Robeson at Rutgers

By Elizabeth Alexander b. 1962 Elizabeth Alexander

Hard to picture, but these Goliath trees

are taller still than Robeson. Outside

vast plate windows in this lecture hall,

I imagine him running down autumn fields,

see his black thighs pumping that machinery

across chalk-painted lines.

He loved the woman

in the lab, Eslanda, who saw order

in swimming circles on inch-wide slides, who

made photographs. I picture her standing

in darkness, led by red light, bathing paper

in broth, extracting images. Did this woman smile

to watch white paper darken, to pull wet

from the chemicals Paul Robeson’s totem face?

Source: The Venus Hottentot (Graywolf Press, 2004)

Biography

Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York, but grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, Clifford Alexander Jr. She holds degrees from Yale, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her PhD. Currently the chair of African American Studies at Yale, Alexander is a highly respected teacher and . . .

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