Paul Robeson

The Discovery of Africa

(1932–1934)

Robeson gave his triumphant first recital of the new tour to a packed house in Town Hall on January 18, 1932. Most of the program consisted of familiar spirituals, but for the first time in New York he successfully tried out his increasingly expert Russian with Gambs’s “Prayer” and Gretchaninov’s “The Captive” (and, as one of the encores, introduced Larry Brown’s “Dere’s No Hidin’ Place Down There”—Brown accompanying). The Russian songs were well received; some Russians in the audience, including members of the Kedroff Quartet, applauded enthusiastically. “I have found a music very closely allied to mine—and emotionally to me as an individual,” Robeson explained to a reporter; “in six months I have learned the language, which I also find a more natural means of expression than English. Certainly many Russian folksongs seem to have come from Negro peasant life and vice versa.” “He feels he is a kindred soul” to the Russian, Emma Goldman wrote Alexander Berkman the following year, praising him for having “gone into the very spirit of the language. I swear if I had not known Paul as a Negro I should have thought an educated Russian before me. I can’t tell you how beautiful he talks Russian.” “He’s so keen,” Essie wrote in her diary. “He feels that he can become an official, and important interpreter of Russian music, and literature. He feels he understands it, and is close to it, and he loves the language.”1

At Robeson’s next tour stop, Boston—his first appearance there in six years—one critic found his voice in “excellent condition,” another essentially “untutored.” In Des Moines, a request from the audience for “St. Louis Blues” and “Sing You Sinners” brought a frosty response from Robeson’s traveling manager: “Mr. Robeson never sings blues!” A reporter’s question about the origins of Robeson’s singing career prompted him to send Carlo a postcard message saying he had replied “that Mr. Carl Van Vechten had launched me upon my concert career. He’s a nice fellow.” In Montreal, the sold-out house cheered wildly at the close, and the Gazette’s critic packaged the excitement in racialist wrappings: “… he looks like an ebony Apollo. He is as tall as a guardsman and carries himself with a royal air. In manner he is as simple as a child, and his beaming face and wide smile, which is sometimes a regular grin, prove him to be, with all his worldly successes, an unspoiled son of mother nature and still close to the earth in which he lives.” (The same critic’s enthusiasm waned when it came to describing the Russian songs; there, he felt, Robeson was “a stranger in a strange land.”)2

The two-month tour completed, in March Robeson joined Yolande on the Continent for a brief break before his scheduled return to the States in April for a revival of Show Boat. (While in Paris, he discussed with Sacha Guitry the prospects of appearing with him and Yvonne Printemps in a play with an African theme—a project that hung fire while they searched for a suitable vehicle.) Paul was late in sending money to Essie, which annoyed her, and then sent an oblique cable that added mystification to annoyance: “Interesting plans ahead … Put flat on market … See Paris ahead …” “He is a funny boy,” Essie wrote in her diary on receiving the cable. “Evidently, he means he wants me to join him in Paris, which is a good one.…” Essie, for the moment, was feeling exhilarated over her writing prospects—putting in a lot of hard work on her prospective play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“I honestly think it’s good, different, and interesting,” she wrote the Van Vechtens. “The role of Tom could be played wonderfully by Paul, but he isn’t NECESSARY to the play at all”), and enjoying an independent life in London that included a heady round of socializing and an occasional flirtation. “I mean to PROVE,” she wrote exuberantly to Larry Brown, “that I made Paul what he is, by doing the same for myself that I did for him. I mean for little Essie to speak up. And loud, too.” She also meant to be prepared in case she and Paul ended up in court. Responding to Larry’s sympathetic noises, she tried to enlist him in looking through Paul’s pockets or luggage for letters from Yolande, claiming that Paul had “stolen” from her file case the ones she had earlier procured “entirely by accident.”³

Paul, it turned out, had not been hinting that Essie should join him in Paris. In early April he made his actual intentions clear in a letter: he wanted her to begin divorce proceedings, and to name Yolande openly as corespondent. Essie cabled back that she would proceed immediately. “I’m glad to have it all over with at last,” she wrote in her diary. “If he has still the same attitude after two years, that settles it, and we’ll call it a day.” She was even prepared to put a good face on it publicly, announcing, in contemporary tones of emancipation, that if “this marriage business” was to survive, it had to be brought up to date, and that divorce was the modernizing mechanism: “I have been married for eleven years to one of the most charming, intelligent, gifted men in the world. I am glad that we have become civilized enough to look at a relationship frankly and say: ‘That was grand. It isn’t grand any more. That is enough, Period.’ And end it as happily as it was begun. My husband and I have been exceedingly happy. I think we are happier now than we have ever been. But we no longer wish to be married. Not to each other, that is. We want to be friends. I hope our friendship will grow. This would be impossible, if we have to remain married to each other for the rest of our lives.” In an article, “Divorce,” that she intended to sell and use to “break into the journalism game,” she wrote “I enjoyed building Paul’s career much more than he enjoyed achieving his success.” Paul, on his side, decided to face down public criticism over a mixed marriage directly, and he sent Essie the name of the hotel in Paris (the Lancaster) where he and Yolande had stayed and the specific dates (March 29 to April 6) when they had been in residence there. Following his instructions, Essie crossed the Channel to obtain the hotel manager’s formal affidavit. Paul left for New York to appear in the revival of Show Boat.4

No sooner had he arrived in New York than scandal erupted from an unexpected quarter. The Daily Mirror, a Hearst tabloid, published on May 2, 1932, the sensational story that the British heiress Nancy Cunard had come to New York in pursuit of Robeson and that the two were staying in the same hotel in Harlem. Cunard was indeed in New York and indeed staying at the Grampion Hotel in Harlem—not to pursue Robeson but to work on her path-breaking anthology, Negro, due to appear in 1934. The two had met briefly in Paris in 1926, and she had twice written to him in 1930 asking him to contribute to the planned anthology, an appeal he had not answered. That was the sum of their knowledge of each other—there was no truth to the story of an affair (possibly it had originated as a transposed version of her involvement with Henry Crowder, the black jazz musician). Both Cunard and Robeson immediately denied the Mirror article, with Cunard stylishly using the opportunity to promote Negro and to call attention to the plight of the nine “Scottsboro boys” being held in prison under death sentence.⁵

She also wrote directly to Robeson to say she knew “nothing at all of this amazing link up of yourself and myself in the press,” to question whether his choice of the word “insult” in answering the Daily Mirror had been “particularly felicitous,” to chastise him for not having answered her invitations to appear in the anthology, and to suggest that, if the recent racist remarks attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham (her hated stepfather) proved accurate, it was Robeson’s “duty to absolutely boycott all Beecham’s musical activities here and in Europe.” The story soon faded from the press, but printed denials could not quite dispel the rumors—the glamorous lifestyles of both principals were sufficient in the minds of some to sustain suspicion. Wendell P. Dabney, black editor of the Cincinnati paper The Union, wrote the Puerto Rican-born bibliophile Arthur A. Schomburg,

I note that she denies, or rather Robeson denies anything apart from a mere acquaintance with the lady. I understood that she was rather partial to a young orchestra leader from Washington, D.C.—Cromwell [sic] by name. I hope, however, in her zeal to champion the “lost cause,” “a forlorn hope,” or an oppressed people, she will not get herself inextricably entangled in the meshes of Negroes whose only qualifications are a glib tongue, good clothes and a nice appearance. Verbum Sap.

The black novelist Claude McKay put the blame on Cunard, scorning her as “a very unreliable person and lacking intellectual purpose and balance, mixing up as she does her love affairs with the Negro problem.” And the black painter Albert Smith wrote Schomburg, “And so her [Cunard’s] Romeo has slipped on his ladder. I have often imagined that that would happen. It was too good to last a long time. For those combinations you need more than flesh to hold them.” The “combination” prompted one anonymous white letter-writer to warn Cunard, “Either give up sleeping with a nigger or take the consequences. We will not only take you but we’ll take your nigger lover-Robeson-with you.”6

In this context of romantic rumor—and more was shortly to follow—the opening of Show Boat on May 20, 1932, could have been an (unsalacious) anticlimax. But producer Ziegfeld had assembled a powerful cast, retaining most of the members from the original American company—Helen Morgan as Julie, Edna May Oliver as Parthy Hawks, Norma Terris as Magnolia, and Charles Winninger as Cap’n Andy—substituting only Dennis King as Gaylord Ravenal and Robeson as Joe. The show received not reviews but hyperboles—“the greatest musical comedy ever produced,” Robert Coleman raved in the Mirror; “the most beautifully blended musical show we have had in this country,” seconded Brooks Atkinson in the Times. Robeson’s personal notices soared beyond hyperbole: “celestial” was how Percy Hammond, the famously acerbic, usually reserved Trib critic described Robeson’s voice. Edna Ferber, author of the book on which the show was based, wrote Alexander Woollcott that the ovation given Robeson on opening night exceeded any she had ever heard accorded a “figure of the stage, the concert hall, or the opera”—the audience “stood up and howled.” “Remarkable,” James Weldon Johnson wrote Robeson by way of congratulation—and the word was not exaggerated.⁷

Ten days after Show Boat opened, the rumor mill began to grind again. On May 31, in London, a reporter from the Daily Herald came to see Essie. Was there truth to the report, he asked, that she had filed suit for divorce, and had named Lady Louis Mountbatten as corespondent? Recently returned from her Paris fact-finding mission (as directed by Paul) to gather the needed evidence for divorce proceedings, Essie, with Paul in agreement, decided to confirm the long-circulating rumor of their separation, though not its purported cause. The marriage, she said, “has gone on the rocks of sheer ennui.” In New York, Paul told the press, “Mrs. Robeson and I have been separated for two years, but the separation has been amicable, and I believe the divorce will be.” He confirmed that he had been seeing an Englishwoman but, beyond denying that she was either Nancy Cunard or Peggy Ashcroft, refused to reveal her identity; whether they would marry, he told one reporter, “is in the lap of the gods. However, if we do marry, I am prepared to leave the United States if there is any stir about it.” “I desire above all things,” he told another reporter, “to maintain my personal dignity,” and rather than tolerate any racist abuse, “I am prepared to leave this country forever.”8

And the role of Edwina Mountbatten? In London, Essie, too, refused to name the actual corespondent, adding, “It is most incredible, though, that people should be linking Paul’s name with that of a famous titled English woman, since she is just about the one person in England we don’t know.” But since Edwina Mountbatten was notorious for her multiple paramours (she served as the model for Amanda Prynne in Noel Coward’s 1930 play Private Lives), the gossip continued to gain ground. The London Sunday paper The People headlined a story, “Society Shaken by Terrible Scandal,” and suggested that Lady Louis, caught red-handed with Robeson, had been exiled from England for two years by the Palace—“a colored man I have never even met!!!!,” the indignant Edwina wrote in her diary. Amused friends brought Essie further elaborations of the gossip—that the Queen had directly asked Essie to discontinue her suit, that Lady Louis had offered her a great sum of money and had had to sell Brook House, her mansion in Park Lane, to raise it. The issue finally came to court in July, Edwina Mountbatten, apparently pressed by Buckingham Palace, having decided to bring a libel suit against Oldham’s Press, publisher of The People. The British legal system smoothed every path. Norman Birkett, one of the great advocates of the day, represented the Mountbattens, the Lord Chief Justice opened court at the unusual hour of 9:30 a.m. (and without prior notice to the press), and the Mountbattens were accorded the privilege of giving direct testimony themselves. When Edwina took the stand, she denied “the abominable rumours,” and the Lord Chief Justice ruled in her favor, compelling Oldham’s to make a full apology. Almost certainly, “justice” triumphed. No direct evidence exists of an affair between Robeson and Edwina Mountbatten. Yet the writer Marie Seton, who knew all parties concerned, insists that she heard directly from Robeson himself that he and Lady Louis did “go to bed once,” that she had been the seducer, and that he had graciously consented to her bringing a lawsuit denying that he had ever been in the house—but that it “jarred inside him.”9

Fania Marinoff stopped off to see Essie on a trip to London and reported back to Carlo that she had found her, Ma Goode, and Pauli “in a very large Flat very comfortably ensconsed,” and “in a high state of excitement about Paul.” Essie told Fania that she would give him a divorce, and without naming a corespondent (“she wants to give him everything he wants”), but predicted he was “going to have a horrible time” and claimed to feel “terribly sorry for him.” When Essie left the room for a time to try on for Fania the “dernier cri” clothes she had bought in Paris to “knock Paul cold,” Ma Goode told Fania that “Essie was forced into giving Paul the divorce, he had not sent her any money for three months, and that she [the mother] and the baby were almost arrested in the Tyrol for the hotel bill. Paul said no divorce no money, et voila; then she said yes and cabled for money for clothes.” Fania concluded that although Essie was acting “very gay and frank and free about the whole situation,” “au fond, it’s really slaying her.” Writing in her diary after Fania had left, Essie gloried in the purported news Fania had brought that Paul had been “depressed and unhappy” in New York and in Fania’s prediction that “divorce will make a great and unfortunate difference in his whole career.” Writing herself to Carlo a few days later, Essie reiterated the view “I hear on all sides that he is very depressed”:

When he gets his divorce he may get himself together. I hope he does, poor lamb.… But it seems impossible to please him. I hemmed and hawed, and put off the evil day (divorce) as long as I could, hoping something would happen, but he insisted that he MUST have his freedom, and that I just HAD to give it to him, so I felt I must.¹⁰

Judging from the one letter Paul wrote to Essie over the summer, his mood was not depressed at all, but upbeat. In going public about his possible marriage to a white woman, he had dared the press to do its worst—and had apparently gotten away with it short of a major backlash. Not only was Show Boat proving a triumph for him on Broadway, but a condensed version broadcast over WABC was also acclaimed. His alma mater, Rutgers, awarded him an honorary Master of Arts degree at its annual commencement in June, and he particularly savored the irony of being cited along with the president of Princeton—the university that had barred its gates to blacks. In July he gave a concert at Lewisohn Stadium with the Philharmonic under Albert Coates that was received rapturously: his voice “is marked by an individual beauty of timbre that sets it apart from the other voices one hears,” wrote the World-Telegram’s respected critic Pitts Sanborn. “This country is really mine,” Paul wrote Essie. “And strange I like it again and deeply. After all—this audience understands the Negro in a way impossible for Europeans. Looks as though I’ll have to leave, but I am enjoying it all.…”11

He was seeing very “little of the old crowd,” feeling somewhat self-conscious with them, but reported to Essie, “I am still adored in Harlem. They still don’t quite understand me”—perhaps because of the perplexing barrage of publicity that reported, almost simultaneously, his titled romances, his performing a benefit for the Harlem branch of the Children’s Aid Society, and his attending (in line with his developing interest in Russia) a talk on that country by Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of The New York Times. Instead of the old crowd, he saw more of Bess and Bob Rockmore; the latter had produced him in The Hairy Ape and would soon become his lawyer. But, Paul wrote to Essie, he had no “new flames”—“Guess I’m really in love this time.… Think I’m knocked cold.” He also reassured her that he was “really being energetic”—“My French is coming fine—my Russian is unbelievable—and I’m also working at German and Spanish.… I have just received your play,” he added, “and will read it. Hope it gets placed. I really think you’re bound to hit sooner or later. You have such fine understanding of the theatre, and I surely believe you’ll strike and hard. So pleased to hear of your doings.… You are charming, you know, and different—more power to you.… I would often love to see you and talk to you. Many problems could bear that common-sense approach of yours. I do remain esoteric at times. Very Russian, I guess.… Do know I shall do all I can in this settlement business. I want to be fair, but I don’t want to be unreasonable to myself. While working here—swell, but if I transfer my activities to the continent the going will be tough.… Remarriage will change things here.”¹²

Paul arrived back in England in September 1932 thinking divorce proceedings were well along and his new life with Yolande soon to begin. All did seem to be on an amicable footing with Essie. She wrote Harold Jackman, the West Indian man-about-town, that “Paul and I are great friends, and I think we like each other much better now than we ever did.… There isn’t any unpleasantness. In fact, Paul is now reading my play, with a view to acting the leading role. Isn’t life funny? … It’s grand fun. To be free, and young enough still to use that freedom.” Her particular pals were the gay couple William Plomer and Tony Butts, Michael Harrison and his sister Vi, and the black playwright Garland Anderson. She had a brief flirtation with Helmut Teichner, a young German Jew, until she decided he was “really tiresome and noisy.” One evening at Butts and Plomer’s house in Kensington, she met Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Essie wrote in her diary, “talked most of the evening with Leonard Woolf about the Negro, and he talked about Africa, and I enjoyed it immensely.” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “… Mrs. Paul Robeson, negroid, vivacious, supple, talking like a woman on the stage: chiefly to L. about negroes.”13

Essie was not as reconciled to the “new, free life,” however, as her public face suggested. Rita Romilly, an actress friend who had crossed on the ship with Paul, brought her news of his finances, which unsettled her surface calm. He had been complaining to Essie about money problems (“Financially of course I’m still struggling”), and, with Bob Rockmore beginning to take over as Paul’s business manager, Essie no longer had a detailed accounting of his income. But now, through Rita Romilly, Essie learned that Paul’s starting salary in Show Boat had been fifteen hundred dollars a week (later cut to nine hundred)—a staggering sum in a Depression year—and that he had turned down a radio contract from “Maxwell House Coffee Hour” for another fifteen hundred dollars a week. “And he has been beefing about paying me $100 a week, and $500 a quarter,” Essie huffed in her diary, “and all this summer I have had to cable at least once for every allowance I have had, and I have never received it on time!” She also knew that he had loaned Jimmy Light five hundred dollars, had given money to his sister and brother, Marian and Ben, and had sent Yolande two thousand dollars toward their expenses in the south of France, where they were intending to live for a year. Essie, who in Paris recently had had fashionable fittings at Pacquin’s and Lanvin’s, immediately called her lawyer, canceled the divorce, and instituted a suit for separate maintenance. “[I’ll] see him in hell before I divorce him,” she fumed in her diary, “unless he gives me my allowance a year in advance, and a contract for 20% of his gross. I was so angry I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it all. The swine!”¹⁴

She had a greater surprise coming. Ten days later Paul told her he would not be marrying Yolande after all. The choice was not his. He had left Show Boat prematurely (after only three months) and turned down various opportunities in the States (including that “Maxwell House Coffee Hour”) in order to return to Yolande, to live with her in France for a year, and to marry in December—only to have her abruptly call the whole thing off. Under pressure from friends and family—her father, Tiger Jackson, was thought by some to have had a strong aversion to people of color—she “lost her nerve” and (according to Essie), deciding that “it would be too risky an experiment to give up all her friends and stupid, social life to marry Paul,” failed to arrive at the appointed place to rendezvous with him. Within a month a public announcement appeared of her engagement to Prince Chervachidze, a Russian aristocrat living in France.¹⁵

Paul was devastated. Her journalist friend Marie Seton believes he “came very close to killing himself.” He tried, however, to keep up a good public front, managing in October to carry out his contractual obligation to appear at the Palladium. And even privately, as time passed, he did his considerable best to blur, or at least transmogrify, the nature of the breakup. He told Freda Diamond that he had realized the match was a mistake after Yolande had made amorous advances to him in the back of a chauffeur-driven car and had pooh-poohed his embarrassment at the chauffeur’s presence—as if to say that mere drivers didn’t matter, didn’t really exist as human beings. Her attitude had brought him up short, had reminded him of the way his own people were treated in the South—which is to say, not as people at all. Fifteen years later, in a revised version in which the entire English upper class had been substituted for Yolande, Robeson told an Australian friend that the chauffeur incident (sitting “with Lady So-and-so” in her car) had made him realize for the first time “the affinity between working men and women the world over, that, black and white, we all had a great deal in common.” In any case, Paul told Essie to stop divorce proceedings and began to spend time with her and Pauli at the Buckingham Street flat. “I liked the apartment,” he wistfully told a journalist friend. Before the year’s end, Essie had begun to plan, yet again, for “the beginning of a new life together.”16

Robeson told friends ever after that he had deeply loved Yolande. What he did not tell them is that for another twenty years at least they stayed in contact, however irregularly, with Larry Brown and the European-based singer John Payne as the go-betweens. A dozen letters have come to light from Payne to Brown, and a half-dozen from Yolande herself to Brown, spanning the years 1932–50, which reveal some sort (on Yolande’s part, at least) of continuing attachment. “She is not well,” Payne wrote Larry Brown as late as 1950, “and loves Paul.…” Soon after that, Payne reported that she was “greaving [sic] herself to death over Paul.” Yolande herself wrote Payne, “I am weary unto death, John. What keeps me alive is my love for Paul, my respect for my father, and the life-lines like you—and Larry.”¹⁷

When writing directly to Larry Brown, Yolande was more explicit still, making it virtually certain that she and Paul had not merely stayed in contact, but may have seen each other more than once. “After P. left,” she wrote Brown in the summer of 1949 from Monte Carlo, where she was staying with friends, “I lost my mental balance, I think.… The cynicism of P. is the thing that has broken me temporarily—and I feel like someone whose legs are badly amputated. It takes time to learn how to walk again.” In two additional letters from the same period, she thanked Larry Brown for having been “so loyal a friend to me in every way for many years” and expressed her envy that Larry had “been beside him as the years developed, and no matter how hard the going, could gradually adapt yourself to the vast change. I have had to try to do that in a very few short stolen hours.” But Yolande assured Larry that she was “being patient and forcing no issues,” even though the situation was “eating into my soul.” Still, she added, it was “worth any pain—because as far as I am concerned—Paul is Paul. The Alpha and Omega. Therefore if I do not hear from him for long stretches, perhaps you could write occasionally. I would not feel so alone then.” In an undated note, probably from the same period, she begged Larry to telephone her—“I have no one else who would understand how hard the road is—but I have got to accept it, Larry—so even a few minutes on the phone without ‘My Lord’ knowing—would help enormously. Oh God, Larry—his rules are hard.”18

Bob Rockmore was apparently the only other person who knew about the continuing contact between Yolande and Paul. On April 22, 1950, she wrote Rockmore an acid little letter that, in its familiar references, confirms both his awareness and her bittersweet attachment to Paul: “Is it against the Protocol to ask whether our mutual friend makes records still—or has he retired to the bosom of his family—or more exhausting still, has taken himself a Female who is prepared to be ‘everything’ to him? It is so dull not knowing. Dear Bob—how annoying this must all be for you. But to be a lawyer and a friend is always a little trying.… I miss the laughter we had together over many subjects, still.… I could of course write to him as a fan for an up-to-date photograph signed ‘Yours truly,’ but as they say in Lancashire, ‘Eeh, ah ’avent got the energy, Luv’!”¹⁹

Yolande told her old friend Rupert Hart-Davis that “she had had a son by Paul, whom she called Little Paul. She said he had been brought up in Switzerland, where he died in childhood.” Hart-Davis didn’t believe the story, “for Yolande lived as much in fantasy as in real life, and this may have been an unfulfilled wish of hers.” In any case, the remainder of her life was, according to Hart-Davis, “chaotic.” Her marriage to Chervachidze fell apart and—judging from the few traces of her later life that remain—she led an “unstable and racketing” existence, living in a variety of places, holding down, briefly, a variety of jobs. In a 1950 letter to Larry Brown she wrote, “Life is a lonely affair for me now, and always will be.” In 1953, living again in Monte Carlo, she wrote Rupert Hart-Davis, “slowly I am finding that a small quotient of happiness can still be gained in this rather curious world.” Yet a mere three weeks later she wrote him again to say, “depression has seized me by the throat,” and to thank him for never having let her down—“& so many people have!” “Perhaps,” she added sadly, “something will happen one day.… I’m so tired of fighting & putting on my clothes as if it were chain armour—I want to lean on somebody! Not always to be the prop. Fundamentally, I am so very tired.” Thereafter the historical record on Yolande Jackson is blank.²⁰

At the end of January 1933, Paul went into rehearsal for a London production of All God’s Chillun, and Essie sailed for New York. (“I had thought of economizing, and taking second class,” she wrote Larry Brown, “but decided against it, as I’m getting too old now to change my habits.” She had just turned thirty-six and felt “happier than I have ever been in my life,” convinced that she and Paul “understand each other now.” She also felt secure in her determination to create a separate career for herself. Both her play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her novel, Black Progress, had been turned down by producers and publishers, but, never one to let grass grow under her feet, Essie rechanneled her ambition into acting. While in the States, she intended to investigate the possibility of enrolling in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and perhaps as well in Professor George Pierce Baker’s famed course in playwriting at Yale. “It’s a grand prospect,” she wrote in her diary; “I feel as though I shall really be fulfilled, at last. Paul has been sweet through it all, sharing my enthusiasm; advising and helping. I’ve never seen him so sweet, so understanding, so attractive. I think now I can be happy with him, for the rest of my life.”21

Essie was not merely indulging a private fantasy. On his own terms—which did not include sexual fidelity or Essie’s control over his business affairs—Paul did seem willing to reconstitute some semblance of their marriage. The shock of Yolande’s desertion had been profound, the more so perhaps for replaying the childhood trauma of his mother’s abrupt death. He would never again actually propose marriage to any of the women he became involved with, though to the more significant among them he would sometimes suggest that external circumstances alone—political and career considerations—prevented him from making a formal, public commitment to them, much to his own regret. For now, the stormy three-year courtship of Yolande still fresh, Paul was content to retreat to a facsimile of domesticity and, above all, to recommit himself to his work. “Am terribly happy at No. 19 [Buckingham Street—their flat],” he jotted down in a few notes to himself at the end of December 1932:

Henceforth, all my energies will go into my work.… Unquestionably, Russian songs are right … most right for me.… As for languages—Russian—basic; German-French for pictures; Spanish; Dutch (as bridge to German); Hungarian along with Turkish (as bridge to Hebrew). Send for all records at home, then Swedish. I feel so ambitious. Want to work all day at something.…

He told a reporter from the Manchester Guardian that his immediate plans included acting in a play by the Hungarian playwright Lengyel, filming The Emperor Jones, studying Russian literature, finding theatrical vehicles that would allow him to play such famous blacks as Pushkin, Dumas, Hannibal, Menelik, Chaka, and Toussaint L’Ouverture, and starting a repertory company in a little theater to alternate Shakespeare, O’Neill, and contemporary plays.²²

First up on his ambitious new agenda was All God’s Chillun. Robeson referred to the role of Jim Harris, the gentle, sympathetic black law student in Chillun, as “still my favorite part,” and the London production proved one of his happiest experiences in the theater. He was blessed with a brilliant young costar, Flora Robson, as Ella and a talented director, André Van Gyseghem, a pro-Soviet activist involved with the working-class Unity Theatre. Chillun was staged at another laboratory theater, the Embassy. To the surprise and delight of Van Gyseghem and Ronald Adam, manager of the Embassy, Robeson agreed to a salary of ten pounds for the run. As a further gesture of commitment, he personally wrote a check for one hundred pounds when an unexpected demand from O’Neill’s agent for an advance in royalties threatened to sink the Embassy’s tiny budget and derail the production.23

In their later recollections of the rehearsal period, Van Gyseghem’s and Flora Robson’s memories coincide. Both found Robeson entirely approachable, considerate of others, open to direction. “He was not up on a throne but a real human person that you could contact,” Van Gyseghem recalls. Even so, Flora Robson felt at first a little shy of him, afraid that Ella’s racist lines would offend him. But after the first week of rehearsals he had put her at ease. She, superbly trained and a brilliant technician, believed that Paul acted from instinct—he either “felt” a role or couldn’t perform it—and thereafter she followed Stanislavski’s precept that all acting hinges on giving and receiving, and never took her eyes off him while playing. The result was a conflagration of emotion, “something so fantastic,” according to Van Gyseghem, “that at times I felt, in those rehearsals, that I ought not to be there. They were stripping themselves so naked, emotionally.” Though in his view Paul was “not a finished actor,” Paul’s technical deficiencies—awkward body movement, a tendency to declaim—themselves fed into the role of the uncertain, desperately sincere Jim Harris, heightening the impact of the performance. The London critics agreed. They gave the edge to Flora Robson, but their praise for Robeson was nearly as unanimous, and the combination of the two was widely hailed as (in the words of The Observer’s reviewer, Ivor Brown) “a perfect dramatic partnership.” Chillun drew enough attention to extend its run for a week at the Piccadilly, but because Robeson had a commitment to film The Emperor Jones in the United States, the play had to close after two months.²⁴

Essie accompanied Paul to New York for the filming of Jones, but the two did not share the same living quarters; Essie again stayed separately with Hattie and Buddy Boiling. On arriving in May 1933, Paul went immediately into production at Paramount’s Astoria Studios on Long Island. For his first talkie and first commercial film, he was given a salary (for six weeks’ work) of fifteen thousand dollars plus traveling expenses; moreover, his contract stipulated that he not be asked to shoot footage south of the Mason-Dixon line. The film’s budget of a quarter of a million dollars was described by Screenland as “an almost unheard of sum for an ‘independent’ production,” but in fact the final cost of $280,000 was low, even for 1933. The producers built an artificial jungle and swamp in Astoria, complete with heaters in the water to prevent Robeson from coming down with one of his frequent colds. The chain-gang sequences were shot in New Rochelle, and Jones Beach substituted for a Caribbean island. For the Harlem saloon scenes, director Dudley Murphy decided to serve the cast real liquor instead of the customary tea, in order to “heighten the realism,” but the scenes were never printed—the cast got drunk and proved “unmanageable.” After the first days of shooting (the entire filming was completed in thirty-eight days), the Will Hays office, the industry’s censoring agency, insisted on seeing the rushes. Viewing the passionate footage between Robeson and Fredi Washington, Hays insisted it be reshot, lest the light-skinned Miss Washington come across as a white woman. With Hays warning that the sequences would eventually be cut if the required changes weren’t made, the producers reluctantly applied dark makeup to Miss Washington for the daily shoots. The Hays office eventually settled for merely cutting two murder scenes and a shot of a woman smoking.25

Reporters visiting the set, aware that the character of Brutus Jones had not been drawn with an eye to pleasing all segments of the black community, asked Robeson for his own opinion of the play. It’s a “masterpiece,” he told one of them; “O’Neill sounds the very depths of Jones’ soul.… Coming from the pen of a white man it’s an almost incredible achievement, without a false note in the characterization.” The black press did not, on the whole, agree. When the film was released in September—a mere two months after completion—it produced considerable controversy.²⁶

Some black commentators emphasized their satisfaction at a black man’s playing the leading role in a movie that subordinated the importance of whites—that alone, they said, constituted something of a filmic revolution. But others were vocal in complaint. The New York Amsterdam News praised Robeson’s acting but denounced the use of the word “nigger” in the film as a “disgrace.” The Philadelphia Tribune pointed out that images derived from stage and screen helped to form the negative view most whites had of blacks, and called Robeson himself on the carpet for perpetuating the stereotype of the black man as “essentially craven, yielding to discouragement as soon as momentary triumph has passed … becoming a miserable victim to moral breakdown and superstitious fears.” A fellow black actor, Clarence Muse, reported from Hollywood in a private letter to Claude Barnett, head of the Associated Negro Press, that “all agree that [Robeson] gave a great performance but story and direction poor.… I think it a damn shame to use such an excellent actor to put over damaging propaganda against the Negro.” The white press made no such complaint, but its reception, too, was tepid—if on different grounds. Several critics complained that Robeson was too civilized a man to convey successfully the loutish aspects of Jones, but generally they greeted his portrayal as a highly auspicious commercial screen debut, even while expressing contempt for his vehicle.27

Robeson himself stressed, at least in the public interviews he gave, the positive benefits he’d derived from acting in the picture. “I was doubtful whether my art could be expressed through the medium of the film,” he explained to one interviewer, “but my experience of filming in New York has changed my ideas”; to another he expressed surprise at the ability of the camera to pick up the subtleties in a performance. When asked by an English reporter about the prospects of going to Hollywood, Robeson replied, “I’m afraid of Hollywood.… Hollywood can only realize the plantation type of Negro—the Negro of ‘poor Old Joe’ and ‘Swanee Ribber.’” He felt increasingly interested in doing “human stories.… A good Negro comedy, if I could find one. Rider Haggard’s novels—‘Allen Quartermaine,’ for example, which has a fine romantic story and an excellent Negro part in Umslopogas. Stories of the great Negro emperors—Menelik, Chaka. America … would hardly believe that there had ever been such a person as a great Negro emperor, but in England you know it. You have had to conquer one or two.”²⁸

Robeson was beginning to expand his indictment of American life and, in a parallel development, to stress the special grace of the black subculture lying within it. To the extent that American culture was distinctive (he told a representative from Film Weekly on returning to London after the completion of Jones), it derived from Negro culture—most obviously in the area of music. “We are a great race, greater in tradition and culture than the American race. Why should we copy something that’s inferior?” he told the Daily Express. “I am going to produce plays, make films, sing chants and prayers, all with one view in mind—to show my poor people that their culture traces back directly to the great civilisations of Persia, China, and the Jews.” Going much further—publicly—than he ever had before, Robeson described the “modern white American” as “a member of the lowest form of civilisation in the world today.” When the rest of the press picked up the remark and Robeson was asked if the attribution had been accurate, he replied, “A trifle exaggerated.” His new outspokenness, however, continued for a while longer to be a matter of fits and starts. “I am proud of my African descent,” he told an interviewer in 1933, “but I am very far from being color-conscious in the sense in which your true Communist is class-conscious. But then you must remember that I am essentially an artist and a cosmopolitan.…”²⁹

Newly vocal on themes that had quietly engaged him intellectually for years, his excitement grew, and he began an energetic effort both to broaden his own insights through formal study and to incorporate his emerging new perspectives into his concert work and his future plans. Robeson had always enjoyed the study of language; now it became a passion. He enrolled in the School of Oriental Studies (part of London University) to do comparative work in African linguistics, with the eventual goal (soon aborted) of taking a Ph.D. in philology. He began “haphazardly” by studying the East Coast languages, and then the Bantu group (his own ancestral background), finding in these tongues “a pure negro foundation, dating from an ancient culture, but intermingled with many Arabic and Hamitic impurities.” From them he passed on to Ewe, Efik, and Hausa, the West Coast African languages, and immediately found “a kinship of rhythm and intonation with the Negro English dialect” that he had heard spoken around him as a child. It was “like a home-coming”; when he began to study, he felt he “had penetrated to the core of African culture.” His hope was “to interpret this original and unpolluted negro folksong to the Western world.…”30

He supplemented his course work with a close study of phonetics, using gramophone recordings he had collected of the folk songs of many cultures and an intense program of reading. He began to talk not only of visiting Africa but also of settling there eventually. Essie, simultaneously, began work in anthropology at the London School of Economics and University College, specializing in the study of African cultures. “When we get through,” she wrote the Van Vechtens, “we will know something about ‘our people.’” After she and Paul read Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Essie wrote to Hurston to express their admiration and to describe the African studies she and Paul had embarked on. Hurston wrote back that the news was “thrilling”—“I feel so keenly that you have at last set your feet on the right road. You know that we dont know anything about ourselves. You are realizing every day how silly our ‘leaders’ sound—talking what they don’t know.… Harry T. Burleigh [and] Roland Hayes … talking some of the same rot.… One night, Alain Locke [the black scholar at Howard University], Langston Hughes and Louise Thompson [the black political radical] wrassled with me nearly all night long that folk sources were not important … but I stuck to my guns.… I have steadily maintained that the real us was infinitely superior to the sympathetic minstrel version.… I am truly happy that you and Paul are going to sources.… That is glorious.…” When W. E. B. Du Bois reminded Essie that her husband “owes THE CRISIS an oft-promised article,” she replied, “I told Paul what you said about the article and he laughed and said he was too hard at work finding out about these African languages and learning to speak and read them to stop now. All the better, for when he is ready to talk, he will have a great deal of interest to talk about, I’m sure.”³¹

Robeson’s interest in African culture did not emerge in 1933 out of whole cloth. At least a decade earlier he had referred now and then to the special gifts and values of black people—to an approach to life that united those of African descent around the world, even as it set them apart from white Westerners. He had occasionally sounded the theme of a distinctive “race temperament,” and as early as 1927 had even chastised Roland Hayes and Countee Cullen for abandoning “Negro sources” in their work. This initial discovery of Africa was apparently the result of his contact with African students in London in the 1920s. By the 1930s he had gotten to know such future African leaders as Nnamdi Azikiwe and Jomo Kenyatta (and later Kwame Nkrumah), as well as the radical Caribbean theorist C. L. R. James (and possibly George Padmore). Yet their limited influence on him before 1933 is not sufficient to explain his abrupt and headlong plunge in that year into African themes.32

There is no clear-cut explanation for Robeson’s pronounced shift of energy and perspective, yet it does seem more than coincidental (if less than conclusively causal) that his re-evaluations followed hard upon the end of three years of emotional turmoil. Walter White, who knew Robeson well in these years, later made an oblique but telling reference to “certain personal and romantic experiences which disabused his mind of the comfortable conception that the people of Great Britain were less prejudiced than the white people of the United States.” White may have been referring indirectly to Robeson’s affair with Yolande; he was certainly pointing out that Robeson, having attained international fame as an artist, was still subjected to the same indignities—though to a lesser degree—that the white world inflicted upon black people everywhere. Yet Yolande’s rejection of him was not insignificant in this regard. Robeson’s prolonged involvement with her had not led to the expected consummation, but to unexpected abandonment. To put the psychological matter crudely (and all such formulas tend to be crude), her rejection symbolically portended the likely treatment he could expect from all whites—acceptance up to a point and then, should he assert full entitlement, repudiation. Yolande’s abandonment shook Robeson not merely because he had lost a woman he deeply loved, but also because he had to question whether his romance with the white world in general was not set in similar sand. He could never again trust whites to the same degree he once had, nor be quite so sanguine about their ultimate intentions.³³

As if one dam within him had burst, and overflowing with new ideas, Robeson started to jot down notes—a gauge of his excitement, since he rarely committed thoughts to paper. In the Western world, he wrote, in North and South America, the West Indies and the Caribbean, the black man “has become Western for good or for evil, and will contribute to the culture of his respective social milieu. That is, the American Negro will contribute, as he has in the past, to American culture. In fact, he may do most of the contributing.” The black man in America might have taken his own direction, but “the white man stood in his path and by refusing to stand apart, settled the issue.” “Helped immeasurably” by his “most astounding inferiority complex,” the Afro-American had become “American to the core”; “his way is settled already.” The Westernized black, who heretofore has held center stage in the world’s consciousness is, “speaking in the broad sense … a decadent, cut off from his source.”34

In the United States, three possibilities remained. The Afro-American would either, Robeson jotted in shorthand, “in time disappear into great American mass (which Negro prefers frankly) which is simple way—give up and disappear as race altogether,” a solution to him “spineless” and “unthinkable”; “or, remain oppressed group, servile—also unthinkable”; or else the black could “become as the Jew before him—a self-respecting, solid, racial unit—with its spiritual roots back in Africa whence he came. Not whining for this or that—but developing his powers to [the] point where there is no possible denial of equality.” In formulating these alternatives, Robeson was implicitly rejecting both the brand of black nationalism that sought salvation in a literal (as opposed to spiritual) return to Africa (Robeson never felt any pronounced sympathy for separatist movements like the Garveyites or the Nation of Islam), and also the assimilationist solution then being proposed by James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP he guided.

Robeson had never been a mere assimilationist—one who works for and welcomes the day when cultural variations will disappear. He recognized that what they were marked to disappear into was the dominant Anglo-Saxon outlook—and of that he had never been more than a temperate fan. But even in the early thirties, in the flush of his enthusiasm for Africa, he was not merely a “cultural pluralist,” either—not parochially insistent on the narrow loyalties and values of one particular cultural or racial group. While rejecting melting-pot aesthetics, Robeson was at the same time attracted to an encompassing, universal vision for mankind. This combined view—ethnic integrity and international solidarity—had already been marked out in the early thirties by the New York Jewish intellectuals grouped around the Menorah Journal. There is no evidence that Robeson knew any of these men—Elliott Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Herbert Solow, Felix Morrow, Sidney Hook, etc.—or even that he had read any of their publications. But, in a parallelism of development common to the history of ideas, he had begun to share their nonsectarian, cultivated spirit, one that declared itself willing to borrow from many cultures in the name of the ultimate goal of a humane society that was simultaneously anti-assimilationist and cosmopolitan.³⁵

In the early thirties, Robeson tilted toward a strong racial identification congenial to the theory of cultural pluralism. But by the end of the thirties, after his experience in Spain and his exposure to the Soviet Union, he would tilt more toward identification with the superseding claims of revolutionary internationalism. Much later, in the fifties, after his cosmopolitan hopes had been trampled by the hostile climate of the Cold War, he would renew and re-emphasize his own black cultural roots. But even then he could never be simply categorized as a “black nationalist.” All of Robeson’s shifts were subtle, none sudden or complete. For most of his life, he managed to hold in balance a simultaneous commitment to the values (sometimes competing, but in his view ultimately complementary) of cultural distinctiveness and international unity.36

Like James Weldon Johnson (and in some respects Du Bois), Robeson implicitly accepted the notion of culturally derived “racial traits”—and the importance of taking pride in them; though he located them not, as Johnson tended to, in a large imitative capacity and a love of humor but, rather, in a highly sophisticated sense of community and a primary emphasis on things of the spirit—“the inner urge” (as opposed to mere religious “mythology”) and a trust in “higher intuition—neither instinct nor reason.” Again like Johnson, as well as other leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, Robeson would continue for a while longer (and to some extent, always) to share the assumption that it was the path of culture, not politics, that best expressed black values and held out the best hope for changing the image of the black man in the white mind—thereby ultimately improving the lot of the black masses. But, while continuing, like most of the black literati, to stress the importance of culture, Robeson was beginning to move beyond them in seeing the “true genius of the race” not in the great deeds of great men but in the accumulated experience and superior wisdom of the folk, of the collectivity—in an African cultural heritage that understood the primary importance of spiritual values, in contrast to the desiccated rationalism, and the worship of technology and material accumulation, that characterized the West.³⁷

Far from believing, as did many of his contemporaries who considered the issue, that American blacks would and should take the lead in “uplifting” Africa, Robeson argued that it was in Africa itself that the black man’s future was to be sought: “From there will come his real contribution to [the] culture of the world.” That future, in Robeson’s view, was “fraught with danger.” The African had been told “he is a primitive,” congenitally inferior. A “nonsensical” view, yet one the African might come to believe. The African spirit was different—but not inherently inferior, as the history of the resplendent early African empires attested. But, ancient Africa aside, the culture of the contemporary African was itself of “high quality,” as exemplified in his intricate music, in a complex tribal development, and in a group of languages capable of expressing the “most subtle ideas” (“It is astonishing and, to me, fascinating to find a flexibility and subtlety in a language like Swahili, sufficient to convey the teachings of Confucius, for example”). In presenting this portrait of the “contemporary African,” Robeson was choosing to de-emphasize the many tribal differences that subdivided the continent in favor of stressing a shared set of cultural attitudes and forms.38

Africa, in his view, was in danger of being “bludgeoned or persuaded into throwing that equipment away,” just as the Afro-American “had—until recently—been taught to hate his own music and folklore.” “This is all right with us decadent Westernized Negroes—but a halt must be called when the sacred regions of Africa are approached.” “Can a whole race of people,” Robeson asked rhetorically in his private notes, “spiritually commit suicide? Strange & terrible as it may seem—following the lead of his supposedly advanced American & Caribbean brothers (who incidentally disown him) he is on the way.… And I hear no deep protest from black Africa about the destruction of his institutions. Here & there feeble attempts are being made & those often by idealistic Europeans to save them—but on the contrary there should be a positive spirit of positive determination to preserve them as one’s very life-blood, which assuredly they are.” To avoid the catastrophe that had befallen the Westernized black, young Africans had to reject “with contempt any philosophy or spiritual message—any teaching or instructions as to fundamental values of humanity”—from the West, borrowing its “technique” alone, even while remembering that technique was “mechanical and only fit for certain uses.” In this, Robeson advised young Africans to look for a model to China and the East.³⁹

The Chinese had always lived

as artists concerned mainly with [the] inner development of man … which we have neglected … man in relation to his fellow man as a “social” being—not as a kind of “lone wolf” … have evolved a man with much deeper capacity for “good life” than our scientific man of West.… Long ago this most ancient of living cultures assigned soldier and warrior and glorious hero to lowest rank—and the scholar stands first—certainly there is no question of fundamental Tightness of the latter.… [No] need to glorify this fighting business as in the West … leave war in its place. Certainly not an ideal of human relations.

China had learned how to borrow from the West without succumbing to it—borrowing applied science, rejecting culture and ideology. “It’s my belief,” Robeson wrote, “that even an ideology as strong and fanatical as communism may later disappear into the deeper roots of Chinese philosophy.” The African, too, must “in his deeper processes … look Eastward. For the technical and mechanical needs to West.”⁴⁰

Yet, in using China as a model, Africans should be neither confined to it nor bound by it, Robeson wrote. Other Eastern cultures, “like those of India and Polynesia,” had aspects worth emulating, and the American Negro could use Russian culture “to advantage” as well—because “the history of the Russian peasant closely parallels that of [the] Negro peasant in America.” Robeson was not trying to postulate a common origin among these varied cultures and races but, rather, to pinpoint “a common element of centuries of serfdom … [and therefore a] common way of looking at life. The Western culture is abstract, from the outside looking in.… The Negro and Eastern culture is pure apprehension.…”41

But finally, Robeson warned, all these examples must be applied with caution. “Even comparison with Chinese only to give him [the African] courage to follow his own way. He can’t be Chinese, Arabian, European or anything else. He must be African.” The experience of other peoples could at best serve as “a temporary superstructure to help get one’s bearings—but only that—and with certain knowledge that as long as that superstructure is necessary—true progress is retarded.” Besides, the “human stem was one”; “Man’s final destiny, when all technique is applied is to live this inner existence—which is close enough to hidden mystery.” The African’s special destiny—rejecting scientific method, logical thought, and the rules of reason as ultimate values—was to build on “the consciousness of inner spirit,” to “look beyond himself” to the “higher apprehension” that “has been his way for untold centuries.” “The Negro’s whole outlook on life,” he told a reporter,

… is one peculiarly his own … he does not regard people, things, or incidents in exactly the same way as the European. In many instances, I protect myself in life with weapons entirely different from those used by the white man.… When a man comes into my room, the words he speaks, his reasoning, mean little to me. But I can “sense” very quickly what manner of man he is, and there are many other things I “feel” which I can never express entirely through the medium of the English language.⁴²

Robeson was not content to work out these views in the privacy of his study. In a series of interviews with the press in 1934, he publicly elaborated his new opinions. “I am more interested in cultures than in politics,” he told one reporter when discussing Africa: “Political and economic systems rise and fall, but the soul of a people lives on.” Blacks “are a race,” he told another, “but not a people.… We are as disharmonious as the white race is.” Yet blacks “everywhere still feel a bond of unity,” even if they do not everywhere recognize that Africa is “their own spiritual centre,” but a politically unified—“a national” Africa—was for the time being “so immensely remote that we need not think about it.” (“For a long time to come Africa will continue to be controlled by Europeans.”) Robeson felt sure that Christianity, at least “as preached by the missionaries and churches,” was the wrong unifying force; it “was not what Africans needed”; it would not heal the enmity between, say, the West African and the Bantu. He did not pretend to know what would, or what kind of leadership was available and desirable. He did know that he personally could not play a leadership role—could not “play Mr. Gandhi for Africa”: “I cannot do it. I have been out of touch with the culture and people myself too long. The root of the matter lies in giving the African Negro a pride in himself.”43

In that cause Robeson felt he did have a contribution to make. “A mighty task confronts us,” he said, “to go to Africa and reveal to the blacks their own historical mission. And this task is much more important than my singing.” He told the press that he hoped to go to Nigeria soon, “to find some pure African music and songs,” to make periodic visits thereafter, to learn the languages, “so that as soon as I arrive I can feel at home,” and, eventually, to live permanently in Africa. A disbelieving reporter asked if by that he had in mind some village in the Congo. “Why not?” Robeson replied. “They are my own people, and I would be on my native soil. Among white men I am always lonely.” “I am tired of the burden of my race,” he told another reporter, a burden that “will be with me so long as I remain here” in the West. “In England I have found perfect freedom and peace, but it has not been so with my friends—companions of my own race. Where I am welcomed they are not.”⁴⁴

He did not yet feel ready for repatriation—“Some day I shall go. Not yet; I have work to do here.” Part of that work involved trying to restructure his own music. He announced to the press his decision that “classical music” would play “no further part” in his concert programs; he would concentrate in the future on presenting “the folk music of the world.” “This is a permanent departure,” he said. He no longer had any desire “to interpret the vocal genius of half a dozen cultures which are really alien to me.” He had attempted lieder in the past and could speak the German language, but he now concluded that there was “little in the German Romantic school that I feel I can make my own. I cannot sympathize with Wagner, for example. I like him for his general lusciousness of effect, but his music does not stir anything within me.” Bach and Mozart, yes; they stood apart for him; the Art of the Fugue he found “intoxicating.” But henceforth his chief concern would be “trying to find an Art that is purely Negro, that is not dependent on Western and European influences.”⁴⁵

In this regard, he rejected jazz as well as Wagner. Jazz “reflects Broadway, not the Negro. It exploits a Negro technique, but it isn’t Negro. [It] has something of the Negro sense of rhythm, but only some.… The rhythmic complications of [African dialects] … make Duke Ellington’s hot rhythms seem childish.” He elaborated further the following year: “Jazz, which is admittedly negroid in its rhythmical origin, is no longer the honest and sincere folk-song in character.… Jazz songs like ‘St. Louis Blues’ or ‘St. James’s Infirmary’… are actually nearer to their folk-song origin than they are to Tin Pan Alley, but … most of it isn’t genuine negro music any longer”—and as for a jazz piece like “High Water,” it was merely “a vulgarized form of ‘Roll, Jordan, Roll.’” (“I would rather get together half a dozen African drummers and listen to them. Their rhythm is so much more complicated.”) In dismissing jazz as having “no spiritual significance,” and in saying it would have no “serious effect on real music,” Robeson was expressing an opinion shared by most “serious” composers and critics of the day. The early explorations of the jazz idiom on the part of Copland, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Weill, Křenek, and others, these critics argued, had just about exhausted its possibilities. Robeson was also echoing an attitude that had existed in the twenties among the black bourgeoisie and some of the Harlem elite—though for very different reasons. Whereas the black upper crust denigrated jazz as the music of their Southern peasant antecedents (an attitude they applied as well to the spirituals), Robeson came to disdain it because it was not a pure enough expression of those folk origins. However, just as the Harlem elite had eventually succumbed to the mania for jazz in the late twenties, Paul also seems in later years to have been able to set aside his theoretical arguments with it and to enjoy it for what it was. Throughout the forties, he frequented such legendary jazz joints as the Apollo and Café Society to hear the big bands and some of the jazz greats, like Chick Webb and Ella Fitzgerald. In the fifties he would go “up to the Savoy Ballroom very often to hear Count Basie … downtown to hear Don Shirley and back up to Manhattan Casino to hear Charlie Parker and get ‘twisted around’ trying to dance to those ‘off beat riffs’, down to the Apollo to hear Dizzy Gillespie take flight.… And Thelonious Monk really floored me.” And much later, in 1958, Robeson would come around to saying, “For my money, modern jazz is one of the most important musical things there is in the world.”46

But if, in the thirties, he scorned jazz as “decadent,” he had a much higher opinion of the blues, considering them “as much genuine darkie material as the negro spirituals,” and was especially admiring of Bessie Smith. The one attempt he himself would ever make at a blues recording, however, had disappointing results. “King Joe,” a musical tribute to Joe Louis, recorded in October 1940 with the Count Basie band, demonstrated clearly that Robeson was far more comfortable with a straight melodic line than with the “impure” phrasing, the flattened notes, and the melisma of jazz or blues. John Hammond, the Columbia recording director who was involved in the session, remembered Count Basie’s saying in an aside, “It certainly is an honor to be working with Mr. Robeson, but the man certainly can’t sing the blues.” Robeson would have agreed: his self-knowledge and his modesty about his musical accomplishments were keen. “Boy, if I had known I wouldn’t have been thrown off the stage,” he once told a reporter after a concert, “I would have come out singing the ‘St. Louis Blues.’”47

Ultimately, Robeson’s inclinations were with folk music. As he said in 1934, folk songs were “the music of basic realities, the spontaneous expression by the people for the people of elemental emotions.” It was to such music that he now turned his attention, especially to the folk songs of the Russian, Hebrew, Slavonic, Highland, and Hebridean people, the idioms that in his view held the deepest affinity with the underlying spirit of Afro-American songs. The close kinship he felt with Hebrew culture now led him to declare publicly—his first such declaration—that the current Nazi oppression was “the most retrograde step the world has seen for centuries.”⁴⁸

In his periodic concerts in the British Isles during 1934, Robeson did make some innovations in his program offerings—but they met with limited success. In addition to his standard repertoire of spirituals and work songs, he added a group of Russian songs arranged by Gretchaninov, the Welsh “David of the White Rock,” the Scottish “Turn Yet to Me” and “Loch Lomond,” the Mexican “Encantadora Maria,” a Finnish ballad called “The Wanderer,” and the English “Oh, No, John, No.” Enthusiastic audiences filled the concert halls, but some critics, even the provincial ones who in the past had tended to be almost uniformly worshipful, gently suggested that his greatest affinity was with the songs of his own people. The critic on the Birmingham Post was less than gentle: Robeson’s voice, he wrote, “is really very intractable”; in the past the force of his personality—unaffected, direct, humane—and not his musical technique had been primarily responsible for his success, his “rather primitive methods” being an ideal match for his material, which he had “always wisely determined by an exact knowledge of his limitations”—thus accounting for “the perfect ‘rectitude’ of his performance.” In expanding his repertory to include the folk songs of other peoples, he was in danger, these critics warned—perhaps uncomfortable with a Robeson they could no longer pigeonhole—of constricting the worth of his musical contribution.⁴⁹

Robeson had still less success when he cast around for a film role that might foster the ideals he had come to espouse. He thought his search was over when, early in the summer of 1934, the Korda brothers offered him the role of the African chief Bosambo in a film they were planning based on Edgar Wallace’s book Sanders of the River. Zoltán Korda had already spent five months in Central Africa, taking 160,000 feet of film on African life, including music, speech, dancing, and rituals, and Robeson thought the footage “magnificent”—vivid confirmation that Africa “had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone Age … an integrated thing, which is still unspoilt by Western influence.” He was thrilled, too, at the recordings Korda brought back of African music; they revealed “much more melody than I’ve ever heard come out of Africa. And I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of their modern dance steps are relics of an African heritage—a pure Charleston, for instance, danced in the Heart of the Congo.” Passing up an offer from the Chicago Opera to do two performances of Amonasro in Aida (at a thousand dollars a performance and with the certainty of enormous national publicity), he accepted the Kordas’ offer to play Bosambo.50

A reporter from The Observer who came to interview him about the project found him “alight with enthusiasm.” “Listen,” he said to the newspaperman as he played his records of native African speech on the gramophone—“Listen to this bit of syncopation. No wonder the Negro carries the power to syncopate in his blood. Everything the American Negroes have got they’ve got directly from Africa—dances and rhythms—movements of the body and ways of walking. Only the original rhythms are a thousand times more complicated.” The movie, he told the reporter, promised to be a milestone, the first comprehensive film record of African culture. He found the prospect enormously exciting—“For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I’ve found my place in the world, that there’s something out of my own culture which I can express and perhaps help to preserve—for I’m not kidding myself that I’ve really gotten a place in Western culture, although I have been trained in it all my life.”⁵¹

Even as the film neared completion, Robeson remained confident of its value. “Every scene and detail of the story is faithfully accurate,” he told a reporter visiting the re-created Congolese village the Kordas had built at Shepperton. Some of the music being used was “genuine African melody,” and most of the 250 extras in the film were blacks recruited from English port towns who had been born in Africa and came from the actual tribes portrayed (Jomo Kenyatta, cast as a minor chieftain, was one of them). “I am sure,” Robeson told the press, that the film “will do a lot towards the better understanding of Negro culture and customs.” Essie reported to the Van Vechtens that it was “great fun” working with the Kordas; “they know their business thoroughly and are human beings.”⁵²

Ultimately, Robeson was bitterly disappointed. It turned out he had lent his talents and invested his hopes in a film that ended up as a glorification of British imperialism. Robeson later told the New York Amsterdam News that “the imperialist angle” had been “placed in the plot during the last five days of shooting,” and that he had been powerless to protest the shift in emphasis since he had no contract provision for approval of the finished film. (And he told Freda Diamond that he made an attempt to buy back the picture to prevent its release.). But the picture’s pro-colonial bias is in fact embedded in its very fabric, including the basic characterization of Bosambo as a loyal lackey dependent on his white master. The African scenes, moreover, though authentically shot on location, are cut and placed in such a way as to signify disparagement, creating an aura made up in equal parts of sentimentality and anachronism. Nor is the film’s overarching and explicit theme, of the necessity of a white presence to bring order out of the savage chaos of black Africa, confined to the final reel. The advertising for Sanders accurately portrayed its message: “A million mad savages fighting for one beautiful woman! … until three white comrades ALONE pitched into the fray and quelled the bloody revolt!”53

Robeson may have been misled in part by the Edgar Wallace book from which Sanders had been devised. In Wallace’s original story, the English District Commissioner is no mere benevolent despot, but a calculating martinet who controls his black subjects through flogging, irons, and hanging. As the Kordas moved gradually away from Wallace’s scenario, the changes may have seemed incidental and insignificant—until their accumulated impact was finally felt. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that Jomo Kenyatta seems to have felt no qualms about the direction the film was taking, expressing “delight” in “the music and the spirit of the African scenes.” Even after its completion, Kenyatta joined in the presentation of a cigarette case to Korda, adding his name to the inscription inside (“With deep admiration and gratitude”), and no one has ever accused Kenyatta of insufficient dedication to the cause of African independence and the integrity of African culture. Kenyatta never again spoke of the film, and Robeson was to speak of it disparagingly; “It is the only one of my films,” he said in 1938, “that can be shown in Italy and Germany, for it shows the Negro as Fascist States desire him—savage and childish.” In all likelihood, both men were too immersed in their particular segments during the actual filming to get any perspective on the whole—and too emotionally invested in the film’s initial promise to see in time that its negative potential was being realized instead.⁵⁴

Most of the leading white critics and nearly all of the black ones had no such trouble. Even those white reviewers who found the paean to British colonialism welcome recognized the picture for what it was. The New York Daily News characterized it as “a film glorifying the heroism of one of Britain’s noted Empire builders,” and the London Sunday Times noted, with no trace of irony, that Sanders provided “a grand insight into our special English difficulties in the governing of savage races”—it “could not be improved upon for the respect it displays to British sensibilities and ambitions.” (The London Times daily reviewer added, “… it will bring no discredit on Imperial authority.”) Less jingoistic critics complained that the film was merely “an imperialistic melodrama,” a full-throated panegyric to “the sacredness of British colonial rule,” “punctilious in upholding the dignity of the Crown.”⁵⁵

Nina Mae McKinney, Robeson’s costar, took a particular drubbing. A marvelous talent who as a sixteen-year-old had made a huge hit in the 1929 film Hallelujah, she was woefully miscast in Sanders—that is, if one assumes the Kordas had ever intended portraying an African woman rather than a commercialized Harlem transplant. Light-skinned, Occidental in features and mannerisms, eyebrows plucked, the sleek, glamorous, American-accented McKinney was disastrously wrong in the role of Bosambo’s native wife; as one critic put it, she was far “too cool and sophisticated a figure ever to suggest that she had really lived in the African bush.” Robeson himself fared better with the white critics, especially those taken with the film’s antiblack theme, with its portrayal of blacks as—at their best—childlike and superstitious. But he was roughly handled by several reviewers, with special mockery made of his “authentic” African singing in the film. The “war-song” reminded one critic “irresistibly of the famous marching song from The Vagabond King,” while another dismissed his performance as “half Wallace Beery–Pancho Villa, half concert singer in undress.” “Here we have the pathetic spectacle,” wrote the American film critic Robert Stebbins in New Theatre, “of one of the most gifted and distinguished members of his race placed in a position where in actuality he is forced into caricatures of his people.”56

During the filming, McKinney and Robeson became, briefly, lovers. The fact was well enough known to reach Ma Goode, who wrote to tell Essie—who already knew. “It all may or may not be true as the stuff Nina Mae said about Paul being her man,” Essie wrote back to her mother, and added an elaborate, unconvincing anecdote about how she had decoyed Paul away from seeing McKinney off at the boat train by getting her hair and nails done and putting on a dazzling new outfit for a cocktail party at the Kordas’, where she was “an immense success,” was asked out to dinner by Robert Donat, and so excited Paul’s attention that he took her out for dinner himself instead of going to see McKinney off.⁵⁷

Sanders of the River made money; perhaps because it glorified the white man’s Empire, it became a popular success. But for Robeson himself it proved an embarrassment. The black press, and even a few friends, took him to sharp account for having lent his name and prestige to a work that disparaged and patronized Africans. According to Frances Williams, the politically active black actress who was working for Katherine Dunham at the time, the two women protested Sanders to Essie, who purportedly replied, “Look, we have to make money. And when we’re millionaires, the people will notice us”; Williams, in disgust, described Essie as “full of phoneyness.” Given Robeson’s idealistic intentions, the press indictment was a terrible irony, and a source of grief. In self-defense, and deeply hurt, he lashed back both at his black critics and at the white sponsors who had led him astray. “To expect the Negro artist to reject every role with which he is not ideologically in agreement,” Robeson told an Amsterdam News reporter—ignoring the fact that when he accepted the role he thought he was in ideological agreement with the filmmakers—“is to expect the Negro artist under our present scheme of things to give up his work entirely—unless, of course, he is to confine himself solely to the Left theatre.” But subsequently Robeson made a clean break with Sanders, accepting full responsibility for his own miscalculation: “I committed a faux pas which, when reviewed in retrospect,” he told a black-newspaper reporter fifteen years later, “convinced me that I had failed to weigh the problems of 150,000,000 native Africans.… I hate the picture.”58

But in 1934–35 the reorientation in his values, though proceeding rapidly, was still incomplete. He could not disentangle himself from the Western precepts in which he had been reared simply by wishing, or even determining, to do so—certainly not overnight, and never fully. But his experience with Sanders helped propel him further in that direction. The white world of filmmaking had proved impervious to his bright new dream of African liberation, but that did not mean to him that the dream had been wrong. On the contrary, given what he had begun to recognize about the world and its ways, it probably proved it had been right; henceforth he would look elsewhere for its fulfillment. In his continuing search for alternatives to a Western culture for which he felt mounting distaste, the next opportunity came from an unexpected source—the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.

Using as a go-between the English journalist Marie Seton, whom he had met two years before in Moscow, Eisenstein sent Robeson a letter inviting him to the Soviet Union as the guest of the Administration for Films, to discuss making a picture together. “I never had an opportunity to meet you and I was allways [sic] sorry of it,” Eisenstein wrote Robeson in his rudimentary English, “because you are one of the personalities I allways liked without knowing them personally!” He went on to say that he was

extremely pleased to hear from Mary [sic] that you get really interested in our country and the problems which run around it all over the world. And I am enthusiastic to see you here. As soon as you’ll be in this country we will have an opportunity to talk (at last!) and we will see if finally we will get to do something together.⁵⁹

Eisenstein had long been an admirer of black culture and interested in making a film about Toussaint L’Ouverture, the liberator of Haiti, and his successor, Christophe, a subject long dear to Robeson’s heart as well. Eisenstein had already talked over the project with Boris Shumyatsky, whom Stalin had appointed head of the Soviet film industry. Shumyatsky was a man of little experience with cinema, and he had already begun “disciplining” Eisenstein by refusing to allow the completion of his Mexican film, Que Viva Mexico. Still, he let Eisenstein feel somewhat encouraged about the Haitian project, going so far as to list it in the export catalogue of Intorgkino. And so, accompanied by Marie Seton, Paul and Essie left London for Moscow on December 20, 1934.60