Paul Robeson (4 page)

Somerville High also heard the first Robeson
Othello
—a burlesque version. The year was 1915, the occasion a presentation by Miss Miller's English class, before the entire school, of “Shakespeare at the Water Cure,” a potpourri of characters from the plays—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello, etc.—who meet as contemporaries at a health resort in England. Teacher Anna Miller later recalled her hesitation in asking Paul to take on the parodic role of Othello as a hotel waiter, especially since the performance was designed to raise money for a class outing to Washington, D.C., that Paul could not join because no hotel in the capital would accept a black guest. “But of course Paul was willing” to perform—and proved a huge hit with the audience.
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On that evening, and many others, he sang as well. Another teacher at Somerville High, Miss Elizabeth Vosseller, had early spotted Paul's remarkable voice, put him in the school chorus—where he carried the bass section single-handedly—and thereafter took special interest in his progress. Paul's own family had recognized his musical gifts even earlier. As the tale goes—doubtless with the touch of highlighting usual in family lore—
the moment of revelation came when Paul and his older brothers Ben and Bill were “chording up on a few tunes” one day. Sailing through their repertoire—“Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Silent Night”—Paul “bore down with boyish glee” on “one of those minors known only to home-loving groups”—and “put it out of the lot.” Brother Bill purportedly yelled, “You can sing!”; Paul purportedly told him to stop making “stupid jokes.” According to Ben's later account, the good-natured battle about Paul's talent “raged” for weeks. But mutual encouragement and support were hallmarks of Robeson family life, and the “debate” soon concluded, a consensus emerging that “there might be a grain of truth in Bill's position.” Thereafter Paul gave himself “with more attention” to singing in the choir of his father's church and took to entertaining at family gatherings.
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Searching their memories many years later, several of Robeson's classmates have ultimately managed to recall some “isolated” instance of bigotry, only to dismiss it as atypical of the prevailing racial harmony in Somerville. In the context of the bitter, often violent antiblack feeling then endemic in the United States, the townspeople are pardonably proud of their record. Somerville was indeed something of an oasis—yet not a Utopia. “Your visiting teams, of course,” one man recalls, “some of them were a little prejudiced against the colored, you know, and naturally they would endeavor in some way, not to intentionally injure him, but really to take it out on him.” But at least once Paul
was
injured in a game: against the much heavier team of Bound Brook, his collarbone was broken. In another incident, Somerville was playing the rival town of High Bridge in baseball, with Robeson catching and Leslie Kershaw pitching. The game had been close until a late inning, when Robeson hit the ball over the center-field fence, giving Somerville the victory. Kershaw claims he heard the High Bridge principal say “big nigger” as Robeson crossed home plate. Whether or no, Paul and everybody else clearly heard shouts of “Nigger!” coming from elsewhere in the stands.
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Robeson experienced that kind of overt racism less often during high school than most teen-age black males do, but the subtler variety—the kind that allowed him, through practice and forewarning, to keep his temper under wraps—was more frequent. A distinct social line was drawn. He often walked to and from school with a white girl in his class, but she acknowledges that he never entered her house: “There never really was an occasion to ask him in.” Though everyone was “very nice to Paul” and Paul in turn was famously nice to everyone, he and his classmates didn't exactly “pal around” together. As one of his teachers put it, “He is the most remarkable boy I have ever taught, a perfect prince. Still, I can't forget that he is a Negro.” Another of his teachers did urge him to attend high-school parties and dances, but Paul himself knew better. “There was always the feeling,” he later wrote, “that—well, something unpleasant might happen.”
Yet a third teacher applauded Paul's discretion: he remained an “amazingly popular boy”
because
“he had the faculty for always knowing what is so commonly referred to as his ‘place.'” Early habituated to solitude, Paul would all his life seek it, deeply marked, in the eyes of some, by the melancholy of confirmed apartness. Yet he would never be a true loner. Unwilling ever to live by himself, he would prefer later in life to sleep on a friend's sofa rather than to stay alone. His ideal situation would always be to have loving friends in near proximity, but to be able to retreat at will to an inner monastic fortress.
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He learned early that accomplishment can win respect and applause but not full acceptance—although he tried to follow the established protective tactic of Afro-American life in America: to “act right,” to exhibit maximum affability and minimal arrogance. Even while turning in a superior performance, he had to pretend it was average and that it had been accomplished offhand, almost absent-mindedly. Any overt challenge to the “natural supremacy” of whites had to be avoided, and on any occasion when whites were surpassed, the accompanying spirit could never smack of triumph. “Above all,” Robeson later wrote, as if repeating a litany drummed into his head by his father, “do nothing to give them cause to fear you, for then the oppressing hand, which might at times ease up a little, will surely become a fist to knock you down again!”
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This balancing act required enormous self-control. Robeson could safely stay on one side of the exceedingly fine line that separated being superior from acting superior only by keeping the line in steady focus. The effort contributed to the development of an acute set of antennae that he retained all his life—he later told a reporter that he could size someone up immediately, could sense, when introduced to a stranger, “what manner of man he is,” regardless of the words he spoke. But having to maintain constant self-control took its emotional toll. “I wish I could be sweet all the time,” he once said when under intense pressure, “but I get a little mad, man, get a little angry, and when I get angry I can be awful rough.” No young man of Robeson's energetic gifts could continuously sustain a posture of bland friendliness without the effort's exacting some revenge—especially since his father had also taught him to be true to himself. The tension was further heightened by a lifetime conviction that “in comparison to most Negroes” he had had an easy time of it growing up in white America, and complaint might appear, even to other blacks, as ungrateful and unwarranted. He preferred to “keep silent,” a tactic for coping with emotional distress that he maintained throughout his life. As an adult he could never reflect with ease on his youth, once confessing to a friend that, when he did recall some of his experiences, they only “aroused intense fury and conflict within him.”
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Robeson's natural talents were so exceptional that he had to make a proportionately large effort in order to forestall resentment in others. He
learned early: even as a boy in Westfield he is remembered as “a shy kid who did everything well, but preferred to keep in the background.” Had his warmth and modesty not been quite so engaging, the astonishing record he compiled at Somerville High might well have stirred more fear and envy. Several of his classmates swore he never took a book home at night—even as Paul sat each evening under his father's rigorous eye reviewing the day's lessons in Virgil and Homer. He was wise enough to appear occasionally as less than thoroughly prepared, or to use humor to “take the teachers on a bit, in a nice way.” Even so, one classmate confessed, “He used to get my goat, everything seemed so easy to him.”
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Indeed it did—in athletics especially. Robeson excelled in every sport he attempted. In baseball he played the positions of shortstop and catcher with equal facility, ran fast, and hit well. In basketball—in those days essentially a guarding game—his height and dexterity made him “good at stopping a man.” He also ran track and (after school) played a fair game of tennis. But it was his skill as a fullback in football that gained him the most attention. Paul “had such a big strong hand,” one contemporary said, that “he could almost wrap [it] around a football” (somewhat rounder than the modern ball) “and throw that thing just like a baseball.” Envy of such prowess (especially in someone of his race) did occasionally surface. In a game against the superior team of Phillipsburg High (known as “a rough bunch of kids” and outweighing Somerville ten pounds to a man) the opposition “lay for him” and piled on—but the attack energized him and he scored a touchdown; still, “handicapped by the work of officials” (as the local paper put it), Somerville lost “the greatest game ever played” on the Phillipsburg grounds. Reverend Robeson was often on hand for the games. A contemporary recalls that “he would keep his eyes upon Paul through every second of play. The fellows on the team said he was like a lucky stone. They liked to know he was watching.” Far from disapproving of sports, he wanted his son to distinguish himself in that area, as in all others—and stood on the sidelines to remind him that, should adversity arise, he had to resist both the sin of lashing out and the sin of stunting his purpose.
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The double injunction to avoid confrontation while simultaneously being self-assertive could in the long haul prove a prescription for paralysis or despair. But for a young man not yet burdened with too great an accumulation of anger, and with a disposition that lent itself naturally to cordiality, the instruction to be proud
and
pleasant does not seem to have been borne with undue strain. Paul's ability for the time being to thrive under rather than succumb to his father's difficult set of standards was illustrated by an episode during his senior year at Somerville. New Jersey had announced a statewide oratorical contest for high-school boys, and Robeson, Somerville's prize debater, entered it. The panel of judges included Frederick K. Shield, then a senior at Rutgers, and the event so
impressed him that seventy years later he remembered it vividly. In addition to Paul, Shield recalls, there were five or six other contestants—all white boys, all good orators, all well prepared. Each gave his speech, each performed well, one scarcely divisible in merit from another.
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Then, as Shield remembers it, “this handsome big Negro's turn came.” He chose for his text Wendell Phillips's famed oration on Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black Haitian revolutionary who defeated Napoleon's troops in a successful rebellion against slavery. Many years later, in his autobiography, Robeson claimed that he had “had no real appreciation” of the oration's meaning, had given “no thought to … the flaming words.” Nonetheless, this was not the sort of topic in 1915 that a black boy bent solely on being polite would have chosen for public declamation. (In a similar spirit, during a senior-year debate with another school on the topic “whether immigration into the United States should be restricted by a literacy test,” Paul's plea for the country to welcome
all
the poor and downtrodden was “so eloquent and moving”—according to Douglas Brown, who was also on the platform—“that many in the audience were in tears.”) Nor, had Paul been bent on being
merely
restrained and courteous, would he have invested his Toussaint oration with the passion he did. “It was as if,” Shield recalls, “somebody's life was being saved, somebody important.” So closely did the boy and the subject seem to merge, and “so great” were the young orator's powers, that Reverend Robeson, sitting in the front row in an audience of some 250 people, “broke out at times”—uncharacteristic of that dignified gentleman—“in emotional expression.” Nonetheless, Robeson was awarded only third prize.
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In that same year of 1915, the seventeen-year-old Robeson took a statewide written exam for a four-year scholarship to Rutgers University. His family preferred all-black Lincoln University, from which both his father and his brother Bill had graduated, but the strain on the Reverend Robeson's limited income made the possibility of a scholarship appealing. Besides, Paul himself did not prefer Lincoln. As his teacher Anna Miller recalled, “Several of the Negro colleges were suggested to him but Paul had his heart set on a large school and no hints as to the difficulties he might encounter on that path could daunt him.… ‘I don't want to have things handed to me,' he declared. ‘I don't want it made easy.'” The other students competing for the Rutgers scholarship had previously taken a test covering their first three years of high school; not knowing of the test in time, Robeson had to write an exam that included the entire four-year course of work. Nonetheless, he won the competition. “Equality might be denied,” he later wrote, “but I
knew
I was not inferior.”
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Like everyone who grows up black in white America, Robeson had experienced his share of racial abuse. Unlike most, it had not become the overwhelming fact of his existence. He had been called a nigger but not consistently treated like one. Accidents of geography, family, and talent
had insulated him from the brutalities of daily life commonplace for black Americans in the pre-World War I years. He would later tell a white reporter—
underplaying
the indignities he had suffered—that his “impressionable years” had been spent “almost entirely in friendly intelligent white society,” an experience that kept him “from distrusting the white race as most Negroes do and from having a feeling of forced inferiority.” Having grown up among whites, Robeson would find it difficult ever to view them as unredeemable demons—or controlling gods. “I came up an idealist,” he once said, “interested in human values, certain that all races, all peoples are not nearly as different one from the other as text books would have it.”
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