chapter 17

let my people go

—“Go Down, Moses”

Robeson returned to London full of enthusiasm for Soviet Russia. He even expressed a desire to live there someday. “Why, it’s the only country in the world where I feel at home,” he later said. However, he insisted that his interest was “non-political.” Eisenstein’s movie project was still in the discussion stage. Robeson was eager to start, but he didn’t know that Eisenstein was waiting for official approval. The men had become close, and they corresponded, planning to work together on a number of films.

Robeson considered many other film offers and rejected most of them. He wanted to incorporate his new values into his work as an actor. One of his goals was to make a film on an African theme that would have a positive message. “Deep down inside me I am African,” he said. He also wanted to earn enough money from movies and concerts to free him up financially and allow more time for meaningful projects and study.

In the spring of 1935, Robeson pursued his interests in portraying black culture truthfully, and reaching the working class. He planned to organize a repertory company that would produce plays with social themes. “When I step on to a stage in the future, I go on as a representative of the working–class,” he said. “This isn’t a bolt out of the blue. Not a case of a guy suddenly sitting down and deciding that he wants to join a workers’ theatre. It began when I was a kid—a working-class kid living in that shack.” He spoke about his experiences as a young man, “working in brick yards, in hotels, on docks and river boats.”

For a start, Robeson joined a small group, the Arts Theater Club. In April, they put on a play titled Basalik, a story about a chief of an African country. They also performed Stevedore, a drama concerning black workers who organize against their white bosses and face down a lynch mob. Robeson took the lead and even sang in the show. Most of the black cast consisted of amateur actors, including Larry Brown. Stevedore closed quickly, though, and Robeson wasn’t able to follow through on his plan to do the plays in the provinces.

In June, he and Brown went on a concert tour in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. “I like singing for those audiences,” he said. “There is sympathy between us—I sing better for them.” In provincial towns, drivers would get off their trucks to shake his hand. Guys working on buildings shouted to him and told him they had his records. “I get on fine with those fellows,” said Robeson. “We know each other. Those are the people I come from. And they understand what I sing.”

“When I sing ‘Let My People Go,’ ” explained Robeson, “I want it in the future to mean more than it has meant before. It must express the need for freedom not only of my own race…but of all the working-class.”

Robeson scheduled the concerts a week apart to give him time for his studies. “All races all Peoples are not nearly as different from one from the other as textbooks would have it,” he jotted down in his notebook. He felt passionate about learning the languages of folk songs from other countries and cultures. Only then, he thought, could he fully understand the meaning of the words and convey the spirit and emotions. Brown said, “After the greatest ovations, Paul would go home and read or study languages—an African dialect or Russian.” He was even studying Chinese. Robeson had formed friendships with many West African and South African students, and people of color from the British colonies. He was also concentrating on learning Hebrew and sang “Avinu Malkeinu,” a prayer recited during the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Robeson said that Russian Jews were among his best friends in London and New York. “I think my people can take a lesson from the Jewish people in self-respect and pride in their culture.” He asked a friend to teach him the Kaddish, a prayer recited in memory of the dead. While Robeson learned the Kaddish, he wore a yarmulke, a traditional skullcap worn by Jewish men, especially during prayer. “He chanted Yiddish rather well,” said his friend, and Robeson later included the prayer in his concert programs. However, Robeson kept his main focus on African culture.

By now, Robeson hoped that Eisenstein would have gained permission to film their movie on Haiti, but his letters gave no sign of progress. Robeson decided to appear in a film version of Show Boat. He received an enormous salary of $40,000 ($720,692 in 2018 dollars), travel expenses for himself and Essie, and approval of location because he still refused to work in the segregated South. On September 25, 1935, he and Essie sailed for New York.

Before heading toward Hollywood, they stopped in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to see Paul Jr. They had sent him there with Grandma Goode so that he could experience living in his own country. Paul Jr., almost eight, complained constantly. “I was tired of being away from my parents, tired of Grandma’s inflexible tutelage,” he recounted. He hated being “a black rich kid in an almost entirely white environment.” Essie wrote him a letter and said, “We think the color is beautiful, and much more interesting than just plain uninteresting white.” Despite her feelings, Paul Jr. was expelled from summer camp for fighting, and he ditched public school, refusing to go back.

The day after Robeson arrived in Pittsfield, he took Paul Jr. for a long walk in the woods. He listened to his son without interrupting, occasionally asking a question. When Paul Jr. was finished, Robeson looked down at him and said “in his soft, deep voice, ‘When you come back to London next spring, you will live with Mama and me, and Grandma will live separately from us. I promise you.”

Robeson and Essie aboard the S.S. Majestic on their way to New York to film the movie version of Show Boat.

Grandma Goode (Mrs. Eslanda Goode) and Paul Robeson, Jr., age seven, February 15, 1935

In November, Robeson began shooting Show Boat at Universal. When he finished singing “Ol’ Man River” with the orchestra and chorus, the musicians put down their instruments and applauded. Essie said, “They tell me it never happened before.”

Robeson astonished the Universal sound engineers by revolution-izing the technique of “synching” a separate sound track with the visual track. He insisted on standing less than two feet from the microphone, closer than usual, and sang in an “intimate fashion” as he did for radio broadcasts rather than at full volume. While he was singing, he acted out the scene mentally, so the sound and the picture matched perfectly.

Robeson, as Joe, sings “Ol’ Man River” in a scene from the motion picture production of Show Boat, 1936.

Show Boat opened at Radio City Music Hall in New York in January 1936. “Opulent spectacular,” cheered critics. “Magnificent in scope.” Once again, Robeson was deluged with film offers from top studios, but he turned them down. He was determined to do significant movies and plays about black people, and he even hoped to “experiment with comic roles.”

He and Essie returned to England, so he and Brown could leave on another concert tour. When the tour ended in April, Robeson “made good on his promise” and brought Paul Jr. to live with them in the flat on Buckingham Street. Since Robeson spent a lot of time at home studying and writing, rehearsing music, and preparing roles, he could see his son often. “Paul’s career dominated the household,” wrote Paul Jr.

Paul Robeson and Lawrence Brown, in formal evening clothes, performing in a concert, 1936

Over the next few months, Robeson starred in a number of English films. King Solomon’s Mines was set in Africa but was filmed in England. It featured a cast of twenty-seven thousand “natives,” grass huts, and exploding volcanoes. Yet the movie, a “thundering good” epic adventure according to reviewers, disappointed Robeson.

However, My Song Goes Forth, a documentary on South Africa, delivered an important statement against the apartheid regime. A white minority owned nine-tenths of the land, completely controlled the government, and enforced segregation. Robeson called apartheid “South African Jim Crow.” Black Africans who had moved to the cities to find work were forced to live in slums. Robeson had become friends with many African students and activists in London, and he strongly supported the struggle of anti-colonialists.

In a prologue for the documentary, Robeson wrote, “Africa was opened up by the white man for the benefit of himself—to obtain the wealth it contained.” For the movie Song of Freedom, Robeson portayed a British dockworker who travels to Africa to find his roots. The film featured the song “Lonesome Road,” which he recorded and performed in concerts:

Look down, look down

That lonesome road

Before you travel on.

Shortly before Robeson left London to see filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union, he received a letter from the manager of the Old Vic Theatre Company. The company wanted him to star in a production of Othello after Christmas. Robeson refused saying he had already committed to a concert tour in the Soviet Union in the fall. But his real reason for turning down the offer was that he didn’t feel ready to master the role. Robeson said, “Now was not the time.”

Robeson visited Eisenstein and conducted more research on the conditions in both urban and rural areas outside Moscow. From his conversations with Eisenstein, and his own observations, Robeson gained a more realistic understanding of the Soviet environment under Stalin’s rigid control. However, he never publicly expressed any criticisms of Stalin’s Russia.

In the meantime, Essie and Paul Jr., traveled to South Africa, British East Africa, and Central Africa. For her, it was “one of those grand dreams come true.” Old friends from Harlem and London who lived in Africa hosted the pair. She marveled at the beauty of Capetown but deplored the poverty and brutality she witnessed everywhere. Each day, she wrote in her diary about the gross injustices in South Africa, and later she used her notes for her book African Journey. She also took photographs. The experience of the trip to Africa transformed her into an anti-colonial writer and activist.

When Robeson returned to England, he starred in a film that showcased the problems of the working class. Big Fella told the story of a black dockworker, and Robeson pressured the scriptwriters to make the character a “steady, trustworthy sort of fellow.” The movie included the song “My Curly Headed Baby,” a lullaby that became a standard of Robeson’s repertoire. He even learned how to sing it in Russian for a twelve-concert tour that he gave in the Soviet Union in October 1936, right after the film was finished. Soviet audiences responded to not only his singing, but also his fluent command of their language and his knowledge of Russian poetry and music.

Before starting the four-city tour, Robeson and Essie enrolled Paul Jr. in the best school in Moscow, attended by children of Soviet officials, including Stalin’s daughter. Grandma Goode was visiting her sons in Moscow and agreed to stay on to help with Paul Jr. Robeson had promised his son he could live with him and Essie and seemed to be going back on his word. Evidently, they felt that school in Moscow would be better for their son while they traveled on tour.

Paul Jr. had just turned nine when he entered the equivalent of fifth grade, and he liked his classmates and teacher. Although he didn’t know a word of Russian, he quickly learned the language. The American press reported the news that Paul Jr. was attending a Moscow school. A Life magazine photographer accompanied the Robesons on their trip to Moscow to enroll Paul Jr. and featured the story with a comment on Robeson’s “Slav admiration.”

A month later Robeson and Essie returned to Moscow to see how their son was doing. This trip deepened Robeson’s belief that the Soviet system of socialism was superior to the Western capitalist system. With Paul Jr. settled in Moscow under Grandma Goode’s supervision, Robeson and Essie traveled to Egypt so he could begin work on a new movie, Jericho. Arriving in January 1937, Robeson set foot on the continent of Africa for the first time. “I want to be African,” he said in an interview. “In my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea: to be African.”

Robeson and actors Henry Wilcoxon and Wallace Ford at the Pyramids near Cairo, during the filming of Jericho in 1937

The screenplay of his new film delighted him because the main character, Jericho Jackson, was a brave, intelligent, African American World War I soldier. He rescues dozens of men trapped below deck when a torpedo hits their troop ship off the coast of Algeria. Jericho accidentally kills an interfering sergeant and is unfairly sentenced to death. But he escapes and becomes the leader of a desert tribe—a “triumphant black hero.” Robeson said, “It’s the best part I have ever had for a picture.”

To prepare for the role, he gathered information about Egypt, studied Egyptian history, viewed Egyptian movies, and even learned a little Arabic. During the month of shooting, he and Essie stayed just outside Cairo. “Cairo is a wonderful place,” Robeson told an interviewer. Essie was struck by the spectrum of skin colors. “It’s great fun to see an enormously rich country like this, where the coloured folks are the bosses!” she wrote to friends.

Most of the filming took place in the desert near the pyramids. This was the actual spot where the Jews had been enslaved, in biblical times, by the Pharaoh and forced to make bricks and work in the fields. Moses had led his people out of this very desert and out of slavery. Robeson had been singing about this all these years with “Go Down, Moses.” The words had recently taken on a new meaning to him, embracing the working class as well as people of his race.

On a day off, Robeson and a few others hired a guide and visited the Great Pyramid of Giza, climbing down a long passage to the King’s Chamber. When the guide began describing the construction, one member of the group heard an echo and asked Robeson to sing. The first note “almost crumbled the place,” recalled Robeson’s costar Henry Wilcoxon. Robeson began to sing an aria from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute and the others were “spellbound—not moving, hardly breathing.” As Robeson sang the last note, all of them “stood silently crying.” Robeson cried too. “There were tears going down our faces,” recalled Wilcoxon. No one spoke on the ride back to Cairo at sunset.