Paul Robeson (44 page)

Benicasim, once a summer resort for wealthy Spaniards, was now the base hospital nearest the front line, and the roads to it were thronged with wounded and convalescent soldiers. Robeson sang at three different places in and around Benicasim, all within an hour. As their car came to a halt at one spot, he saw a young black soldier stare in disbelief at him. Robeson spoke to the soldier and found that he was a Spanish black from Harlem who had been fighting in Spain eleven months and had just been wounded at the battle of Teruel. They were soon surrounded by other volunteer soldiers, the International Brigadists, from Britain and the States. Two days later, at Albacete and Tarazona, they “were delighted to meet many of ‘the brothers'”—Andrew Mitchell from Oklahoma, Oliver Charles Rose from Baltimore, Frank Warfield from St. Louis, Ted Gibbs from Chicago, and Claude Pringle, a coal miner from Ohio. They “talked at length with them all, and gave them the latest news from America. The men were all keen, and aware, and sturdy spirited”—the Lincoln Brigade was the first U.S. unit ever integrated up to and including command positions.
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The most celebrated of the black volunteers was Oliver Law, a thirty-three-year-old regular-army man from Chicago who had never been promoted above the rank of private but had risen to be commandant of the Lincoln Brigade and had died on the Brunete front. The more Robeson heard about the “quiet, dark brown, strongly built, dignified” Law and how he had kept up the morale of his men by personally undertaking any assignment he asked of them, the more Robeson determined to do a film that would center on Law, but also tell the story of “all of the American Negro comrades” (in Robeson's words) “who have come to fight and die for Spain.” The project never got off the ground; “the same money interests that block every effort to help Spain,” Robeson wrote, “control the Motion Picture industry, and so refuse to allow such a story,” preferring to produce profitable films of “mediocre entertainment.”
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Everywhere he went, Robeson was immediately recognized by the troops. They had read about him, seen his films, heard his songs. Astonished to see him in Spain, they crowded around him at several stops, and at each he sang without accompaniment, the soldiers calling out favorite songs. At the International Brigade training quarters in Tarazona, he was warmly welcomed by soldiers from a dozen countries—some fifteen hundred
men packed the church, after passing in review and saluting the Robeson party, to hear him sing and Charlotte Haldane talk—so movingly, her own eyes full of tears, that the men stood up and cheered her at the close. Two of the British volunteers still remember the impact Robeson himself made. The soldiers “were thrilled to bits to see him,” George Baker recalls—that is, once they believed he was actually there. “You don't get people like that every day of the week running into a war to see how things are going,” says Tommy Adlam, then a sergeant in the medical corps, recalling that at first most of the men discounted the rumor that Robeson was in the vicinity. After it was established as fact, “the whole place lit up.” Robeson was so “alive and vivid,” he had an instantaneous effect—“it was just like a magnet drawing you … as if somebody was reaching out to grasp you and draw you in.” After he sang and talked with the men, they felt they had been with “a friend of lifelong standing.”
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From Tarazona the party drove to Madrid, finishing the last part of the trip in darkness and at a crawl because that stretch of road was within range of the fascist artillery and was regularly bombed. Madrid itself had been shelled on a nearly daily basis since 1936, and no women and children were being allowed to enter the city; the Robesons got through only because they had special government papers. Driving directly to the Presidencia, they were received by the acting governor of Madrid, Dr. F. Grande-Covian, and went from there to luxurious accommodations in the Palace Hotel, “astonished” that such facilities were still available. They were only a few miles from the front line and could hear artillery fire clearly.
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The next day, from the observation tower in the former royal palace, they could see the trenches, government troops on one side, the insurgents on the other. While they were still in the tower, a shell whizzed over and burst into a nearby building; another landed on a nearby bridge, destroying it. They took refuge in the staff room and were entertained on the guitar by a young lieutenant, as other soldiers joined in singing flamenco songs (Robeson told Nicolás Guillén, “the Flamencan song is Black in its rhythm and its sad depths”). Robeson, in turn, sang for the soldiers—the Mexican folk song “Encantadora Maria” and spirituals (“My songs,” he told the
Daily Worker
reporter in Spain, “came from the lips of the people of other continents who suffer and struggle to make equality a reality”). The soldiers seemed as absorbed in the singing as if there were no war at all. On the streets, too, the Robesons had been impressed with the remarkable capacity of the people to remain cheerful and to carry on, between shellings, with daily life. It was Essie's impression that they harbored little bitterness against the adversary, were optimistic that Franco would be defeated and anxious not to sully their own cause by adopting the barbarous tactics of the enemy (the Robesons were elated when news came over the radio that the government had successfully bombed Saragossa—only
to hear their Spanish friends disapprovingly comment that the government had resorted to “murderers' weapons,” had mistakenly adopted Franco's antilife values).
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The Robeson party was welcomed everywhere in Madrid. They met the remarkable Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria), the press came for interviews, Robeson broadcast to the nation, and Dr. Grande gave a party for them at which the great Pastora Imperio danced and Paul sang. At a performance of Cervantes's
Numancia
, Paul was recognized in the audience; the cast then performed some special folk songs and dances in his honor—and he in turn sang from the stage while the audience stomped and shouted its approval. On January 29 the Robesons went to the barracks where soldiers from the front lines were resting, and then to the parade grounds, where he talked and sang to the men; the soldiers called out requests to him in various languages, and a motion-picture crew shot him “from every possible angle” with the troops; Robeson later dubbed in two songs as sound background for the film—choosing the militant “Joshua” and Rosamond Johnson's “Singing wid a Sword in Ma Hand, Lord!”
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From Madrid the Robeson party drove to Valencia, stopped all along the road by earnest young militiamen “armed to the teeth” who recognized the official car but nonetheless insisted on the precaution of checking their papers. A fierce air raid on Valencia had preceded them by only a few hours, and they saw the terrible devastation on all sides. After resting for the night, they moved on to Barcelona by way of the coast road; they were again fortunate in their timing, and arrived there just after two morning air raids. In Barcelona, Essie thought the reporters “depressing, rather like vultures. Not sympathetic at all … I doubt if they really care who wins or loses.” They saw Robert Minor again and had lunch with Earl Browder, who had just arrived from Toulouse. “Browder was a quiet middle-aged man, very sympathetic and interesting,” Essie wrote in her diary. “We had a good talk over lunch, and afterwards over coffee.…” The Commissioner of Information of Catalonia, Jaume Miravitlles, and the well-known folklorist and musician Joan Gols i Soler also paid visits; with both of them Robeson discussed the music of Catalonia, and Gols promised to send him a collection of songs.
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After another overnight, they headed out of Spain to the French border, stopping at Figueras to pick up their driver's brother. During the trip he told them that the Spanish people “lack all sense of color prejudice and are actually proud of whatever Moorish blood they have”—perhaps deliberately broadening his own Republican principles to cover a less than spotless historical record. Lieutenant Conrad Kaye, a popular New York volunteer, had earlier told them that they had had “quite a time at first with some of the southern white Americans and the British on this Negro question … the really difficult ones [having been] the British. They refuse
to eat in dining rooms with the Negroes, etc., and have to be drastically educated, because neither the Spaniards nor the International Brigade will tolerate such heresy.” Essie, for one, “never felt any barrier because of Race or Color with the Spaniards.” As they drove toward the French border, mingling political talk with a song fest (the Robesons teaching the others the words to “I'se a Muggin'”), Captain Castillo unpinned the medal he had won for heroism in 1936 from his uniform and handed it to Essie with the simple words “I give you this.” At the border there were fond farewells and embraces. The Robesons got into a small sedan and crossed over into France; they arrived in Paris on the morning of February 1.
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Robeson later called the 1938 trip to Spain “a major turning point in my life”—in the sense of intensifying his already well-developed political sympathies. “I have never met such courage in a people,” he told a reporter. He disliked the notion of turning to war to solve problems, but felt the Spanish people could not stand there and “be just murdered.” In his notebook Robeson wrote, “We must know that Spain is our Front Line.… We are certainly not doing anywhere nearly enough. We don't feel deeply enough.… If we allow Republican Spain to suffer needlessly, we will ourselves eventually suffer as deeply.” He deplored the failure of the Western democracies to aid the Loyalist cause in Spain. In contrast, Robeson felt, Communists had proved themselves enthusiastic allies in the fight against Franco, and the Soviet Union's support of the antifascist struggle confirmed for him—and for many others—that it stood in the forefront of the struggle for democratic liberties everywhere. On Essie, too, the trip to Spain had a profound effect. “Hitherto,” she wrote William Patterson, she had not been “fundamentally interested” in politics, but now felt she was rapidly “catching up” with Paul's commitment. Less than a week after returning to London, Paul and Essie left for Paris so he could sing for the exiled delegates of the Cortez (the Spanish Parliament) on their way back to their respective countries. From Paris, Essie went on to Moscow to discuss with Ma Goode whether she and Pauli should return to London because of the worsening international situation, and Paul went back to London. They stayed in touch for many years with Captain Castillo, subsequently put him up with his family, and financed an exhibition of the paintings of his father-in-law, Don Cristobal Ruiz, in London (Freda Diamond took on the job of getting him an exhibition in New York), and then essentially supported the family until it could resettle in Mexico.
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Disgusted and alarmed at political developments, Robeson felt he could not simply “stand by and see it happen.” He began to consider returning to the States, where he could speak out without being dismissed as an “alien.” In England, as a noncitizen, he had to try to remain “reasonably discreet,” but, as Essie wrote William Patterson, the “attitude and behaviour” of the “ruling classes” in England “has soured us, and we
despise them openly.” Essie also conveyed to Patterson her approval of the recent purge trials in the Soviet Union. They had given her “a bad scare,” she wrote, because they brought back to mind the personal contact she had had with Ignaty N. Kazakov, the doctor who had just “confessed” to murdering OGPU Chairman Menzhinsky. Kazakov had asked Essie, when she and Paul left Kislovodsk after their 1937 vacation, to bring him “some compound of tungsten” for his laboratory when she returned to Moscow. She had managed to secure the tungsten from her London physician, but, being unable to learn what it could be used for—other than in light bulbs—she had decided to return the tungsten to her doctor; she did not want to “be responsible for importing anything I didn't understand myself.” On returning to the Soviet Union, she had gone to explain to Kazakov—and found that he was in prison. “Can you imagine my being so dumb??” she wrote Patterson. “It develops that he used this marvelous clinic of his for poison, as well as for more constructive work.” She thought the treachery of the “conspirators” “a very terrible thing” and was “glad they have been punished.”
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There is no record of Paul's reaction to the 1936, 1937, or 1938 Moscow trials, but as early as 1936 he had given an interview to Ben Davis, Jr., in which he is quoted as saying that the U.S.S.R. had dealt properly in the trial of the “counter-revolutionary assassins” of Kirov—“They ought to destroy anybody who seeks to harm that great country” (and while saying it, according to Davis, he looked “as if he could strangle the assassins with his own hands”). Marie Seton recalls a far less histrionic and apologetic version. Paul, she says, acknowledged to her in 1937 that “dreadful things” had taken place in the Soviet Union, implying sympathy for those who had “confessed” to an antigovernment “plot” but blanketing his doubts with the extenuating argument that rapid social transformation comes with an inevitable toll. That was a view common in the ranks of pro-Soviet intellectuals everywhere, exemplified in Britain by John Strachey's influential 1936 book,
The Theory and Practice of Socialism
, in which he could “find no meaning in the allegation” that Stalin had made himself a dictator and hailed the Soviet system for producing a “far wider measure of democracy than do parliaments or congresses.”
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The Robesons' alarm over the world situation made them anxious about leaving Pauli, now age ten, in school in the Soviet Union. It had become difficult to reach Moscow except through German-controlled territory (even the Scandinavian air route stopped at Hamburg), and with Spanish and Russian stamps on their passports guaranteeing German hostility to them, the Robesons finally decided to send for Pauli and Ma Goode. They did so reluctantly, knowing how happy the pair had been in Moscow; indeed, Pauli agreed to return only because (as Essie wrote the Van Vechtens) “we
PROMISED
to spend a lot of time with him, and after all, he hadn't seen his parents enough.” Ma Goode went to the States for a
prolonged visit, and Pauli was able to live with his parents on a daily basis for the first time since their summer vacation together in 1937. He was also happy when they immediately enrolled him in the Soviet School in London, maintained for the children of U.S.S.R. officials, an arrangement that allowed him to continue his studies without interruption (and to continue to be shielded from some of the rawer daily manifestations of racism—“Russian children don't look at you as if they hated you,” Pauli told a newspaper reporter).
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