁵⁴

The impending birth of their baby drew the Robesons somewhat closer. From on board the S.S.
Majestic
on his way to Europe, Paul wrote Essie with a fullness of affection that had recently been missing from their relationship: “So hard to leave you sweet. Seems as tho you are me.… You'll never know how marvelous I think you are. Of course I love you more than I love my very self. I just almost melt away with happiness when I think of the beautiful days we have before us. I love you darling with all my soul.… So many thanks darling for all you have done for me—for my career—for my better understanding of myself—for your patience and care and devoted love. And know that whatever I achieve shall have been due in great part to your unselfish interest and devotion.”
⁵⁵

His appreciation of Essie was genuine—but so was his anticipation of meeting in Paris a young woman named Freda Diamond, of whom he had become enamored. They had first met in 1923 at a party for the Chauve Souris, the Russian musical-theater troupe. Paul was stepping into an elevator as the beautiful seventeen-year-old Freda was stepping out of it, accompanied by her sister and mother (the formidable Ida Diamond, a friend of Emma Goldman). Even as a teen-ager, Freda Diamond was a striking presence. She was tall, with dramatic, deep-set eyes—a classic Russian-Jewish beauty—with the forceful, gregarious nature to match. Paul told Essie to continue to their next appointment, while he retraced his steps to the party and danced all night with Freda. Thus began a relationship that lasted, in its many manifestations, and despite the multiplicity of his romantic and sexual encounters, for many years. Despite the conventional demeanor he still chose to show the world, Robeson, emotionally, was already defying official culture, refusing to narrow down his behavior to fit the monogamous norm—to love only one woman forever (or, indeed, even one at a time).
⁵⁶

Paul became enchanted with Mama Diamond as well as her daughter, and was closely drawn into the circle of this deeply political family (at age twelve, Freda herself was on the street passing out leaflets against conscription). The circle also included Ida Diamond's sister, Bess Davidoff, her husband, Henry (a schoolteacher who often discussed music with Paul), and their daughter Amy, whom Paul adored (when she died in her early twenties, he was devastated). On occasion in the twenties, Mama Diamond would chide Paul for not being sufficiently committed to politics. One evening (around 1928), Mama Diamond met Paul on the street in front of their building on West 11th Street in Greenwich Village in order to escort him up in the elevator personally. She later explained that the
new doorman had suggested that her black guest would have to go up in the service elevator and she had stationed herself on the sidewalk to prevent such an indignity. Paul thanked her, but added that her gesture really hadn't been necessary, since he had learned, as an artist, not to let such incidents bother him. Mama Diamond lit into him—“We expect plumbers to have political consciousness, why not artists?” It was a view Paul would shortly come to share.
⁵⁷

CHAPTER 7

Show Boat

(1927–1929)

Gertrude Stein had a bad cold and, being “a little afraid of the inside of a Paris theatre,” she missed Robeson's inaugural concert at the Salle Gaveau on October 29. Almost everyone else from the American colony, white and black, showed up: Roland Hayes, Caterina Jarboro, Alberta Hunter, Johnny Hudgins, Mrs. Cole Porter, Ludwig Lewisohn, Naomi Bercovici, Michael Strange, and Sylvia Beach—along with James Joyce and some of Paris's own notables, Georges Auric and Baroness Erlanger. Freda Diamond's Aunt Bess and Bess's daughter Amy—soon to become part of Paul's extended family—also turned out for the concert. Although the program had only been routinely advertised, the audience filled the fifteen hundred available seats as well as standing room, and another five hundred were turned away. The enthusiastic crowd called Robeson back at the end of each section of his program of twenty spiritual and secular songs and at the close of the concert gave him an immense ovation, a full half-hour of applause and encores. It was, Alberta Hunter wrote in her diary, “a triumphant success.” The critics, like the audience, showered him with praise
(“un baryton magnifique”; “L'ensemble n'en fut pas moins fort agréable”; “… y fit valoir la belle qualité d'un timbre naturellement générevx”)
; several of the English-speaking critics present who had heard him on earlier occasions commented on the marked improvement in the range and quality of his voice and on the “poise and ease” of his manner.
¹

Robeson himself wasn't pleased. He had come down with a severe cold, and had been in bed for the four days preceding the performance. Yet the reception was so favorable that Varney immediately scheduled a second concert, and this time Robeson agreed with the critics, telegraphing
Essie, “Tremendous success. Marvelous critiques. Everything grand.” Gertrude's cold was better, too, and she not only attended the second concert but rhapsodized to Paul about the unique quality of his voice. “She had identified him with herself,” Essie quoted Paul as saying, “in the unaesthetics—says Paul does with his voice what she does with words—unbroken continuity, etc.”
²

Essie gave birth to a son, christened Paul Robeson, Jr., on November 2, 1927. She had a difficult time with secondary complications, but once again concealed her health problems from Paul. He remained in Europe to continue his concert engagements—and his relationship with Freda Diamond, traveling alone on her first trip to Europe (in those days an unusual act of daring for a young woman). During the four years he had known her, Freda had grown into a confident, fiery, sometimes imperious young woman; after graduating from the Women's Art School at Cooper Union, she was now embarked on additional study in architecture and decorative design and headed toward an influential career as a designer of home furnishings. A radiant, high-spirited twenty-one-year-old, she was Robeson's constant companion in Paris, and was with him when news arrived of Paul, Jr.'s birth. Though Paul expressed minimal enthusiasm for the event to Freda, she urged him to return immediately to New York—and, by the time she left for Italy the next day, thought she had persuaded him.
³