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A PECULIAR INSTITUTION

Williamston and Greensboro, North Carolina

It was a long way from Melbourne, Australia, to Williamston, North Carolina. But the distance I was crossing was more than merely geographic.

I parked my rental car in the yard belonging to a dilapidated oyster bar in Washington Street, near the Roanoke River. The building, like the surrounding neighbourhood, had known better days, with the discarded shells littered about the only sign of recent custom.

I was here to meet a woman called Phyllis Roebuck. I’d come because her ancestor had owned Paul’s father as a slave.

Williamston lay in Martin County, in the midst of the Black Belt — a term originally referring to the dark soil of fertile land, but later denoting the presence of the African Americans upon whom American agriculture had traditionally depended.

In 1963, Williamston had briefly made national headlines when the desegregation campaign of the Freedom Movement became a cause célèbre during the struggle for civil rights. The town was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan, and the protesting African Americans were regularly presented with evil little cards reading KKK is watching you. Later that year, 250 Klansmen, in full regalia, gathered in a field on the outskirts of Williamston to raise and burn a 30-metre cross, in a different but no less sinister warning.

The very extremity of American slavery rendered the ‘peculiar institution’ (the euphemism preferred by Southern ideologues) so distant as to seem almost incomprehensible to me. The Romans had owned slaves — and they had crucified criminals and staged gladiatorial battles for sport. Slavery in North America felt like that: an unimaginable practice from a different epoch, separated from the contemporary by deep, nearly geological, time. Yet Paul Robeson, alive when I was born, was the son of William Drew Robeson, a man kept in bondage on the tobacco farm of the Robason family near Robersonville, North Carolina, a few kilometres from Williamston.

For a researcher, the biographies of African Americans living under slavery remain notoriously difficult to reconstruct, since the enslaved were generally forbidden education and thus left few written records. Often, the only information comes from the white owners documenting the ages and histories of the individuals who were considered their property. That’s why, when the ex-slave Frederick Douglass addressed abolitionist meetings in the North, he would begin by saying: ‘I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them.’

In any case, my difficulties were more than merely archival. Paul’s visit to Sydney mattered so much to Faith Bandler because of the parallels between his life and her own. Her father had also been a slave — an Islander man kidnapped from the New Hebrides and forced to work the sugarcane plantations of northern Australia. Bandler shared the institutional segregation directed at the Indigenous people with whom she allied herself, a discrimination recognisably similar (though by no means identical) to that enforced in the American South. But I was white and raised in a metropolitan centre, and my experiences were very different. I’d come to the United States to study a racism I’d never endured personally, a stranger trying to bridge a gulf of history and culture in a country not my own. But if I wanted to understand Paul’s life and its meaning, I felt I had to try.

Martin County, I knew, was where Paul’s story began.

The Inn at Moratoc was a family-style restaurant, with a buffet of candied yams, chicken and dumplings, and banana fritters, and a daytime clientele consisting mostly of retirees.

Phyllis was clutching a photo album, sitting at a table next to two women of a similar age. She introduced her companions as Becky and Joyce.

The three were cousins. They’d all been raised in Williamston, but their friendship had grown through their shared research.

‘George Outlaw Robason is my great, great granddaddy,’ Phyllis said, pulling out her scrapbook. ‘Do you wanna see a picture of him?’

She handed me a photo of a severe-looking, rather whiskery nineteenth-century gentleman. The appellation ‘Outlaw’ came from his Scottish ancestry: George had belonged to the MacGregor clan, which had been disbanded (‘outlawed’) in the seventeenth century, and his insistence on the name a hundred years later suggested a propensity for long-term grudges.

She passed around images of other relatives and then of the house George had lived in. It wasn’t precisely a plantation but it was, as she said, multi-storied, and so would have been substantial for the time and the place. North Carolina was never particularly wealthy, certainly when compared with other slave-owning states.

‘He made and shipped wine, high-quality wine, up north. He had a lot of Yankee contacts. When the war broke out, he became a special emissary for Robert E. Lee. Because he had so many contacts, he was able to get supply and arms for the Southern campaign. My half of the Robason side all became merchants as well as landowners. They set up the first grocery stores. We grew as the area grew.’

I’d already visited Robersonville, where George and his father, William Robason, had established that early shop on the corner of Roberson Street and Railroad Street. The place was tiny — a school, a Baptist church, a public library, and not much besides.

The African-American memoirist Mary Mebane had taught in Robersonville in the 1950s. ‘[I]t was easy to tell,’ she wrote, ‘when you were in a black neighbourhood: the pavement stopped … The dirt singled the beginning of the black neighbourhood.’ Little seemed to have changed. Where there was bitumen, it was cracked and splitting, and weeds sprouted along the edges of the sidewalk. The town was more than sixty per cent African American, inhabited by far more descendants of slaves than of slaveholders. Such was the consequence of the South’s peculiar institution — a persistent poverty, handed down through the generations.

But I wasn’t sure how to discuss that with Phyllis.

In his book Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball writes of tracing the slaveholding legacy of his ancestors. He recalls a saying of his father’s: ‘There are five things we don’t talk about in the Ball family: religion, sex, death, money, and the Negroes.’

In fact, Phyllis mentioned slavery before I did.

‘When I look at this Civil War stuff,’ she said, still leafing through her photo album, ‘I remember how I asked my grandmother at some point: Nanny, did George O. ever own any slaves? She said no. And I said, why not? And she said, because we didn’t believe in that.’

All three women laughed, and I did, too, though I wasn’t sure of the joke.

‘Because of course he did!’ she said, looking to check I was catching on. ‘She’d cleaned that up, you see! She just created her own belief system.’

Ball describes a similar ‘cleaning up’. His relatives had taken pride in their ancestors, in their vanished wealth and influence. They all recalled, almost lovingly, the extent of the family plantations. But they compartmentalised their recollections, avoiding questions that might shatter that fantasy.

‘My father didn’t own slaves,’ snapped Ball’s cousin. ‘And my grandfather didn’t own slaves. To do this [write this book] is to condemn your ancestors! You’re going to dig up my grandfather and hang him!’

And I could see a sense in which that was true.

An hour and a half south-west from Williamston lay the town of Smithfield. On 21 May 1937, a white woman called Mary Hicks arrived there. Hicks was employed by the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal scheme paying jobless authors to collect the tales of ordinary Americans.

On this occasion, Hicks was interviewing Cornelia Andrews. Mrs Andrews was eighty-seven years old, and as a girl she’d been enslaved, at about the same time as Paul’s father.

Hicks asked the old woman if she’d been mistreated during slavery. ‘Was I ever beat bad?’ Mrs Andrews replied. ‘No ma’am, I wasn’t.’

But Mrs Andrews’ daughter intervened. ‘Open your shirt, Mammy, and let the lady judge for herself.’

Eventually, the old woman slowly (she seemed ‘ashamed’, wrote Hicks) loosened her shirt so as to expose her back and shoulders. The flesh was ‘marked as though branded with a plaited cowhide whip. There was no doubt of that at all.’

‘I was whipped public,’ she said tonelessly, ‘for breaking dishes and being slow. I was at Miss Carrington’s then, and it was just before the close of the war. I was in the kitchen washing dishes and I dropped one. The missus calls Mr Blount King, a patteroller [a patroller, a man charged with disciplining slaves], and he puts the whipping you see the marks of on me.’

No, you couldn’t dig up the family and hang them — but the knowledge of Mrs Andrews’ treatment brought about a different kind of execution. For how could the tale not change your attitude to the historical Carringtons? How could the story not define them for posterity? They might have been cultured and intelligent people, they might have cared for their children and showed kindness to their neighbours, but they’d ordered a young slave girl thrashed to the bone because she dropped a dish.

‘The glory of my boyhood years,’ Paul had written, late in his life, ‘was my father. I loved him like no one in all the world.’

William Drew Robeson was probably born in 1845. His mother was a woman called Sabra (pronounced Say-bra). His father, Paul’s grandfather, was called Benjamin. We know that, alongside William, Sabra had two other children in slavery: Ezekiel and Margaret. Of course, others might have perished in infancy. The rate of mortality for slaves was dizzyingly high — twice that of white babies. The slave diet was poor (corn bread, pork, and molasses, supplemented by meat from possums, raccoons, rabbits, and other game), and slaves were usually supplied with rough clothes and wooden-soled shoes only once a year, leaving many wearing rags most of the time.

Throughout his life, William avoided discussing his past in the South. To his children, he divulged nothing about his enslavement. We can’t know what William endured. But the historian Edward Baptist notes the centrality of violence to the slave system. ‘Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another,’ he writes, ‘sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in “stress positions”, burning, even waterboarding.’

In his memoir, Paul remarked on his father’s symptomatic silence. ‘I am sure that had my father ever spoken about this part of his life, it would have been utterly impossible for me as a boy to grasp the idea that a noble human being like my father had actually been owned by another man — to be bought and sold, used and abused at will.’

But, of course, that was an aspect of adulthood for Paul: realising that his dignified father had once been treated as an object — and recognising that he too might be reduced to the less than human.

Phyllis had never given much consideration to her family’s involvement in slavery. But during her genealogical research, she’d uncovered, she said, documents in which the social relations of the past became shockingly apparent.

Becky nodded agreement. ‘In the wills, the slaves were left like property,’ she said, something like wonder in her voice. ‘Every will we have in the family history, they would leave people in their wills. Like, they would say, “I’m gonna leave Bessy to Joyce,” “I’m gonna leave Laura to Becky.” And it was only first names. The slaves never had last names.’

I explained to them how William had escaped in the early phases of the Civil War, when the Union captured the strategic Fort Hatteras, and slaves from all over the state rushed to join the Northern soldiers. William’s brother, Ezekiel Roberson (the spelling of both the black and the white version of the name varies between Robeson, Roberson, and Robason), fled to New Bern, a town about ninety-six kilometres from the Robason plantation — and, most probably, William accompanied him, possibly with their sister Margaret.

On that trip, William and his siblings had been forced to leave Sabra behind, I said. Family lore held that during the Civil War, William had twice, at great risk to himself, crept back to the fields to visit his still-enslaved mother. The church where William had ministered in Princeton still contained the stained-glass window he’d built, inscribed In loving memory of Sabra Robeson — a reminder of that heartbreaking separation.

Phyllis’ face lit up in recognition. ‘Oh, Sabra! Oh, I’ve got her here.’

She leafed frantically through her folder until she came upon a will. In 1845, William Robason left to George O. Robason what the notarist described as ‘one Negro boy named Arden, one cow and calf [and] one feather bed’, while to his daughter Caroline he bequeathed ‘one Negro girl named Sabry during [Caroline’s] natural life and then to her children’. If Sabry was William’s mother Sabra — and that seemed almost certain — somehow she (or perhaps just William) had eventually become George’s slave.

Phyllis was still staring at the paper. ‘Oh, this is giving me the creeps. You know, I thought when I saw it, that’s a real beautiful name.’

The three women were completing high school during the Williamston Freedom Movement, and they told me of the changes wrought by it. Phyllis recalled being outraged when her parents declared she’d be pulled from class if a single black student attended. Becky said that when she went to college, she’d recognised, with a sickening jolt, the injustice the older generation had accepted without question. ‘Wait a minute! We owned people? Like livestock? What makes that right? Why would you do that? Why would you treat people that way?’ she remembered thinking.

Becky had only recently returned to Williamston, after forty or more years away. The prolonged estrangement made her more conscious of the racial attitudes still prevailing in the town. ‘It’s like going back in time,’ she said, and all three of them laughed. She continued, ‘Some white people do feel an extreme privilege because of the past. They feel more entitled.’

‘But that entitlement comes from both sides,’ said Phyllis.

They all nodded.

‘When I grew up,’ Phyllis said, ‘the black folks that lived on the farm, there was an obligation to take care of them and look after them. And I know my granddaddy and my daddy paid for many babies to be born that were not their babies. When they went to the hospital, they put the landowners’ name on the record and then the landowner got whatever medical or baby bills. You were just expected to do that. Many of the older people that I was in contact with, older black people, they were called Aunt or Uncle.’

‘Though they weren’t really our aunts or uncles,’ added Joyce.

‘It was a title of respect,’ said Phyllis. ‘We treated them with respect. If we needed them, they were there; if they needed us, we were there.’

I didn’t know what to say. Phyllis, Becky, and Joyce seemed lovely women, and they’d been very kind to me. Other members of the Robason clan flatly refused to meet once they’d learned of my project, whereas Phyllis and her cousins had gone out of their way to help. But I also knew that, during the struggle for civil rights, the Williamston Freedom protesters had specifically demanded authorities use ‘courtesy titles’ such as Mr and Mrs when interacting with African Americans. The campaigner Willis Williams explained: ‘Blacks never became mister. They were “boy” until they got so old they couldn’t walk and then they became “uncle”.’

For the activists of 1963, the appellation Phyllis called as a gesture of respect was a belittling diminution — and they were willing to risk their lives to say so.

After more talk, I refused the offer of lunch and walked back to my car. As I drove away from Williamston, I was thinking about a curious passage in Paul’s memoir in which he recalls an encounter with a descendant of those who had owned his father.

In a nightclub in New York in the 1940s, he’d been approached by a white man who introduced himself as a Robeson from North Carolina. The Southerner explained his mother’s particular attachment to Paul’s career, how she’d kept a scrapbook documenting the honours Paul had brought to their shared name.

He suggested all three of them get together for a chat. It would be, he said, a kind of family reunion. ‘You see,’ said the stranger, ‘your father used to work for my grandfather.’

An angry Paul snapped back: ‘You say my father “used to work” for your grandfather. Let’s put it the way it was: your grandfather exploited my father as a slave!’

Needless to say, the proposed reunion did not occur.

So goes one version of the story. There are, however, two other accounts of that incident.

The second variant comes from the actress Uta Hagen, Paul’s co-star in Othello and lover. In her account, the Southerner was drunk and deliberately baiting Paul. ‘Your daddy was probably one of my daddy’s slaves,’ the man yelled. ‘You probably belong to me.’

In this telling, Paul responded by shouting, ‘You bastard!’ and had to be restrained from attacking his namesake.

Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson Jr (nicknamed ‘Pauli’ by his mother), recounts a third version, in which a slightly intoxicated white man approached Paul. The stranger wasn’t aggressive so much as nervous, awed by the proximity of a global superstar. He referred to their shared surname while asking for an autograph, in a clumsy attempt to make a personal connection. ‘My grandfather gave your father his name,’ he stuttered.

Pauli describes his father as momentarily stiffening. But then Paul recovered, and scribbled the man a personalised message with a broad smile. ‘Let’s just say my father worked for your grandfather.’

In this version, it’s Pauli who becomes angry. He demands to know why his father wasn’t more militant. Why not put the white man in his place?

‘It is far better to educate than to humiliate,’ Paul says. ‘Save your anger for the real enemy.’

From our vantage point, there was no way of knowing exactly how the encounter played out. Yet the psychological plausibility of all the scenarios demonstrated something, I thought, about the institution and its legacy. Slavery left its imprint on the oppressor as well as the oppressed, even as it marked the interactions between them. Those accounts hinted at the complexity of America’s great and unhealed wound.

My next stop was Greensboro, North Carolina, where I stepped from the train carriage into a building dedicated to the vanished glory of rail. The J. Douglas Galyon Depot had been constructed for the old Southern Railway network back in 1927. The elegant curve of the interior hinted at the distant and glamorous horizons to which a Jazz Age traveller might once have been conveyed; the ionic columns supporting the exit added an aura of almost Athenian sophistication.

It was only later that I understood the building’s incongruous grandeur. Once, the Greensboro station had marked the gateway to the Jim Crow–era transport system of the South. Not only had the waiting room been segregated; its luxury was also, in a sense, a celebration of segregated travel for its white patrons.

I’d come to Greensboro looking for a man called Robeson Logan. He was a descendant of William’s siblings, the Robesons who’d stayed behind in North Carolina.

In 1866, William had moved to Pennsylvania and enrolled in Lincoln University, where he’d eventually earn a BA, an MA, and a degree in theology. That meant mastering Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, geometry, chemistry, geology, trigonometry, mineralogy, political economy, and the myriad other components of a nineteenth-century classical education. It was an astonishing achievement, given William had almost certainly lacked any schooling at all when he escaped.

Paul always knew how lucky he’d been. ‘I have cousins who can neither read nor write,’ he said in 1941, at the pinnacle of his fame. ‘I have had a chance. They have not. That is the difference.’

Indeed, the census of 1870 showed the Robesons who stayed in Martin County — Ezekiel and his family; Benjamin (then fifty and working as a farmhand), Sabra, and their three youngest children — were all still illiterate.

Logan was a big man: tall and solid and friendly. The resemblance to his ancestor was apparent as soon as I looked. They had the same stature, the same musculature, the same easy smile.

‘My grandmother’s maiden name is Roberson,’ he told me. ‘She would be —’ He hesitated, thinking through the relationship. ‘Paul’s second cousin.’

I nodded. My genealogical research had brought me to the same conclusion. ‘Her father was Ezekiel, and he and William were brothers.’

We’d met in Scuppernong Books on Elm Street, a charming bookshop where indie rock played softly on the stereo and where the cold-drinks menu was titled ‘To Chill a Mockingbird’. A bearded man cut cakes on a counter bedecked with signs advertising organic coffee and locally sourced wine. Near the couch where we sat, a shelf featured reviews of works by local poets and novelists.

Logan had inherited a little parcel of land near Robersonville, a patch he could trace back through his grandmother’s line to when his family worked as sharecroppers. But he didn’t like the town. ‘The land was predominantly owned by the slave owners. I’m not gonna say that the mentality is still alive today, but I just see how defensive they are. They own the town, practically. Wilson, Williamston, Robersonville. I am lucky enough to have something in my name. But, as far as the areas that are more profitable, downtown, well, they’re owned by the same people.’

He paid the small amount of tax owing on the land almost as a matter of principle, even though he knew he’d never become a farmer. ‘Every year I go back and remind myself: my father, my grandmother, Paul’s father — all my relatives, all the way back to the days when we were slaves — they all walked across those fields. I just can’t sell it.’

Logan was born in Raleigh and raised in Greensboro, places where, he said, racism mostly remained hidden. During his childhood, it was entirely unexceptionable for African-American kids and white kids to be friends, to socialise and hang out. Sexual relationships, though, were more problematic. ‘No one would directly say anything, but you see it. We don’t make it such an issue, but we know what lines not to cross, you know.’

I asked him to explain.

‘Well, for example, the parents might slip up and say something if I was with a white girl. See, it’s mostly an older generation who would react — I’m thirty-three, so it’s the generation before me. They’re mostly the ones who might have a problem.’

Greensboro was the site of the famous 1960 sit-in at Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter, in a building now restored as a civil-rights museum. The student protest spurred imitative actions all throughout the South, the great eruption of civil disobedience that toppled the Jim Crow system.

Logan also came from a family of activists. His mother had worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. His recently deceased father had been a life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the senior pastor of the Johnson Chapel Missionary Baptist Church in Elm City, and the treasurer of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.

Just a few days before I met with Logan, the teenager Michael Brown had been killed by police in the town of Ferguson, and so inevitably we talked about that and the resulting protests that had spread from Missouri across America.

A similar killing could, he said, easily take place in Greensboro. The previous year, a policeman had been captured on camera throwing a young African-American man to the ground outside his house and handcuffing him, for the offence of ‘running off his mouth’.

That was why, as a youth, Logan had been given ‘the talk’, with his parents advising him to avoid becoming a statistic. ‘I recognise I have to be careful. It’s just the nature of it. I’m a threat, I’m six foot four, 270 pounds — I fit the profile.’

Paul had sat down with his own son in the early 1940s for a very similar discussion, warning the sixteen-year-old that he’d make a likely target for the state police. The language he’d used was almost identical.

‘I know my place,’ Logan said again. ‘I make myself known in my community. There’s maybe four black families in my neighbourhood. And I’m aware of that. I get myself involved being on the housing association, not because I want to, but for my own safety. That was something my parents said: “It might be a good idea that you get involved.” I make myself visible, I make myself known. If it’s a nice day, I do yard work. Make sure I wave to everyone. That way I can avoid —’ He hesitated. ‘Well, something that might happen.’

Listening to him, I was reminded of my visit to the Civil Rights Museum further down Elm Street, where, earlier that day, I’d tagged along behind a group of children from a school in Raleigh. I’d been with them as they’d entered a room depicting racial atrocities of the past. The famous picture of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith dangling from a tree in Marion, Indiana, after being taken from jail and beaten by racists. A burning cross in North Carolina. Dogs mauling marchers in Birmingham, Alabama. The charred corpse of worker Will Brown, burned by a mob in Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1919 race riot. Emmett Till — a fourteen-year-old brutalised in Money, Mississippi, after allegedly flirting with a white girl — lying in his coffin.

For the most part, they’d seemed unmoved by the images around them. They were kids, after all: more intent on jostling one another and fidgeting than paying attention to their teachers’ instructions.

But every so often, one of them stared with sudden intensity, as if a particular image had confronted them as a real event, a representation of extraordinary violence inflicted on someone who looked very much like them.

Then, on their way out, the children shuffled past a long list of names: a roll call of those arrested in the struggle for civil rights.

I was struck, walking down that hall, by how a discussion of race in America necessarily overturned all the assumptions of liberal civics. In the Greensboro exhibit, the heroes were those who stood against their own government and its police — because the government and police were wrong.

Logan couldn’t tell me much more about Paul. He knew his own heritage — his mother had urged him, he said with a laugh, to produce as many kids as he could to carry on the lineage — but he also confirmed what I’d already suspected: that few of his peers even recognised Paul’s name. At school, he’d sometimes prompted his teachers to discuss Paul Robeson. Invariably, they’d reply that the topic wasn’t part of the curriculum.

Still, there was something satisfying in the evolution of the name: once the appellation of a slaveholder, it had become, for Robeson Logan, a designation of pride and a reminder of resistance.

I was thinking about that all the way to Princeton.