Paul Robeson (14 page)

In
American Mercury
, George Jean Nathan wrote that Robeson, “with relatively little experience and with no training to speak of, is one of the most thoroughly eloquent, impressive, and convincing actors that I have looked at and listened to in almost twenty years of professional theatergoing.” Why? Because “the Negro is a born actor.” Nathan doubted that Robeson understood at all how he created the “beautiful” effects he did with his voice, hands, and “somewhat ungainly body.” His acting was “instinctual.” His performance in
Chillun
had “all the unrestrained and terrible sincerity of which the white actor, save on rare occasions, is by virtue of his shellac of civilization just a trifle ashamed.” It was “not acting as John Barrymore knows acting” but, rather, “something that is just over the borderland of acting, and just this side of the borderland of life and reality.” Nathan may have been accurately describing the special power of Robeson's stage presence, but was giving him no conscious credit for creating it. He dismissed the idea that part of Robeson's power as an actor derived from his being an educated and intelligent man. No, educated instincts—
understanding
a role—had nothing to do with it. It was Robeson's
race
that made him a “natural-born actor.” In light of condescending praise like this, it becomes easier to understand why, even after Robeson
sought further technical training, he would tend to underplay that fact, emphasizing instead—as Nathan had—that he was an untrained “natural.”
⁴⁹

Nathan's views were hardly unique at the time. Joseph Wood Krutch, also a highly regarded critic, expressed much the same racial interpretation of acting in a 1927 article in the
Nation
. “Ecstasy,” he wrote, was the black's—and the black actor's—“natural state”; his “instinctive sense for participation in an emotion larger than his comprehension” gave him “a gift for drama in a form more primitive as well as, perhaps, more purely dramatic than that of our conventional stage.” Indeed, the Negro actor “is good only when some utter abandonment is to be portrayed. He may move awkwardly, almost uncomprehendingly, through level scenes … but he leaps with an effortless joy into a crisis and surrenders himself to joy, to terror, or to grief, as to a native element.”
⁵⁰

In making these distinctions, both Krutch and Nathan saw themselves as champions of the black race, endowing it with attractive
innate
qualities. This “liberal” attitude had its roots in the nineteenth-century view that blacks—like women—were
naturally
endowed with childlike emotionalism and a “superior” capacity for affection, personal loyalty, and joy. This deadly confusion between biology and social learning could, by easy re-emphasis, yield a value judgment about
innate
black “childishness” that served as a perpetually self-justifying rationale for proscription and separation.

Though there was scarcely a peep of dissent in the white press about Robeson's performance in
Chillun
, some black reaction both to him and to the play was less favorable. A. B. Budd in
The Afro-American
described
Chillun
as “a hard play to sit through. To see a big, respectable and cultured character as the slave of a slim, depraved and silly white woman isn't the kind of enjoyment calculated to make up a good evening's entertainment.” Will Anthony Madden in the Chicago
Defender
praised Robeson and even praised O'Neill for having provided “the Negro the opportunity to show that he is an actor,” but he denounced both
Chillun
and
Jones
as “genius productions of subtleness of the most insidious and damaging kind.” That indictment was elaborated by William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP (and dean of Baltimore's Morgan College). Pickens argued that the subliminal theme of
Chillun
was a case
against
racial mixing: in showing how a black boy and a white girl first met in a mixed public school and later fell in love, with disastrous consequences, the play pointed a “dangerous” negative moral—“the Ku Klux would pay to have just such a play as this put on.” Nor did Pickens spare Robeson. “Some colored people in it? Oh, that's nothing. Colored people are no better than white people. You can hire
SOME
of them to do anything that the law allows, if you have money enough.”
⁵¹

Other black commentators took issue with this negative judgment—pre-eminently
W. E. B. Du Bois, who chided his fellow blacks for being “tremendously sensitive”—understandably, he acknowledged, since previous portraits of black life had been merely the “occasion for an ugly picture, a dirty allusion, a nasty comment or a pessimistic forecast.” But
Chillun
, Du Bois argued, was something different and better—human and credible—and O'Neill deserved applause for “bursting through.”
⁵²

Perhaps taking her cue from Du Bois—whose comments had appeared in the playbill for
Chillun
—but at any rate sharing his opinion, Essie argued that “Mr. Negro-With-a-Chip-On-His-Shoulder,” intent on emphasizing the negative implications in
Chillun
of a black from a good family's marrying a “white trollop,” ought instead to concentrate on “the important thing”—“that he marries a white girl at all”; “O'Neill has dared to make the Negro fine and chivalrous and ambitious, and the white girl weak and pathetic by contrast.” Essie insisted that all blacks “ought to be glad and proud” that Paul had demonstrated to whites that “Negro life is interesting and colorful” and forced them to “see that a Negro can act.” She believed that, because of Paul's breakthrough performance, henceforth “plays will be written for us” and black actors “will find themselves on Broadway instead of at the Lafayette.” But Paul was less sanguine and far more affected than Essie by the hostile response to
Chillun
from a portion of the black intelligentsia. When his gloom continued, Essie tried to amuse him “by comparing articles in the white press which said the play was an insult to the white race, with articles in the Negro press which said it was an insult to the Negro race.”
⁵³

But Paul was still sufficiently concerned six months later to tell
Opportunity
magazine (the organ of the National Urban League and chief purveyor of the New Negro movement in literature) that he read
Chillun
as the story of “the struggle of a man and woman, both fine struggling human beings, against forces they could not control, indeed, scarcely comprehend, accentuated by the almost Christ-like spiritual force of the Negro husband—a play of great strength and beautiful spirit, mocking all petty prejudice.…” He argued that the negative reaction to the play among some blacks was one of “the most serious drawbacks to the development of a true Negro dramatic literature. We are too self-conscious, too afraid of showing all phases of our life—especially those phases which are of greatest dramatic value. The great mass of our group discourage any member who has the courage to fight these petty prejudices.” He acknowledged “being damned all over the place for playing in
All God's Chillun
,” and also acknowledged feeling annoyed at the criticism: “Those who object most strenuously know mostly nothing of the play and … in any event know little of the theater”; nor did they seem to recognize that O'Neill is “a broad, liberal-minded man” who “has had Negro friends and appreciated them for their true worth. He would be the last to cast any slur on the colored people.”
⁵⁴

Chillun
had a profitable run, playing alternate weeks with
The Emperor Jones
through June, then alone through July, and reopening for yet another two months, this time to nonsubscription audiences and standing-room-only crowds in mid-August; it finally closed on October 10, 1924, after a total run of one hundred performances. Robeson's double success had propelled him into the tiny front rank of Afro-American artists, more universally applauded by white intellectuals than by blacks but recognized even by dissenting blacks as superbly gifted. As Augustin Duncan, who had directed him in
Taboo
, wrote to Robeson, “I know you will go on now from one big success to another,” adding prophetically, “and I believe your successes will be more than personal successes.”
⁵⁵

The great point now was, What next? Paul had earned a total salary of only $1,782.15 from Provincetown for the entire year of 1924—and no attractive new vehicle for him was immediately forthcoming. Essie's salary from her job at Presbyterian was still their chief source of income, but she was “sick to death of the Lab,” and wrote in her diary in mid-August, “do hope I won't have to go back.” Paul began to show renewed signs of restlessness, and began to express anxiety about whether it might not make sense, after all, for him to return to the law. He told a newspaper interviewer in June 1924 that he himself preferred the stage—feeling “as if I were already much farther along in that line than in the lawyer's career” and feeling “sure that I would have more opportunity on the stage to benefit my race.” But he acknowledged that many friends, convinced he should be the next Booker T. Washington, had continued mildly to rebuke him for deserting the law, and that he had not yet definitely decided which career choice to make. Essie encouraged him to give the theater another five years before making a final decision, though it would not take that long. In the interlude, the Robesons were able to distract themselves with the assorted pleasures of his newfound celebrity.
⁵⁶

CHAPTER 5

The Harlem Renaissance and the Spirituals

(1924–1925)

Antonio Salemmé, a promising young Italian-American sculptor, was at work in his Washington Square studio in Greenwich Village one day when a friend dropped by to tell him he
had
to see “this black actor” doing
Emperor Jones
at a theater only two blocks away. Tony went to a performance the next day. “It was just a little basement theater,” he remembered many years later. “And for the first time I see this Paul Robeson, sweating, running away from the drums.… I was terribly impressed. I thought, ‘My God, this guy is not only a great actor but he's beautiful.' I mean, I saw a statue. All I could think of was a statue.”
¹

Salemmé went backstage after the performance, asked Robeson if he would pose for him—and offered him 25 percent of the sale price if he sold the statue. Robeson “was very businesslike, because he needed money” (when Tony later met Essie, he found her “twice as businesslike”—“hard-boiled, absolutely adamant and independent. Drove a hard bargain and didn't make friends”). Robeson said he'd change clothes and go around to Salemmé's studio for coffee with him and his wife, Betty Hardy. “He arrived as if he'd been there a hundred times before. You could see he was collegiate, perfectly dressed, and you could never guess that he'd been sweating, doing
Emperor Jones
less than an hour before. He had this presence, which was both dignified and disarming at the same time. He was very much himself, a very strong presence, but not a presence that would embarrass you or that would make you nervous. He made you feel at home. He himself was at home. That's the point. He had no need to impress, and if he was impressed with you, he didn't show it, didn't make any fuss over it. You knew you had met somebody unusual. There was no mannerism of
any sort. Absolute authenticity. He spoke slowly, and he took his time about everything. He never looked at his watch. Paul had this air of not going anywhere, and yet he traveled very fast. That's one hell of a trick to pull off.… He was a born gentleman … deeply a man of good will.”
²

Before the first visit was over, the two men had agreed to begin work immediately, and Paul came to pose for two hours nearly every day for months. Tony placed him in a standing position, with his hands upraised (“He has wonderful spiritual qualities.… His hands upraised [represent his] great healing qualities”). “Now, all right, Paul,” Tony would say, “just think of ‘Deep River.'” Paul would slowly raise his arms, lost in concentration, and then would start to sing. The voice was so beautiful, Tony didn't know whether to work or just to listen. His first impression held—Paul was a man of dignity, patience, and humor, a “self-contained man, highly evolved, a beautifully clear person, withdrawn in the true sense but without being moody. If there was nothing to say, he wouldn't say anything.”

The intermittent sittings ultimately spread over a two-year period due to Paul's other commitments. When the larger-than-life-size statue was completed in 1926, its “spiritual” qualities were not widely appreciated, though Salemmé considered the work “the highest achievement of my art.” Philanthropist Otto Kahn came to his studio and sent him a check for five hundred dollars—but did not make an offer for the statue. Ruth Hale (Mrs. Heywood Broun) dropped by and thought the statue so beautiful she cried. The official art world was less enamored. The nude figure stood for a year in the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, and in 1930 the Sculptors' Committee of the Philadelphia Art Alliance asked Salemmé to submit it for exhibition. He did—and all hell broke loose. Some worried souls on the executive committee of the Alliance were filled with alarm at the prospect of a naked black man going on public display; the statue was recrated and returned to Salemmé along with a letter explaining that it could not be exhibited because “the colored problem seems to be unusually great in Philadelphia.” Asked by the press to comment, Salemmé said, “We sculptors don't sell many statues in Philadelphia.” Asked by the Alliance to submit another work in place of the Robeson figure, he sent a plaster Venus.
³