The powerful voices and arguments raised in Robeson’s behalf failed to budge the State Department. And so, after a brief period of high hopes, Robeson was flat up against the fact that he remained, in his words, “a prisoner in his native land.” Because his expectations had soared, his ensuing disappointment was proportionately great. Six weeks after Judge Mathews’s decision returned him to square one in the passport fight, Robeson noticed that he was passing blood in his urine. He consulted the young black physician Aaron Wells, who was on the staff of Sydenham Hospital in Harlem, had occasionally treated Essie, and was also physician to the Ben Robeson family. Paul confided to Wells that he thought the trouble might be the result of gonorrhea he had had as a younger man, but Wells told him the trouble was a degenerative condition of the prostate and recommended surgery with McKinley Wiles, a urologist at Sydenham. Nearing his fifty-eighth birthday, Robeson had only been in a hospital once (for a football injury) and, as both his son and Helen Rosen remember it, was “frightened stiff.” His nerves were already raw from the passport fight, and the accumulated strain of years of surveillance by the FBI fueled his fear of what might “be done” to him in the hospital, a fear given a certain plausibility by the government’s demonstrably malignant attitude toward him. He decided that he had cancer and was going to die. The last few days before entering Sydenham, he kept telling Paul, Jr., “If something happens to me, please do this, and that,” and revising his will.13
He did have a difficult operation—some friends thought it had been “botched”—and suffered considerable pain in the postoperative period (both the white and the black press reported he had been operated on “for an abdominal obstruction”). His three-week stay in the hospital, with round-the-clock private nurses for most of that time, proved a grim experience. Released early in November, he decided not to return to Ben’s parsonage but to take up life again with Essie. Since he and Essie had gone almost entirely separate ways after the sale of the Enfield house, his agreement to let her buy 16 Jumel Terrace in Harlem and his decision to take up his own residence there surprised many of his friends. Lee (Mrs. Revels) Cayton recalled in bemusement a joking remark Paul had made earlier: “I’ll never be in that rocking chair.”14
But the decision had its own logic. Essie had herself been ill that summer, and the diagnosis had turned out to be cancer, leading to a radical mastectomy. She kept the news a tight secret, determined, with her usual grit, to live out her life at full steam and without the pity of others. In fact she made a good recovery and it would be several years before she would have a recurrence, but at the time the prognosis was chancy and Paul felt he owed it to Essie to go back and live with her again. Besides, he needed her, needed the approval of black public opinion which a return to her side would create, and needed, too, beset by the debilitating effects of political repression and physical decline, her competent, efficient ministrations. It had been convenient in the forties, for a man bent on avoiding an exclusive commitment to any one woman, determined to lead several lives simultaneously, to be able to point to the existence of a formal marriage that actually made no difficult demands on him. Now, during the mid-fifties, older, unwell, and unnerved, less interested in romantic attachments and sexual adventures, he was tired of living in other people’s homes, and his primary need was for comfort and stability. He knew Essie wanted—had always wanted—him back again, even if only in name. He knew she would manage and organize his life as no one else could, protecting him completely while being careful not to impose any requirements other than his formal presence in the same house. Paul needed to be taken care of again, and Essie was happy to work hard again at the job.
Besides, she was far more of a political creature than in her youth. Her views on the Soviet Union now closely coincided with Paul’s, and over the years she had become powerfully engaged with the struggle for black freedom and against colonialism. She remained more elitist than Paul, less alienated from the white power structure, less profoundly identified with the working-class poor, white and black, less ideological and theoretical, less responsive to Party discipline, but was nonetheless, in her awareness and commitment, a more acceptable political mate than she had once been.15
In 1955 Essie was accredited to the UN as correspondent for New World Review, but in between her journalistic chores she delighted in having a new house to fix up. Resuming her role as world-beating shopper, she raced off to auctions looking for bargains, and her close friend Freda Diamond often came up to Jumel Terrace to give her professional help with decorating. At one point Essie saved money by buying up parachute material to use for draperies; at another, deciding they couldn’t afford new carpeting on a much-reduced income, she located miles of thick used beige and taupe carpets, bought them for a song, and, after “scientifically” studying printed instructions, consulting a local Armenian tradesman, and purchasing the necessary tools, laid them herself. In her spare time she supervised Paul’s diet and welcomed her grandchildren for occasional Saturday-night sleepovers.16
Even so, Paul’s recovery was slow. In December 1955 he consulted Dr. Morris Perlmutter, whose partner, Ed Barsky, had performed the mastectomy on Essie. Perlmutter found elevated blood pressure and a “somewhat enlarged” heart, but when Robeson returned for a second visit, in January 1956, both conditions had disappeared. Perlmutter therefore decided that it was all right for Robeson to keep a concert date in February in Toronto, where he had been invited by his old friends the Mine and Mill workers after the State Department restored his right to cross the border into Canada. On February 7, along with Alan Booth, his temporary accompanist, and Lloyd L. Brown, who had been helping out in a general managerial capacity, Robeson left the United States for the first time in six years. He went straight to the national Mine, Mill convention in Sudbury, Ontario, telling the delegates that “no attacks from any quarter will force me to tread backward one inch,” and then stayed on in Canada to fulfill other engagements until the end of the month. For his Toronto concert in Massey Hall, every one of the twenty-eight hundred seats was filled, and he was given a standing ovation when he stepped onto the stage. The critics commented on how much thinner he was—“almost frail”—and lamented that his pacing seemed off and his vocal color dimmed; still, they hailed the continuing power of his “magnetic” presence. Robeson ended the concert with a dramatic reading from Othello and from Pablo Neruda’s Let the Rail Splitter Awake, then spoke a few words to the adoring audience: he had, he said, but one purpose in life, “to fight for my people that they shall walk this earth as free as any man.”17
The trip did not mark, as Robeson had hoped, a restoration of his health. No sooner had he returned to the States than he was hit with a serious blow: a U.S. Court of Appeals decision not to overrule the State Department’s refusal to grant him a passport. Then, four months later, Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress were published in The New York Times. In contrast to the many white Communists who went to pieces over the Khrushchev report, deserting the CPUSA in droves, few black members left the Party, preferring to read Khrushchev’s revelations as a sign of renewed hope, an indication that the U.S.S.R. was about to return to the purity of its earlier revolutionary goals. Even so, it would be the calculus of phony heroics to claim—as some of Robeson’s intimates do—that the Khrushchev report had no impact on him. Such an interpretation would reduce a greathearted man to a wooden warrior. He was, demonstrably, mortal—susceptible to disappointment, weariness, despondency—if anything, more susceptible than most, given his enormous capacity for empathy. He did, however, make the decision not to comment on his reactions to anyone, instead maintaining silence and outward equanimity, and even managing, on March 10, to show up at a party celebrating William Z. Foster’s birthday. But within the week he suffered a recurrence of urinary-tract infection, this time followed by an emotional collapse as well.18
His dream had been closing down with an abrupt vengeance of late: some nine months befo
re the Khrushchev revelations, and simultaneous with the failure of his 1955 passport appeal, both Freedom and the Council on African Affairs had suspended their operations. Then had come the prostate surgery, which, especially when coinciding with a set of external pressures, does frequently bring on depression. In Robeson’s case, however, his initial bout of what would later be called “bipolar disorder” was primarily manic (though it turned to severe depression two months later). At first, instead of confusion, fatigue, paralysis of will, lack of motivation, inability to concentrate or conceptualize—the classic symptoms of depression—he became, according to his son, “a dynamo of intellectual energy,” much of it going into compulsive and vocal elaboration of what he claimed was a universal music theory based on the pentatonic scale. The universality of the pentatonic scale (what amounts to the five-note harmonics of the black keys on a piano) in folk music around the world is a “discovery” as indisputable as it is unoriginal—it is a scale, as Pete Seeger has said, “as natural to music as making a basket is once you’ve learned how to twist a thread.” Musicologists do disagree, however, as to whether the harmonic scale is built into the sound of wind and string instruments or has been historically transmitted primarily through human contact—a point of disputation in which Robeson had scant interest and to which he made no theoretical contribution. His concern—to the point of obsession when in an agitated state—was in the proven universality of the pentatonic scale and in the case that could be extrapolated from that proof for the commonality of human experience. He would tell Helen Rosen and others that in solving the riddles of Bach he would somehow succeed in solving the problems of the world; and once thrillingly announced to Freda Diamond that he saw similarities between cantorial liturgy and some parts of Bach’s masses, therefore “proving” that Bach was a converted Jew.19
Helen Rosen, one of the very few people allowed to see him during these months, confirms the obsessive zeal with which he went “on and on” about the pentatonic interconnection of practically everything (trying out his theories on the composer Marc Blitzstein, Robeson got angry when it became clear that Blitzstein, attempting to be polite, was in fact “astonished and appalled”). When Paul stayed overnight at the Rosens’ place, Helen would sleep with one ear cocked, concerned about what he might do. At four o’clock one stormy winter morning she discovered him trying to leave the house; when she asked him where he was going, he said he had to get a book to track down an idea he’d just gotten about his pentatonic theory. “He didn’t know what he was doing,” in Helen’s opinion. On another day he seemed so “disheveled” to her when she visited Jumel Terrace that, coming downstairs from his bedroom and finding Revels Cayton and Ben Davis in the living room, she couldn’t restrain her tears. “I can’t bear to see him like this,” she said. Revels and Ben tried to persuade her that Paul would be all right. Although he did improve—indeed, judged by externals, would soon appear entirely normal—in Helen’s opinion he was “never again quite the same.”20
His physician Dr. Aaron Wells listened to him rattle on about pentatonics and how he intended to learn more languages in order to prove additional similarities between seemingly disparate cultures, and decided he was “off the wall.” Wells prescribed sleeping pills; they didn’t work. Dr. Perlmutter suggested a psychiatric consultation, and a psychiatrist friend of Ed Barsky’s did come to see Robeson, who refused to cooperate. Wells believed Robeson was in “deep trouble” psychologically but that the problem might have an essential organic component as well, perhaps the onset of some form of “early senility triggered by underlying arteriosclerosis.” Perlmutter thought otherwise, believing his condition had resulted from the combined stress of prostate surgery and the accumulated pressure built up from years of harassment and confinement—though warning that medical diagnosis, particularly after the fact, is not “an exact science.”21
By the middle of May, Robeson had lapsed into a deeply depressed state. With the doctors in disagreement and with Robeson refusing to see a therapist, he simply stayed in his room at Jumel Terrace and remained almost totally inactive, going nowhere and seeing almost no one except family. Then, just as he seemed to have reached rock bottom, word arrived from Washington that he had been subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities as part of its investigation into “passport irregularities by Communist sympathizers.”22
The doctors advised him not to go, and even wrote letters to HUAC declaring him unfit to give testimony without serious risk to his health (Wells, in his letter, overplayed Robeson’s minor cardiac condition in order to downplay rumors of an emotional collapse, but the prostate surgeon, Dr. Wiles, did emphasize in the letter he wrote that “stress” had produced Robeson’s “weakened condition”). HUAC granted Robeson a two-week postponement but did so reluctantly and hoped to use the delay as a way of trapping him. Don Appell of HUAC phoned Wick of the FBI to say “it occurred to the staff of the Committee” that if it could be shown Robeson left his house between May 29 (when he had been scheduled to appear) and June 12 (his new date), “it will be possible for the Committee to cite him for contempt”; HUAC asked the FBI to inform the committee of “his movements.” (A note on the memo, in what appears to be J. Edgar Hoover’s handwriting, reads, “I don’t think we should be making investigations for the House Committee.”) Beyond the two-week postponement, Robeson refused to request a further delay. He “insists upon making a trip to Washington, D.C., which he considers urgent,” Wells wrote in disapproval to Milton Friedman (whom Robeson had retained to represent him before HUAC), and was disregarding Wells’s opinion that “at this time he should not make any public appearances.”23
Essie and Paul, Jr., along with Milton Friedman, Lloyd Brown, and William Patterson, accompanied Paul to Washington. Just before he entered the hearing room, he appeared so depressed and his eyes looked so vacant that it was doubtful he could go on. Friedman got Paul to agree that on prearranged signal he would ask for time out to consult with counsel. Essie told Freda Diamond that she had decided to pull a fainting spell if Paul’s testimony seemed to be going haywire. But, to everyone’s surprise, he performed with élan. His steady, even caustic testimony was all the more remarkable because the committee did what it could to unnerve him further—refusing to let him read the prepared statement he had brought (he had accurately predicted in the statement that “those who are trying to gag me here and abroad will scarcely grant me the freedom to express myself fully in a hearing controlled by them”) and, ignoring all pretense of discussing the purported focus of its investigation on passports, took every opportunity to goad him into answering whether he was a member of the Communist Party.24
The hour-long session proved stormy, the committee members gunning throughout for an angle to justify throwing the book at him, taunting him with implied accusations, and reading into the record previous and tainted testimony from professional informers like Manning Johnson. Robeson, on his part, at first cagily parried blows, then, toward the end, bellowed at his tormentors in full defiance. “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” asked Representative Gordon Scherer (Republican, Ohio), not two minutes into the hearing, and implying that Robeson’s membership now was the only unresolved question. “What is the Communist Party?” Robeson responded, then added, “As far as I know it is a legal party … a party of people who have sacrificed for my people.…” HUAC Counsel Arens persisted, “Are you now a member of the Communist Party?” This time Robeson gave a tart reply: “Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see?” Pressed yet again, he took the Fifth Amendment and told the committee to “forget it.”25
Arens moved on to the tired accusation, which the FBI had failed for ten years to prove, that Robeson’s Communist Party name was “John Thomas.” Robeson burst out laughing—as Essie later wrote, “the idea of this world-known giant with the fabulous voice trying to hide himself under an assumed name” was absurd. Recovering his gravity, Robeson replied,
“My name is Paul Robeson, and anything I have to say or stand for I have said in public all over the world—and that is why I am here today.” The committee was neither amused nor impressed. Chairman Francis Walter—one of the architects of the McCarran-Walter Act—took up the cudgels, doing his best in a series of questions to assert Robeson’s friendship with a variety of Soviet espionage agents. Feigning not to recognize Walter, Robeson asked if he was “the author of all of the bills that are going to keep all kinds of decent people out of the country.” No, Walter replied, “only your kind.” “Colored people like myself,” Robeson shot back. Arens then confronted Robeson with the 1948 testimony of Max Yergan: “It became clear to me that there was a Communist core within the Council [on African Affairs].… Paul Robeson was … certainly a part of that Communist-led core.” Robeson replied: “I am not being tried for whether I am a Communist, I am being tried for fighting for the rights of my people, who are still second class citizens in this U.S. of America.… You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people.…” Walter cited Jackie Robinson’s disparaging testimony about Robeson from 1949 as proof that he did not represent his people, and when Robeson replied “that in his heart” Robinson “would take back a lot of what” he had said about him, Arens countered with the flat assertion of Thomas W. Young (the black editor of the conservative Guide Publishing Company) that Robeson “does not speak for the masses of the Negro people whom he has so shamelessly deserted.”26
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