I Pissed All Over Paul Robeson’s Trousers ©
By Yosef Bar-On
My father shot and killed a Czarist official in 1905. He was
then sixteen years old and a member of a revolutionary socialist party. He was
arrested and sentenced to death. The family was able to gather enough funds for
a bribe by selling almost everything they owned and he was released, luckily for
me of course, and left Russia. He came to America and, except for two trips, one
in which to find and bring back with him a woman to marry who would eventually
become my mother, and the other, to meet his grandchildren, he never left the
United States again.
My father was a short, physically strong man. He was perpetually suntanned and
he was always carefully arranging the few thin strands of hair left to him
across his broad pate, trying to hide his baldness. He was a bit of a dandy
during most of the year. He wore a carefully brushed pearl-grey Homburg and a
business suit but he was always unmistakably a working man. I have a number of
snapshots of him from the twenties and the thirties in which almost invariably
he is well dressed, sporting a cane and striking a pose. Very often on the edge
of the picture is some woman or other, holding his hat or his overcoat. In the
summer however, he seemed to allow himself to be a bit sloppy. One of the
snapshots shows him wearing shorts, a torn T-shirt and a sweat-stained sailor’s
cap. He‘s playing hand-ball with my cousin Phil. He was a hard worker but never
a success and, in spite of the efforts he made to advance himself, and they were
many, he exuded an aura of defeat. I think he thought of himself as a failure.
He remained a working man always, having failed in an attempt to open his own
tailoring shop. The Stock Market, in which my cousin Phil excelled, remained
largely an enigma to him. In spite of his political beliefs he tried to make
himself into a little capitalist and his failure at that is one reason he felt
himself unsuccessful. I also think he blamed himself for the failure of his
marriage. I myself have doubts about that; I doubt if any man could have been
successful with my mother, at least then. I always thought of him as a good man
and a loving father. He read the New York Times and the Morgen Freiheit. When no
one was looking, he would stand in front of the bathroom mirror carefully
enunciating over and over, ‘vegetable soup, vegetable soup.’ But it would always
come out as, ‘wege table.’ He smoked cigars and even today whenever I smell a
cigar, no matter where I am, I’m reminded of him. The depression was
particularly hard on him. From what I gather from family anecdotes, since I
really can’t remember much from that time, I realize that he was unemployed for
years.
He was a highly skilled men’s tailor; what the British call, I believe, a
bespoke tailor. The sort of craftsman who could take a bolt of cloth and your
measurements and make you a suit of clothes that would fit as if you were poured
into it. A rare and expensive talent for which unfortunately, there was little
call during the depression years. He was short, as I said, and he had large
expressive hands with prominent veins, which I’ve inherited. I don’t know what
else I’ve inherited. Once when I was a child, he saw me sewing a button back
onto a shirt of mine. He smiled ruefully when he saw me wrap the thread expertly
around and around the threads to anchor the button properly. He muttered
something about a tailor’s son and I was inordinately proud. Of course now I
know that he would never have wanted me to follow in his footsteps. I haven't.
During the depression years, as hard as they were, I was well dressed. I know
from snapshots of myself from then that I still have among my family papers. In
them I appear as a skinny little boy in well cut clothes, knee-length knickers.
In one picture I am wearing a Mackinaw coat with a perfectly fitted and
intricate zippered hood, which he had designed and sewn. He made all my outer
clothes then. He made them from remnants and bits. I was a small boy; they
didn’t have to be big pieces of cloth and he had the time.
The hardness of those years comes to me now only in bits and pieces of
recollection. I was really too young then to have any direct knowledge or
understanding of what was going on. Some things stand out: My favorite shirt
hanging with the laundry on the fire escape in the freezing winter so that when
I tried to take it off the line I accidentally tore the frozen sleeve. It
actually broke and I burst into tears. The present I received on my seventh
birthday, that I remember well.
It was a mattress, from some welfare agency, the Salvation Army I think. A
simple blue-ticking mattress filled with dusty yet fragrant straw. My father had
to pay a nominal sum for it but even that was difficult for him then. I knew
that and I appreciated the gift. What was so special about a mattress? I slept
on a cot, probably from the same source. It was a surplus U.S. Army cot left
over, I suppose, from the first world war. It was made of canvas and wood and
built to be easily taken apart. When it was opened the canvas was as taut as a
drum. It was comfortable in the summer. The trouble was that in the winter I
would freeze lying on it. No matter how many blankets I piled on top of me, the
cold came up right through that thin canvas and froze my skinny bottom. That
night I fell asleep easily, tucked into a warm bed, sneezing a bit from the dust
and pollen in the mattress but warm throughout.
When I was seven my father took me to Camp Kinderland, which was situated
somewhere in New York state, not far from Poughkeepsie. Together
with the snapshots I mentioned, there are a number of fading five by seven
photographs from then. In one of them we, a bunch of seven and eight year-old
city kids, sit on a long bench in front of the rustic bungalow we lived in. On
both sides of the row are two buxom women in shorts who were in charge of us.
I’m seated near the center next to a really fat little boy. I’m the skinny kid
with the dreamy expression. I look at the photograph and I smile. I had a great
time there, though I don’t remember what I did. I was really skinny; you could
see my collar bones easily. I’m not skinny anymore—It was so long ago!
I even remember the name of one of the two women, the blonde one with the
pig-tails and the athletic thighs who stood on the left. Her name was Sonia and
I think she laughed when I told her my fears about a prayer I must have learned
in school which was terrifying me; “If I should die before I wake, I pray the
Lord my soul to take.” Now I’m not sure if it really was Sonia who relieved my
fears. Maybe it was a schoolteacher, but I certainly remember fighting falling
asleep because I was sure to wake up dead!
On the bottom of the photograph are a few lines in Yiddish in white ink, I
suppose that they were written onto the negative. It says something about
working class city kids enjoying Nature. My Yiddish is poor and the only thing
I’m really sure about in the writing is the date, 1937, written in a European
hand with a crossed seven.
Together with the photographs is a neckerchief, which was once bright red and
had a lot of words in Yiddish stamped around and around on it in gold and black.
It’s completely faded now and the letters are almost illegible. It was just like
the red neckerchiefs worn by Komsomol kids in the Soviet Union. It won’t fit
around my neck anymore. Why have I kept these things? I’m not sure. As I said, I
enjoyed myself there very much. I think that it may have been the first time
that I ever was outside the city and by myself with a lot of kids my own age.
I’m not sure that it was the first time in the country—I do have a vague early
memory from some time or other of playing by myself in a green field being
frightened by a cow or a heifer and running away.
I went to Camp Kinderland two summers in the late Thirties and I have a very
warm feeling about the place. I’m not sure exactly why, but I do remember two
events quite clearly. The first is of a concert held there one sunny afternoon.
The second happened at the end of my second and last summer there when I
contracted pneumonia and had to be taken to a local hospital. I believe that I
was there for a long time but all I really remember are white muslin mosquito
nets and my frightened father and dust motes moving erratically in hazy rays of
afternoon sunlight. I must have been very ill. I lost a term at school and never
came back to Camp Kinderland again.
The concert was something altogether different. It probably took place on a
weekend because there were a lot of parents there. I suppose that the concert
was really for the parents. It surely wouldn’t have interested us! I was in the
youngest age group and we sat up front, right up against the stage. We sat there
expectantly for there was a gala atmosphere and the adults were all excited. I
sat impatiently with my buddies on a long low bench and the stage towered high
above us. There was a lot of colorful bunting and flags on the stage and it was
very hot and sticky. Finally someone, one of the camp staff I suppose, climbed
onto the stage and made a speech. There was a great deal of applause for the
speaker but I think I must have been bored. I couldn’t understand what he was so
excited about. Spain, Spain, that’s all he talked about and he was very excited.
I nudged the kid next to me and we giggled. Every time he mentioned Spain all
the adults applauded and we giggled. I whispered, ‘Spain, Spain!’ into the kid’s
ear and we sniggered. When the man finished his speech, he raised his fist high
above his head and we all did that too. I think that I must have looked quite
silly; a skinny kid with protruding collar bones with a tiny clenched fist
raised high.
Finally he finished and it became very quiet. We looked around, I don’t know
what we expected but suddenly there burst forth a wave of applause from the
audience behind us that quite frightened me. All the adults in the back stood up
and I saw that a couple of the staff were coming towards the stage leading a big
black man.
We didn’t say black then. Nobody said black, they said Negro, carefully
enunciated so as not to say the bad word, Nigger. Or they said colored. But I
looked at that man coming closer, he was huge and he was black alright. I don’t
know if I ever been that close before to one of them. I doubt it. Our family and
all our neighbors were all eastern-European Jewish in origin and in school the
kids were either Jewish or Italian, Calabrese in our neighborhood, to be exact.
There must have been some blacks then, but they don’t come to mind. Later on of
course, there were blacks in the elementary and secondary schools I attended and
I was aware of them and myself and I became uneasy in my own prejudice. All the
while the applause grew and then he was standing there, up right on the edge of
the stage directly above me.
I recall that he wore a dull brown wool double-breasted suit and a tie, which
seemed silly to me in the summer heat. What is clearest in my mind is the memory
of his shoes, which were only about a foot or two above my head. They were
two-toned brown and white wing-tips with leather tassels and they were enormous!
I had never seen such big shoes.
Some woman in a big straw hat came up onto the stage and sat down at the piano
just behind him and started to play something or other. Everybody stopped
applauding and they all sat down. The man smiled, bowed once to the audience,
clasped his hands at chest height and then he began to sing.
I must say something about that singing. I don’t know what he was singing or
even what kind of songs they were but I never had heard anything quite like it
and rarely since then have I heard so deep and expressive a voice. It‘s
difficult now for me to gauge how much that voice affected my innocent ears. It
was a revelation. His voice had a timbre, a resonance, a—I’m using words that
can only approximate what I was experiencing. Here I sat on a bench and there
right above me was one of the biggest men I’d ever encountered, black as the
night, he seemed and he sang to a large audience, adults and kids, all seated
under the trees and his voice thundered through me. When his voice went lower
and deeper I could feel, I most definitely could feel the bench under me
shaking. I glanced at my neighbor but he was looking up, open-mouthed and
glassy-eyed. The man stopped singing and stepped back and bowed. Behind me the
audience went wild, up on their feet, bravoes, cheers, whistles and loud
applause. I just sat overwhelmed.
I can’t say that is was because of the singing. What could I have known about
singing then? I think that it was the elemental force that that man expressed.
Big and black and possessed of a deep devilish voice, he represented a passion
I’d never faced, never even imagined existed.
Gradually the applause faded away, the audience sat down again and the man
stepped up to the front of the stage, but this time he began to speak. I
listened carefully but I couldn’t grasp what he was talking about. His speaking
voice was deep too, and warm and the word Spain was scattered throughout
whatever he was saying, but this time we didn’t giggle. Now again the lady in
the straw hat played a chord, everybody became quiet and he began singing again.
This time it was a soft song, maybe a lullaby. He sang almost in a whisper but
everybody was quiet so every word was clear. It was in some foreign language. I
couldn’t understand the words but I saw Sonia, who was standing at the end of my
bench, and she had tears in her eyes.
Someone put a chair on the stage, a kitchen chair and the singer stood in front
of it and he said, I remember every word now: ‘This is a song for the children
of this world!’ Again there was a lot of cheering and applause and then he bent
down, towards me. He smiled at me, I looked around but it was at me that he was
smiling. He reached out and down with those huge black hands, plucking me
effortlessly right off the bench and he sat down on the kitchen chair, planting
me on his lap.
I can’t blame myself for what happened, although for years I was terribly
ashamed of what I did. When I got older it became a useful anecdote to tell
people and even to try to impress girls with. The truth is that I was absolutely
terrified then. You can picture it. There I was; high above my own small world,
everyone staring at me, seated on a huge lap, held by big black foreign hands
that were probably four times the size of my own. I was powerless, held by
something, someone far beyond my understanding. My father, who had been my
tower, was far away on the edge of the crowd. I could barely make out his round
bald head. I realized suddenly that this big black man was bigger than my
father, stronger than my father and nothing could be done for me. I was trapped.
I didn’t cry but no credit is due to me for that. I was like a rabbit transfixed
on the light beams of an onrushing car. I was just paralyzed with fear and all
the while I could hear the applause. He held me easily; I didn’t squirm or try
to get down. Then he began to sing.
When he sang before, as close to me as he had been, and there had been only a
couple of yards between us, we were after all, quite separate. He had been up on
the stage; I had been in the audience. Now I was on his lap and his voice went
right through me like a knife. I was like a sounding board. The man’s voice was
loud and deep and passionate. I shook all over and I wet my pants and pissed all
over Paul Robeson’s trousers.
Of course I didn’t know at the time who the man was. But many years later I saw
him in “The Emperor Jones.” I can’t remember if it was at a concert or in the
movie version. Most probably it was the movie. When he began to sing, and I
again heard that voice, it all suddenly came back to me and I realized whose
trousers I had wet. My God, how ashamed I was! It was funny really, it was so
many years since that little incident and here I was in a movie house, a grown
man myself, ashamed almost to tears.
He didn’t stop singing and I don’t think that many people were aware of what had
transpired. He, after all, was a professional. He finished the song and got up
and deposited me in the kitchen chair. Luckily his trousers were dark so no
stains were visible. He looked at me, smiled ruefully and then he said, so
quietly that no one could hear him but me, ‘It’s alright Sonny. Don’t let it
bother you.’ Then he patted me once on the head with his big gentle black hand.
I looked at him and just gulped. What could I say?
The End
December 1991 – January 1992