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] Rol
and 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
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