Paul Robeson (9 page)

From Essie's perspective, matters proceeded smoothly until the summer of 1921, when Paul stopped coming around with the same frequency. Hurt at his neglect and ascribing it to the sudden appearance at the Columbia Summer School of “some very attractive girls” who “began to vamp Paul first in fun and then rather seriously,” Essie decided, with “common sense and directness,” to fight fire with fire. She “resorted to the old game”—meaning she began being seen around with a young man named Grant Lucas, and made a conspicuous public display of her apparent interest in him. Due notice was taken; Essie's new attachment (so she later claimed) became the talk of their crowd and within a month a contrite Paul appeared at her door to say he had come to his senses, had been made to realize how much he loved her, and had decided to propose marriage.

Such, at least, was Essie's version of the culmination of their courtship. Possibly it represented all that she knew at the time, more likely all that she was willing to admit. Throughout her year-long campaign to snare Paul, he was apparently playing his own, more concealed game, and was far from being a mere dupe in her plot. Essie liked to think of herself as
an irresistibly clever manipulator, but in fact her studied moves were entirely readable. Paul, by contrast, rarely tipped his hand. His easygoing affability served to conceal the actual intricacy of his personality—indeed, encouraged the view that he was merely good-natured. Yet, if Essie could noisily connive, Paul could laconically dissemble, his moves far less detectable than hers. Possibly, in the end, she did force his hand—not by seeing another man but by telling Paul that she was pregnant with his child. In later years he came to believe, or claimed to believe, that he had been tricked into marriage, yet finally the evidence for believing that Essie had resorted to the ruse of a pregnancy is not impressive, let alone conclusive. Besides, nothing in the passionate (and believable) love letters the two exchanged in the first few years of their marriage suggests that they had decided to wed in the summer of 1921 for any essential reason other than love, however much Essie may have plotted its course and outcome and however convoluted were some of the twists and turns it took.
¹⁵

It's unlikely Essie knew
all
the convolutions afoot. Paul had given up seeing Frankie after meeting Essie, but his deeper attachment to Gerry Neale had not only continued but, if anything, intensified. Indeed, the impulsive proposal of marriage to Essie in August 1921 may have resulted not from
her
calculations but, rather, from Gerry's.
¹⁶

In the fall of 1919, Gerry had gone to Atlantic City to teach mentally retarded children. She and Paul corresponded and occasionally he visited her. During her second year there—by this time Paul was seeing Essie—Gerry decided to enroll at Howard University to work toward a degree. Before beginning classes, she returned home to Freehold, New Jersey, for the summer—the same summer that “something happened” (in Essie's words) to deflect Paul's attention. That “something” was Gerry.

In August, Paul went to see her at Freehold, shortly before she was due to leave for Howard University. They talked all day and into the night, and Paul again asked Gerry to marry him. She told him she “was going to have a career and probably might not marry.” They discussed Essie briefly. Paul said Essie wanted to marry him, and that he “admired” her, thought her “bright and capable.” Mutual friends had already filled Gerry in, telling her that Essie was “brilliant, well educated, successful in her work, aggressive, sophisticated, knew the ways of the world,” loved Paul very much—and, yes, they said, “was determined to marry him.” Gerry's one direct contact with Essie had been favorable. At a fraternity dance in New York, they had “exchanged pleasantries” and Gerry had seen her do something that she thought boded well for Paul's future: the weather that night was foul, and Essie had gone out in the sleet to find a cab for herself and Paul, leaving him inside the building. The gesture impressed Gerry; she felt Essie was taking the needed precautions “to protect Paul's voice”—and was “devoted” enough “to defy convention.” That night in Freehold,
Gerry conveyed her favorable impression of Essie to Paul. He returned to New York.
¹⁷

Essie's account picks up the story. Early on the morning of August 17, 1921, she answered the doorbell to find a “somewhat disheveled” Paul standing there. He said he'd been thinking about “how much he liked her and what a great pal she was” and had realized, after she started to see someone else, “that he was very much in love with her.” “He suggested quite simply that they go out and get married that day.” Essie “pinched herself” and “with a wildly beating heart calmly told him” that she thought marriage “was an excellent idea.” Since Paul still had to finish law school and such a precipitate step might be difficult to explain to their families, they decided not to go to City Hall (since all licenses obtained there were announced the following day in the newspapers). Instead, they headed up to Greenwich, Connecticut, the usual destination for elopers in those days, stopping to pick up Hattie Boiling, Essie's close friend, in case they should need a witness. Told in Greenwich that as out-of-state residents they would have to wait five days, they headed dejectedly back to New York on the interurban streetcar. As they passed through one village, Paul spotted a “Town Clerk” sign, and off they jumped at Portchester, where, thanks to New York State laws, they were married in fifteen minutes.
¹⁸

Back in the city, they continued their previous bachelor living arrangements. Paul went on sharing a flat with Jimmy Lightfoot, and Essie went on sharing a studio apartment on Striver's Row with her lifelong friend and confidante, Minnie Sumner, a good-natured, tough-minded, dark-skinned young woman who had begun to make her way as a “modiste.” When Lightfoot was out of town with his band, Paul and Essie had that place to themselves. When Lightfoot was in town, Essie and Minnie would have Paul over for dinner (Minnie doing most of the cooking), along with a young lawyer recently arrived in the city in whom Minnie was deeply interested (and would briefly marry), William L. Patterson (“Pat”), a future leader of the Communist Party and in later years a close associate of Robeson's. After dinner the four would play whist, which Paul at first disliked. Essie persuaded herself that she eventually managed to interest him in the game by inviting in “another young man to make a fourth,” while Paul sat by and studied—an arrangement he “soon tired” of.
¹⁹

Essie took credit for persuading Paul to continue in law school, while she returned to her $150-a-month job at the Presbyterian lab, abandoning thoughts of a career in medicine. Though “uncomfortable about his wife working,” Paul agreed reluctantly. By December they decided to make their marriage public, choosing for the occasion the national conventions (to which both were delegates) of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha (the oldest black fraternity in the country), and her sorority, Delta Sigma Theta.
Ma Goode was pleased with the news, but Paul's family, scarcely knowing Essie, gave only guarded approval. (Earlier, Paul's brother Ben had counseled him against marrying Essie; she somehow saw that letter and held it against Ben ever after.) Essie had embossed announcement cards printed at Altman's and sent them out to friends. The couple moved into the top floor of a private house, which they furnished with wedding presents and purchases on installment.
²⁰

Married life now began in earnest—and its adjustments. With her usual systematic agenda, Essie set about to make “the best and most” of her husband. Since he was already “the sweetest, most intelligent, most gifted and attractive man” she had ever known, she proceeded to implement the needed minor improvements; Essie's attitude toward him, one of her relatives later said, was that “this great handsome hulk of man needs me to refine him.” First she “solved” the problem of his appearance. He didn't seem to care about clothes and would absent-mindedly wear the same ones until they wore out, when he would buy new ones—giving him, toward the end of the cycle, a somewhat “untidy” look. Similarly, he would go into an ordinary shoe store, purchase the largest-size shoes in stock, which never proved large enough, and complain vaguely that they cramped his feet. With characteristic thoroughness, Essie set matters right. She went through most of the men's shops in New York until she finally learned that Wallach's and Rogers Peet carried the best selection of extra-large clothing and John Ward stocked size 12½ shoes. She purchased only “lovely and becoming colors”; people told Paul he was “growing handsome,” and he pronounced Essie “a miracle worker.” She had somewhat less success adjusting their conflicting timetables. Essie's clock ran from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., Paul's from noon to 3:00 a.m. She “thought it rather wicked laziness” to sleep after eight in the morning and persuaded Paul to try getting up earlier. He did his best, only to wander around in a daze, kiss her goodbye blindly—and go back to bed. Even Essie could occasionally acknowledge defeat. She relented, calling off at least one of her campaigns.

Their life was busy. Essie worked daily at Presbyterian Hospital; Paul shuttled between full-time law school, part-time athletics, and occasional singing engagements or public appearances (among them a “seat of honor” at the Columbia senior-class dinner at the Hotel Astor). Evenings, they saw an ever-widening circle of friends—Minnie and Pat, Hattie and Buddy Boiling, Essie's old friend Corinne Cook and her new husband, Louis Wright, the brilliant young physician and civil-rights activist who became the Robeson family doctor. Occasionally there would be a trip to one of the cellar cabarets, like Eddie's, that were springing up all over Harlem, or a boat-ride excursion up the Hudson. But for the first year of their marriage, the Robesons were essentially a struggling, upwardly mobile
young couple, “primarily concerned with
ourselves
,” as Essie later wrote, “with our own future,” not yet at the glamorous epicenter of the Harlem literary renaissance or its burgeoning racial politics.
²¹

Back in 1920 Paul had become involved with the Amateur Players, a group of Afro-American students who banded together under the direction of Dora Cole Norman, sister of Bob Cole (one of the great forces in turn-of-the-century black theater). The Players wanted to “attempt to produce plays of their race,” a goal that led Mrs. Norman to stage a revival at the Harlem YWCA of Ridgely Torrence's drama
Simon the Cyrenian
, the story of the black man who was Jesus's cross-bearer. She had finally prevailed on a reluctant Paul to play the leading role of Simon; according to an account he gave to a newspaper six years later, his apartment was next to the rehearsal hall and the Players would “waylay him and dragged him in whenever he passed,” until he “gave up the fight.”
²²

Paul treated the show as a lark, but several whites influential in the theater happened to catch his performance, were impressed, and subsequently recommended him for his first professional role, the lead in a play about voodoo entitled
Taboo
. It was the initial writing effort of Mary Hoyt Wiborg, the fashionable young white socialite “Hoytie,” daughter of wealthy financier Frank Wiborg, and sister to Sara (wife of Gerald Murphy of Lost Generation fame). The melodramatic plot of
Taboo
centers on a plantation in antebellum Louisiana. Severe drought conditions threaten the crop, and some of the superstitious plantation slaves, blaming the lack of rain on “a curse” placed on the mistress's mute grandchild, decide to sacrifice the boy. A wandering minstrel, Jim—the part offered Robeson—intervenes, and after several hundred turns in the plot, including an African flashback in which Jim transmogrifies into a voodoo king, rainfall descends at the crucial moment and all ends happily.
²³

Paul was again inclined to refuse the part, preferring to concentrate on law school, but Essie, with Dora Cole Norman backing her up, kept at him. After much discussion, and having determined he could continue his law studies simultaneously, Paul agreed to take on the role: “I knew little of what I was doing, but I was urged to go ahead and try.” The production, at the Sam Harris Theater, was an elaborate one. The great black actor Charles Gilpin helped to coach the cast; Augustin Duncan, Isadora's brother, directed; the famed Clef Club Orchestra accompanied; and Margaret Wycherly, most recently associated with the Provincetown Players, starred opposite Robeson. The major critics saw little merit in the play, and nearly as little in the performances. Robert Benchley in
Life
roasted the playwright, and Alexander Woollcott in
The New York Times
roasted the star (Wycherly “gave a monstrously stagy and sepulchral performance”). Robeson's press was generally positive—he “dominates the play,” his voice is “rich, mellow”—but Woollcott, though impressed with Robeson's
strong presence, advised him that he belonged almost anywhere but on a stage. (Having met Robeson during the play's run, Woollcott later wrote, “I never in my life saw anyone so quietly sure, by some inner knowledge, that he was going somewhere.…”) Wycherly immediately gave notice, and the production came to an abrupt end after four matinee performances.
²⁴

Hoytie Wiborg was not discouraged. She had the financial resources and theatrical contacts to back up her self-confidence, and within two months of
Taboo
's closing in New York had arranged for a production in London. It was to star none other than Mrs. Patrick Campbell, one of the legendary figures of the English stage, who had often stayed at Hoytie's Fifth Avenue home and was given to doing favors for her amateur-playwright friends. Hoytie offered Robeson the chance to re-create his role opposite Mrs. Pat.
²⁵