Chapter   2

Paul Robeson: crossing over

One ever feels his twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

In the jargon of the contemporary pop music business, a cross-over star is one who appeals to more than one musical subculture; one who, though rooted in a particular tradition of music with a particular audience, somehow manages to appeal, and sell, beyond the confines of that audience. Dolly Parton, Gladys Knight, Paul McCartney are recognisably country, soul and rock performers respectively, but they have a following among people who are not especially into those kinds of music. While having this wider appeal, they are still rooted in the particular musical subculture that defines them – in crossing over, they don't lose their original following. Or not too much of it.

The term cross-over, in this sense, did not exist when Paul Robeson was a major star, but, at least between 1924 and 1945, he was very definitely an example of it.1 His image insisted on his blackness – musically, in his primary association with Negro folk music, especially spirituals; in the theatre and films, in the recurrence of Africa as a motif; and in general in the way his image is so bound up with notions of racial character, the nature of black folks, the Negro essence, and so on. Yet he was a star equally popular with black and white audiences. There were other black singing stars as, if not more, popular than he in the twenties and thirties – Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday – but none of these quite established the emblematic or charismatic position, for blacks and whites, and in more than one medium, that Robeson did. How did he manage this?

Some would argue that his achievements were so unarguably outstanding that he had to be recognised. Certainly there is no gainsaying those achievements – a brilliant academic record at Rutgers University (1915–19), where he was the only black student at the time and only the third ever to have been admitted, and at Columbia graduate law school (1920–1), where he was again the only black student; a great football player, the first black player ever selected to play for the national team (the All-Americans) from the university teams, all the more remarkable, according to Murray Kempton, for being from Rutgers, a less prestigious university (Kempton 1955: 238); certainly the best known and most successful male singer of Negro spirituals, in concert and on record, and always highly acclaimed critically; the performer of what has been called the definitive Othello of his generation (‘The best remembered Othello of recent decades’, wrote Marvin Rosenberg (1961: 151)) and in the longest running Shakespeare production in Broadway history (1943–4); one of those performers who has made one of the standards of the show business repertoire, ‘Old Man River’, wholly identified with him, so much so that he was himself often referred to as Old Man River; singer of the hugely successful patriotic ‘Ballad for Americans’ (1939) that the Republican party adopted for their National Convention in 1940; rapturously received in the theatre, particularly in The Emperor Jones (New York 1924, London 1926, Berlin 1929), All God's Chillun Got Wings (New York 1924, London 1933), Show Boat (London 1928, New York 1932) as well as Othello (London 1930, New York and US tour, 1943–5, Stratford-on-Avon 1959); and if nothing in his film career quite matches up to all that, still he was big enough to be billed outside a London cinema for the première of Song of Freedom 1936 as ‘GREATEST SINGING STAR OF THE AGE’ and worked with the most important black film-maker of the time, Oscar Micheaux (in Body and Soul 1924), with the avant-garde group surrounding the magazine Close-Up (Borderline 1930), in a lavish Hollywood musical (Show Boat 1935) and in a series of popular and, shall we say, for the most part decent British films of the thirties, as well as narrating a number of documentaries, including Native Land 1941 by Frontier Films and, outside our period, Song of the Rivers 1954 by Joris Ivens.

Yet such a list of achievements does not really explain his stardom. Whilst I don't want to diminish his talent or effort, this list is for the most part a statement of the fact that he was highly acclaimed, very popular, in other words, a star. But why were these achievements of so much interest to so many people? How were his remarkable qualities also star qualities? How and why were these the qualities of the first major black star?

We need to get the question right. How did the period permit black stardom? What were the qualities this black person could be taken to embody, that could catch on in a society where there had never been a black star of this magnitude? What was the fit between the parameters of what black images the society could tolerate and the particular qualities Robeson could be taken to embody? Where was the give in the ideological system?

Yet another way of putting it might be – what was the price that had to be paid for a black person to become such a star? Harold Cruse, the subtlest critic of both Robeson and the Harlem Renaissance with which he was associated, argues that from the perspective of black politics and black consciousness the price was too high. He finds Robeson too integrationist, too concerned with adapting himself to white cultural norms, too far removed from the real cultural concerns of black people, and too little aware that cultural development is not a thing of the spirit alone but is rooted in material conditions, the necessities of funding and support usually absent in black communities (Cruse 1969, 1978). Likewise, Jim Pines (1975: 32) suggests that Robeson's work is a ‘largely individualist and generally mystifying protest … [that] seems to substantiate the ineffectualness of individualist forms of protest against cultural exploitation by the media’; and Donald Bogle (1974: 98) even argues that Robeson was not only individualist in Pines’ sense of an isolated individual but in the sense of self-seeking; ‘No matter how much producers tried to make Robeson a symbol of black humanity, he always came across as a man more interested in himself than anyone else’.

The figure of Robeson still sets off argument about images of black peoples, and there is still a striking disparity in the different ways he is perceived. I am confining myself to the period in which Robeson was a cross-over and major star, roughly 1924–45, when the politics are less explicit and explosive than afterwards. What particularly interests me is the way that Robeson's image takes on different meanings in this period when read through different contemporary black and white perspectives on the world. There are different, white and black, ways of looking at or making sense of Robeson, but it would be a mistake to think that the white view is the one that stresses achievement, the black the one that stresses selling out. To set against Cruse, Pines, Bogle and the other black writers, there is Paul Robeson: The Great Forerunner, a book of articles and tributes, produced by the radical black magazine Freedomways (Freedomways editors, 1978), as well as countless celebrations of Robeson by black people throughout his career. Likewise, one can find – less easily, it is true – white writers quick enough to point to his artistic limitations or, like Murray Kempton (1955: 259), to deny his significance as an embodiment of black people: ‘There was absolutely nothing between him and the people for whom he affected to speak’.

Equally, in speaking of different, white and black perspectives, I don't imply that black people saw him one way and whites the other. What I want to show is that there are discourses developed by whites in white culture and by blacks in black culture which made a different sense of the same phenomenon, Paul Robeson. There is a consistency in the statements, images and texts, produced on the one hand by blacks and on the other by whites, that makes it reasonable to refer to black and white discourses, even while accepting that there may have been blacks who have thought and felt largely through white discourses and vice versa.

The difficulty of this argument is not so much theoretical as in discerning the difference between black and white discourses in relation to Robeson. The difference is not obvious in the texts, and that is part of the explanation of how Robeson's cross-over star position was possible. For much of the time it could seem that the black and white discourses of the period were saying the same thing, because they were using the same words and looking at the same things. Robeson was taken to embody a set of specifically black qualities – naturalness, primitiveness, simplicity and others – that were equally valued and similarly evoked, but for different reasons, by whites and blacks. It is because he could appeal on these different fronts that he could achieve star status.

All the same, Robeson was working, particularly in theatre and films, in forms that had been developed, used and understood in predominantly white ways. In appearing in white plays and films, Robeson already brought with him the complex struggle of white and black meanings that his image condensed – but what happened to those meanings? Just by being in the plays and films, some of those black meanings are registered – but they are part of a broadly white handling of him, and this is significant not so much at the level of script and dialogue, as at the level of various affective devices that work to contain and defuse those black meanings, to offer the viewer the pathos of a beautiful, passive racial emblem.

The strategies of the white media worked to contain Robeson, but only worked to. How he was handled by the media is conceptually distinct from how audiences perceived him. The media might reinforce white discourses that intended to contain what was dangerous about black images in general, but by registering the black meanings in his image they also made these widely available, for use by black people. There is plenty of evidence of the impact that Robeson had on black audiences, but James Baldwin's notion of the way that Robeson (and other black stars) could work against the grain of his films suggests, at least, how a black viewer could see it that way, and with the force of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’:

It is scarcely possible to think of a black American actor who has not been misused: not one that has ever been seriously challenged to deliver the best that is in him … What the black actor has managed to give are moments, created, miraculously, beyond the confines of the script; hints of reality, smuggled like contraband into a maudlin tale, and with enough force, if unleashed, to shatter the tale to fragments … There is truth to be found in … Robeson in everything I saw him do.

(Baldwin 1978: 103–5)

It is the range of potential reading, black and white, in the context of an overall white media handling of Robeson that is the subject of this chapter.

ESSENTIAL BLACK

Paul Robeson was widely regarded as the epitome of what black people are like. People felt that they could see this in the way he stood in concert, ‘tightening his broad shoulders to bear a load of agonised entreaty, casting the outlines of his head into a sort of racial stereotype’ (Sergeant 1926: 196), or hear it in his voice – ‘it was Mr Robeson's gift to make [the spirituals] tell in every line … they voiced the sorrows and hopes of a people’ (New York Times of his first concert, 19 April 1925). Ollie Harrington's (1978: 102) memories of a black ghetto upbringing, in the Bronx and then in Harlem, equally testify to how deeply racially significant Robeson was felt to be, an example of the fact that black people were capable of achieving what whites could and also someone whose singing ‘gripped some inner fibres in us that had been dozing’.

A similar feeling is evoked by Eslanda Goode Robeson in her 1930 biography:

Paul Robeson was a hero: he fulfilled the ideal of nearly every class of Negro. Those who admired intellect pointed to his Phi Beta Kappa key; those who admired physical prowess talked about his remarkable record. His simplicity and charm were captivating; everyone was glad that he was so typically Negroid in appearance, color and features … He soon became Harlem's special favorite, and is so; everyone knew and admired him … When Paul Robeson walks down Seventh Avenue … it takes him hours to negotiate the ten blocks from One Hundred and Forty-Third Street to One Hundred and Thirty-Third Street; at every step of the way he is stopped by some acquaintance or friend who wants a few words with him.

(Robeson 1930: 67–8)

This passage is a major moment in the authentication of the Paul Robeson image. It authenticates his image as the Negro man par excellence by showing that it is based in grass-roots approval in the heartland of urban black America, Harlem; and that is itself authenticated by being recounted by his wife. (At the level of popular hagiography, no niceties about spouses as unreliable witnesses intrude.) Eslanda's biography was a basis for much of the subsequent writing about Paul – this 143rd to 133rd story recurs endlessly, for instance.

The early recognition of Robeson as the incarnation of blackness was developed in his subsequent career. He played or was associated with many of the male heroes of black culture. He sang ‘John Henry’ in concerts and on records, and appeared in 1940, albeit briefly due to illness, in Roark Bradford's play about that more or less mythical worker hero of the 1870s. In 1941 he recorded, with Count Basie, ‘King Joe’, a tribute to Joe Louis, the most celebrated and successful of black boxing champions, and himself very much seen as the pride of his race (see Levine 1977: 429ff). He had, moreover, already played a boxer, a kind of generic black hero figure, in Black Boy in 1926. He played the lead in C. L. R. James's play Toussaint L'Ouverture in London in 1936, and was to have played in Sergei Eisenstein's film based on the revolutionary leader. There are echoes of Shine, the legendary black stoker on the Titanic who saw trouble ahead and swam an ocean to safety (Levine ibid.: 428), in Robeson's role as Yank in The Hairy Ape 1931 and the scene in the boiler room in the film of The Emperor Jones 1933. There is a portrait of Booker T. Washington behind the happy ending grouping of Robeson (as Sylvester) with wife and mother-in-law in Body and Soul 1924, and he was associated with the other major black intellectual leader of the times, W. E. B. DuBois, in public appearances at numerous meetings and rallies.

If he played or was associated with the heroes of black culture, he also played the stereotypes of the white imagination – Lazybones (the role in Show Boat), smiling Sambo (the ads for Show Boat (Figure 2.1), Bosambo in Sanders of the River 1934), variations on the plantation/sharecropping Jim Crow (Shuffle Along (Figure 2.2) 1920, Voodoo 1922, Tales of Manhattan 1942), black nobility (Song of Freedom 1936, Big Fella 1937), creature of the ghetto (Rosanne 1924, Body and Soul 1924; All God's Chillun Got Wings 1924, Crown in Porgy and Bess 1927, The Emperor Jones) and brute (Crown, Brutus Jones, Voodoo, Black Boy, The Hairy Ape, Basalik 1935, even Othello and Stevedore 1935) – to name but a few.

Small wonder then that Robeson should be so identified as the representative of blackness. Apart from the brute stereotype, these images of blackness, of Paul Robeson's blackness, were, whatever we may think about them now, affirmatively valued in the discourses of the period. Robeson represents the idea of blackness as a positive quality, often explicitly set over against whiteness and its inadequacies.

Typical of the general view of blackness that Robeson represented are statements like the following, from a white enthusiast for black culture:

It is … the feeling for life which is the secret of the art of the Negro people, as surely as it is the lack of it, the slow atrophy of the capacity to live emotionally, which will be the ultimate decadence of the white civilised people.

(Mannin 1930: 157)

Figure 2.1    Advertisement for Show Boat (film) 1936 (Miles Kreuger)

Such sentiments are part of a general revulsion with contemporary industrial society, of which Mabel Dodge's (1936: 453) words are typical:

America is all machinery and money making and factories. It is ugly, ugly, ugly.

Figure 2.2    Paul Robeson (left) in Shuffle Along (Paul Robeson Jr)

(Dodge was the patron of the Greenwich Village circle that had close links with the artists of the Harlem Renaissance.) Much of the work Robeson was associated with, and especially Eugene O'Neill’s dramas, plays on this opposition of basic black and white racial/cultural differences. The stage directions for All God's Chillun Got Wings spell it out quite precisely:

A corner in lower New York … In the street leading left, the faces are all white; in the street leading right, all black. It is hot spring … People pass, black and white, the Negroes frankly participants in the spirit of spring, the whites laughing constrainedly, awkward in natural emotion. One only hears their laughter. It expresses the difference in race.

(Act One, Scene 1).

John Henry Raleigh (1965: 110) notes of the black/white symbolism of The Hairy Ape,2 and particularly the central scene between ‘the terrified slender white-skinned, white-clad Mildred and the black, half-clad, muscular brute, Yank’, that it suggests a ‘familiar theme in the American racial situation … namely, that black stands for animal vitality, while white signifies frayed nerves’.

These are all positive evaluations of blackness by whites, but one can find similar statements about blackness by black writers. The words are not exactly the same, and behind minor differences in wording lie very significant differences in understanding, but they seemed to be saying the same thing. The locus classicus of the black view of blackness is The New Negro, a collection of essays edited by Alain Locke and published in 1925, which is often seen as the manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance. Whatever the topic, the same kind of evaluation of black (or, as they prefer it, Negro) art and culture recurs. Compare Ethel Mannin's ‘Negro gift for life’ and ‘atrophy of white civilisation’ with Albert C. Barnes on Negro art:

[Negro art] is a sound art because it comes from a primitive nature upon which a white man's education has never been harnessed … the most important element … is the psychological complexion of the negro … The outstanding characteristics are his tremendous emotional endowment, his luxuriant and free imagination … The white man in the mass cannot compete with the Negro in spiritual endowment. Many centuries of civilisation have attenuated his original gifts and have made his mind dominate his spirit.

(Locke 1968: 19–20)

Or compare Mabel Dodge's disgust at industrial, money-mad ugliness with J. A. Rogers on jazz:

The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow – from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air … it has been such a balm for modern ennui, and has become a safety valve for modern machine-ridden and convention-bound society. It is the revolt of the emotions against repression (ibid.: 217).

And so on.

Paul Robeson himself was one of the clearest exponents of this view. In an article in The Spectator of 15 June 1934, he spelt out this black/white, emotion/intellect, nature/civilisation opposition very directly:

The white man has made a fetish of intellect and worships the God of thought; the Negro feels rather than thinks, experiences emotions directly rather than interprets them by roundabout and devious abstractions, and apprehends the outside world by means of intuitive perceptions instead of through a carefully built up system of logical analysis.

(Robeson 1978: 65)

One difference between some of the black discourses on blackness (and Robeson) and some of the white is the kind of relationship assumed between the spontaneous/natural/simple/emotional quality of blackness and the civilised/rational/technological/arid quality of whiteness. Many of the contributors to The New Negro see the relationship very much in terms of black emotion as a resource to be transformed into a fully mature culture and to revitalise aesthetic expression. They often stress its limitations as it stands, but see it rather as a shot in the arm for pallid white art. Often too they have a vision of a synthesis of black feeling and white intellect, black sensuousness and white technology, and this emerges very clearly in their treatment of Africa. Two of Robeson's films, Song of Freedom (1936) and Jericho (1937), are explicit statements of this theme, both concerned with a Western black man who returns to (Song of Freedom) or lands up in (Jericho) Africa, and sees his mission as the bringing of the benefits of Western medicine, technology and education to the vibrant emotional life of the country. The films thus explore (more complexly than I've just indicated) one of what Alain Locke (1968: 14–15) calls the

constructive channels opening out into which the balked social feelings of the American Negro can flow freely … [namely] acting as the advance-guard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilisation … Garveyism may be a transient, if spectacular, phenomenon, but the possible role of the American Negro in the future development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern people can lay claim to.

The white positive valuation of blackness does not have these tendencies towards racial synthesis, but on the contrary often seems to want to ensure that blacks keep their blackness unsullied. One can see this in much of the white critical response to Robeson's Othello.

Robeson played Othello three times – in London in 1930, in New York and on tour from 1943–5, and at Stratford-on-Avon in 1959. It was well received, though English critics were protectively quick to say of the 1930 production that Robeson had not really mastered the verse. Still, James Agate, for instance, praised, without stating the racial connection, those qualities that reproduced an inflection of the notion of blackness we are discussing – by the end of the play, ‘Othello ceased to be human and became a gibbering primeval man’ (Sunday Times, 25.5. 30; quoted in Schlosser 1970: 133). By the time of the New York production Robeson had ‘mastered the verse’; he was also playing the role in terms of Othello as a man of dignity whose racial honour is betrayed (rather than purely in terms of sexual jealousy). The dignity and verse-speaking were noted, but the critics were now regretting that, for instance, his ‘savagery is not believable, the core of violence is lacking’ (Rosamund Gilder, Theatre Arts, 27 December 1943: 702; quoted in Rosenberg 1961: 153). Similar comment greeted the Stratford performance, Alan Brien explicitly linking Robeson's Othello to the safe, gentle image of the black man and regretting the absence of the primitivistic element:

Mr Robeson … might be the son of Uncle Tom being taught a cruel lesson by Simon Legree … I pitied him, but in my pity I never felt any of the wild, guilty, apocalyptic exultation at the vision of Chaos come again.

(The Spectator, 10.4. 59).

As Marvin Rosenberg (1961: 202) shows in his study of the history of Othello productions, despite the many disagreements about the interpretation of the title role, the idea of its involving ‘a passion so demented, so entire that once roused it seizes and dominates the man’ has been held as essential since the play was first produced. This can be understood in purely individual terms – Othello is someone like that – or universal ones – everyone is like that – but it can also be understood racially. The play allows this rather forcefully – Iago is able to draw upon a fund of racist ideas about blacks, and black sexuality, to further his own resentment against Othello:

(to Brabanto, Desdemona's father)
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise …
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.

(Act One, Scene 1)

and he articulates the claims of (white?) reason against (black?) sensuality:

If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts.

(Act One, Scene 3)

We have no need to take the racial equation. Certainly the character of Othello might be played as a contradiction of Iago's view, the play as a whole not endorsing this concept of blackness. This presumably was part of what Robeson was trying to do. However, as Rosenberg notes (though again without pressing the evident connection with racial notions), it has been common in the twentieth century to view Othello in terms very close to the definition of blackness we are discussing – the idea of Othello ‘as a primitive or barbarian veneered by civilisation, hence easily plunged into savage passion, has been a fairly popular critical interpretation’ (Rosenberg 1961: 191–2, my emphases). Faced with a black man, Paul Robeson, playing Othello, white critics easily expected this primitivist interpretation and when they did not get it were disappointed (especially as they felt they had done so in 1930).

Robeson's Othello did make an issue out of the fact that Othello was black, or at any rate did so at the level of widely reported intention. But he wanted to emphasise the social position of Othello, a black man in a white society, someone living outside their culture. The critical reaction, however, suggests a desire to see the racial dimension in terms of essential racial differences, the blackness of emotionality, unreason and sensuality.

Black and white discourses on blackness seem to be valuing the same things – spontaneity, emotion, naturalness – yet giving them a different implication. Black discourses see them as contributions to the development of society, white as enviable qualities that only blacks have. This same difference runs through the two major traditions of representing blacks that Robeson fits into – blackness as folk, blackness as atavism.

BLACK AS FOLK

We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

In his biography of Jerome Kern (the composer of Show Boat), Gerald Bordman (1980: 400) recounts a visit made by Kern to a Phil Silvers cabaret in 1944, in which there was a skit on Kern teaching Paul Robeson ‘Old Man River’:

Much of the fun derived from contrasting the grammar and rhetoric of the unlettered black man who is supposed to sing the song in the show with the college-educated Robeson's meticulous English. Robeson, for example, demands to know what ‘taters’ are and when he is told then attempts to sing the line in his impeccable Rutgers grammar. But even Robeson must admit that ‘He doesn't plant potatoes …’ fails to work.

Part of the gag is anti-Robeson, his overeducatedness and effrontery in changing the words of the song (discussed below); but it does have a more progressive implication too.

No one, presumably, has ever thought ‘Old Man River’ was a genuine folk song, but it has often been credited with having a folk feel and certainly as sung by Robeson it was widely felt to express a Negro essence. Virginia Hamilton, in her 1974 biography for children, writes of the London Show Boat audience listening to ‘Old Man River’ and gazing ‘openmouthed at this man who had somehow clasped the history of his people to his soul’(51). Yet what the Phil Silvers skit emphasises is the artificiality of this. Robeson as Joe was not a case of natural emanation but something that had to be worked up, learnt, produced as a particular image (and then, later, resisted as an image). The very idea of folk culture or consciousness is a construct, though one that gets its force and appeal from appearing not to be, from notions of naturalness and spontaneity.

In a discussion of black folk literature in The New Negro (Locke 1968: 242), Arthur HuffFausset conveniently summarises the components of this concept of folkness. Folk is characterised by

1   Lack of the self-conscious element found in ordinary literature.

2   Nearness to nature.

3   Universal appeal.

This can be quickly disputed – self-consciousness is a defining feature of particular kinds of literature only and folk stories are certainly conscious of their own conventions; there is no evidence that literature from one folk culture appeals to all people everywhere (or even, as may be implied, in all other folk cultures); and the notion of ‘nearness to nature’, as anthropologists like Mary Douglas have shown, involves us in not seeing how highly wrought is the sense tribal societies make of the natural world. However, what is important here is that these kinds of ideas about folk culture were believed and inform the development of black images and of Robeson in particular.

This is not to deny that there might be such a thing as folk culture, if we define this simply as those cultures produced in rural, peasant societies – but there is no a priori similarity between those societies and their cultures, and certainly not of the kind evoked by Fausset. That kind of image of folk culture derives most immediately from the Romantic movement (although with a still larger history – see Raymond Williams’ The Country and the City), and, in the case of its application to black American culture, more specifically from the nationalist schools of music and literature that developed in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. The connection between these movements and the kind of folk work Robeson was involved in is quite precise. In the case of music, the link is Anton Dvořák, one of the major examples of a romantic nationalist composer, who used the peasant music of his country as a source and inspiration for his own music. He established, with Jeanette Thurber, the National Conservatory of Music, with the remarkable policy of recruiting equal numbers of white, black and Native American students, in order to foster ‘authentic’ American music rooted in folk music traditions (see Cruse 1978: 54). One of his students was Harry T. Burleigh, whose arrangement of ‘Deep River’, published in 1916, established the spiritual as a form of art song, acceptable in the concert hall. The spirituals were the cornerstone of the Harlem Renaissance argument for black folk culture, and were the basis of Robeson's concert and recording work.

The drama connection is similarly precise. The first plays to deal with black subjects from a folk perspective were written by the white Southern playwright, Ridgley Torrence, and he explicitly modelled himself on the work of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory in Ireland, probably inspired by the visit of the Abbey Players to New York in 1911 (see Clum 1969). The connection was seen straightaway by one of the most enthusiastic white supporters of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten – of Torrence's ‘Negro play’ Granny Maumee he wrote ‘the whole thing is as real, as fresh, as the beginning of the Irish theatre movement must have been in Dublin’ (New York Press 31.3. 14: 12; quoted by Clum 1969: 99). Paul Robeson's first stage appearance was in a production of Torrence's Simon the Cyrenian (at the Harlem YMCA in 1920), and it was his performance in this that impressed Eugene O'Neill, himself developing a folk-based drama. Robeson subsequently appeared in three of his plays, including The Emperor Jones – one of the roles that established his reputation – in the theatre and in the film version. Further developments of this kind of folk drama include Porgy by Dorothy and DuBose Heyward (described by James Weldon Johnson (1968: 211), the first major chronicler of the Harlem Renaissance, as ‘a folk play … [which] carried conviction through its sincere simplicity’), in a 1927 revival of which Robeson played Crown; and Porgy and Bess 1935, a ‘folk opera’ based on Porgy, several of whose songs Robeson recorded with considerable success.

The nationalist movements in music and literature occurred in Europe in those countries at the point of undergoing a rapid spurt of industrialisation and urbanisation, and at a time when the rural, peasant experience that is the basis of folk art was becoming increasingly untypical of the population as a whole. Yet it is just this untypical situation and experience which is labelled, by nationalist aesthetic movements, as the characterising culture of the country. Similarly, the spirituals as concert music and the plays of Torrence, O'Neill, the Heywards and others occur as a celebration of the Southern Negro situation and experience at the end of a massive migration of black people in the USA to the cities of the North, and supremely to Harlem, the urban heartland of these productions of the Southern Negro essence.

The Negro folk idea, and Robeson's relation to it, is probably best looked at through the spirituals rather than the folk dramas. Not only were the spirituals the art form that the Harlem Renaissance pinned its colours to in terms of its claims for Negro culture, they are also the most enduring feature of Robeson's career, not only in concerts but as a regular part of his stage and film appearances. (The films do not necessarily include true spirituals, but they do feature folk material or imitation folk material – and though the issue of genuineness and authenticity can be crucial in discussions of folk, at the level of popular representation the folk feel can pass muster.) There was general agreement that Robeson's approach to the singing of spirituals was ‘simple’ and ‘pure’, but the kinds of emotions and meanings that he conveyed through the spirituals were more widely interpreted.

Robeson's musical qualities seem to exemplify Albert C. Barnes’ view of the essence of the spiritual – ‘natural, naive, untutored, spontaneous’ (Locke 1968: 21). Mary White Ovington (1927: 213), a (white) member of the Niagara group and founder member of the NAACP, stressed that Robeson retained the simple essence of the spiritual because he was in touch with its roots in folk culture:

Robeson had heard these songs in his boyhood as the older generation had given them, simply, without diminuendo tailpieces or a conductor's pounding of time at each new line … Thus Robeson came to his … triumph as a singer of spirituals.

Musically there is no disputing Robeson's simplicity and purity, if we are careful about what we mean by these terms.

By simple is meant that he sings the melody straight through, with little adornment whether of the classical singer's trills, slides and other decorations or the jazz use of syncopation or phrasing that bends, delays, quickens or plays on the melody. By pure is meant that his voice always remains within the strict tonal system of Western harmony, not using any of the ‘dirty’ notes of black blues, gospel and soul music. You are made aware of Robeson's pure and simple approach when you listen to him singing songs that are not written to be sung like that. His recordings of ‘Summertime’ and ‘A Woman is a Sometime Thing’ from Porgy and Bess with the Carroll Gibbons Orchestra illustrate this. One does not expect the kind of intensified jazz play of Lena Horne's 1957 recording of ‘Summertime’ or Leontyne Price's syncopated coloratura treatment in her 1981 recording, but even the relatively straightforward recordings and the score itself indicate a number of syncopated and ‘impure’ elements that Robeson eschews. Where Gershwin has slides and uneven notes on ‘Don't you cry’ (e. g. 1a), Robeson sings precisely separated, even notes (e. g. 1b),3 and the syncopation required for phrases like ‘an’ yo’ ma is good-lookin’’ (e. g. 2a) becomes evenly paced notes in Robeson (e. g. 2b). These ‘purifications’ of Gershwin are even more noticeable in ‘A Woman is a Sometime Thing’, anyway a more jazz-related number. All singers that I have heard, save Robeson, bring out the rhythm of a phrase like ‘’Fore you start a-travellin’’ (e. g. 3) by a syncopated stress on ‘’Fore’ and a longer stress on ‘tra-’ and consequently shorter ones on ‘-ellin’’, details that the classically based notation system cannot render. Robeson, however, gives little stress to ‘’Fore’ and sings ‘travellin’’ as three notes of correct (as notated) length.

Similarly his only blues recording, of ‘King Joe’ (‘Joe Louis Blues’) with the Count Basie band in 1941, shows, by the concessions it makes to blues style, how little touched by these black music traditions Robeson generally is. At the end of phrases he gets that sense of falling on to a note, characteristic of blues singing, of which perhaps the most memorable, because most lyrically appropriate, example is ‘I hate to see the evenin’ sun go down’. Thus in ‘King Joe’ he sings:

They say Joe don't talk much
He talks all the time
They say Joe don't talk much
He talks all the time

He also sings the blue notes of the tune (as, of course, he has to if he is going to sing it at all). But on an exultant final phrase like

But the best is Harlem
When a Joe Louis fight is through

he is too concerned to get all the words in to allow for any hollering or rasping, or even for extending ‘fight’ briefly but tellingly beyond the strict time-value that the note accords it.

If Robeson sings without any of the conventions of jazz blues, his form of folk singing also bears little resemblance to the kind of nasal delivery that is now customary in folk and folk-inspired music. Robeson's singing is art or concert singing without the flourishes – hence pure of tone and simple of delivery. And this purity and simplicity was taken to be the hallmark of singing which caught the folk essence of the spirituals. Robeson was held to return to the true basis of the spiritual, without recourse to symphonic elaboration, as Ovington noted above, and without, as Elizabeth Sergeant (1926: 207) put it, ‘lapses into jazzed effects and the Russian harmonies that have recently crept into the Spirituals’.

If symphonic and jazz inflections were not true to the spiritual, then nor was pure and simple singing either, if by true is meant accurately reproducing how they were originally sung. The development of the spiritual as a form of concert music was a history of the purification of the spirituals of all their ‘dirtiness’, intricacy and complexity. To begin with, they were not solo songs anyway but choral, often using elaborate forms of harmony and counter-melody, and the call-and-response patterns characteristic of African music. Polyphony was achieved through the use of vocal timbres, and this subtle sound colouring was developed through the use of various kinds of instrumental accompaniment. Finally, they were rhythmically very complex, making great use of contrapuntal elements (see Roach 1973: 31–3). None of this survives into the concert hall, or record-selling, spiritual. Indeed such elements were consciously expunged both by Harry T. Burleigh (see Southern 1971a: 286–7) and by George L. White, choirmaster of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the first choir to popularise spirituals in the USA. White aimed for ‘Finish, precision and sincerity’ (quoted by Roberts 1973: 161); in effect, purity and simplicity.

It may well be true that, had it not been for these adjustments, this black music tradition might never have become as widely popular, and marketable, as it did. But purity and simplicity are not only neutral musical terms, they are also value terms, they describe certain ethical qualities that folk cultures are held to maintain and that are supposed to be expressed in folk music. Musical purity and simplicity become purity and simplicity of heart.

The idea that the Negro folk character is itself simple and pure runs through much of The New Negro and texts inspired by it. Many of these texts are quite nuanced. Locke (1968: 200), for instance, stresses that simplicity of means does not imply simplicity of meaning:

For what general opinion regards as simple and transparent about [the spirituals] is in technical ways, though instinctive, very intricate and complex, and what is taken as whimsical and child-like is in truth, though naive, very profound.

Moreover, in the black discourse the spirituals are seen – though not invariably – as cultural products rather than an innate predisposition granted along with dark skin.

These nuances and culture-based conceptions of simplicity and purity were easily lost sight of in white discourses, probably under pressure from what remained one of the most powerful images of blackness, Uncle Tom.4 Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel (1852) fixed a particular conception of the black character in liberal white discourse, and it is one founded on notions of purity and simplicity. Her description of Uncle Tom could be a description of Paul Robeson (or one way of seeing him), not only because of the character traits but because of the physical similarity:

a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterised by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air, self-respecting and dignified, yet united with a humble and confiding simplicity.

(Stowe 1981: 68)

Size, dignity, simplicity – these terms recur so frequently with reference to Robeson that you will find them scattered throughout the quotations used in this chapter. There were, besides, more or less direct references to Robeson as Uncle Tom throughout his career. The New York Times wrote of him in All God's Chillun Got Wings, ‘the hero … is as admirable, honest and loyal as Uncle Tom’ (quoted in Seton 1958: 64), and the play itself ends with the defeat of Jim's plans to become a lawyer and his acceptance of playing Ella's ‘Uncle Jim’. ‘Old Man River’ was often seen in Uncle Tom-ish terms – Brooks Atkinson greeted Robeson's singing of it in the New York revival as an expression of ‘the humble patience of the Negro race’ (20.5. 32; quoted by Schlosser 1970: 142), and Robert Garland referred to Robeson's Joe as ‘one of God's children with a song in his soul’ (New York World Telegram,20.5. 32; quoted by Schlosser, ibid.). Similar interpretations met his film performance, although for the black press this was a negative quality:

if indeed he has ever died in the theater or on the screen, Uncle Tom has a true exponent in Paul Robeson.

(California News, 8.3. 36; quoted by Schlosser, ibid.: 252)

I have already quoted Alan Brien's reference to Robeson's 1959 Othello as Uncle Tom.

Stowe, like other white people later – compare Mabel Dodge's words quoted above – developed an image of blackness as a repository of all the qualities that she considered lacking in the dominant society of her day. As George M. Fredrickson (1972) shows in his The Black Image in the White Mind, Uncle Tom's Cabin is not only a protest against slavery but a wider critique of contemporary society as materialistic, aggressive and over rational. Stowe sets many of her black characters, and also many of her female ones, against this image of society. Her argument – and hers is only the most imaginatively powerful expression of widespread liberal thought – was that, since blacks were so pure and simple, it was unchristian to treat them badly and that, in their purity and simplicity, they held a lesson for white society. But it was possible for her listeners not to hear the second part of the argument and to draw a different conclusion from her compelling image of the Negro character. Her imagery is based on earlier pro-slavery literature that had depicted the Negro as docile and humble, as long as he or she remained a slave; that argued that blacks had a predisposition to bondage, and that it was against their natures to be free; that blacks were happiest kept in their lowly pure and simple state. Moreover, in validating blacks’ lack of aggression, Stowe offered no model of black advancement by any means, violent or otherwise. If blacks are so wonderful oppressed, what need have they of liberation? Indeed, are they in that case really oppressed at all?

This is the crux of the Uncle Tom image. By validating Negro qualities it keeps the Negro in her/his place, and it permits the dimension of oppression, of slavery and racism, to be written out of the white perception of the black experience. The simple and pure distillation of the Negro essence in the development of the spirituals and Robeson's singing of them purges blackness of the scars of slavery, of the recognition of racism. At most these elements are marginalised or rendered invisible. None of Robeson's films confronts slavery or racism directly, but neither was it in the meaning of the spirituals and Robeson's singing of them. Or rather – and this is the point – it was possible not to hear it there, not to discern it in his much vaunted ‘expressiveness’.

To say that Robeson sang simple and pure does not mean that he sang without expression. He had a deep, sonorous voice, but was able to soften it to convey a range of gentle, tender, sweet, melancholy qualities. Equally he used not so much loudness as intensification of his voice to convey strong, deeply felt emotion. In his rendition of ‘Deep River’ in The Proud Valley (1939), the close-up allows us to see the effort involved in the singing, the deep breaths, the moistening of the lips between phrases, which signal the intensity of the feeling that is being produced. Softening and intensification of a rich, deep voice – these means were constantly found profoundly, movingly expressive; but expressive of what?

The answer, or rather answers, to that are suggested if we consider what the spirituals were held to express. This is a subject of controversy. More clearly here than in the general discussions of the negro folk character, one can see the different way white and black discourses hear and feel the same material.

One might say that the ultimate white person's spiritual is ‘Old Man River’ though of course it is not a spiritual at all. But it expresses the basic emotional tone that whites heard in spirituals and in Robeson's voice – sorrowing, melancholy, suffering. Moreover, the way it reiterates the river imagery allows the cause of this suffering to be laid at the door of the river's indifference and to be transmitted into the eternal lot of mankind, as borne, conveniently for the white half of the community, by blacks ‘Old Man River’ does contain references to slavery and oppression, even before Robeson started changing the lyrics in an effort of resistance against the song's more generally heard message of resignation. There is reference to the fact that ‘darkies all work while de white man play’ and ‘you don't dast make de white boss frown’, but this is swallowed up in the generalised reference to ‘you and me’ who ‘sweat and strain’ in the face of the endlessly rolling river.

It is this mood of sorrow and resignation that whites heard, after all without difficulty, in Robeson favourites like ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen’ and ‘Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child’. River imagery, apparently echoing the melancholy of ‘Old Man River’, recurs again and again in his song repertoire – ‘Deep River’, ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ (‘I looked over Jordan …’), ‘River Stay Way from my Door’, ‘Sleepy River’ written for Song of Freedom, ‘The Volga Boat Song’, ‘Four Rivers’ (see Musser 2002), and so on.

River imagery is very common in black American folk music – Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein were right to put it into the mouth of the chief Negro character in Show Boat, but wrong to make it mean the eternal vale of life's tears. Within the context of slavery, river imagery has a dense set of meanings, all to do with deliverance from the oppression of slavery. It could refer to hope in the hereafter, crossing over the river of death into heaven, but it could also refer to rivers of escape, to the North and Canada, or else to the Atlantic Ocean, crossing that river not only to escape but to return to the homeland, Africa. The familiar spirituals (though not, of course, ‘Old Man River’ or ‘Sleepy River’, that were composed in line with the melancholy-resignation image of the spirituals) take on a very different significance when heard this way. ‘Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child’ is not just an ever-sorrowing lament but a reference to the fact of slavery ‘a long ways from home’ (i. e. Africa), and the second verse, ‘Sometimes I feel like I'm almost gone’, is no longer a mournful statement of weariness and pain, but a recognition of death or escape as a release from slavery. The fourth line of the refrain of ‘Deep River’, ‘I want to cross over into camp ground’, is meaningless to white ears but a reference in black tradition to the secret camp meetings where it was possible to meet slaves newly arrived from Africa and hence have contact with the homeland (see Southern 1971b: 82–7 and Walton 1972: 25–8). In this reading, the spirituals are not about some innate Negro predisposition to suffering, but about the suffering inflicted on generations of black people by slavery and, by extension, by white racism since abolition.

But slavery could not be spoken – it represented too much guilt for whites, too much shame for blacks. Thus even though in interviews Robeson often stressed that he thought he was expressing the sufferings of slavery and the slaves’ hope for release, it was easy to hear those deep, gentle, intensified cadences as expressive of a more generalised racial feeling. Slavery and racism would base the black folk image in historical reality; but if you didn't hear that element in the spirituals, see it in Robeson, the folk image became the unchanging, unchangeable fate of the black people.

ATAVISM

The idea of the black race as a repository of uncontaminated feeling informs the atavistic image as much as the folk image, and both have been acceptable to blacks and to whites. But whereas the folk image can be read as an Uncle Tom image, the atavistic image can be read through the other major male black stereotype, the Brute or Beast.

Atavism as a term need only mean the recovery of qualities and values held by one's ancestors, but it carries with it rather more vivid connotations. It implies the recovery of qualities that have been carried in the blood from generation to generation, and this may also be crossed with a certain kind of Freudianism, suggesting repressed or taboo impulses and emotions that may be recovered. It also suggests raw, violent, chaotic and ‘primitive’ emotions. It is this complex of ideas and feelings that is at issue when considering notions of atavism in relation to blackness and Robeson.

Atavism, in the black American/Robeson context, involves first the question of Africa, for it was to Africa that the unrepressed black psyche was held to return. What Africa was presumed to be like was then also what blacks were supposed to be like deep down, and the potent atavistic image of Africa acted as a guarantee of the authentic wildness within of the people who had come from there. This was held equally, though with different understandings, within black and white discourses – at one level, atavism was simply the tougher, more energetic version of the folk image. Robeson's relation to both the African and the more generalised atavistic image is quite complicated. In principle embracing Africa as a homeland, his film and stage work is implicitly a rejection of the idea of Africa; and while initially associated with the more general wildness-within idea of atavism, this is dropped quite early on in his career, too close to the brute stereotype to appease white fears or please black aspirations.

Africa

An initial problem was that of knowing what Africa was like. There is an emphasis in much of the work Robeson is associated with on being authentic. The tendency is to assume that if you have an actual African doing something, or use actual African languages or dance movements, you will capture the truly African. In the African dream section of Taboo 1922, the first professional stage play Robeson was in, there was ‘an African dance done by C. Kamba Simargo, a native’ (Johnson: 1968 192); for Basalik (1935), ‘real’ African dancers were employed (Schlosser 1970: 156). The titles for The Emperor Jones 1933 tell us that the tom-toms have been ‘anthropologically recorded’, and several of the films use ethnographic props and footage – Sanders of the River (1934, conical huts, kraals, canoes, shields, calabashes and spears, cf. Schlosser 1970: 234), Song of Freedom (1936, Devil Dancers of Sierra Leone, cf. ibid.: 256) and King Solomon's Mines 1936. Princess Gaza in Jericho 1937 is played by the real-life African princess Kouka of Sudan. Robeson was also widely known to have researched a great deal into African culture; his concerts often included brief lectures demonstrating the similarity between the structures of African folk song and that of other, both Western and Eastern, cultures (see Schlosser 1970: 332). However, this authentication of the African elements in his work is beset with problems. In practice, these are genuine notes inserted into works produced decidedly within American and British discourses on Africa. These moments of song, dance, speech and stage presence are either inflected by the containing discourses as Savage Africa or else remain opaque, folkloric, touristic. No doubt the ethnographic footage of dances in the British films records complex ritual meanings, but the films give us no idea what these are and so they remain mysterious savagery. Moreover, as is discussed later, Robeson himself is for the most part distinguished from these elements rather than identified with them; they remain ‘other’. This authentication enterprise also falls foul of being only empirically authentic – it lacks a concern with the paradigms through which one observes any empirical phenomenon. Not only are the ‘real’ African elements left undefended from their immediate theatrical or filmic context, they have already been perceived through discourses on Africa that have labelled them primitive, often with a flattering intention.

This is not just a question of white, racist views of Africa. It springs from the problem, as Marion Berghahn (1977) notes, that black American knowledge of Africa also comes largely through white sources. It has to come to terms with the image of Africa in those sources, and very often in picking out for rejection the obvious racism there is a tendency to assume that what is left over is a residue of transparent knowledge about Africa. To put the problem more directly, and with an echo of DuBois’ notion of the ‘twoness’ of the black American – when confronting Africa, the black Westerner has to cope with the fact that she or he is of the West. The problem and its sometimes bitter ironies, is illustrated in two publicity photos from Robeson films. The first, from the later film Jericho, shows Robeson with Wallace Ford and Henry Wilcoxon during the filming in 1937 (Figure 2.3). It is a classic tourist photo, friends snapped before a famous landmark. Robeson is dressed in Western clothes, and grouped between the two white men; they are even, by chance no doubt, grouped at a break in the row of palm trees behind them. They are not part of the landscape, they are visiting it.

The second photo is of Robeson and Jomo Kenyatta taken during the shooting of Sanders of the River (Figure 2.4). Kenyatta, the African and future African leader who plays a chief in the film, wears white Western male attire; Robeson, the American who plays the part of a leader in all his films set in Africa, wears the standard Hollywood native (or Tarzan) get-up. As Ted Polhemus and Lynn Proctor (1978: 93) point out, clothes are major signifiers of power on the international political scene. When the West is in the ascendant, other nations dress in Western clothes; but when the relations of power shift, the leaders of non-Western nations can wear their national clothes. In the Robeson-Kenyatta photo, the politician (as he was then learning to be) who would have real power in Africa implicitly acknowledges Western cultural power in his dress; while the actor who enacts an idea of power in Africa both explicitly rejects the West in his dress and yet in fact asserts Western notions, since the dress owes far more to Western ideas about African dress than African ideas of it. It is hard to think of a more graphic example of how much a black American star is inevitably caught in Western discourses of blackness, especially when seeking blackness in African culture rather than in black American culture itself.

Figure 2.3    Wallace Ford, Robeson and Henry Wilcoxon during a break in filming Jericho 1937 (Paul Robeson Jr)

Something of this problem is confronted in Song of Freedom.5 Here, unconsciously perhaps, is an engagement with the problem for black Americans of coming to terms with Africa. When Robeson/John Zinga arrives on Casanga (the island whose rightful monarch he is, being descended from the despotic queen Zinga who had reigned a couple of centuries earlier), he is rejected by the inhabitants because of his white man's clothes. ‘Everything's so different from what I expected – it's all so primitive’, John says. He further alienates himself by breaking up a witch doctor's dance, since he believes his white man's medicine will do more good for a sick person than superstitious African dancing. He has to learn to show respect for the customs of Casanga, and it is only when he reveals that he knows the ceremonial song that ‘no white man has ever heard’ that he is finally accepted as the true king of the island.

Figure 2.4    Jomo Kenyatta and Robeson on location for Sanders of the River 1935 (Paul Robeson Jr)

The film tries to bring into line a progressive black approach to Africa and an atavistic image of Africa. John's ideas about medicine are part of the conception in black discourses of a synthesis between black spirituality and white technology; but there is no image of black African spirituality in the film, only mumbo jumbo. The positive images of African spirituality in the literary work of Hurston, McKay and others created no equivalents in popular culture; John/Robeson's spoken ideas of black and white synthesis founders on the lack of any visualisation of what the positive black contribution to that synthesis would be. The same kind of contradiction dogs, though less damagingly, the climax of the film, with John's remembering the words of the ‘Song of Freedom’. The fact that it is a song of freedom links it to a central fact of black experience, a point to which I'll return; and its narrative function is to bring order and stability to Casanga (under the rightful hereditary leader to the throne, which John is), not primeval chaos. However, the fact that John has carried a snatch of the song in his head throughout the film and that it all comes back to him at the climax suggests the (atavistic) idea of a race memory, and this is realised musically through a ‘jungle’ beat and words that suggest a release from the savagery of thunder, wild bird and lion, climaxing with the Western John Zinga/Paul Robeson singing

From the shadow of darkness
I lead my people to freedom.

Song of Freedom is in tension with the atavistic idea of Africa, which was central to two earlier stage works, Voodoo and The Emperor Jones. Unfortunately it is hard to find out a great deal about Voodoo6 but it did involve the Robeson character, a plantation worker (pre- or post-slavery?), falling asleep and in his sleep returning to Africa. Photos of the production (which look like front-of-house pictures rather than photos of the play in performance) clearly show Robeson as a handsome, genial plantation worker and then as a manic African savage (Figures 2.5, 2.6). In his dream, the plantation worker has relived his ancestry as a wild man. The idea that seems to be implicit here, that within the civilised black man there is the trace of savage ancestry, is more explicitly and definitely present in The Emperor Jones as both play and film. Brutus Jones is a Southerner who, through cunning and threat, comes to be boss man and self-styled ‘emperor’ of a Caribbean island; but when his rule becomes intolerable, the islanders rebel and chase him through the forests of the island. The image of Jones in flight takes up nearly all the play and the larger part of the film (which includes more about Jones's life in the USA), and it is the image that is fixed as the core of the play.⁷

Figure 2.5    Taboo 1922: Robeson as plantation worker (Paul Robeson Jr)

Figure 2.6    Taboo. Robeson as savage (Paul Robeson Jr)

The significance of this long-drawn-out flight is that in the course of it Jones reverts from being a civilised ruler to being a chaotic, superstitious primitive. He becomes primeval, aboriginal. He stumbles deeper into the forest (→ jungle → Africa → chaos); he has hallucinations of wild beasts (alligators) and of witch doctors, as well as of moments from his US past. His manner and language become more crazed and fearful. It is a classic statement of the atavistic idea in the black context – that blacks have within them, beneath a veneer of civilisation, a chaos of primeval emotions that under stress will return, the raging repressed.

This return of the primeval repressed does not recur in any of Robeson's later roles, but the image of Africa in several of his British films does evoke these same primitivist ideas. This is not done, however, through the Robeson character himself, but rather through the general construction of an image of Africa. Perhaps the most offensively sustained example of this is Sanders of the River.

Throughout the film Africa is represented as a land of at best childish incompetence and at worst dangerous, violent ferment. The message of the film is that it is only the presence of white men that brings any law and order to the continent. The most concise and vivid illustrations of this are two montage sequences, one occurring when Sanders has left the area (to go to Britain to get married) and the other on his return. The first shows Africa reverting to chaos – the drums of the ‘bad’ tribes sending messages that Sanders is dead, ‘there is no law any more’, are cut with shots of animal wildlife, which then cut to dissolving shots of war dances and warriors marching, followed by a series of dissolves of shots of vultures, ending with more shots of drumming and marching. The sequence dramatically shows the absence of the good white ruler heralding a reversion to a state of nature which, in Africa, is also a state of chaos and threatening violence. The second sequence reverses this. Shots of the plane carrying Sanders back to the area are cut with further wildlife footage, but whereas in the earlier sequence the animals are for the most part the dangerous ones (lions, crocodiles), here they are the more harmless ones (birds, wildebeest), and where earlier they were crowding together or moving in for the kill, here they are scattering. As these latter images are also aerial shots, this gives the impression of the animals of Africa scattering before the return of the white boss in his plane. This is further linked to the end of the immediately previous sequence, where the ritual war dance of the rebellious tribes ends in a charge accompanied by catcalling. This charge is executed towards the camera, down left of the frame. The movement of the aerial camera in the Sanders return montage is forward into the space being filmed, and the animals scatter to left and right away from the camera. We are thus placed in a position that is first fearful of, and then in fantasy can quell, primitive revolt.

In the two films in which he plays an African (Sanders of the River, King Solomon's Mines), Robeson is not associated with this primitivism, but is rather presented as the exceptional figure. He is the ‘good’ African with whom the whites can work. There is a difference of emphasis between the two films – in Sanders of the River Bosambo is dependent on Sanders both for his authority (Sanders sanctions his leadership which means that his rule has white power as a back-up) and directly in the plot when he and Lilonga have to be rescued by Sanders from captivity. In King Solomon's Mines there is more sense of the whites being dependent on Umbopa, who knows the desert, is able to smell the whereabouts of water and uses his massive strength to push a boulder away from the entrance to the mines where the party is trapped. Yet Umbopa is, like Bosambo, dependent on white intervention to establish his rule – it is by using white ‘magic’ (knowledge of eclipses) that Umbopa plays upon the superstitions of ‘his people’ to convince them he is their rightful leader.

Broadly then, in Robeson's African roles he is, at the level of narrative structure, set apart from African primitive violence. This is largely true too of other aspects of the way the character is constructed. His singing, a selling point of the films, is markedly different from other singing in the films, though both are supposed to be African. Robeson/Bosambo leads the just (white-backed) war against the usurping king Mofolaba with a steady marching song, with English words in the tradition of European/American battle songs, and delivered in his booming deep voice. Later in the film, when Ferguson, Sanders’ replacement, has been captured, he is surrounded by men in masks, singing in cod African, to a hectic, irregular beat, in high-pitched voices – in every particular the antithesis of the Bosambo/Robeson war song. Similarly in King Solomon's Mines Umbopa/Robeson sings English lyrics to melodies with a regular (unsyncopated, uncomplex) rhythm and Western harmonies, while ‘his people’ sing African words and music. The latter, as with much of the footage in both Sanders of the River and King Solomon's Mines, is ‘authentic’, in the sense of being recorded on location; when, during the eclipse, Umbopa/Robeson sings in African, it is almost certainly Efik, which he learnt for the part. But the placing of these ‘genuine’ African elements is significant. In the ceremonial dance performed near the mines, at which Gagool, the (wicked, in the film's terms) wise woman of the tribe, is to select those to be sacrificed, the African singing and dancing, however authentic, functions in the narrative as a threat to our identification figures, one of whom, Umbopa/Robeson, is himself African. Moreover, an isolated shot from this scene looks like any photograph of white dignitaries looking on at African tribal performance (cf. the Royal Family's obligatory look at native customs on their visits to colonies and former colonies) – the position of ‘our’ characters in the frame, the way they hold themselves and direct their attention, reproduces the relations of power and difference of colonialism, even if in the plot it is the (to all intents and purposes) white party that is under threat.

The Robeson characters are also written as docile, good, simple characters. It is sometimes argued that within that, at the level of performance, Robeson himself suggests a level of insolence or irony that undercuts this Uncle Tom/Sambo stereotype, but this is a hard argument to sustain. It is not just editing alone (as is also often claimed) that makes Bosambo appear a lovable, rather naughty child in Sanders of the River; nor in his first meeting is it just the powerful headmaster–schoolboy rhythms of the script, though these are extraordinarily evocative:

Sanders:	You know that every six months I call on the Orkery.
Bosambo:	Yes, Lord, at the time of the taxes.
Sanders:	Yes, Bosambo, at the time of the taxes, in a month's time.

Robeson's performance reinforces this characterisation, often quite subtly. When Sanders questions him about whether he is a Christian, he says,

I went to missionary school, I know all about Markee, Lukee, Johnee and that certain Johnee who lost his head over a ransom girl,

but Sanders cuts him short with ‘That will do.’ Robeson/Bosambo speaks the speech just quoted with great eagerness, warming to the subject as it becomes more sexual, but then looks utterly crestfallen when Sanders stops him. This is in a two-shot, not a shot/reverse shot sequence; the eagerness and crestfallenness are conveyed through acting.

In all these ways then Robeson, unlike his roles in Voodoo and The Emperor Jones, is not identified with the atavistic view of Africa as a state of inchoate, dangerous emotion. There are perhaps slight hints of it. Bosambo's thoughts run easily to sex, as seen above, and while Sanders has to leave Africa to go away to marry, a journey that is never consummated since he has to return to Africa to quell the chaos his departure occasions, Bosambo is shown surrounded by adoring women and later marries Lilonga/Nina Mae McKinney, on the strength of an extremely sexually explicit dance she performs. Africans are allowed the sexuality that whites stoically (or relievedly) have to do without. The writing of the film of King Solomon's Mines does still have something of the ambivalence of Rider Haggard's novel, where the narrator Allan Quartermaine both admires Umbopa (‘I never saw a finer native’ (1958: 42), ‘a cheerful savage … in a dignified sort of way’ (ibid.: 46) and yet is also affronted by his arrogance (‘I am not accustomed to be talked to in that way by Kaffirs’ (ibid.: 58)). Here too the contrast is with other, inferior, more African Africans – whereas Umbopa is ‘magnificent-looking … very shapely … his skin looked scarcely more than dark’ (ibid.: 42), Twala, king of the Kukuanas, is described as ‘repulsive … the lips were as thick as a Negro's, the nose was flat … cruel and sensual to a degree’ (ibid.: 115). But hints of sexuality, traces of arrogance are but hints and traces – if anything, it would seem that such violent, difficult qualities have been eliminated, because they are threatening elements. What remains is Robeson's passive physical presence, something I'll come back to later.

Wildness within

Atavism as a reversion to Africa is then only a feature of a couple of Robeson's stage roles, and of the image of Africa in his films but not of his role in those films. The more generalised idea of atavism as wildness within is implicit in some of the other roles where the connection with Africa is not explicitly made. As an image, it is very close to the alternative black male stereotype to Uncle Tom and Sambo, namely the brute or beast.

This informs Robeson's roles not only in Voodoo and The Emperor Jones, but in Black Boy 1926, Crown in Porgy 1928 and in The Hairy Ape 1931. Even when this was not clear in the role, there was often a play on its sexual dimensions. Hints of black–white rape cling to the characters – in Basalik 1935 Robeson played an African chief who abducts (but does not in fact rape) the wife of a corrupt white governor; in Stevedore 1935, he played Lonnie Thompson, who is wrongly accused of raping a white woman at the start of the play. Equally, Othello could be read in this light – Robeson could not take the 1930 London production to Broadway because it was felt improper for an actual black man to play Othello to an actual white actress. When All God's Chillum Got Wings had been produced in New York in 1924 an enormous amount of publicity had surrounded its depiction of a black-white marriage even before its first performance. Although not the first play to deal with this topic, a perennial theme in American literature, a forceful Robeson/O'Neill/Provincetown Players treatment was anticipated as dangerous and subversive. Even when films Robeson appeared in were not in the brute mould, the advertising for them might hint that they were – Sanders of the River was sold with the following come-on: ‘A million mad savages fighting for one beautiful woman! Until three white comrades ALONE pitched into the fray and quelled the bloody revolt’ (quoted by Cripps 1977: 316).

The brute image not only has a sexual dimension. As a football player, though praised largely in terms of skill and intelligence, his playing was also described as ‘vicious’ – ‘no less than three Fordham men were sent into the game at different times to take the place of those who had been battered and bruised by Robeson’ (New York Times 28.10. 17; quoted by Henderson 1939: 100). Writings about him on the field are a litany of references to his size – ‘the giant Negro’, ‘the big Rutgers Negro’ (ibid.), ‘a dark cloud … Robeson, the giant Negro’ (New York Tribune 28.10. 17, Charles A. Taylor; quoted by Hamilton 1974: 29), ‘a veritable Othello of battle … a grim, silent and compelling figure’ (quoted without reference by Ovington 1927: 207); and publicity for his appearances suggests a force and dynamism that could have been threatening (Figure 2.7).

The brute stereotype not only threatened whites, it also offended blacks. The fact that it was abandoned, along with one of its justifications, atavism, early on in Robeson's career, is a result of common cause between the two ethnic discourses. But there is a further suppressed element – slavery, again. Just as the spirituals were emptied of their slavery meanings and transformed into songs of universal suffering, so one of the possible articulations of atavism was also lost. The primary meaning of atavism was back-to-the-aboriginal-jungle, but it was possible to return to another violent race memory, that of the experience of slavery. The play of The Emperor Jones does just this. Jones's flight into the forest is systematically organised as a flight through Afro-American history – after hallucinating a general, Expressionistic vision of ‘little formless fears’ (‘if they have any describable form at all it is that of a grubworm about the size of a creeping child’, Scene Two), in the following scenes Jones sees, in this order, a Pullman porter playing dice, a black chain gang with a white guard, a group of white slave buyers ‘dressed in Southern costumes of the period of the fifties of the last century’ (Scene Five), two rows of Negro slaves huddled together in a slave ship, a Congo witch doctor.

Each of these visions is emblematic of black American history – Pullman porters were an all black trade and probably the most familiar black figures in American public life, as well as a respectable avenue of employment for black men; the chain gang was not an exclusively black experience but, then as now, blacks were disproportionately represented in penal institutions, as all oppressed peoples are; the slave trade and, finally, or rather as point of origin, Africa need no further gloss as aspects of black history. O'Neill’s use of the witch doctor clearly brings his image of Africa in line with that discussed above, and the idea of this Africanness being in all black people still is brought out in the last scene. Throughout Jones's flight tom-toms have been beaten, becoming gradually louder and faster; in the final scene, with Jones now dead, Smithers, a white trader who was in league with Jones as ruler of the island, says to the islanders who have been pursuing Jones,

I tole yer yer'd lose'im, didn't I? – wastin’ the'ole bloomin’ night beatin’ yer bloody drum and castin’ yer silly spells!

The dramatic irony is not only that we know that Jones is dead, but that his terror has been shown on stage as induced by or at least whipped up by the relentless tom-toms and his death comes as he fires his gun wildly at his final hallucination, the witch doctor. Smithers is doubly wrong – Jones is dead, and it was the drums and spells that got him. The conclusion of the play is then African atavism, but the structure of the rest of the play emphasises Jones's terror at the real, historical experience of the black man in America.

Figure 2.7    Robeson the football player, announced for Wisconsin College football game (Columbia University)

In the film, the sequence of visions is altered. Most significantly, there is no reference to slavery at all. The progression of visions seen in flight are – Jeff, a Pullman porter whom Jones worked with, playing dice; the chain gang; a Southern black church service; the witch doctor and an alligator. One of the effects of these changes is to individualise Jones's flight into his (race) memory, partly because the first three visions use shots from earlier in the film and thus retrace Jones's career before arriving on the island. Moreover, because the film has given us more of the narrative before Jones's arrival on the island, we know that it is a brawl arising out of a dice game that led to his conviction – the chain gang becomes less emblematic of a condition of oppression, and more a moment in a particular person's biography.

This individualisation goes hand-in-hand with a fundamental alteration of the facts and meaning of black history. Whereas the play gives us

low-life black employment → the ordeal of the black chain gang → the terrors of slavery → the fears of mumbo-jumbo,

the film gives us

low-life black employment → the ordeal of the chain gang → superstitious black Christianity → superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

Neither progression is entirely ‘logical’, but the difference of emphasis is striking. Moreover, although there is a limit to what one can say about the production of The Emperor Jones as a play (even given O'Neill’s quite detailed stage directions, and even if one confines oneself to the Robeson productions), the film does seem to emphasise inchoate emotion over the terrors of history. There is a visual progression in the film as Jones gets further and further into the jungle – that is, his primitive self. The trees, creepers and forest shadows crowd out the screen more and more, so that we see Jones through the jungle. There is no indication in the play of any equivalent devices for the theatre. In the film, when Jones sees the chain gang, he joins in, beating with an imaginary hammer before his anger leads him to shoot at the white guard. The play here emphasises white violence – Jones's action is provoked by the guard's cruelty with the whip that he uses to lash both the gang in general and Jones in particular. Lastly, the film opens with a shot of African tom-toms being beaten which dissolves to jazz drumming; nowhere does the play insist on a direct continuity of African and Afro-American feeling. In such ways, the film empties the play of its historical dimension, of the reality of black oppression.

Robeson's relation to the atavistic image of blacks was blocked on two counts. The possible inflection of it in terms of slavery was dropped – white guilt and black shame made it too uncomfortable an element for cross-over stardom. But without this, atavism is too close to the brute and beast image, too threatening to whites, too demeaning for blacks. It was thus eliminated gradually from his work, as a disturbing undertone that could either be ignored or seen as something that is contained or withheld.

FREEDOM

They are scared, Negro brother,
Our songs scare them, Robeson.
(Nazim Hikmet, ‘To Paul Robeson’)

So far I have been arguing that the conditions that made it possible for Robeson to be a cross-over star were his place in discourses of blackness that were acceptable to both black and white audiences, though they might be differently understood by those audiences. There is a price to be paid for success in these terms, and I have indicated how easily a positive view of black folk and African culture as a radical alternative to materialistic, rationalistic, alienated white Western culture slides back into sambo, Uncle Tom, brute and beast.

It is important to emphasise what nonetheless remains in the Robeson image, even when the sambo or brute imagery dominated it: a certain irreducible core of meanings that were still felt to be threatening or insolent or inspiring enough to need further ideological handling.

To begin with, a major emphasis of the image was always Robeson's physique, and the size and muscularity of this could easily be seen to be potentially at the service of the strength, power and action necessary for radical black advancement. Equally, his unassailable reputation as good, noble, pure, and so on, however much we may note in it notions of naivety and simplicity (and behind them childlikeness), was an image of what a black person could be and was, an image that still had that moral force in the face of racism which Stowe and others had intended it should have. Moreover, the extraordinary record of Robeson's achievement, outlined at the beginning of this chapter, meant that it was hard to deny what a black person was capable of doing – in sports, in the professions, academically and artistically.

More important still is the insistence on the concept of freedom throughout his work. I have noted above how the fact of slavery is to a considerable extent suppressed in Robeson's work. Although not altogether – it is still there in the play of The Emperor Jones; it is there obliquely in the words to ‘Old Man River’; it is there in the establishing sequence of Song of Freedom where John Zinga's ancestors flee the despotic queen Zinga unwittingly into the arms of the white slave trade.

Yet if direct acknowledgement of slavery is only to be found in these few examples, the implication of it and of white racism in general is continually present through the longing for and quest for freedom that runs through so much of his work. The song John Zinga carries in his (race) memory is not just any old song, but a song of freedom, giving its name to the film. Here, Africa connotes above all freedom, and, as Marion Berghahn (1977) has pointed out, this was characteristic of much black cultural production of the period, though seldom of white. At the beginning of Jericho (1937), Jericho/Robeson is unfairly sentenced to death for his necessary act of shooting a panic-stricken white sergeant when their ship was torpedoed; he escapes, to the freedom of Africa, and when his friend, the white captain Mack, finds him and tells him he can clear himself, he, Mack, realises that Jericho is in fact happier in Africa with his people than he could be back in the USA. Once again, Africa symbolises the freedom from oppression represented by the USA. Even in the unpromising setting of My Song Goes Forth (original title, Africa Looks Up 1936), a documentary on South Africa, purporting to show what ‘the white man has achieved for himself’ and ‘what he has done for the natives’ (Africa Looks Up publicity booklet, n. d.: 1; quoted by Schlosser 1970: 524), Robeson sings of freedom and Africa:

From African jungle, kraal and hut
Where shadows fall or torrid light,

My Song Goes Forth and supplicates

In quest of love and right

I seek that star which far or near,
Shows all mankind a pathway clear,

To do unto his brother

And banish hate and fear.

(My Song Goes Forth publicity sheet, Ambassador Film
Productions, n. d.: 2; quoted by Schlosser, ibid.: 255.)

In his concerts, Robeson increasingly stressed a similar message, either by virtue of the conditions of performance (e. g. low and uniform seat prices; open-air concerts) and where performed (e. g. at Loyalist camps in Spain in 1938) or by introducing more political material, culminating in his 1942 recordings of Songs of Free Men, including ‘Joe Hill’ and Soviet and Spanish Loyalist songs, which he had been using for several years in concerts. By this time his explicit espousal of socialist ideas was widely known, and often used against him. It is not this connection which is crucial here, but the idea of freedom that is important, since this is so fundamental a part of American rhetoric. As Michael Klein (1975) has argued in relation to Native Land (1941), the left-wing Frontier Films’ documentary for which Robeson did the narration, a possible strategy for left film-makers has been to appropriate the general national ideological rhetoric for left struggle, to demonstrate that freedom is not the prerogative of the right but is endemic to left thought too. In his general appeal to freedom, Robeson can be understood as employing just this strategy.

Parenthetically, we should note the limit of this strategy (as of any other). Native Land is notable for having a black narrator, yet a tiny handful of black images. The incident used to exemplify the vileness of the Ku-Klux-Klan is when they attack some white men. At the start of a scene at a union meeting, the camera gives us a close-up of a black male face and then moves across to a white woman sitting next to him; there is then a cut to a series of shots of white men. The black man and white woman are joined together in one binding shot, and then the dominance of white males is reaffirmed. The only black women in the film are those shown briefly dancing towards the end. Apart from the extreme visual marginalisation of black people, there is also something very disconcerting about the words Robeson speaks near the beginning. Describing the settlement of the USA as prompted by a desire for freedom, he uses the word ‘we’, part of the film's strategy of including the left and, all too implicitly, blacks in the rhetoric of American destiny. But to hear a black man say, as Robeson does here, ‘We crossed the ocean in search of freedom’, is to feel an astonishing weight of false consciousness.

Perhaps the most important example of the idea of freedom in Robeson's work is his gradual alteration of the words of ‘Old Man River’, to bring out and extend its reference to oppression and to alter its meaning from resignation to struggle. The stages in this process are instructive. In his first appearance in Show Boat in London in 1928, he changed the words in the second verse from ‘Niggers all work on de Mississippi’ to ‘Darkies all work on the Mississippi’, and throughout the song he tended (though with more insistence as his status as a performer increased) to correct the purportedly Southern black English of the lyrics – ‘old’ for ‘ol”, ‘and’ for ‘an”, ‘with’ for ‘wid’, ‘along’ for ‘alon’, and so on. He did sing, in London, in the New York 1932 production, in the 1935 film and on a mid-thirties British recording, the rest of that verse as written, with words sharper in their reference to black labour than they are sometimes given credit for:

Darkies all work on the Mississippi
Darkies all work while the white folk play
Pullin’ those boats from the dawn to sunset
Gettin’ no rest till the judgement day.
…
Let me go'way from the Mississippi
Let me go'way from the white man boss
Show me that stream called the River Jordan
That's the old stream that I long to cross.

The Jordan reference takes us back to the ‘eternal suffering’ reading of the spirituals, and it is left to the chorus (and Robeson on the record) to sing perhaps the harshest words in the song, harshest in their reference to both white rule and the black man's hopeless lot:

Don't look up, an’ don't look down,
You don't dast make de white boss frown,
Bend your knees, an’ bow your head
An’ pull dat rope until you're dead.

These words were amplified somewhat by the montage sequence in the middle of the number in the film, where the heaviness of Robeson/Joe's labour is shown and where his aching anger is shown in a shot of him with clenched fists raised to the skies. This treatment is interesting because, contradictorily, the character is constructed as, in his wife's words, ‘the laziest man that ever lived on this river’, and because the publicity for the character in the 1932 stage version and for the film emphasises his smiling affability.

Refusing white words to describe blacks and white imitations of how they thought black people spoke was already an invasion of mainstream white cultural production, but in his concerts and later radio appearances, for which he was always asked to sing ‘Old Man River’, he changed the words more radically. In the opening verse as originally written the singer wants to be ‘Old Man River’ because the river does not worry about freedom; in Robeson's version, that is precisely why he does not want to be ‘Old Man River’:

original	Robeson
Dere's an ol’ man called de	There's an old man called the
Mississippi	Mississippi
Dat's de ol'man dat I'd like to be	That's the old man I don't like to be
What does he care if de world's got	What does he care if the world's got
troubles?	trouble?
What does he care if de land ain't	What does he care if the land ain't
free?	free?

Singing ‘I don't like’ instead of ‘dat I'd like’ puts an emphasis on the notes that interrupts the easy run of the phrase, and Robeson if anything emphasises this, giving it a bitterness that suggests a resentment that he has himself been identified with the eternal river of indifference to suffering. Further, the heavy tread of the ‘lento con sentimento’ original, while it can hardly be avoided altogether, is to some extent broken by taking the whole thing at a brisker pace, which suits the further changes to the words.

In the bridge passage and final statement of the song, the original and Robeson versions show a shift from suffering and resignation to oppression and resistance:

original	Robeson
You an'me we sweat an’ strain	You and me we sweat and strain
Body all achin’ an’ racked wid pain	Body all aching and racked with
	pain
‘Tote dat barge!’, ‘Lift dat bale!’	‘Tote that barge!’, ‘Lift that bale!’
Git a little drunk an’ you'll land in	You show a little grit and you land
jail	in jail
Ah gets weary an’ sick of tryin’	But I keep laughin’ instead of cryin’
Ah'm tired of livin’ an’ scared of	I must keep fightin’ until I'm dyin’
dyin’
But ol’ man river	And old man river
He just keeps rollin’ alon’.	He'll just keep rollin’ along.

These changes in the words of ‘Old Man River’ are interventions in one of the most popular show tunes of the time;8 they mark a political black presence in a mainstream (i. e. white) cultural product. This sense of being a black presence in a white space marks every stage of Robeson's career outside the theatre and films – Robeson playing a white man's game (football), Robeson, the only black face in a white fraternity (at Rutgers) and in a white profession (the law) (Figure 2.8), Robeson's white-style home in Connecticut (Figure 2.9), Robeson posing before the stars and stripes, in (white) American uniform. Most significant of all – but then, like the rest, most ambiguous too – was Robeson with Lawrence Brown in concert, this indelibly white cultural space confidently occupied by two black performers (Figure 2.10). To many observers, especially subsequently, such moments and images show Robeson as a white man's nigger, sacrificing his specific-ally black cultural heritage to the codes and conventions of white culture. The 1942 Look magazine spread of him and his family at home could easily give offence in these terms. Yet it could also be seen as inspiring to other black viewers and readers, and, partly because of this inspirational quality, as uppity, threatening and offensive to whites.

It was not until the late forties that Robeson began to get his comeuppance for his politics. The scale of it is striking even for the era of McCarthy – massive rioting attended his open air concert at Peekskill in 1949, he was subsequently unable to find concert halls in the USA willing to let him perform, and he could not perform outside the USA between 1950 and 1958 because his passport was taken away. All this lies after, and therefore outside, the period covered in this chapter, but the potentially disturbing aspects of Robeson – his physique, his moral character, his level of achievement, his association with ideas of freedom, his occupation of white cultural spaces – were always present. The way the white media handled him, and especially the cinema, suggests just how disturbing all this could be felt to be.

Figure 2.8    Robeson at Columbia University Law School graduating class 1923 (© Columbia University/Paul Robeson Jr)

Figure 2.9    Robeson at home in Enfield, Connecticut, Look 1941 (Frank Bauman)

Figure 2.10    Lawrence Brown and Robeson at a recital in Moscow, 1936 (Paul Robeson Jr)

BODY AND SOUL

Before examining the strategies of the white media for handling Robeson, and as both a prelude to that and a recapitulation of what has been said so far, I want to look in some detail at a film that is differently placed in relation to these problems and yet is profoundly caught up in them. This is Body and Soul.9 It is in a different position from the rest of Robeson's stage and film work partly by virtue of its early date, 1924, when Robeson was only just becoming established as a star, and partly because it was written, directed and produced by the black film-maker Oscar Micheaux. I am not claiming that because a film-maker is black (or a woman, or gay) his or her work will necessarily be more truly expressive of black (or female, or gay) experience, much less of progressive views of that experience. But it is likely to be couched in specifically black (or female, or gay) subcultural discourses, to be in at least a negotiated relationship to mainstream discourses. Not inevitably, but likely; and, as Thomas Cripps (1977: 193) observes, Body and Soul is remarkable because it does bring together ‘alternative life-models’ specific to black American existence, ‘close-packed upon each other in competition’. In other words, Cripps suggests it has an inwardness with the different contradictory ways (images and practices) that black people had of making sense of their situation to a degree no white-made film ever did.

Body and Soul is not a film that is easy to get to see. Cripps suggests that there were two versions, the one that Micheaux originally made, and a revised version made under pressure from the New York censor board, whose objections, according to Cripps, were ‘much the same (as) the NAACP would have given’ (ibid.: 192), namely, its rather lascivious depiction of ghetto low life. The version preserved at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, is presumably the latter, although it bears only some resemblance to Cripps's account of the film. This version, and the fact that Micheaux had to adapt his film to white ideas, encapsulate the dilemma of constructing such a film. It does not just register, as in Cripps's reading, the alternative life-styles of ghetto society itself but also the problems of how to represent that society, and in particular how to represent black sexual mores.

This is also the problem in Paul Robeson's image at this time. It is quite clear that he was thought to have ‘sex appeal’. Some found it in his voice.

The best description I ever heard of Robeson's voice was from Norman Haire – but unfortunately it is unprintable, since sexual imagery in this country is verboten, in spite of the fact that sex is life, and all art sexual.

(Mannin 1930: 158)

Eslanda Goode Robeson's 1930 biography also stresses how much women found her husband sexually attractive. This is never so powerfully expressed in later references, but in addition to the brute/rape motif noted above, the idea of a less aggressive, but still potent, sex appeal was enough to make the Art Alliance of Philadelphia return their commissioned nude statue of Robeson to the artist, Antonio Salemme. It is interesting to note the differences in the costume designs for Robeson's three Othellos, all working within the all-purpose, Tudor-theatrical style. The 1930 version has him in tights, with sensuous tops of fur and flowing velvet or puffsleeved brocade; legs and inner thighs (if not exactly crotch) are revealed below, chest and arms amplified above (Figure 2.11). In the 1943 production, on the other hand, he is in flowing robes that wholly conceal the shape of the body (Figure 2.12) or leave only the arms bare in the murder scene. The same is true of the 1959 Stratford production. There is too a difference in the overall feeling conveyed by him in production photos. In 1930, he is glowering, smouldering; in 1943, troubled; in 1959, anguished, angry. Though it would be wrong to read him in the 1930 photos as just sexual, sexuality is present there to a degree not true of the others.

In the context of Robeson's functioning within white discourses, the gradual elimination of this sexuality from his image can be understood as a further aspect of the need to deactivate, lessen the threat of, his image. Body and Soul, however, suggests that there is a tension surrounding this within black discourses too. There is a central dilemma in most black thought of the period, especially that coming out of the Harlem Renaissance – is celebrating black sensuality insisting on an alternative to white culture or, on the contrary, playing into the hands of white culture, where such sensuality could be labelled as a sign of irrational inferiority and more grossly read as genital eroticism, as ‘sexuality’? In Body and Soul this dilemma is worked through the figure of Robeson, who, in the available archive version anyway, plays two roles, both sexually ambiguous.

One role is Isiah. An opening shot of a newspaper item announces the escape of a prisoner posing as a preacher; there is then a cut to Isiah/Robeson seen from behind. From the start then the film gives the audience a position of knowledge in relation to Isiah – we know he is bad but his parishioners do not. The major narrative of the film concerns Isiah's misuse of his position and the adoration of his congregation to get free liquor and access to Isabelle, the daughter of one of his most loyal admirers, Martha Jane. His rape of Isabelle and her flight in shame to Atlanta, where Martha Jane finds her and learns the truth, lead to Isabelle's denunciation of him in church and the congregation hounding him out of town.

Martha Jane and Isabelle represent the familiar melodrama values of poor-but-honest, toiling and God-fearing folk. This is established in the very first shot of them, the one in bed, the other ironing, which is cross-cut with shots of Isiah talking with the local liquor salesman, threatening to preach against drink if the salesman doesn't keep him supplied with it. This elaborated use of editing is characteristic of the film's method. A later example occurs in the scene between Martha Jane and Isabelle in Atlanta; Isabelle is explaining what kind of man Isiah really is, and this is done through a series of flashbacks. In one, Isabelle has been left by Martha Jane with Isiah, ostensibly so that Isiah can persuade her to give up her wish to marry the man she loves, Sylvester. Isiah attempts first to rape/seduce Isabelle (not for the first time), and then gets her to produce the family Bible (which we already know is where Martha Jane keeps their savings). Three close-ups follow, one of dollars in Isiah's hand, the next of Martha Jane ironing, the third of her picking cotton. This is followed by the title ‘Blood Money’. The editing no less than the story is generically classic melodrama, a stark opposition of good and bad, the pure women at the mercy of the heartless villain, the honest poor abused by the greed of the strong.

Figure 2.11    Peggy Ashcroft and Robeson in Othello, London 1930 (Paul Robeson Jr)

Figure 2.12    Uta Hagen and Robeson in Othello, New York 1942 (Paul Robeson Jr)

Yet this is complicated by the fact of Isiah/Robeson's sex appeal. It is not just that Robeson had it, or that, in Cripps's words (1977: 192), ‘Robeson fairly oozed … sexuality’, but that we are repeatedly encouraged by the film to feel that sex appeal. Cripps (ibid.) refers to ‘tight close-ups that tilted up to capture a virility long missing from black figures’. In the rape scene – presented as Isabelle's first memory/flashback to her mother in Atlanta – we are placed with Isabelle, and although the purpose of the flashback is to reveal Isiah's dastardly duplicity, it greatly emphasises the sensuality of the experience. Isiah and Isabelle are hiding in a shack after their horse has broken loose from their buggy during a storm. Isiah leaves the room (exiting screen left) so that Isabelle can undress for bed. There follows a sequence of cross-cutting of Isabelle's bare head and shoulders and his feet walking slowly forward (rightwards) in the passage. We have the eroticism of her undressing and nudity, and the tension of his making his way towards her. As we see her in full light, in a classic ‘beauty’ pose, and see only his active feet, we might seem to have here a standard identification with the male hero in his quest to get the beautiful female object of desire. Certainly we can easily place ourselves thus in relation to the events; but we are invited to place ourselves with Isabelle – it is her flashback – and the final shot, when Isiah enters and before the discreet fade, is a shot of him smiling at her/the camera, not of her cowering or responding to him/the camera. Moreover, this shot of him emphasises his flesh by his shirt being opened at the neck (the only time in the film) and by the fact that it is in an iris, a form of framing that often connotes ‘the loved one’ in silent films (an analogy with the shape of nineteenth-century pocket portrait photographs – compare D. W. Griffith's use of this in relation to Elsie/Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation).

One could not really construe the film as saying that Isabelle wanted to be raped. Her virtue and his evil are quite clear in the narrative context; but the immediate treatment of him in the scene yields to the notion of his sexual attractiveness, even in a rape context. His attractiveness is anyway clearly marked at the beginning of the film. He is the only good-looking male character (bar one significant one) in the film. The first scenes show him with a businessman who has luridly made-up lips and bright, dirty Jim Dandy clothes, and with a character called Yellow Curley, whose face looks as if it has been plastered with chalk. Both these characters look as corrupt as they are. Beside them, Isiah/Robeson looks the strikingly handsome man he was. He also looks blacker than they do. The businessman's lips suggest an attempt to alter their shape to conform more closely to white norms, while Yellow Curley looks a classic stereotype mulatto. Isiah/Robeson is not only blacker in feature, but is not trying to look white either.

We have then in Isiah a character who is unquestionably bad, and yet very attractive because he is so black. It was the lot of black women stars to become known for their beauty only to the degree that they were fair. This is true of several of Robeson's co-stars, including the actress playing Isabelle in Body and Soul, as well as Fredi Washington (Black Boy, The Emperor Jones (film)), Nina Mae McKinney (Sanders of the River), Elizabeth Welch (Song of Freedom, Big Fella) – and, most notoriously, Lena Horne. This has not been true of black male stars, although between Robeson in Body and Soul and the appearance of stars such as Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree and Billy Dee Williams, there are only two black leading men stars, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier. The question of the sexuality of their image, as of the blackness of it, is a vexed one, but neither was allowed the kind of directly, smoulderingly sexual appeal of Isiah/Robeson or of Brown, Roundtree and Williams.

One further element of Body and Soul raises, and confuses, the fact that Isiah/Robeson can be taken as attractive: the only other attractive man in the film, Sylvester, the man Isabelle wishes to marry, is also played by Robeson. Sylvester/Robeson is a much less developed character. We are first introduced to him in an iris shot, walking through woods; this is a cut from a close-up of Isabelle, indicating not what she is looking at but what she is thinking of. (It may even be an important convention that male objects of female desire are introduced this way, thus making the desire more distant and spiritual; compare the introduction of Ahmed/Rudolph Valentino as the object of Yasmin/Vilma Banky's thoughts in The Son of the Sheik (see Dyer 2002b: 118).) This shot/thought occurs in a scene at Martha Jane's home, while she and Isiah are talking – but no title indicates who this is (the title may be lost, of course). For all we know, it could be Isabelle thinking of having seen Isiah romantically: the confusion of finding Isiah/Robeson attractive has set in. Sylvester/Robeson only occurs a few times in the rest of the film, chiefly as a brief reminder of who Isabelle really loves. Only at the end does he come into his own. He has invented something (it is not clear what), his invention has been accepted, he has enough money to marry Isabelle – the two of them and Martha Jane are grouped before a portrait of Booker T. Washington, the apostle of just such black enterprise as Sylvester/Robeson represents. Isiah/Robeson's power was his sex appeal; Sylvester/Robeson's is his respectability.

But there is one further twist. Just before this final scene, there has been a climax to the Isiah story. Fleeing from his congregation, he finds himself in the forest, pursued by a small boy. He turns on him and begins to beat him with a stick. Cut to Martha Jane starting awake in her chair, and the title ‘For it was all a dream’, at which point Isabelle and Sylvester enter. Isiah then presumably never existed; he was a figment of Martha Jane's dream. Easy enough to read this as psychologically motivated – a mother's fears about the man her daughter loves. But it also represents the wider dilemma the film presents, as did Robeson at that point – the difficulty of stating black sexual appeal. In Martha Jane's dream Sylvester/Robeson's absent sexuality becomes Isiah/Robeson's disturbingly present, attractive, duplicitous, aggressive sexuality.

The rest of Robeson's work, especially in film, works to banish that image even as a spectre in a dream; but it is worth registering how powerfully, disturbingly present it could be. At least a black film-maker, torn apart by the contradictions posed for black culture and politics by the image of an active black male sexuality, registers the problem of handling the image. The later work perhaps handles it all too efficiently, to the point that one might not notice it was there.

PASSIVITY AND PATHOS

There was no conscious strategy to handle Robeson a certain way. However, even the most progressive white uses of Robeson, such as the avant-garde Close-Up group that was behind Borderline or the Labour Party-identified group behind The Proud Valley, were caught in white discourses that had a way of handling the representation of black people so as to keep those represented in their place. The basic strategy of these discourses might be termed deactivation. Black people's qualities could be praised to the skies, but they must not be shown to be effective qualities active in the world. Even when portrayed at their most vivid and vibrant, they must not be shown to do anything, except perhaps to be destructive in a random sort of way. If narratives, even the residual narratives of songs and photographs, are models of history, then blacks in white narratives may be the colouring of history and the object of history, but not its subject, never what makes it happen.

In this regard, the treatment of blacks bears many resemblances to the patriarchal treatment of women. In addition, the cinematic treatment of Robeson is, with a few exceptions, striking for the degree to which the films deactivate any role that their star may have, in the narrative or even simply in his presence on the screen. As a result there is a contained power about his appearance, a quality that many have found the most moving thing about him.

It is no accident that there are similarities between how black men are represented and how women are depicted. Putting it at its broadest, it is common for oppressed groups to be represented in dominant discourses as non-active. It suits dominance that way, for a variety of reasons – their passivity permits the fantasy of power over them to be exercised, all the more powerful for being a confirmation of actual power; their passivity justifies their subordination ideologically (they don't do anything to improve their lot); their activity would imply challenge to their situation, to the dominant it would imply change.

There is a more specific linkage in US representations of all black people and all women. Many of the nineteenth-century arguments for the abolition of slavery saw blacks and women as sharing a similar nature. At its least attractive, this was a kind of ‘you shouldn't kick the weak, you shouldn't mock those inferior to you’ argument; but it also came couched in feminist terms (just as there were close connections in political practice between abolitionism and feminism in the mid-nineteenth century in the USA). George Fredrickson (1972) refers to this in relation to what he calls Northern ‘Romantic Racialism’. Harriet Beecher Stowe is exemplary here, but Fredrickson also refers to male abolitionists and pro-feminists of the period. Theodore Tilton, for example, the editor of the New York Independent, stated in a speech at the Cooper Institute, New York, in 1863:

In all the intellectual activities which take their strange quickening from the moral faculties – which we call instincts, intuitions – the negro is superior to the white man – equal to the white woman. It is sometimes said … that the negro race is the feminine race of the world. This is not only because of his social and affectionate nature, but because he possesses that strange moral, instinctive insight that belongs more to women than to men.

(quoted in Fredrickson 1972: 114–15)

While statements as ideologically explicit as this would not have received universal assent, it would be difficult to overestimate the impact of Stowe's work, and thus ideas like this, on the popular imagination and on the habitual way of thinking about black people. In any event, the treatment of black men, when they are not brutes, constantly puts them into ‘feminine’ positions, that is, places them structurally in the text in the same positions as women typically occupy.

To argue this through in relation to Robeson, I'd like to look first at aspects of how he is photographed, in pin-ups and photographs, to turn next to the question of his performance style and finally to look at the way he is used in narratives, his function in the overall structure of plays and films and the way he is edited in to the local structure of specific film scenes.

Pin-ups of white men are awkward things. As I've argued elsewhere (Dyer 2002c), they exemplify a set of dichotomies – they are pictures to be looked at, but it is not the male role to be looked at; they are passive objects of gaze, but men are supposed to be the active subjects of gaze, and so on. Many male pin-ups counteract the passive, objectifying tendency by having the model tauten his body, glare at or away from the viewer, and look as if he is caught in action or movement. The portrait of Robeson taken for Sanders of the River is like that (Figure 2.13). It is particularly instructive to compare his body here with the more snapshot-like photo of him with Kenyatta discussed above – the slack body in the latter is here tautened for the purposes of a classic male pin-up.

However, such treatment of Robeson is untypical. Far more characteristic is the portrait taken for King Solomon's Mines (Figure 2.14). It is in some ways similar to a later portrait of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan (Figure 2.15). Dappled light and vague fern-like tall grass backdrops suggest a deep-in-the-forest/jungle setting. Both create a soft, ‘beautiful’ feeling, but whereas Weissmuller is posed with his body turning, resting on his arms, Robeson is posed sitting, his arms resting on his knees. Thus Weissmuller seems to be caught in action and his body is tensed, Robeson is still, his body relaxed. Moreover, Weissmuller looks up, in a characteristic pose of masculine striving; Robeson just looks ahead, with a slight, enigmatic smile on his face.

The Robeson portrait has at least as much in common with the early portraits of Marlene Dietrich (Figure 2.16). Particularly notable is the use of textured clothing that catches and diffuses the light and so blurs (rather than outlining; cf. the discussion in the Monroe chapter above) the shape of the body. Like Dietrich, there is perhaps a trace of irony, a sense of detachment. Unlike Monroe, Robeson does not give himself to us, any more than Dietrich does. Like Dietrich though, he is set in place by the image – any movement would spoil the beauty of the composition, the effect of the light. He is pinned in place to be pinned-up – and he has laid his spear and shield aside.

As much like Dietrich as like Weissmuller, Robeson is put into a position of ‘feminine’ subordination within the dynamics of looking that are built into any portrait-image of a human being in this culture. (These dynamics are more complex than a ‘men look: women are looked at’ opposition, though that is a fair starting point.) The Emperor Jones, the film in which Robeson has the most dynamic role in the narrative of any of his sound films, is also – and perhaps not coincidentally – the film that, at the level of visual treatment, most suggests this kind of ‘feminine’ positioning. Particularly striking is the constant use of mirrors, to suggest a narcissistic involvement with self that is typically male but always coded as feminine. The first shot of Robeson in the film shows him preening in front of a mirror, followed immediately by a shot of a woman looking at him, saying, ‘Um – um, yo sho’ is wonderful in them clothes’, with a cut back to him looking at himself in the mirror some more. By the time he is ruler of the island, he has installed mirrors all over his palace. The introduction of him in full Emperor regalia is done with a shot that tracks down from the top of an ornate mirror in front of which Jones/Robeson is dressing himself; when he goes to see his court he walks along a hall with mirrors on the wall, stopping for a moment in front of each one to catch his reflection. This is part of the film's mockery of Jones; male concern with display, finery, appearance, looking good, is often mocked through this kind of mirror imagery and its connotations of narcissism, and the thrust of the jibe is that such concerns are ‘feminine’.

Figure 2.13    Sanders of the River 1935 (Paul Robeson Jr)

Figure 2.14    King Solomon's Mines 1937 (Paul Robeson Jr)

The analogy of this visual treatment of Robeson with that of women might also suggest that these images, like pin-ups of women, are heavily coded in terms of eroticism. Undoubtedly sex appeal is, powerfully, one of the ways that such images of Robeson can be taken; but much pin-up and portraiture of him works out of a tradition that is more ambivalent on this question, that of the idea of the classical nude.

Robeson is often taken, in photographs and in one-shots in films, in poses that derive formally from the statuary of classical antiquity. The 1926 photograph by Nickolas Muray has many of the formal features of the work of, say, Praxiteles or a nineteenth-century neo-classical sculptor such as Canova, or many between and since – the stance with the weight on one slightly bent leg, the other held straight; the head held downwards, sideways; one hand turned inwards, the other outwards, both held half-way to a grasp; one shoulder higher than the other; a sense of flowing lines through the body (Figure 2.17).

Figure 2.15    Pin-up of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan (Cecil Beaton, courtesy of Sotheby's, London)

The significance, in our period, of this formal similarity to the art of classical antiquity in the treatment of the nude is that it makes possible an appeal to the idea of timeless, immemorial ideals enshrined in the classics. This appeal can then be used to defend the practice of representing the naked human body in a period when such representation is widely deemed lewd or immoral. In order to be able to go on producing images of naked people at all, art practice had to produce a discourse that denied the erotic dimension of such images, that insisted classical-style nudes transcended sexuality and were a celebration of the ideal beauty of the human form, ‘proportion, symmetry, elasticity and aplomb’ in Kenneth Clark's words (1960: 30). This defence of the nude effects a double articulation – it is both a way of producing potentially erotic images while denying that that is what is being done, and also a way of constructing a mode of looking at the naked form (as generations of art school students have) ‘dispassionately’, without arousal.

Figure 2.16    Marlene Dietrich (BFI Collections)

Figure 2.17    Nude study of Paul Robeson (standing), New York 1926 (Nickolas Muray/Paul Robeson Jr)

The classicism of still images of Robeson fitted with a quite general perception of him as cast within ‘the heroic mould’. Elizabeth Sergeant referred to both physical and ethical dimensions. Physically, Robeson was ‘of noble physical strength and beauty … like a bronze of ancient mold’ (1926: 40), while ethically ‘unlike most complex moderns, [he] does not appear half a dozen men in a torn and striving body … he is one and clear-cut in the Greek or primordial sense’ (1927: 194). Similarly, Edwin Bancroft Henderson (1939: 33–5) enthused over another black male with whom Robeson was linked, Joe Louis, in a disconcerting mixture of racial praise:

Joe has the physique of a Greek god. His color appears to be a golden bronze. Few Negro fighters have shaded lighter than he.

The pure beauty ideology was clearly expressed by Antonio Salemme, who made the nude statue of Robeson that upset the moral-artistic guardians of Philadelphia. His words to Robeson, reported in Eslanda Robeson's biography and repeated in Shirley Graham's, are pure art school ideology.

All that we are exists in the body – mind, spirit and soul. The human form takes its beauty from all these. Its lines may suggest full, glowing life or dormant, empty life; the muscles may suggest fine, free, powerful movement, or calm stillness and peace. The body has harmony, rhythm and infinite meaning.

(Robeson 1930: 81–2)

In this rhetoric, art is sex-blind, the human body ungendered; but in practice it is the nude female whose muscles suggest ‘calm stillness’, the nude male's that suggest ‘fine, free, powerful movement’ – the white nude male, that is.

In the classical period proper it was possible to represent the athletic male nude body as an object of contemplation, but by the nineteenth century (and long before), if the naked male body was to be represented at all, it had to be doing something, in action. Westmacott's Achilles or Eakins's studies of boxers were not just images of bodies capable of action, but actually in action. Even George Washington's statesmanship translates, in Greenough's statue, into physical action. Yet Robeson's still images, though we see an athletic, muscular body, tend to show a potential for action only, not action itself. In Muray's standing portrait, the head is bowed more than in the classical model, perhaps suggesting the weight-of-sorrow view of the black man's lot. More striking is another study by Muray of Robeson with his hands holding on to a slab (of concrete?) (Figure 2.18). The position of his right arm and leg, nearest to us, shows their muscularity – but the pose does not actually suggest the model is doing anything. The bent leg is not giving leverage, the arms are not holding up the slab but merely holding on to it. The body's potential for strength is revealed, but if anything the use of that strength is denied by the positioning of the legs and arms. Not only are they not doing anything, there is nothing they could do in that position – the concrete(?) blocks are fixed. What the blocks do is confine the model, he is bowed over and contained by them. Even more is the sorrowful weight of oppression suggested, but not the heroic resistance or overthrow of it.

Finally in the Muray studies, not only do we not see the penis (moral censorship? fear of showing a black man with phallus?); we also don't see the face. That part of the body that carries the greatest burden of meaning, in terms of personality and expression, is hidden.

The visual treatment of Robeson suggests analogies with the visual treatment of women, in so far as it reproduces the feeling of subordination of the person looked at; but the ‘classicism’ of the approach plays down and may even dispel altogether the eroticism of the images. What is produced is the idea of passive beauty. This corresponds also to aspects of performance:

There is no remark that is so disparaging to the Negro actor, singer, musician, as the one – often intended as a high compliment – that he is a natural born actor.

(Isaacs 1947)

It is interesting to look again at Salemme's quoted words to Robeson. When the latter said that he did not think he could ‘pose for a sculptor. I don't know how’, Salemme replied,

Posing is not what I want. Your body is something beautiful to behold. It is expressive; it has intelligence. I'd like to work it in bronze.

Figure 2.18    Seated nude study of Paul Robeson, New York 1926 (Nickolas Muray/Paul Robeson Jr)

Edwin R. Embree's version of these words is, ‘Good God … you don't need to pose; just take your clothes off and stand there’ (1945: 251). Robeson's beauty, even his expressivity and intelligence, become structured as natural possessions, not something he produces. As with women, so black men are the object of, in Mary Ellmann's words, ‘the celebration of thoughtless achievement’. This sense of Robeson just ‘being’ beautiful, wonderful, expressive underlies much of the rapturous critical reception of him as a performer.

In addition to remarking on his size and magnificent physique, critics and observers sing the same refrain:

Robeson … is one of the most thoroughly eloquent, impressive and convincing actors that I have looked at and listened to in at least twenty years of professional theatregoing. He gains his effects with means that not only seem natural, but that are natural. He does things beautifully, with his voice, his features, his hands, his whole somewhat ungainly body, yet I doubt that he knows how he does them.

(George Jean Nathan, review of All God's Chillun Got Wings,
American Mercury July 1924; quoted by Noble 1948: 141)

In the same article Nathan risked the generalisation that ‘the Negro is a born actor, where the white man achieves acting’. Similarly,

Paul Robeson is a natural artist, completely lacking in self-consciousness, or affectation.

(Mannin 1930: 158).

Robeson possesses a beautiful, natural, unforced, baritone voice of great volume … Ivor Brown in The Observer … [wrote] ‘Mr Robeson's Ebon Othello is as sturdy as an oak, deep-rooted in its elemental passion … One thinks of a tree because the greatness is of nature, not of art’.

(Cuney-Hare 1936: 372–3)

Or compare black writer, Edwin R. Embree, in his book celebrating black people who have made it against the grain of American society, Thirteen Against the Odds:

He has travelled only two of Shakespeare's roads to greatness. He was born great, and – almost against his easygoing inclination – he has had greatness thrust upon him.

(Embree 1945: 249–50)

Robeson himself sometimes gave credence to this view by his reported descriptions of his own approach:

I'm not a great actor like José Ferrer … All I do is feel the part. I make myself believe I am Othello, and I act as he would act.

(Reported by Jerome Beatty, ‘America's No. 1 Negro’,The
American Magazine, vol. CXXXVII, no. 5, May 1944;
quoted by Schlosser 1970: 182).

This way of reading Robeson's performances as unproduced fitted with the fact that his acting style used a minimum of performance signs, or rather used stillness, a small number of gestures, intensification of the voice rather than more movement, elaborated gestures and vocal gymnastics. (I have already discussed something of this aspect in relation to his singing style and its purity and simplicity.) Stillness, a minimum style of performance – these can be treated as deliberate choices, to do with a refusal of theatrics or else a method for producing intensity, concentration. Robeson could certainly be read in the latter way –

It was Mr Robeson's gift to make [the spirituals] tell in every line, and that not by any outward stress, but by an overwhelming inward conviction.

(New York Times, 20.4. 25: 2)

but he was more generally read emblematically, his stillness a passive, inactive embodiment of value in the 1942 Othello he could be seen as the victimised symbol of nobility, simplicity, dignity, partly through the contrast between José Ferrer's Iago, ‘all movement and all over the stage at once’ and his Othello's ‘sculptured stillness’ (Hamilton 1974: 108). That this is also what some critics expected Robeson to be (when they were not hoping for aboriginal passion) is revealed in Michael Mac Liammoír's comments on the 1959 production, where even the few gestures Robeson did use were felt to interfere with his emblematic stasis. Mac Liammoír suggests that it would have been better if Robeson had just been allowed to be

immobile and magnificent as the Sphinx … allowing him to rely for interpretation on the profound reality of his voice.

(The Observer, 12.4. 59)

Robeson's immobile performance style is suggested by a production still from the 1928 London production of Show Boat (Figure 2.19). It is the ‘Can't Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ number, in which Magnolia, the daughter of the white owner of the show boat, is singing the ‘nigger’ song that the mulatto Julie has taught her. Magnolia's movements are a conscious imitation of ‘nigger’ dancing; everyone else, bar Robeson/Joe, is performing with minstrelsy derived cavorting or bending movements. Julie (Marie Burke, fourth from the right), not yet revealed as a mulatto, remains somewhat more ladylike (= white). Robeson/Joe stands in a rather classical pose, the emblematic onlooker. He refuses the coon style performance, and is left with the purity and simplicity of mere presence.

Figure 2.19    ‘Can't Help Lovin’ Dat Man’, Show Boat, London 1928 (© Miles Kreuger)

This is also how he is used throughout both play and film. The role is sometimes described as being akin to a Greek chorus, commenting on but not participating in the action. This may be structurally accurate, but the Greek chorus is anonymous, characterless, representing the universal every-person of implied author and audience; Joe/Robeson, on the other hand, is, as character, a working black man in the racially segregated world of the South, and, as performer, appearing in an expensive show before predominantly white audiences. Though ‘Old Man River’ appeals to the universal, it roots the experience specifically in black toil and tribulation. Moreover, Joe's emblematic presence is most called upon at specifically racially sensitive moments in the play and film. He is just there throughout the first half, but his presence is emphasised when the plot hinges on racial questions, especially the discovery that Julie is a mulatto and her banishment from the show boat. Compare his positioning in the finale to Act One (1928 production) (Figure 2.20) where he stands out by virtue of the simplicity of his clothing but not because of where he is standing, with his positioning in the miscegenation scene (Figure 2.21), a quite startling placing that draws attention to his inactive looking on at this racially tense moment.

Figure 2.20    Finale Act One, Show Boat, London 1928 (© Miles Kreuger)

Figure 2.21    The miscegenation scene, Show Boat, London 1928 (© Miles Kreuger)

In the film this is emphasised by the use of editing. When Ellie comes rushing into the rehearsal, full of her secret (that Julie is not 100 per cent white), there is a cut in of a close-up of Joe/Robeson, looking and listening; when the sheriffenters to arrest Julie, another cut-in of him; when Steve, who has previously cut Julie's hand and sucked some blood from it, declares that he too has Negro blood in him, another cut to Joe/Robeson, who with one movement of his eyes and head conveys a wealth of unfathomable meaning; finally, when the sheriffdeclares that folks in the area would be put out to know there are white people acting with black, the film cuts again to Joe/Robeson's face. Quite precisely, the film, even more it would seem than the show, stresses Joe/Robeson as an emblem of racial suffering. Both staging and editing register awareness of racism in Robeson's passive observation of it.

Joe/Robeson only once does anything in the plot, and that is to go through the storm to fetch the doctor for Magnolia's confinement. This action is in the film only, and shows courage, but entirely in the service of white destinies. After the early plays and films, Robeson seldom had a role that involved actions that had an effect on the plot, unless it was in white interests. The role of leader of his people – taking them on a trek to find salt in Jericho, organising them into a farming collective in Tales of Manhattan – might give him such a narrative function, but even as a leader, he is effectively ineffective. In Sanders of the River, apart from quelling King Nofolaba's warriors early on as the British administration requires, being king involves little but sitting about in regal regalia. In Basalik, as a native chief, critics complained that he had ‘little to do but stand about and look noble’ (‘IB’, Manchester Guardian, 9.4. 35; quoted by Schlosser 1970: 156). When not playing a leader, his part becomes little more than that of helper to whites in their problems, whether domestic – the runaway boy in Big Fella, who, when he is returned to home, sickens until Banjo/Robeson comes to his bedside – or domestic and industrial, as in The Proud Valley.

This film displays a white community's easy acceptance of a black worker, yet unconsciously demonstrates the terms of that acceptance. As far as work goes, David/Robeson can be one of the men but neither a leader – he refuses to go in with the other men to see the Minister responsible for mining – nor a survivor – when a group of the men is trapped underground it is he who lights the dynamite, knowing it will free the others and kill him. In both cases, David/Robeson makes the decision – at the ministry he tells the others to go on in without him, and before their feeble protestations, says, unanswerably, ‘Oh no, I wouldn't be much use to you’; down the mine, lots are drawn as to who is to light the dynamite fuse and Emlyn does so, but rather than let him do it, David/Robeson knocks him out and lights the fatal fuse himself. He participates in his own subordination and sacrifice. It is uncomfortably close to what Elizabeth Sergeant (1926: 41) called ‘that self-denying, passive, deeply impressionable Negro essence’ that makes black people such good performers.

In domestic terms, David/Robeson's role in The Proud Valley is again purely as helper, sorting out the problems of the whites around him, but having none of his own. In one sequence, he acts, on his own initiative, as go-between for Emlyn and his girlfriend Gwen who have fallen out; the model for this, including the light comedy of the subterfuge and manipulation involved (e. g. telling Gwen it is all over with Emlyn so that she will go to him fierily and tell him that it is not) is classical comedy, Robeson playing the servant role to the silly lovers. Despite being the star of the film, there is no question of him being a lover.

Not only in overall plot terms, but also in the construction of individual scenes, David/Robeson is marginalised. In a sequence quite early in the film, David/Robeson has just been introduced to Dick's family – there are questions of whether there is room for David to be a lodger, of Emlyn and Gwen's courtship, of the forthcoming Eisteddfod. The scene begins with an establishing shot, with David/Robeson sitting to the right of the table and the others ranged round it. However, once discussion starts, we move not to close-ups of speakers but to two- and three-shots with David/Robeson excluded, so that the group becomes defined as the whites. Only at the end of the sequence do we have the establishing shot repeated. David/Robeson's marginalisation is particularly noticeable at emotional moments in the film – he is the star and ostensibly the main character, yet when the bell announces the pit disaster, there is a quick series of close-ups, of Gwen (‘The pit!’), Emlyn (‘Dad!’) and Mrs Parry (‘Oh, my God!’), which put all the emotional drama on to Dick, even though David/Robeson is also down the pit at the time. When the miners set off on their march to London, each has a loved one to kiss him goodbye save for David/Robeson who has to hang about awkwardly in the background.

The most sustained use of Robeson in such a way is seen in Borderline (Figure 2.22). Here the emblematic approach meshes with the theoretical position that informs the film, derived from Soviet theories of montage. Borderline's use of Robeson might even be the same as Sergei Eisenstein's would have been, had they made a film together as they planned. Vladimir Nizhny's description of how Eisenstein spoke in his classes of using Robeson suggests an essentially emblematic function.¹⁰ He showed the class photographs of Robeson, and referred to his ‘rich temperament … physique and marvellous face’ (1962: 27), and then talked about a scene in which Dessalines storms a castle. In discussing how to achieve maximum impact, Robeson, the performer, becomes a plastic element, important for his ‘temperament’ and emblematic blackness –

Figure 2.22    Borderline 1930 (BFI Collections)

when … a candelabrum, with lighted candles to boot, sparks blazing and flickering from its pendants, is raised by a man of gigantic stature, with dark face and flashing eyes and teeth (remember Paul Robeson), this will be not only effective, but a veritable climax to Dessalines’ indignation.

(ibid.: 58)

The ideological-aesthetic justifications for this emblematic use of performers are well known – the desire to make crowds, not individuals, the heroes of the (hi)story, the use of individual performers as types representative of social groups. In the context of Black Majesty, where all performance might have been approached in this way, this might not have made Robeson's appearance in the film different or passive (though Eisenstein's words do suggest the frisson of the white contemplation of the huge black man). In Borderline, the same approach is more problematic.

Borderline was written and directed by Kenneth Macpherson, a member of the avant-garde group associated with the film journal Close-Up which had links with the Harlem Renaissance (producing a special issue on blacks and film), the literary and quasi-feminist avant-garde (H. D., Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson), psychoanalysis (Barbara Low, Mary Chadwick, Hans Sachs and Freud himself), as well as formalist film theory (publishing the first translations of Eisenstein among others). (For further discussion of Borderline and its context, see Cosandey 1985; Friedberg 1980–1.)

Although constructed more insistently through the chains of association and rhythmic effects of its montage, Borderline does have a plot, concerning a white couple, Thorne and Astrid, and a black couple, Adah and Pete (Eslanda and Paul Robeson), all of whom live in the same inn in a small village. There is an implication that Thorne and Adah have been sleeping together. Astrid and Thorne fight, over his infidelity perhaps but also out of the jadedness of their relationship. Thorne stabs Astrid. The racial prejudice of the other villagers mounts; Adah goes away, leaving Pete a note saying it is all her fault. Pete is ordered out of the town by the mayor, but before he goes, Thorne, who has been acquitted of murdering Astrid, comes to the station to say goodbye. This bare outline of a deliberately elliptical plot already suggests how little an active role the Paul Robeson character has in the narrative. The highly complex use of montage only reinforces this inactivity.

The film is organised around the basic antinomy of black and white at every level, aesthetic, metaphorical, ethical, ethnic. The photography exploits black and white stock for dynamic visual effects, effects, that is, based on an aesthetic of contrast or clash between dark and light areas and shapes. Equally the film sees black and white people antithetically. The traditional Western moral dichotomy of black and white is also maintained, but reversed in its conflation with race – that is, in Borderline racially black equals morally white and vice versa. These antinomies are further expressed in other elements of film style – black characters are shot still and in repose, in visually simple compositions; white characters are shot in frenzied movement and gesticulation, in complex compositions. As a result, black performers (the Robesons) do not do anything, whereas white performers, especially H. D. as Astrid, are constantly, albeit destructively, active. All this recalls the white alienation versus blackfolks’ spirituality opposition that runs through discourses on blackness in the twenties and thirties.

A good example of Borderline's method occurs early in the film. Thorne and Astrid are in their room, bored and tetchy; Pete is in his, just there. The cuts in the Thorne–Astrid scene focus on jagged, quick movements, Astrid clutching at her fluttering tea-gown, Thorne playing with a knife. The cuts in the Pete scene are a series of close-ups of Pete/Robeson's body in repose – his profile, his hands, his body stretched out on the bed. Neither scene is primarily concerned with narrative, rather they contrast the feeling of the black and white temperaments.

Shots of Paul Robeson throughout further emphasise his passive, emblematic beauty – his dark, smiling face contrasting with bulbous white clouds; shots of him motionless on a hillside intercut very fast with a tumbling waterfall (this, again, being also a cutting between a predominantly black and still and predominantly white and fast image); a close-up of him laughing, with a white flower in his ear, and so on.

In addition to the racial and aesthetic significance of this photography, there is an implicit sexual dimension. Although hardly an explicitly gay film, the construction of the narrative and the emphasis on Robeson/Pete's passive beauty both suggest that he functions as an object of desire in the film. There are touches of gay subcultural iconography – the dyke style of the innkeeper and her woman friend, for instance, and the piano player with the photo of Pete/Robeson on his piano. More importantly, the last scene in the film with any emotional weight is that between Thorne and Pete, looking at each other and, in extreme close-up, shaking hands. At one level this suggests friendship transcending race, but it is also a friendship transcending adultery and death. After it we have a shot of the flower Pete/Robeson was wearing in the bar, dead in its glass, and a shot of Thorne sitting alone beneath a cherry tree on the mountain. The flower imagery evokes love and the death of love between the two men.

Borderline's use of Robeson can be seen as a product of aesthetic theory, blackfolks’ ideology and gay sensibility. It is different from the use made of him in other films, but it is still broadly within the general discourse that deactivates the black person even while lauding her or him.

The only exceptions to this kind of treatment are Robeson's roles in left theatre. As Toussaint L'Ouverture (1935) and John Henry (1940), in the plays of C. L. R. James and Robert Roark respectively, he played the traditional active hero of a narrative. Two socialist plays, Stevedore and Plant in the Sun, developed a different kind of protagonist–narrative relationship. Neither play was written with Robeson in mind, and he appeared not in their original US productions but in those by the Unity Theatre in Britain. Both are concerned with racial questions, but their emphasis is on the need to sink racial differences in the recognition of class identity, neither black nor white but workers.

In each case Robeson plays a worker who is both an organiser of his fellows and a victim of discrimination because of it. In Stevedore (London, 1935), a wrongful accusation of rape against the Robeson character, Lonnie, is used as an excuse for attempting to lynch him and so curb his union activities; in Plant in the Sun (London, 1938), his character, Peewee, is fired for such activities. In both cases his treatment is what galvanises his fellow workers, white as well as black, into action in support of him. Plant in the Sun, a lighter play with much humour in it, ends with the action of Peewee's immediate mates, a sit-down strike, inspiring the whole works to join in, thus promoting the tactic of the sit-down strike that had been so successfully used at General Motors in 1936 (see Goldstein 1974: 184–5). Accounts of the play suggest that Robeson/Peewee gives the initial impetus for what happens by articulating the politics of action and by being the occasion of it; thereafter his role is as one of the group. In the London production, this was echoed in the way that he was not given star billing but simply treated as one of the company – the mode of production of the play embodied the ideal represented by the play.

Stevedore, a more sombre piece, ends with Robeson/Lonnie shot by the leader of the white lynch mob, an action which leads first to the blacks turning on the lynch mob rather than taking the quietist stance that many have been urging up to that point, and then by Robeson/Lonnie's fellow white workers joining in and routing the lynch mob. In Karen Malpede Taylor's (1972: 77) description: ‘The curtain falls on a tableau like the Pietà: Ruby holds Lonnie's lifeless body in her lap’. As in Plant in the Sun, the Robeson character both articulates the socialist and racial consciousness of the play and is the occasion for realising that consciousness in action. Taylor argues that although each of Stevedore's three acts ends ‘with a moment of pathos’, Lonnie dragged away to be lynched, another character shot, Lonnie murdered, ‘the crux of each act, the moment of conflict which determines in which direction the future action will go, occurs as the black community confronts its white oppressors … The defeat and deaths of individuals provide three emotional endings. Yet this … domestic tragedy is undercut by an epic movement which … [represents] a nation struggling to be born’ (ibid.: 77–8). The Robeson character is active in the narrative, but ultimately this action is taken up into the broader sweep of collective action. Whereas the mainstream plays and films render the Robeson character passive and ineffective, the left-wing plays show his individual action as part of collective action in history. Yet it is interesting that Stevedore should end on a Pietà – the resonance of the pathos of the kind of black male image that Robeson was elsewhere taken to embody in his singing and person is still drawn on here, perhaps only as a universalising touch, but maybe as a lingering register of the ‘romantic realism’ of the left.

The image of the heroic Robeson/Lonnie dead at the end of Stevedore may also have had a peculiarly powerful pathos because it reworks a certain kind of feeling that is often proposed in Robeson's work. This is the contrast between his terrific potential for action and the fact that it is either curbed or not used; it is the pathos of strength checked, of power withheld, of the beast caged.

Robeson's given physical power was always evident. His sheer size is emphasised time and again, as is the strength presumed to go with it. Song of Freedom early on has him picking up a crate single-handed that his white workmates can't manage; when he starts singing, someone says, ‘Where did you hear that?’ He replies, ‘It's been at the back of my head ever since I was a little fella’, to which comes the retort, ‘When was you ever a little fella?’ His size is evoked in the title of Big Fella, and used for wry visual humour in the scene where he first meets the tiny Phyllis in The Proud Valley. The crate-lifting in Song of Freedom is like a strong man's turn, as are shifting the boulder in King Solomon's Mines or the fallen timbers in The Proud Valley. Size and strength were complemented by the power of his voice, its deep, resonant quality. The critic of the Hartford Daily Times’ description of Robeson's suitability for his role in Black Boy sums up the sense of power of Robeson's physical make-up, though the final reference to ‘mobility of expression’ is interesting as a reference to something more often, as I've argued, curbed in most productions:

Mr Robeson's equipment for this role is well-nigh perfect; a physical giant with a voice so deep and rich and powerful, both in speech and song, that it would make a dramatic appeal even without the aid of a mask of extraordinary mobility of expression.

(ibid., 12.9. 26 quoted by Schlosser 1970:92)

Yet this power was often contained, by being turned into the spectacle of passive beauty, by becoming a turn, by the editing techniques I've discussed, or by the contrast between it and the subject matter Robeson was performing. Here was this big man singing songs that were taken to express sorrow, resignation, humility. Here was this giant playing men humiliated – by their own superstition (The Emperor Jones), by their love for a worthless white woman (All God's Chillun Got Wings), by schoolmasterly white superiority (Sanders of the River). Above all, there was the contrast between the potential bodily power and his actual stillness and, most movingly, between the potential vocal power and his soft, gentle, careful actual delivery of speech and song.

This is very clear in Robeson's earliest recordings, made in 1925 and 1926 and reissued in 1972 by RCA as Songs of My People. The voice here, as later, is capable of great power; some phrases and passages are delivered with a full-throated energy; there are already the deep, resonant, sustained notes so characteristic of the sound of Robeson in popular memory. These heavy, forceful qualities are lightened here by a number of factors: a wider vocal range, so that he can move into the tenor register easily and soaringly, without the (exciting) sense of effort he required later; greater use of grace notes, making the overall effect more elegant but also less direct; the choice of as many fast and exultant numbers as slow and mournful ones, sung with an astonishing brilliance, rapid phrases tripping off the tongue in a manner not generally associated with bass singing. At the end of ‘Get On Board, Little Children’ he sings the refrain once through straight and strong, but then softens his voice (and Lawrence Brown self-pedals the piano) so that the final statement of the refrain is not loud and firm, but muted and delicate. For the last phrase ‘many a more’, his voice takes on the plummy, rounded sound of parlour balladry on ‘many a’ and then just fades gracefully on the long-held final note on ‘more’. The kind of rousing, affirmative feeling that is usual with this song (and in some of Robeson's later performances of it) is modified by a gentleness and quietness which could also be called damping and restrained.

Many listeners sought phrases that would capture something of this remarkable quality:

G. B. Stern said to me that Rebecca West had described Robeson's voice as ‘black velvet’, but that Van Druten defined the shade as ‘mulberry’, which did I think the better adjective?

(Mannin 1930:157)

He combined with a rich and mellow voice a dramatic restraint and power that seemed to hold unheard thunder behind each song.

(unnamed article quoted by Ovington 1927: 213; my emphasis)

Some tones were so deep that they suggested the elemental sound of thunder; others were strangely clear, high, sweet and gentle.

(Seton 1958: 50)

Cicely Hamilton's description of Robeson in the London production of The Emperor Jones articulates the kind of effect produced by this contained, restrained, withheld power:

Something of Mr Robeson's success is due, no doubt, to his personality; to his voice, which is soft as well as resonant, to his racial intonation and his size. Above all to his size; there was pathos almost unbearable in the humbling of so mighty a man.

(Time and Tide, vol. 6, no. 39, September 1925: 938–9;
quoted by Schlosser 1970: 79)

Similarly, Marie Seton's (1958) description of his singing ‘Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child’ in concert:

There was something almost painful about this massive man with strong, forceful features speaking in song with such infinitely tender and sorrowful yearning.

It makes a difference what the source of humbling is – whether contained by the compositional or narrative structures of the text he appears in or held back by his own performance technique – but the fact of it, the moving affect of it, may be the emotional heart of Robeson's cross-over appeal.

At the end of the film version of ‘Old Man River’ (which Robeson recorded close to the microphone, hence softly, not boomingly), there is an extreme close-up of Joe/Robeson. He finishes singing, and then looks ahead for a few moments – neutrally? sadly? bitterly? – before gradually forcing a smile through his face, so that the shot and number can fade on a sambo grin. It is the kind of moment John Ellis (1982) refers to as something we search out in star performances, that meaningful flicker of expression that we think we see when we have mentally cleared away all the hype and production.

It looks like Robeson the performer having to make Joe the character smile, being forced to play Sambo. It is ‘unbearably moving’ because it is the humbling of a great singer in the service of a demeaning stereotype. Obviously, what I am offering here is my own reaction as evidence of a possible reaction, but it is of a piece with Hamilton and Seton, quoted above, and many others. It is a response that needs a critique, for it puts me in the position of agonising exquisitely over the fate of a black man, getting offemotionally on the humiliation of a people. That is the kind of price being a cross-over star may involve with some audiences. In any event, when Robeson no longer played the part of power withheld and became more vigorous and harsh in his vocal delivery as well as his opinions, he ceased to be a cross-over star.

CONCLUSION

We, over a period of time, have apparently decided that within American life we have one great repository where we're going to focus and imagine sensuality and exaggerated sensuality, all very removed and earthy things – and this great image is the American negro.

(Lorraine Hansberry, Variety, 27.5. 59: 16)

It did not occur to us that there would be any objection to showing a nude figure … The executive committee, however, expressed their apprehension of the consequences of exhibiting such a figure in a public square, especially the figure of a Negro as the coloured problem seems to be unusually great in Philadelphia.

(Walter Hancock on behalf of the Art Alliance of Philadelphia;
quoted in Opportunity, June 1930: 168)

It is no accident that so much of the argument surrounding Robeson as a star should involve discussion of perceptions of his body and of how his body was photographed, directed, used. All performers use their bodies and have their bodies used, but in the case of Robeson in the twenties and thirties he was often little more than a body and a voice. In this regard, his treatment is typical of the treatment of black people, female and male, in Western culture.

Representations of black people are one of the primary sites where the problem of the body is worked through. This is not just in the kind of celebration of sensuality promoted by whites and blacks associated with the Harlem Renaissance; it is also central to many of the characteristic white narratives centred on black characters – the rise to fame of the black man through the use of his body in sports; the hysterical treatment of the mulatto, the product of a mingling of blood who lives out in her/his body the racial confusions of a society; the importance of the rape motif, power relations between the races realised through power relations between bodies, black men overpowering white women's bodies in rape, white men overpowering black men's bodies in castration and lynching. The ideology of the very notion of race invites these narratives: race is an idea in the discourse of biology, a way of grouping people according to perceptions of bodily difference.

Yet the problem of the body seems to me to be rooted not in the biologism of race so much as in the justification of the capitalist system itself. The rhetoric of capitalism insists that it is capital that makes things happen; capital has the magic property of growing, stimulating. What this conceals is the fact that it is human labour and, in the last instance, the labour of the body, that makes things happen. The body is a ‘problem’ because to recognise it fully would be to recognise it as the foundation of economic life; how we use and organise the capacities of our bodies is how we produce and reproduce life itself. Much of the cultural history of the past few centuries has been concerned with finding ways of making sense of the body, while disguising the fact that its predominant use has been as the labour of the majority in the interests of the few. One way of doing this has been the idea of sexuality, an ever increasing focus on the genitals as a concentrate of physical needs and desire. Another has been the professionalism of medicine and the medicalisation of ever increasing aspects of bodily function, notably those connected with the reproduction of life. Yet another has been race, which at the level of representation means blacks, since whites are represented not for the most part as whites but as the human norm.

It is no accident that blacks should figure so crucially in this scheme of things. Through slavery and imperialism, black people have been the social group most clearly identified by and exploited for their bodily labour. Blacks thus became the most vivid reminders of the human body as labour in a society busily denying it. Representations of blacks then function as the site of remembering and denying the inescapability of the body in the economy. Hence, on the one hand, the black body as a reminder of what the body can do, its vitality, its strength, its sensuousness; and yet, simultaneously, the denial of all that bodily energy and delight as creative and productive, seen rather hysterically in images of bad (mixed) blood and rape or else as mere animal capacity incapable of producing civilisation.

Hence, finally, a figure like Robeson, whose body can be, in sport, in feats of strength, in sculpturable muscularity, in sheer presence, in a voice the correlative of manly power, but whose body finally does nothing, contained by frames, montage, narrative, direction, vocal restraint. He was a crossover star because (and as long as) he so hugely em-body-ed, in-corpo-rated this historical functioning of black people in Western representation and economy.