The Martin Duberman Reader (18 page)

Several of his teammates have subsequently downplayed the amount of racial antipathy Robeson faced on the Rutgers squad—just as whites who knew him in Somerville later minimized town prejudice. One Rutgers teammate, “Thug” Rendall, insisted sixty years later that there had been no opposition to Robey's joining the team, and Steve White, a senior when Robeson was a freshman, flatly declared, “There was never any discrimination.” Earl Reed Silvers, who graduated two years ahead of Robeson and was later a Rutgers faculty member, claimed to have “attended every football practice” during Robeson's freshman year and did not remember “any untoward incident on the field.” Silvers further claimed to have checked his memory with four members of the varsity squad of that
season and reported that not one of them could recall a deliberate attempt to injure Robeson. In any case, Silvers felt sure, “Paul would not . . . wish to question the integrity of his college or the sportsmanship of his friends.”

But another member of the varsity squad, Robert Nash, flatly states that Robeson “took a terrific beating. . . . We gave him a tough time during the practices; it was like initiation. He took it well, though.” And Mayne S. Mason, one of Robeson's teachers, remembers him coming into class one day with his hand bandaged; Mason later found out that someone on the team had spiked Paul's hand. Robeson had learned as a young man to muzzle his feelings, but that wasn't the equivalent of not having any, nor any guarantee that under special provocation they wouldn't surface.

By the end of his freshman year, Robeson was in the starting lineup; by his junior year, he had become the star of an exceptionally talented Rutgers team and had gained national prominence—a “football genius,” raved one sportswriter, echoing many others; “the best all-round player on the gridiron this season”; “a dusky marvel.” Twice, in 1917 and 1918, Walter Camp, the legendary Yale coach, put Robeson on his All-American football teams—the first Rutgers player ever named—calling him “a veritable superman.” The phrase scarcely seemed overheated; by then, with a superfluity of skill, Robeson had also distinguished himself as center on the basketball team, catcher on the baseball team, and a competent javelin and discus thrower on the track team. By the time of his graduation, he had won fifteen varsity letters in four different sports.

All of which suggests, in bald outline, a triumphal procession, inexorable and uninterrupted. The reality was a good deal bumpier. If Coach Sanford had never been bigoted, and if the Rutgers football team had been taught not to be, that still left the outside world. One classmate remembers the shouts of “nigger” that would sometimes come from the stands, and Coach Sanford's son recalls that Robeson “was treated very badly by the opponents. . . . Everybody went after him, and they did it in many ways. You could gouge, you could punch, you could kick. The officials were Southern, and
he took one hell of a beating, but he was never hurt. He was never out of a game for injuries. He never got thrown off the field; when somebody punched him, he didn't punch back. He was just tough. He was big. He had a massive, strong body, among other things. He felt the resentment but he managed to keep it under wraps.” Among Rutgers's Southern opponents in football, William and Mary and Georgia Tech simply refused to play against a black man.

Because the feats of “the giant Negro” extended beyond football, they could not easily be dismissed as the mere by-products of “animal vitality.” Robeson dominated not only the playing fields but the classroom—and the debating hall and the glee club and the honor societies as well. And he did so with a modesty that further disarmed would-be detractors. Robeson maintained such a consistently high grade average in his course work that he was one of four undergraduates (in a class of eighty) admitted to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. A speaker of exceptional force, he was also a member of the varsity debating team and won the class oratorical prize four years in succession. His bass-baritone was the chief adornment of the glee club—but only at its home concerts; he was not invited to be a “traveling” member and at Rutgers sang only with the stipulation that he not attend social functions after the performances. “There was a clear line,” Robeson later wrote, “beyond which one did not pass”; college life was “on the surface marvelous, but it was a thing apart.”

In that same spirit, Paul once let a teammate, Donald Storck, persuade him to go to a college dance—but positioned himself on the balcony, where, to wild applause, he serenaded the dancers below with “Roses of Picardy.” Storck marveled at his friend's calm exterior but recognized that he was “roiling” inside. By others, however, Paul's prudent self-possession was often mistaken for nonchalance. An undergraduate two years behind him sent him myopic congratulations later in life on the attitude he'd shown: “I will never forget how much you seemed to enjoy watching, though never participating in, any of the social affairs of your contemporaries. . . . This was
but one of your most typical, admirable qualities that endeared you to all who knew you. It was in keeping with your modesty. . . .”

As a young man Paul talked less guardedly only among his circle of black friends, a small group of collegians, male and female, drawn from the Philadelphia–New York area and (as one of them has put it) from “well-to-do middle-class homes. . . . We met regularly for dances, forums, picnics, athletic games, and the usual events that engage college students. There were also profound discussions about the Negro in our society.” As one of the young black women in his circle told me many years later, “Paul was distinctly aware and disturbed” about racial questions. . . . He was race-conscious at an early stage,” and “it showed when we met in groups together.” He described his hope of someday being able “to do something about it”—though “he wasn't clear at that early age about what he might be able to do . . .”

Soon after graduating from Rutgers in 1919—he delivered the Commencement Oration—Paul met and became romantically involved with a young woman named Eslanda Goode, called by everyone “Essie.” She came from a distinguished lineage of mixed racial stock. Her grandfather, Francis Lewis Cardozo, was descended from a Spanish-Jewish-black family and became a prominent racial spokesman. Essie had cream-colored skin, black hair, and Mediterranean features—with a slightly Oriental look around the eyes that gave her the overall aura of being a foreigner rather than black. When Paul met her, she'd graduated from Columbia as a chemistry major, and was known for her quick intelligence, energy, efficiency, and spunk. Paul was ambivalent about settling down, but Essie knew she wanted to marry him almost from the first, and some evidence suggests that she may have maneuvered him into it. They married in 1921.

Initially trained for the law, Paul's disinclination for legal work in combination with the overt racism of the profession led him to explore possibilities in concert work and theater. His association with the Provincetown Playhouse and Eugene O'Neill led to a meteoric rise; by 1930 he was starring opposite Peggy Ashcroft in a London production of
Othello
—and having an affair with his leading lady as well. It was hardly Paul's first extramarital fling, but this time Essie found a love letter, and the affair with Ashcroft ended.

But Paul's need for sexual expression outside his relationship with Essie continued. His next affair, with a free-spirited young white actress named Yolande Jackson, became a consuming passion, what he himself called “the great love” of his life. He took a separate apartment from Essie and their young son and gave serious thought to divorcing her. When she, in turn, learned about Yolande, she decided to write Paul a long letter.

In the no-nonsense manner on which she prided herself (and in which she thought Paul woefully, perhaps morally, deficient), she laid out options, imposed conditions, drew up systematic conclusions. “My dear P,” she began, “I don't seem to be able to talk to you anymore. We don't seem to speak the same language. So I thought I'd better write.” She was now entirely prepared, she continued, to give him a divorce, should he want one. “I shall be infinitely better off divorced from you, than married to you. . . . As your wife, I have rarely had the supposed pleasure and comfort of your company—except at very irregular meals and at odd hours late at night; and of course on those social occasions when you found it convenient or necessary. . . . All I really lose when I divorce you is a job; and divorces being what they are, I lose the job but keep the salary, with a raise.”

She then reiterated her charge that he was a deficient father, uninterested in his own son, and defended herself from his longstanding complaint about her extravagance. “You deplore the number of ménages you must keep up,” she wrote, but seem unwilling to forgo separate sleeping quarters. As for Yolande, Essie had “thought
a great deal about this racial mixing business” and concluded that “when a white woman takes a Negro man as a lover, she usually lowers him and herself, too; white people and Negroes feel rather that she has a bull or a stallion or mule in her stable, her stable being her bed of course, and view the affair very much as if she had run away with the butler or the chauffeur; she is rarely—almost never—a first-class woman, and neither white nor black people think the Negro has won a prize.” On her own behalf, Essie objected to the way he had publicly flaunted his affair with Yolande and his “lack of taste in emphasizing” the gifts Yolande had given him of a cigarette case, a locket, and a seal ring.

“If you had ever seriously tried to make love to me, I'm sure I don't know what might have happened. But we needn't worry about that—you never did. You made a pass or two at it—took me to a theater and were very pleased with such evidence of your devotion. I was, too—which makes it even funnier. [I] seriously doubt if you were ever in love with me. You liked me, were companionable, and I was thoughtful and considerate of you. I doubt now if I was ever in love with you—I admired you tremendously, and I was certainly interested in you.”

But the past, she concluded, “is behind us. The question is, what should we do with the future? I know what I want to do, and shall do, with mine. There is no indecision about me, as you know. But about you—you have a great natural gift, and a magnificent body, neither of which you have done anything to preserve and improve. . . . You also have a terrific charm—but have rather overworked that. You have a fine mind. You have, as I said in 1921, the immediate possibility of becoming the greatest artist in the world—if you want to; and it wouldn't take much work, either—you have so much to start with. If you continue to drift along as you are doing now, refusing to face things out, you will degenerate into merely a popular celebrity. Which seems poor stuff when one thinks of being a really great artist, the thrill of having done something perfectly. . . . Well, it does seem that I fall naturally into place in the role of lecturer, doesn't it? All I can say in my defense is that I have decided what to try to make
of my own life, and as we part, I should be very happy to know that you have decided upon something for yourself. I do so hate waste. And you will be a wicked waste if you don't step on it.”

On the evening of November 28 [1931], Paul dropped by the flat to leave a Russian dictionary (Essie had also taken up the study), found she had gone out, and saw the pencil draft of her letter to him. Apparently it moved him, and he returned the next morning to have a talk with her. As she described it in her diary, it turned out to be “a red-letter day for me, perhaps one of the most important days in my whole life. . . . We got closer and more friendly than we have been. He says he wants to see me often, and urgently, and that we have something between us which no one else will ever be able to duplicate. He thinks he wants to marry Yolande, but he isn't sure, but he is sure he wants us always to remain close and friendly. . . . We had a lovely time, slept together, and enjoyed it enormously. I'm so glad things are pleasant and friendly. Most important of all, he has found his feet, so far as his work is concerned, and is through with slacking and sliding and muddling through. Thank God for that!” She sent a high-spirited version of their new arrangements to Carl and Fania Van Vechten: “He doesn't live here of course, but has reached the regular and often-calling stage, which is much more inconvenient. He is a dear, though, I must say, even though he is so funny and serious and absurd at times. I think no matter what happens to him, and I'm sure a great deal will happen to him, he'll always be a very nice person.” [In the upshot, Yolande broke off with him, and Paul and Essie remained married, though uneasily . . .]

In the late thirties, even such left-leaning CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) unions as the Transport Workers or the Hotel and Restaurant Workers didn't address racism seriously—though these unions were light-years ahead of most AFL (American Federation of Labor) affiliates in accepting blacks for membership. Mike
Quill of the Transport Workers Union never made any substantial effort to fight for expanded job opportunities for black workers, placing priority instead on issues of union recognition and the protection of the rights of those already enlisted in its ranks. Other left-wing labor leaders did have strong convictions about the need to change patterns of racial discrimination within industry, but were sometimes reluctant to push their more conservative memberships in a direction that might split their unions and jeopardize their own positions of leadership. And the Communist Party (CP) didn't exert much pressure in that direction on labor leaders sympathetic to its ideology.