Paul Robeson (8 page)

During one game Robeson sustained a serious injury to his thigh muscle and was rushed to New York's Presbyterian Hospital for an emergency operation. Henry A. Murray, the young assistant surgeon on duty (and later known as a pioneer in motivational theory), recalled sixty-five years later that he had been astounded at the extent of the injury—“what was exposed when you looked in there was a great cavern, a hole like an excavation”—and the difficult operation became “a surgical event,” the talk of the hospital. The operation was a success, but Robeson had to remain at Presbyterian for several weeks in severe pain. Harry Murray became immensely taken with his patient (“He was like a king, of an ancient civilization, as it were; he had a posture and a look and a presence that were absolutely unforgettable”), and he hit on an idea for making Paul's convalescence more pleasant. Murray had gotten to know and like a young black woman, Eslanda Goode, who was working as a pathology technician in the surgery lab, and he decided to take her to Robeson's
bedside for an introduction. What Murray didn't know was that Essie had previously spotted Paul on their mutual rounds of Harlem parties, had met him casually, and had been looking for a chance to extend the relationship.
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Eslanda Cardozo Goode, called by everyone “Essie,” came from distinguished lineage of mixed racial stock. Her great-grandfather, Isaac Nuñez Cardozo, came from a Spanish-Jewish family of considerable wealth that had emigrated to America in the late eighteenth century. He fell in love with an octoroon slave in Charleston, South Carolina, and married her, though maintaining the fiction—since state law forbade intermarriage—that she was his mistress, an alliance considered socially acceptable.
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Essie's grandfather Francis Lewis Cardozo, one of six children of that union, graduated from the University of Glasgow and became pastor of a Congregational church in New Haven. Referred to after the Civil War by Henry Ward Beecher as “the most highly educated Negro in America,” Reverend Cardozo, through the American Missionary Association (the most important of the organizations assisting the freedmen), was granted ten thousand dollars to establish a secondary school for blacks in Charleston—which became the famed Avery Institute. Cardozo appealed to the South Carolina legislature for the right to enroll white as well as black children, but was turned down.

Within a few years Cardozo became a prominent racial spokesman and entered state politics. In 1868 he was elected treasurer of South Carolina for two terms, then secretary of state for one, before resuming the office of state treasurer. But his burgeoning career was abruptly halted during the presidential election of 1877. Refusing to abandon the party of Lincoln, and ignoring both physical threats and attempts to bribe him, Cardozo worked strenuously to hold the black vote for the Republican candidate, Hayes. When the latter squeaked into office in a contested (and probably fraudulent) vote count, the state's Democratic leaders indicted Cardozo for embezzlement and jailed him.

Cardozo refused to plead guilty in exchange for a pardon, and only a public campaign in his behalf, and the election of a new governor in South Carolina, finally secured his freedom a year later. President Hayes received him in Washington and, as a token of gratitude for his support during the campaign, offered him a janitorial job in the Treasury Department building. When the scholar-statesman refused it, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts secured him a clerkship. In 1878 he accepted an offer from a committee of prominent black citizens to take charge of the black high school, and in that post he again fought—again unsuccessfully—against segregation.

Cardozo was ahead of his time not only as an educator and a civil-rights
activist, but also in encouraging strength of mind in women. His daughter Eslanda (mother to Essie—there was an Eslanda in every generation) was her father's great companion and under his tutelage developed into a forceful, independent, and (so her legion of detractors claim) imperious woman, whom some members of the family nicknamed Queen Victoria. Beautiful as well as clever, the light-skinned Eslanda was popular in Washington's fashionable black circles. That is, until she announced in 1890 that she would marry a dark-skinned War Department clerk named John Goode, who had a degree from Northwestern. Black society expressed its shock: “Essie Cardozo has married a dark man; her children will be dark.”

Two of them, John and Frank, were. The third and youngest, Eslanda, like her mother, 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 a black. When Essie was only four, John Goode, Sr., died from alcoholism, leaving his family nearly without means. Ma Goode, as Essie's mother was called, attacked the problem of earning money, as her daughter later wrote, with an “almost masculine intelligence.” She had taught before marriage, but that option was now closed, because married women were not welcome in the schools. The genteel female trades of dressmaking and millinery did not appeal to her. Finally, she decided to take up beauty culture, and did so with characteristic vigor.

Passing as white, Ma Goode investigated the best beauty shops in Washington, found them “old-fashioned” and “unhygienic,” and decided to move her family to New York so she could study “the latest and most scientific methods.” There she learned osteopathy from a physician, conferred with chemists about creams and lotions, read the scientific literature in the medical library, put her combined knowledge into the formulation of her own system, opened a private practice at high fees, and promptly became a success, attracting a wide clientele that included wealthy society figures like Mrs. Joseph Pulitzer and Mrs. George Gould.

With energy to spare, Eslanda Goode closely supervised her children's lives. She would hear their daily lessons and, if monthly report cards were good, treated the children to theater or gave them a party. Almost every Saturday night the family played whist together (for money, a family tradition), mother and daughter against the brothers, the two Eslandas (in the daughter's words) fighting “hard to score a feminine victory.” Essie went everywhere with her brothers, playing almost exclusively with them and other boys. (“I was freed from the usual inter-sex diffidence.… Man, as man, has never made me have dizzy spells, and spots before my eyes.”) When her mother asked her why she didn't play with girls, the self-styled “tomboy” impatiently answered, “Oh, who wants to sit on the steps all
afternoon and giggle and whisper and play jacks?” When, at age nine, Essie was enrolled for swimming instruction with a lifeguard at Asbury Park, he canceled after the first lesson: Essie had asked to learn how to dive, her apprehensive coach had reluctantly obliged by placing her on a wooden piling to watch him demonstrate the proper technique—and she had impatiently jumped straightaway into the deep water in imitation, giving him a thorough scare.
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In 1912 Ma Goode took over a beauty shop in Chicago, and Essie finished high school there, graduating at the age of sixteen. Placing third on the statewide competitive exams, she won a full four-year scholarship, tuition-free, to the University of Illinois. Aminda Badeau (later Mrs. Roy Wilkins) remembers that, when she moved into the rooming house Essie had just vacated, the landlady bored her by endlessly singing Essie's praises as “the ideal young woman.” Essie registered at the university in domestic science but soon discovered it was the science part she cared about and became a chemistry major. Deciding she wanted to work in a lab in New York City, thinking she might eventually become a doctor, she transferred to Columbia for her senior year. On graduating in 1917, she accepted an offer as histological chemist at Presbyterian Hospital, becoming the first black employed there in a staff capacity (though the hospital did enjoy a good reputation among black patients for its comparative lack of racial prejudice). She liked to describe herself as “a girl scientist, working in a great white institution,” but her job consisted primarily of preparing tissue slides for pathological diagnosis, with no authority to make diagnoses herself.
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When the young surgical intern Harry Murray met Essie at Presbyterian in 1920, he was immediately struck by her quick intelligence, her energy and spunk, her “definitely English” air, her superb efficiency (at times “too efficient, too officious, too bossy”)—and her beauty. “Well, now, Paul, you really have to see what we have in this hospital,” he enthusiastically told the convalescent; “I very much praised her,” he remembers, though “I'd known her just a few months.” When the two took to each other, Murray became “empathically romantic,” even while realizing that the match might not be one made in heaven—depending on whether one believes happiness in a union hinges on the similarity (rather than the complementarity) of the partners. Paul, in Murray's opinion, “gave a definite impression of being natural,” while Essie “was contriving. He let things happen, and she tried to make them happen.” He seemed “like a Billy Budd”; her essence was that of an “impresario”—the “innocent” versus the calculator. Murray considered Paul deeply sensuous, whereas “there wasn't much sensuousness” about the practical-minded Essie (“In a symposium on achievement versus love, she's on the side of achievement—Paul would be very strong in both of them”). Where he was genuinely
warm, she was merely effusive. Paul was interior, self-referring; Essie was more studied and more superficial, concerned with accoutrements and acclaim. Where she was “obvious,” meticulous, and purposeful, he was laid back, affable, self-contained—“It was all in the manner. He's not an unnecessary duplicate. He's a unique, separate, superior man.… A person could buy everything that Essie had, and couldn't buy anything that Paul had. He had something that's inside.”
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Essie, like Murray, saw essential differences in temperament between herself and Paul, but regarded them as complementary, rather than as sources of potential antagonism. Ten years later, during a time of hurt and alienation, she expanded on her view of those differences in emphatic, even exaggerated detail:

His education was literary, classical, mine was entirely scientific; his temperament was artistic, mine strictly practical; he is vague, I am definite; he is social, casual, I am not; he is leisurely, lazy, I am quick and energetic.… [He is] genial, easily imposed upon, mildly interested in everybody and very impractical; Essie [is] pleasant to a few people, affectionately and deeply devoted to a very few, and entirely unaware that anybody else existed; she [is] mildly tactful, but if there [is] the faintest suggestion that anyone was to impose on her she [is] distinctly rude.… It is doubtful if Paul could be rude or say no to anyone; Essie could relish being rude to anyone who deserved it.… He likes late hours, I am an early bird; he likes irregular meals, they are the bane of my life; he likes leaving things to chance, I like making everything as certain as possible; he is not ambitious, altho once having undertaken a thing he is never content until he accomplishes it as perfectly as possible; I am essentially and aggressively ambitious, I like to
undertake
things.”
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Those words, written in the early 1930s, were designed to rationalize and lessen the pain of a separation which then loomed, its immediate anguish heightening the dichotomies in Essie's description. Still, the personality differences between Paul and Essie were marked and obvious from the beginning—though at the time Essie saw them as essential ingredients of their mutual attraction, “wonderfully ideal complements” for a shared partnership designed (in Essie's phrase) for “shooting the rapids.”
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Their courtship did not proceed rapidly, although Essie, who was essentially guiding it, did her best to pilot a straight course. She knew what she wanted, he was ambivalent; as she proved all her life, Essie was a systematic and shrewd strategist, clever enough to recognize when caution was called for. Robeson was besieged by attractive young women who had set their caps for him—part of the appeal of Gerry and Frankie, perhaps,
was that they had not. Essie (in her own words) “applied her brains to this problem exactly as she applied them to her problems in chemistry; she surveyed the situation as a whole, decided upon a course of action and pursued it religiously.” She arranged her dinner hour at the “Y” to coincide with his. She was careful to wear her most attractive clothes if she thought she might run into him. She saw to it that they would “happen” to walk home together from the university, and would meet frequently at Harlem parties. She took care to be well informed about matters that interested him—sports especially; he was surprised and charmed by her knowledge of the comparative strengths of big-league baseball teams, her predictions about the outcome of intercollegiate football games, her attendance at Forest Hills tennis matches, her own skill at swimming, basketball, and ice skating.

By the winter of 1920–21 they were spending long evenings together discussing the law cases he was studying, or the chemistry of nutrition. “She would explain to him what became of the protein and carbohydrates he ate” and the anatomy of the body's muscles and bones—“as an athlete he was greatly interested.” Their contrasting habits of mind and temperament produced “deliciously” heated arguments, made more “thrilling” still because (according to Essie) they managed to reach “the same conclusion by widely different paths,” usually discovering they “liked the same plays, books, people.” As they became more intimate, Essie took care (so she later, unconvincingly, claimed) “to keep the rapidly growing friendship well outside the danger zone of sex”; knowing that Paul and Bud Fisher had been “sowing their wild oats,” she wanted “this particular friendship” to be “a little different from his others.”