Eslanda (BOOK REVIEW)
Eslanda
The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson
by Barbara Ransby
Yale
University
Press
Hardcover, $35.00
434 pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 978-0-300-12434-7
Book
Review by Kam Williams
“At
a time when most Black women suffered painfully circumscribed lives, Eslanda
Robeson enjoyed enormous mobility... For most of her life, Essie was a
traveler, both literally and metaphorically.
She
transcended class and cultural boundaries and crossed international borders;
she conversed in multiple languages and traveled to nearly every corner of the
globe. Essie Robeson’s story is about one woman’s journey across the vast and
volatile landscape of 20th Century world politics and culture…
But
it is not a singular story. It is a story of a marriage and a partnership that
was fraught with complications, but which ultimately endured.”
--
Excerpted from the Introduction (pg. 1)
Born in Washington, D.C.
in 1896, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson was a descendant of slaves and Sephardic
Jews. Although there were enormous barriers encountered by African-Americans during
the early 20th Century, she somehow managed to gain admission to an
Ivy League school, Columbia
University, at a time
when most black women worked as domestics and most black males had to settle
for menial labor.
After earning
a B.S. degree, Essie landed a job as a chemist at a Columbia Presbyterian
Hospital. In 1919, while
still living in New York City,
everything changed the day she met Paul Robeson, who was then a law student at
NYU. The two fell madly in love, married a couple of years later and eventually
had a child together.
Blessed
with a powerful, bass-baritone singing voice, Paul opted to pursue an
entertainment career over the practice of law, with Essie serving as his
business manager. Everyone knows that he went on to become an international
icon, first as an entertainer, then as a blacklisted civil rights advocate.
However,
his wife was every bit as interesting, and her compelling life story is the
subject of this fascinating biography by Barbara Ransby. For, despite the
trials and tribulations of a rocky marriage and of having Paul, Jr. to raise, Essie
remained a fiercely-independent trailblazer in her own right, whether attending
graduate school, writing books, or railing against racism, sexism and
colonialism.
Above all,
Eslanda Robeson was an outspoken peace pilgrim with an enviable, global network
of friends and supporters, even if she would become a pariah in the United States
because of being an outspoken advocate of progressive politics. This fact is
reflected in the book’s 30+ pages of photographs, in which we find her in the
company of such luminaries as Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Dr. Martin Luther
King, novelist Pearl Buck, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, playwright
Eugene O’Neill, Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah and poet Langston Hughes.
A poignant
portrait of a peripatetic, human rights activist willing to challenge
oppression of any form wherever she could find it.
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