Paul Robeson (97 page)

“In a socialist country,” Robeson told a reporter on his return to London, “I give my services free. In a capitalist country I charge as much as I can.” He put that principle to work in deciding whether or not to take up a lucrative offer to tour New Zealand and Australia for ten weeks. He didn't want to go; he was tempted to visit Ghana instead, and was also homesick for the States. Offered more than a hundred thousand dollars for twenty concerts in Australia and New Zealand, with additional sums to be added for television appearances, Robeson reluctantly decided to accept. For two or three months' work, Essie wrote to Freda Diamond, they could “clean up some fast money, and then he can retire, and do only what he wants to do, when he wants to. Which means television, radio, and occasionally a concert. And some writing.” (Paul still hoped to do a book about his musical theories.) With Essie and Larry Brown, Robeson arrived in Australia on October 13.
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The tour did bring in the expected income and generated some incidental pleasures as well, but, far from being a piece of cake, it proved a grueling ordeal. In Robeson's opening press conferences in Sydney and Brisbane, several hostile reporters prodded him with sharp-edged questions, and Robeson rose angrily to the bait. Had the Hungarian uprising been justified? Robeson pointed his finger at the questioner and told him the uprising had been inspired by “fascists”—encouraged by Voice of America broadcasts to Hungary—and was not a revolt of the people. Had not the condition of blacks in the United States greatly improved of late? It had
somewhat
improved, Robeson shot back, primarily because blacks had become militant in demanding their rights and because the U.S.S.R. had supported the black struggle. Was he bitter about the way the U.S. government had treated him? Bitter? Robeson echoed, and then launched into what one newspaper later described as an “emotional outburst” and another as a “nauseating” political “tirade.” “If someone did something bad to me I wouldn't be bitter—I'd just knock him down and put my foot into his face” (crashing his foot down on the floor to illustrate his point). He then went on—at least, so the press reported—to say that the Russians would “hammer out the brains” of any country, including America, who took arms against them, and to declare that, in the event of such a conflict, he would side with Russia. Paul “is angrier than ever,” Essie reported ruefully to Freda Diamond, “and it makes me shudder, because he is so often angry at the wrong people, and so often unnecessarily angry.”
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Paul's anger reflected not the momentary logic of events but storedup griefs, a nature unraveling. Behind the reporters' hostile questions—which had been thrown at him now for two decades—he heard the smug, unspoken subtext: “Come on, Robeson,
confess
, confess that your hopes
have run aground, confess that human beings
stink
, confess that the rest of us have always been right, that we're perfectly entitled to go on leading the narrow, hardened, opportunistic lives you silly idealists once so righteously scorned.” He told Nancy Wills, an Australian woman he had first met in London in the forties, that he was afraid to walk the streets in Australia—“He didn't believe that the people here loved him.” When Essie, in front of Wills, mentioned the possibility of stopping off in the Philippines on their way back to London, Paul flew into a rage, declaring that U.S. agents would kill him if he ever set foot in the Philippines—“It was frightening,” as Wills remembers the scene, “to see and hear anyone so distraught, so angry.”
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Australia had not fully emerged from its own McCarthy-like deepfreeze, and the current Menzies government was, at the very moment of Robeson's arrival, debating an anti-civil-libertarian Crimes Act Amendment. Having set him up with a string of loaded political questions, the Australian press proceeded to lambaste him for being too political. The
Herald
and
Sun
chain of newspapers headlined their stories of Robeson's initial press conference, “Would Back Russia in a War,” and “Robeson Bitterly Critical of U.S.” while the
Telegraph
weighed in with “I Wish He Was Still Bosambo.” D. D. O'Connor, the sponsoring agent for Robeson's tour, wrote Essie that the headlines “aroused a certain amount of resentment, particularly in official circles and of course in the wealthy and rather snobbish section of concert patrons.” Since tickets for the tour were scaled rather high, O'Connor expressed concern for its commercial success, a concern heightened when the director of adult education in Hobart promptly canceled Robeson's scheduled appearance in that city (“My Board is reluctant to be identified with Mr. Robeson's public statements, and cannot co-operate with you as previously arranged”).
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Things simmered down once the tour itself began. The next three weeks were spent in New Zealand, and there the press was altogether more civil than in Australia. At a typical concert appearance Robeson (continuing his recent practice) would eschew a formal program and present instead an informal combination of talk and song. One reporter vividly caught his platform manner:

Robeson treated the normal procedures … with something like kindly indifference, putting on thick-rimmed glasses to read the words of a song from a copy of the printed program, and commenting on many of his songs in the light of his own view of social justice (“If they call that politics, I plead guilty”). With a small lectern beside him, to hold notes and reminders, there were times when he stripped his glasses off at the end of a song and challenged his audience with the optical and vocal intensity of a preacher delivering a spiritual ultimatum.… This cosmic
belch of a voice still has the power to astonish by sheer, carpeted magnificence.

Not only did the music critics hail Robeson's artistry, but the news reporters skirted political questions (according to one reporter, Robeson's New Zealand agent phoned in advance to request that political topics be avoided). When his plane set down at Whenaupai Airport in Auckland, he was given a traditional Maori welcome, and he later visited the Maori Community Centre. “The Maoris are a wonderful people—beautiful copper colored,” Robeson wrote Clara Rockmore. They “have accepted us as of them and [are] very proud of our success.… Am over the dumps (the bad spots)—and riding high.” Despite his agent's worry, and although local Catholic schools were instructed not to support Robeson's concerts because he was a “Communist,” they in fact sold out.
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Still, the fireworks, if dampened, continued to smolder. The New Zealand
Woman's Weekly
reported that Robeson at times seemed “edgy” when speaking to the press—“A quick answer, an impatience at any sidetracking.…” It also quoted him as saying he had no further musical ambitions and was now only ambitious “as a scholar”; he wanted “to be so fluent in one other language—any one—that I can find myself dreaming in that language, so that I am not forced, as I am now, to do all my thinking and talking in the tongue of my oppressor. That sounds bitter, I guess.” Robeson sometimes talked politics to the reporters even when they did not goad him into doing so. In Auckland he told the press he was “here to sing” and was “through with missions for the moment”—and then proceeded to criticize the United States for supporting Franco and Chiang Kai-shek. He declared himself still “a rigid Marxist,” expressed concern about mistreatment of the Maoris and the suppression of their culture, and even volunteered sardonic disappointment that blacks back home seemed wholly wedded to a prayerful, nonviolent struggle: “They say to me: ‘Paul, you're black like we are but you don't pray so much. You're more likely to break a few heads. So you stay overseas where you are.'” The reporter from the conservative New Zealand
Herald
concluded, “He is a man who quite openly wears a chip on his shoulder.” Robeson further alienated conservative New Zealand opinion by singing to the waterside workers in Wellington, who were out on strike, and accepting membership in their union. Essie gave a few interviews in her own right and saw her function as being “especially gracious and pleasant, though always forthright, to try and counteract some of the anger.” But by the end of the tour, Essie was fed up with trying to pacify Paul and the press simultaneously. She let out her feelings to the Rosens: “Your Boy is full of bile and tension, and remains
ANGRY
at the drop of a hat. I'm very tired of coping with it. I've developed enough patience to last me the rest of my life, so there is no need to develop any more. You can have him. He's tired out, but keeps on
doing everything on the horizon, and so hereafter, I just don't want to look at it. I'd rather not see it. Then I won't need to protest, and try and save him, and try and fob off pests. He resents everything I do, no matter what. So, I'm up to here. Period.”
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The U.S. Consul in Auckland was pleased to report back to the State Department that “no civil reception or other formal type of welcome was tendered to Robeson during his stay.” Peace groups took up the social slack. In both New Zealand and Australia, the Robesons were welcomed in every city by delegations drawn from the trade unions, the Communist Party, Soviet and Chinese friendship societies, peace committees, and the Union of Australian Women. In Sydney, the Soviet Ambassador came down from Canberra to attend a peace reception in the Robesons' honor, and the Tass representative in Australia solicited an article from Paul (written by Essie) about their impressions of the country. In that article, and frequently elsewhere as well, Robeson spoke out against New Zealand's discrimination against the Maoris and Australia's more overt brutality to its own native population, the aborigines. There were about seventy-five thousand aborigines in a total Australian population of ten million, driven off their land into a desert interior scarce in food and water and nearly devoid of the game they had traditionally hunted and lived on. Without the vote or representation, the aborigines roamed the Outback, a desperately abused people, Australia's “niggers.”
⁶²

The more Robeson learned about the condition of the aborigines as his tour progressed through the country, the more his indignation grew. Through Faith Bandler, an aboriginal activist, the Robesons saw a private showing of a fifteen-minute film made in the late 1950s on the plight of the aborigines in the Warburton Ranges. As she remembers it, “The tears started to stream down his face”; but when the film showed thirsty children waiting for water, his sorrow turned to anger. Flinging to the floor the black cap he had taken to wearing on his head for warmth, he swore aloud that he would return to Australia and help bring attention to the appalling conditions in which the aborigines lived. He repeated that promise a few days later to the press, and again at a large peace reception for him at Paddington Hall in Sydney. “There's no such thing as a ‘backward' human being,” he told the crowd. “There is only a society which says they are backward.” He cited the case of his own family: his cousins in North Carolina who worked the cotton and tobacco fields were also called “backward”; that meant they hadn't been allowed to attend school. “The indigenous people of Australia,” he roared,
“ARE
my brothers and sisters.”
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Arriving at the Perth airport in Western Australia toward the end of his tour, Robeson was met by Lloyd L. Davies, a lawyer and longtime aboriginal activist. Davies remembers that a throng of well-wishers was on hand at the airport to welcome Robeson but when he spotted a group of local aborigines shyly hanging back, he instantly headed for them, moving
through the crowd “like a fullback.” When he reached them, “he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms,” and when he moved toward his waiting transport, the aborigines moved with him. Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.” In his speech to the West Australian Peace Council, Robeson referred to his “darker brothers and sisters” whom he had seen at the airport—“they're good stockmen, they tell me, know how to handle those horses and sheep; they ain't too dumb for that. Not too dumb to labor for nothing.” Robeson went on to say, “I wish I could be sweet all the time.… Sometimes what you read in the paper sounds a little rough. You're right, it was rough. That's right. I said it.” In Davies's view, Robeson's gestures and words during his visit to Australia “gave a tremendous boost to the Aboriginal cause.”
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The Robesons returned to London in early December 1960, their bank balance improved, their pockets stuffed with excellent artistic notices and mixed political ones—and thoroughly exhausted from the effort. “Had a really wonderful—moving tour,” Robeson wrote Clara Rockmore right after they returned, “surely need no more ‘
Proof
' of anything”; the tour “fulfilled its mission in a most complete way. The audience took me up at my own valuation and responded nobly.” Still, he felt “just tired out—
Bored
—to put it truthfully.” From one angle, he was “just not too interested in what comes up—will do what does as well as I can—but in a ‘normal world'—I'd just quit—retire in general—and do just enough to keep going
well
above water.” But “there is little excuse not to function without seeming very difficult and
shirking
,” and so he would try to be “philosophic.” Of one thing, though, he felt certain: “that's the
last tour
, as such. I'll sing at benefits as far as concerts are concerned—and professionally will do what I have to do.” Additional plaudits meant nothing to him; to be “perfectly honest,” he wrote Clara, they had become entirely overshadowed by “the
absolute vacuum
(emptiness) in my personal life.” He felt “terribly, terribly lonely.…” It was “almost unbearable.” “We are just beginning to feel the strain,” Essie wrote in innocent imitation of Paul's freighted lines, “so we are taking time out for a couple of months, just to sit here with
NOTHING
to do!!” Essie, who was “feeling much better generally,” went to work on a new book about blacks and American politics, while Paul continued desultory work for a book on folk music and held occasional sessions with Larry Brown to prepare recital material for future concerts.
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