Paul Robeson (3 page)

The Bustill clan showed disinterest in the “dark children” Louisa had left behind (she herself had been light-skinned and high-cheekboned, reflecting the mix of African with European and Delaware Indian heritage),
which was perhaps another reason Paul identified deeply with his father's uneducated relatives, who treated him with unfailing kindness. Reverend Robeson, bereft of his pastorate and his mate, struggled to regain his balance. He was occasionally called on to give a sermon in this church or that, but to piece out an income he became a coachman, driving Princeton students around town, and in addition got himself a horse and wagon to haul ashes for the townspeople (the ashes, Paul later recalled, “piled up in the back yard in such mass as if one were looking at a coal heap in the Rhonda [sic] Valley in Wales …”). “Never once,” Paul remembered, did Reverend Robeson “complain of the poverty and misfortune of those years.” He retained “his dignity and lack of bitterness.” But for a time he could barely sustain a livelihood. The Princeton
Packet
, wanting in all other news about blacks, printed a notice that William Drew Robeson owed $12.25 in unpaid taxes on his house.
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At the time of their mother's death in 1904, Ben and Paul were the only children still at home (Marian, next youngest to Paul, was staying with relatives in North Carolina and studying at the Scotia Seminary for young black women). It wasn't until 1907 that Reverend Robeson managed to relocate himself and his two sons in the town of Westfield, but even then economic hardship continued. Reverend Robeson worked in a grocery store, slept with Paul and Ben in the attic under the roof of the store, cooked and washed in a lean-to attached to the back of the building. Shifting his denominational affiliation from Presbyterian to African Methodist Episcopal, he somehow managed to build a tiny church, the Downer Street St. Luke A.M.E. Zion (Paul and Ben helped lay the first bricks “in this
Pillar
of Zion”), and to hold together its flock of rural blacks from the South. They, in turn, helped Reverend Robeson hold together his family. The woman who ran the grocery store downstairs, along with other church sisters and neighbors, brought food from time to time (supplemented by bags of cornmeal, greens, yams, and peanuts sent up by relatives from Robersonville, North Carolina); and if Reverend Robeson had to visit a parishioner or be away overnight, one of the sisters would take young Paul home, sewing on his buttons, darning his socks, making him rice pudding and chocolate cake. “There must have been moments,” Paul later wrote, “when I felt the sorrows of a motherless child, but what I most remember from my youngest days was an abiding sense of comfort and security.” The townspeople, in turn, remembered him as a “a nice, open-hearted kind of boy.… Made people want to help him, just being what he was.” Later the whole town of Westfield would claim him, yet he “was always aware of that subtle difference between my complete belonging to the Negro community and my qualified acceptance (however admiring) by the white community.”
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In 1910 Reverend Robeson was finally able to re-establish himself in a parish, St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion, in the town of Somerville, New Jersey.
By then Ben had gone off to Biddle University (now Johnson C. Smith) in North Carolina, destined from there to enter the seminary and later to become the pastor of Mother A.M.E. Zion Church in Harlem. That left Paul and his father living alone together. Despite a fifty-three-year gap in their ages, the two were mutually devoted, Paul's respect for his father bordering on awe. The one anecdote Robeson repeatedly recounted as an adult to illustrate his deep regard for his father, and his fear of displeasing him, centered on the consequences of disobeying:

I remember once he told me to do something which I did not do and he said “come here.” I ran away. He ran after me. I darted across the road. He followed, stumbled and fell. I was horrified. I hurried back and helped “Pop” to his feet. He had knocked out one of his most needed teeth. I shall never forget my feeling. It has remained ever present, and I sometimes experience horror, shame, ingratitude, selfishness all over again, for I loved my “Pop” like no one in all the world.… Never in all my life afterwards, and this happened in 1908, when I was ten, did he have to admonish me again.

The old man's “rock-like strength and dignity” (in Paul's words) took on added authority from his habit of dressing in the long black coat of the “old school,” square-cornered and worn down to the knees—and also by his remarkable speaking voice. Paul later called it “the greatest speaking voice I have ever heard … a deep, sonorous basso, richly melodic and refined, vibrant with the love and compassion which filled him.” In the mid-twenties in New York, Robeson would sometimes amuse friends with an affectionate imitation of his father, the “voice going down like an organ” as it delivered a soul-stirring sermon.
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Reverend Robeson had a passion for oratory—those were the days of Gladstone and Parnell, prime declaimers of the spoken word—and in his youngest son the dream of passing on his vocal powers was realized. He gave Paul speech after speech to memorize, going through them with him line by line, “dwelling on the choice of a word, the turn of a phrase, or the potency of an inflexion.” Evenings, Paul would perform his prepared orations for his father's judgment. That done, Reverend Robeson would then often play checkers with his son, and on rare occasions would talk to him about his own early years as a slave. If the tales were infrequent, they were also graphic; later in life Paul would recall how they had haunted his memory and infused his singing of the slave spirituals with a special knowledge and poignancy. He marveled at his father's refusal to remain in bondage and, “in all the years of his manhood,” his refusal “to be an Uncle Tom.” Though he himself witnessed his father “taunted by the hideous injustices of the color ‘bar,'” he never once saw in him a “hint of servility”;
Reverend Robeson taught his children that the black man “was in every way the equal of the white man.” Paul marveled, too, that his father always acted like “a perfect Christian,” rejecting bitterness or even unkindliness. He taught Paul that he had a special responsibility to his race—but also taught him to care “for all people who were unfavorably treated,” and never to assume that whites, by definition, were as a group incapable of caring, reminding him “that whites as well as blacks had given him aid and comfort in his trek for Freedom.” As if to illustrate his words, Reverend Robeson counted among his friends in Somerville the Woldins, a white family who lived almost directly across West Cliff Street. He and Sam Woldin, who had escaped from czarist persecution of the Jews, would often sit on the porch “puffing contentedly on pipes or little Recruits or sweet Caporals, sharing tales of their respective flights to freedom.” As an adult Paul would counsel others in the same theme: neither suffering nor compassion is confined to a single race.
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As a parent, Reverend Robeson was loving but demanding, a strict disciplinarian whose perfectionist standards his son eventually internalized (“It was not like him to be demonstrative in his love, nor was he quick to praise,” he later wrote of his father). Paul was expected to play an active role in church life, to shoulder a full share of family chores, to turn in a superlative academic performance—and to work at odd jobs to help pay his school fees. He met all the expectations, and then some (beyond the requirements a perfectionist parent articulates usually lies the unarticulated final demand that the child surpass any goal he manages to meet—an insatiable process, once inaugurated, never allowing for surcease). At twelve Paul worked as a kitchen boy, at fourteen on a farm, at fifteen at a man's job in brickyards and shipyards, and then, as an older teen-ager, he became a waiter during the summers at the small Imperial Hotel at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island.
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The waiter's job had its special indignities: the hotel guest list was entirely white, the staff entirely black, and there were no alternate social outlets, no chance to blow off steam in the town. Yet there were compensations. In his “Memory Book” Paul described Narragansett as “wonderful … plenty of bathing and summer pleasure,” and good “chaps” on the staff to hang around with. One of the chaps was Oscar C. Brown, later a Chicago real-estate developer and civil-rights activist. Brown worked in the hotel as a bellhop and part-time secretary, and recalls being pleased that he could take home sixty dollars for the summer's work—“I didn't have to be amused, I was in school.” The congenial black staff also included Fritz Pollard; he, like Robeson, would become a storied athlete (in 1916 at Brown, Pollard became the first black All-American football player, named the year before Robeson became the second). The ten or so young black men on the staff enjoyed one another's company, threw a football around on the beach, now and then discussed “current questions,” and cheered
Paul on when the hotel sponsored an oratorical contest. (He won.) “Paul didn't know anything about waiting on tables,” Oscar Brown recalls, “but he did know everything else—the things we struggled to learn, he could get them just by rote almost.” He was a big hit with the rest of the staff. “Everyone loved Paul,” another friend from those days remembers, “and wherever we went there was a great demand to hear his beautiful voice.”
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In school, too, Robeson seems from the beginning to have been the outstanding scholar
and
the most popular boy—a double palm only the most graceful can carry off. On first arriving in Somerville, in 1910, Paul attended James L. Jamison's “Colored School” (Jamison had moved north after the Ku Klux Klan burned down the schoolhouse he had insisted on keeping open during cotton-picking season, when blacks were expected to be in the fields). Paul was one of three graduates from the Jamison School in June 1911, and at the closing exercises, after his father had given the invocation, he “quite captured the audience” (according to the local paper) “by the genuine ring of oratory displayed in his declamation of Patrick Henry's ‘An Appeal to Arms.'” Following Paul, one speaker, in “a very practical address to the graduates,… urged them to do something.” And another (white) encouraged them to continue their education by expressing “his pleasure that a colored boy … [had] graduated from the high school this year and he thought others would get through.”
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Following his graduation from the Jamison School, Paul shifted briefly to Westfield's unsegregated Washington School, graduated at the head of his class, spent eighth grade in a segregated Somerville school, then entered Somerville High in 1912. The town of Somerville had neither Princeton's entrenched racism nor its close-knit black community. By his own later testimony, Robeson “came to know more white people” and made more friendly connections with them than he had when growing up in Princeton. He realized, however, that his own “easy moving between the two racial communities” was “rather exceptional,” that “barriers between Negro and white existed,” and that his own partial exemption from them was neither typical nor indicative of full acceptance.
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Somerville High, reflecting the racial composition of the town, had fewer than a dozen black students in a total enrollment of about two hundred. Robeson and a boy named Winston Douglas were the only blacks in their class of some forty. The “colored fellas,” one white classmate asserts, “fitted in very easily.” There was “no antiblack feeling in the town,” a second classmate insists. “It was a nice small town, very good, and the Robesons were highly respected, really.” “There was no prejudice at all,” claims a third classmate, “never any mention of any prejudice.”
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That the youthful Robeson was well liked and widely admired is certain. Those who knew him in high school remark upon his “sweetness and modesty,” his “warm, easygoing, laid-back” temperament, his “refined, clean-minded, wholesome” qualities—offering, without irony, a set of attributes
that, in their suggestion of constraint and lack of spontaneity, would not be universally regarded as the apogee of adolescent development; and showing, too, no awareness of the psychological costs of always having to appear, and be seen, in so restricted a guise. In the same way, those who knew Paul in Somerville have no trouble citing the astonishing range of his gifts in sports, studies, singing, and debating, but have uniform trouble recalling or crediting any obstacles placed in the way of those accomplishments. They cite the civility of his manner and emphasize the smoothness of his path.
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Most of Paul's white classmates apparently believed—at the time and since—that his unfailingly courteous, Christian demeanor reflected the full range of his feelings, and that his penchant for remaining somewhat apart merely reflected a loner's temperament. “Well,” Robeson later laconically observed, “I was a good boy, sure enough—but I wasn't
that
good!” And, indeed, one classmate, J. Douglas Brown, remembers that Paul “was so busy with other activities … that he was not always fully up on his assignments” and recalls, too, that far from being a joyless ascetic, Paul “was fun to be with.” When the two boys put on the funeral scene from
Julius Caesar
(Paul playing Mark Antony) before the entire school, Paul flung off the sheet from Caesar's “corpse” to reveal “a dozen gory splotches of tomato catsup” they had secretly added to heighten the effect. He also took part in an apparently unsupervised theatrical evening filled with songs and jokes so “coarse and of the low variety type” (in the words of the local paper) that the audience “expressed amazement at the audacity of some of the performers,” and the Board of Education, after calling a special meeting to consider the grave offense, passed a resolution of “severe censure” on the boys who had participated.
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