Paul Robeson (63 page)

The raid marked the end of the affair between Paul and Uta. “It was like suddenly the relationship had become a threat,” as Uta recalls, “and he had to end it. But he did not say so in so many words.” After that night, through the intercession of the actress Rita Romilly, they exchanged a few
letters and met a few times—“maybe six times after that”—but when they did get together Paul made no attempt to explain his remoteness other than to say that they “had to be careful until the whole thing calmed down.” In short order the “silences got longer and longer.” Paul soon stayed away entirely, and the affair “just disintegrated.” Between her husband's raid and her lover's disengagement, Uta “was mad at men for a long time.” Mad, and flat broke. Ferrer refused to give her a nickel of alimony, and Paul volunteered only a couple of hundred dollars now and then for a short time; it wasn't until her starring role in
A Streetcar Named Desire
a few years later that she got back on her feet, financially and professionally. The last time she saw Paul was in Chicago in 1949, when he came to see her in
Streetcar
. They had dinner afterward and, according to Uta, it was “unbelievably nostalgic,” Paul “making a very big pitch towards me again.” She felt “rather objective about it all—I still adored him, but the spell was broken, completely broken that one night.”
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Paul and Essie's life together had become so attenuated that, whether or not she knew of the raid, she had long since learned that any attempt to interfere with Paul's privacy could only jeopardize her standing with him. It was a time in her life, in any case, when her newfound success as writer and lecturer had given her a sense of independence. She had spent May through November 1946 in French Equatorial Africa and the Belgian Congo, was writing a book about it, and was collaborating with Pearl Buck on another. Feeling riskily outspoken, she wrote Paul a thirty-five-hundred-word letter in December 1946—just before the raid—on the subject of money, her lack of it and Bob Rockmore's “vindictive” withholding of it. The letter had been triggered by a recent episode involving Paul, Jr. Inducted into the Air Force in the spring of 1946, he had been stationed in Spokane, had found a girlfriend out there and needed a little extra money. When he wired Essie for forty dollars from his own savings, she used the occasion—to Paul, Jr.'s dismay—to sit down and write Rockmore, asking him to send Paul, Jr., a hundred dollars. According to Essie, Rockmore got “very angry” and reluctantly agreed to send him an additional fifty. Essie decided to use the episode as an occasion for challenging Rockmore's stewardship—which she had always resented—over her own finances.
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Rockmore feels, Essie wrote Paul, Jr., that “you should behave like a modest little colored boy, efface yourself, play it low,” dutifully applying to him as a supplicant so he could feed his “power complex”—he “wants to run everybody”—and his
“VERY
patriarchal attitude toward Negroes”; it seems we have “a lot of folks among our friends who will always
TELL
you what to do, and how to do it.
YOU
must always be the last word for
YOU.
Even against me and The Papa. And I mean that.” As for herself, she refused to be patronized any longer; she intended to be polite to Rockmore “but that's all.” None of this, she stressed to Paul, Jr., had been Paul,
Sr.'s fault—“The Papa is too generous, he has never been tight in his whole life.”
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Yet, when she wrote to Paul, Sr., herself a day later, she felt the need to expound again on the subject of finances. Her set of grievances turned out to be much broader than that, but she started with a restatement of her money problems—“to get it off my chest,” so that “the few times we do meet,” money would not have to be discussed. “I've never had a personal allowance of any kind ever since we've been back in America,” she wrote, “and I've never had enough to run the house properly”; on occasion she had been reduced to cutting the grass herself after Rockmore announced they couldn't afford a gardener. The breaking point had come when she came back from Africa late in 1946 and had had to put Ma Goode into a nursing home; Rockmore's reaction had been to cut her allowance from ninety dollars a week to eighty. “I suddenly saw the light: He'd never have dared to do that to a white woman. Never. But I'm colored folks, and so I can take low.… I really don't believe, in all fairness to Bobby, that this kind of explanation has ever crossed his mind. (He tries consciously,
VERY
consciously, to be pretty liberal).… Suddenly, I've had my stomach full. I feel at 50 [her upcoming birthday was December 15] … I'm going to start a new life altogether. I'm going to get myself settled and straightened out, so I'll know where I am, where I'm going, and how.”

That said, Essie advised Paul to “heave a deep breath.… I'll take you further along the garden path and prepare yourself, because its going to be rough walking.” She had a couple of questions she needed to ask. First and foremost: “Am I to continue to be Mrs. Robeson? Yes or No.” The last time she'd been in Rockmore's office, he'd confided “that you had been going to marry Freda, and proved to me that you were.” That news, Essie continued in her letter, “set me back. Maybe I wasn't even Mrs. Robeson any more.” She wanted to know. And she also wanted a guaranteed personal allowance (“I should have had one ever since we returned to America. Otherwise I'm being your wife for my living, only, and am merely a paid housekeeper. I feel I rate better than that. Anyway, good housekeepers come high, these days”). The assured income would allow her “to do something on my own.… I may even be able to make myself independent, so if ever you want to shed me, it should be easy.… My wings are itching, and I think I'm going to fly. But I want good visibility before I take off.” Having had her say, Essie promised not to bring up “my personal business” again; “I've said everything that's been on my mind for some time, and I feel better for saying it, no matter how it comes out.”
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Essie knew how to tough it out, but Paul knew when and how to acknowledge the din—in order to neutralize it and to be better able to proceed on his own unencumbered way. He told Essie (as she reported to Paul, Jr.) that he “couldn't imagine anything more reasonable” than her insistence on a hundred dollars a week for the house and a hundred a
month for her personal allowance, and said that in the future, if she needed more, she should come to him directly, immediately. Just two months after sending her husband what read like a firm ultimatum, Essie was confessing to her son that she herself wasn't “clear” about what was going on. “Bobby does his ground-work dirty. He tells me one thing, and The Papa another. And what with all the misunderstanding, and inefficient (deliberately so) interpreting, The Papa and I get more and more distant.” Essie may to some degree have decided against greater clarity with Paul, Jr., to spare him—he had apparently expressed concern over the possibility of a formal split between his parents—for when she did allude to additional complications it was in a protectively evasive way: “Of course, bad news is bad news, but if its well delivered, it isnt as bad as it could be. Maybe this is over your head. And anyway, there may be no bad news at all.… Anyway, you make plenty of sense when you say: If the three of us cant work everything out, we ought to give up. That's my sentiments. And I too, think its high time the three of us
DO
work it out.”
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Essie, quick to flare, knew how to back down when it appeared her belligerence might threaten her own vital interest in remaining Mrs. Robeson. She knew that Paul, ordinarily less quick to react, capricious about the details of ordinary life, had a powerful will. If he came to feel that
his
essential interests were at stake, he could prove by far the more intractable of the two, difficult to turn from any course of action upon which he had decided, insistent, ultimately, on doing exactly what he wanted and telling others only precisely what he wanted them to know. “Nobody tells me anything,” Essie complained to Revels Cayton, aware somewhere in her depths that the brash appurtenances of command she liked to flaunt were pale shadows of her husband's quietly powerful authority (and no match for it). Having openly broadcast her complaints, she now wisely decided, “once and for all, to close ranks with him.”
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CHAPTER 16

The Progressive Party

(1947–1948)

Henry A. Wallace, Roosevelt's Vice-President and now Truman's Secretary of Commerce, began to speak out against administration foreign policy in 1946. He, like Robeson, deplored Churchill's “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri, and counseled Truman to adopt a more flexible attitude toward the Soviets in order to control atomic energy and to maintain peace. Truman ignored him. On September 12, 1946, Wallace delivered a crucial speech at a meeting sponsored by two groups (Robeson was affiliated with both) that later that year were to merge into the Progressive Citizens of America; in it, Wallace forcefully attacked the emergent Anglo-American “get-tough” policy toward Russia, arguing that nations with different economic systems could and must live in peace together (the same argument Robeson employed when testifying before the Tenney Committee three weeks later in California). Wallace's speech caused an uproar, with Secretary of State Byrnes threatening to resign and the foreign-policy hard-liners in both parties repudiating it. On September 20 Truman requested and received Wallace's resignation from the Cabinet. The rift had been opened that would lead to Wallace's third-party Progressive race in the presidential election of 1948, but throughout most of 1947 he explicitly refrained from declaring his candidacy. Robeson, meanwhile, remained primarily absorbed in fighting political battles on his own front.
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They began to multiply. As early as the spring of 1946, local rightwing forces had succeeded in banning various Win the Peace meetings at which Robeson had been scheduled to appear, or in forcing him to shift concert halls. Embarked on yet another four-month, cross-country concert tour with Larry Brown in January 1947, Robeson arrived in St. Louis,
Missouri, to find himself in the middle of a controversy about segregated facilities in the city's theaters. When the Civil Rights Congress of St. Louis called for a demonstration in front of the American Theater, Robeson joined the picket line of about thirty people. At a press conference the next day he created another flurry by announcing that at the conclusion of his current tour in April he intended to abandon the theater and concert stage for two years in order to “talk up and down the nation against race hatred and prejudice.… It seems that I must raise my voice, but not by singing pretty songs.” For the immediate future he would sing only “for my trade union and college friends; in other words, only at gatherings where I can sing what I please.” A few days later the left front wheel came off a car in which Robeson was riding on a highway near Jefferson City. Fortunately the car had been moving at a moderate speed and no one was hurt. The Pittsburgh
Courier
did not hesitate to report the episode as “a prejudice-prompted attempt on the life of Paul Robeson.” The driver of the car told the
Courier
that “the wheel showed definite signs of having been tampered with.”
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Both the FBI and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, on their respective fronts, took due note of Robeson's announced intention to devote himself to political activity. J. Edgar Hoover, in an apparent decision to formalize charges against him, had already ordered the New York Office to “prepare a report in summary form” setting forth “only such information of a legally admissible character as will tend to prove, directly or circumstantially, membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party, and knowledge of the revolutionary aims and purposes of that organization.” Hedda Hopper rushed to her own set of barricades. When Robeson came to California in March, she devoted most of her column to lambasting him for having sung the Russian “People's Battle Song” and for remarking in public on the effort “in America today to kill the liberal movement, to crush the labor movement, to stifle the cries against reaction.” Such talk, in Hedda Hopper's view, was an example of Robeson's “abusing the precious heritage of freedom given us by our Constitution in flaunting the preaching of our most dangerous enemy.…”
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When Robeson reached Peoria in April, the sniping against him mushroomed into a full-blown public confrontation. From the first announcement of a Robeson concert in Peoria, there had been rumblings of opposition. Then, two days before the concert, the House Committee on Un-American Activities cited him, along with nearly a thousand others (including Henry Wallace, David Lilienthal, and Harlow Shapley, the Nobel Prize-winning astronomer from Harvard), as one “invariably found supporting the Communist Party and its front organizations.” Edward E. Strong, organization secretary of the National Negro Congress, gave vent to the anger felt by many progressives: “The Un-American Committee in Washington has allegedly been carrying on an investigation of un-American
organizations and subversives. Whom have they attacked? The C.I.O. but not the Ku Klux Klan; Paul Robeson but not Theodore Bilbo; not a single group guilty of burning Negroes, gouging out the eyes of veterans, and subverting the Constitution throughout the South … have been called to the stand.… The un-American forces … in the name of ‘patriotism' would deny the great Robeson the right to sing in Peoria, while the supporter of fascism during the war, Flagstad, is singing and being acclaimed at Carnegie Hall in New York.”
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When word of HUAC's citation reached the Peoria City Council, it immediately passed a resolution opposing the appearance of “any speaker or artist who is an avowed propagandist for Un-American ideology.” A group of local citizens protested this affront to civil rights, declaring that “there are few progressive independent thinking people who have not been branded ‘red' at some time or other since Hitler developed this technique to destroy democracy and bring Nazi-fascism to Europe.” Peoria Mayor Carl O. Triebel agreed momentarily to make City Hall's assembly room available to the citizens' group so it could hold a reception for Robeson. But Triebel held to his promise for only one day, rescinding it under a barrage of pressure from “patriot” groups on the following afternoon—the day Robeson, accompanied by Max Yergan, arrived in Peoria. He came despite rumors of impending violence and although William Patterson had reported that he had seen more guns in Peoria “than he ever had before.” Denied a place to sing, and refused time to present his case on the local radio station, Robeson was reduced to meeting with a handful of people in the living room of Ajay Martin, a union official and the president of the Peoria branch of the NAACP.
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