Water Boy

PAUL ROBESON, NEGRO--Eslanda Goode Robeson--Harper ($2.50). Many a U. S. citizen, white and colored, has heard Paul Bustill Robeson, in the flesh or on a phonograph record, sing "Ol' Man River," "Water Boy" and many another movingly mournful song of his race. Those who have seen him know he is young (32), tall, powerful, coal-black, has a modest, engaging stage presence. Singer Robeson is married. His wife, much smaller, much less dark than he, sings for an audience too, but only sings her husband's praises. Paul Robeson, Negro is partly biography, partly propaganda for the "new," educated Negro, partly a paean of press clippings.

Paul Bustill Robeson was born in Princeton, N. J., where his father was pastor of the Presbyterian Negro Church. Paul was the youngest of eight children. When the family moved to Somerville, N. J., Paul won many an honor in high school for high marks, all-round athletic ability. He was the third Negro to enter Rutgers. "When he graduated in June 1919, he had won his Phi Beta Kappa key, and had been selected by Walter Camp as end for his annual All-American football team. . . . He had won 12 letters. . . . He delivered the Commencement oration; and he was elected to Cap & Skull" (the four seniors "who most truly and fully represented the finest ideals and traditions of Rutgers"). At Columbia Law School, too, he did well. Then, waiting for something to turn up, he got the part of Jim Harris in Eugene O'Neill's play, All God's Chillun Got Wings. Critics liked him.

Actor Robeson played in another O'Neill play. The Emperor Jones; then tried the concert platform. Again he was a great success. He had had no voice training, thought he needed none; but at a concert in Boston a bad cold made his voice "tight and hard and unrecognizable." After that he took lessons. He has been abroad three times: to play in The Voodoo, in The Emperor Jones, to sing "Ol' Man River" in Show Boat. Now he is in London playing in Othello. The Robesons like London, have decided to live there permanently, have taken a house on Hampstead Heath. Fortnight ago U. S. radio-listeners heard Actor Robeson broadcast from London a talk on "How It Feels for an American Negro to Play Othello to an English Audience." Said he: Shakespeare meant Othello to be a "blackamoor;" without the difference in race between Othello and Desdemona the jealousy theme is implausible, the tragedy falls to pieces. Robeson hopes to play Othello in the U. S., thinks he will have the chance next fall. Last month he had another reminder of the U. S. Negroes' handicap in the arts. The Philadelphia Art Alliance rejected, after requesting, a nude statue of Robeson by Sculptor Antonio Salemme (see cut). But the Brooklyn Museum promptly put the piece on public exhibition.

Mrs. Robeson says her husband has a fault: he is lazy. Beyond that she will not go. To a friend in London who suggested someone ought to write Paul's life, Biographer Eslanda admitted she was trying to, had made several attempts already. But, put in Paul: "She thinks I'm a little tin angel with no faults at all, and so of course the book is stupid, uninteresting and untrue."

Biographer Eslanda thinks white people "astonishingly ignorant about Negroes." Says she: "The Negro problem is not so much of a problem as America would have the world believe. The Negro is a problem because he is described as a citizen of the U. S. by the Federal Constitution, and yet in some individual states he is placed in the impossible position of being a full citizen, but enjoying none of the rights of citizenship." Biographer Eslanda is a Harlem girl.

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