Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Read online

  Later that month his flax crop wilted. Then the land was assaulted by millions of army worms. Micheaux returned to Gregory County to harvest his winter wheat, which had been helped by the June rain, but his acres of flax appeared a “brown, sickly-looking mess.” He had borrowed his limit, and when he brought his weak harvest of wheat to market, it fell pitifully short of his expenses.

  Before the drought, land near Gregory had sold for as high as a hundred dollars an acre, and lots a few miles away routinely sold for fifty to eighty. Now the merchants were pressured by the wholesale houses, the speculators by loan companies, and everyone felt the tightening squeeze of the banks. “No one wanted to buy,” wrote Micheaux. “Everyone wanted to sell.”

  The adversity was worse in Tripp County, which had opened “when prosperity was at its zenith,” in Micheaux’s words, its streets filled with “money-mad” people buying and spending without caution. Now, homesteaders old and new deserted in droves. Landholders simply up and abandoned their claims, heading back east in a steady stream of horses, wagons, and rickety hacks, their spirits vanquished. One day, as Micheaux headed north across the White River to visit neighbors, he counted forty-seven houses along his route; all but one was abandoned.

  A born pragmatist, Micheaux was also an incurable optimist, not a quitter. He rejoiced when a torrential rain fell late in the summer, filling the creeks and draws, though it was too late to make a difference. And in the fall he channeled his mingled hope and bitterness into a front-page article for the Chicago Defender, touting new Rosebud lands opening up in Tripp County. The article was headlined:

  COLORED AMERICANS TOO SLOW,

  To Take Advantage of Great Land Opportunities

  Given Free by the Government—

  Jews, Germans, Swedes, Arabs, Southern Whites and Irish

  Were All On Hand to Get Land—

  Negroes Should Not Wait for Cities to be Built, Then Try

  TO GET ALL PORTERS’ JOBS;

  In Sight—White Race Will Run You Off Your Feet

  If You Fail to Get and Own Land—

  South Not the Only Place for You—

  Wherever Flag Floats is the Place for Race—

  Only Seven Took Advantage of Free Land

  and All Get 160 Acres—

  Great Praise is Given Chicago Defender.

  This time bylining from Witten, Micheaux again criticized “colored Americans” who “do not take the chance advantage that these openings afford, as do the whites.” Once more, he noted the paucity of Negroes on Rosebud homesteads. “There can be but one particular excuse,” he wrote, “and that is the personal bravery that more do not take advantage of an opportunity that only comes once.”

  Micheaux reeled off statistics to prove his points (“…everyone that came here five to eight years ago owns farms that are worth from five to ten times their valuation in 1904…”), and perhaps to impress readers with his status as a newly appointed “Government Crop Expert for Rosebud County.”*

  One particular colored American came in for especially barbed criticism. Assessing the disappointing initiative of “our people,” Micheaux wrote, “I have always felt that the colored people have been held back largely by some of our social demagogues.” For example, Micheaux wrote, there was a certain “presiding elder in the Methodist conference,” who once had seemed “very explicit in his determination to register for these lands, and according to his advice he was coming this month to register with a great following. The opening closes today. I took pains to notify this elder through information, so that he must be aware. This was last spring when he was going to do this, but I haven’t heard nor seen anything of him and his following. It’s not the individual, but it’s the cause that follow[s] such pretensions that is detrimental to our young people.”

  Not long before, Micheaux had bundled up the letters he had received from friends of the McCracken family, expressing support for him—along with adverse information and opinions about the Reverend—and mailed them off to his father-in-law. Now he had taken an even bolder step, clearly alluding to the Reverend McCracken as a “social demagogue” in a newspaper read widely by black people not only in Chicago and Illinois, but throughout the nation.

  It was a year of unfortunate coincidences, Micheaux said later. The worst summer drought in two decades was followed by the harshest winter in memory, with the heaviest snows, which led to calamitous flooding and freezing. His capital exhausted, Micheaux languished in Orlean’s “lonely claim-house” during the winter, going over and over in his mind everything calamitous that had happened to him: the courtship, the marriage, the stillborn baby, his wife’s desertion.

  Fishing and hunting were his only distractions. “I lived in a sort of stupor,” he later wrote, “and my very existence seemed to be a dreadful nightmare. I would at times rouse myself, pinch the flesh, and move about, to see if it was my real self; and would try to shake off the loneliness which completely enveloped me. My head ached and my heart was wrung with agony.”

  As the days of anguish passed, Micheaux sought “consolation in hope” and resolved to make one last stab at a rapprochement with Orlean, when the winter snows finally melted.

  At Easter time, he boarded a train to Chicago and checked into the Keystone Hotel in the heart of the Black Belt. Reverend McCracken was in town, so Micheaux was obliged to conspire with family friends to lure Orlean over to a neighbor’s house, where he could talk to her outside the presence of the potentate. When Orlean arrived at the neighbor’s house, looking more “fleshy” than the last time he saw her, in Micheaux’s words, his wife uttered a gasp of surprise and “sank weakly into a chair.”

  Micheaux published three accounts of what happened next, each more sensational than the last. But in the first one, The Conquest, he mentioned buying tickets to see Robert Mantell in Richelieu, a real actor and stage play performed in Chicago at Easter 1912. That, plus the fact that the Illinois presidential primary fell on the Tuesday after Easter—and Micheaux was rooting for Teddy Roosevelt—confirms the time frame.

  Though at first she was taken aback at her husband’s presence, Orlean warmed up to Micheaux, and as ever they talked easily. After a while she wanted to phone her father and tell him that her husband had come from South Dakota to see her. Micheaux tried in vain to talk her out of it. When he heard his father-in-law’s despised voice boom out of the receiver (“Why don’t you bring him to the house?”), Micheaux reacted irrationally. Grabbing the phone, he started shouting at Orlean’s father, blaming the Reverend McCracken for everything that had happened, accusing him of ruining his life.

  In all three versions of this incident, what followed was tangled and chaotic. “What passed after that I do not clearly remember,” Micheaux explained in The Conquest, “but I have read lots of instances of where people lost their heads, where, if they would have had presence of mind, they might have saved their army, won some great victory or done something else as notorious, but in this I may be classed as one of the unfortunates who simply lost his head.”

  All he could remember was shouting and shouting into the receiver, as his allies who lived in the house tried to pull him away from the phone, and his wife “in a state of terror” turned on him with a vengeance.

  “The words I cannot, to this day, believe, but I had become calm and now pleaded with her, on my knees, and with tears; but her eyes saw me not, and her ears seemed deaf to entreaty. She raved like a crazy woman and declared she hated me.”

  In The Homesteader, the Orlean character kicks and pummels Oscar while he is down on his knees. In The Wind from Nowhere, his third and final fictionalized account of the Rosebud years, the climax is melodramatic; they struggle over a gun, and he is accidentally shot.

  How many minutes passed is uncertain, but the McCrackens lived very close by and soon enough the Reverend raced in the door. Orlean flew into his arms, sobbing. The Elder turned his eyes on Micheaux—“the eyes of a pig, expressionless”—and swept his daughter outside.<
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  “The next moment the door closed softly behind them. That was the last time I saw my wife.”

  Micheaux took the train back to South Dakota, feeling empty and dead inside. Indeed, he understood that part of him was dead. Writing of his alter ego Jean Baptiste in The Homesteader, Micheaux said, “In the days that followed the real Jean Baptiste died and another came to live in his place.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1912–1914 DARK DAYS

  These were “dark days” of solitude, despair, and disgrace, Micheaux wrote later. The drought continued erratically, the hot winds blew incessantly, and millions of grasshoppers coated the prairie. The harvest that year would be dismal. Micheaux had lost the heart for homesteading; he knew that his temporary payments were only staving off foreclosure.

  Living morosely on his wife’s claim during the dark summer of 1912, Micheaux found his principal solace in books. He prided himself on the breadth of his reading, and worked to keep up with works of literary merit and bestsellers alike. Two recent novels nurtured and inspired him: Martin Eden and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

  He identified passionately with the title character of Martin Eden, Jack London’s semi-autobiographical account, first published in 1909, of a San Francisco seaman who dreams of literary accomplishment. Micheaux saw his own life mirrored in the character’s poverty and hardship, his struggle to educate and express himself, his youthful idealism turned sour, his failures with women. Though London’s story didn’t satisfy Micheaux’s usual taste for happy resolution, the homesteader was feeling low, and he couldn’t argue with Martin Eden’s suicide in the final pages.

  Although The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is considered a literary landmark today, when it was published in 1912 its author chose to remain anonymous, and at first it was little known outside of African-American circles.* The novel is narrated by the son of a light-skinned black woman and a white Southern gentleman. But the father has shirked his illegitimate child’s upbringing. Growing up in Connecticut, aloof from other black people, the boy doesn’t realize he is “colored” until he encounters prejudice in school. Musically gifted, the narrator heads to college in the South, but before enrolling he is robbed, a traumatic event that spurs him to strike out on his own. He travels to Florida, New York, and (as the paid companion of a wealthy white patron) Europe before returning to New York to write ambitious classical music voicing African-American themes. At one point he witnesses a lynching, but he is so light-skinned himself that he “passes” everywhere as an “invisible Negro.” By the end, though he has completely adopted the guise of a successful white man, the “ex-colored man” feels deeply conflicted.

  Both Martin Eden and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man affected Micheaux profoundly. His solitary, memorable adventure on the Rosebud struck him as worthy of a novel like London’s; and the tragic “memoir” of “passing”—a subject already of keen interest to him, considering his failed romance with the white Scottish neighbor—had an unassuming, confessional writing style that he might emulate. After he was finished with his copy of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, he sent it to his estranged wife, Orlean, in Chicago or, perhaps, as he suggests in one of his novels—to the blonde Scottish maiden.

  Gradually, as he devoured these and other books—not just reading, but “studying every detail of construction, and learning a great deal as to style and effect”—Micheaux got the radical notion that he might write down his own life story in the form of a quasi-autobiographical novel.

  “In all his life he had been a thinker, a practical thinker—a prolific thinker,” Micheaux wrote of the character Jean Baptiste, who served as his alter ego in his third novel, The Homesteader. “Moreover, a great reader into the bargain. So the thought that struck him now, was writing. Perhaps he could write. If so, then what would he write? So in the days that followed, gradually a plot formed in his mind.”

  He bought a cheap, thick legal tablet, a handful of pencils, and sat at a small table on his wife’s claim. The skeleton of the plot was obvious: His life struggles. “Of writing he knew little and the art of composition appeared very difficult,” according to The Homesteader. “But of thought, this he had aplenty. Well, after all, that was the most essential. If one has thoughts to express, it is possible to learn very soon some method of construction.”

  Inspired by Martin Eden’s daily writing regimen in London’s story, Micheaux sat down on the first day and wrote ten thousand words.* The second day, he “reversed the tablet and wrote ten thousand more” (or so he claimed in The Homesteader). “In the next two days he rewrote the twenty thousand, and on the fifth day he tore it into shreds and threw it to the winds.”

  Having discovered that he had “no difficulty in saying something,” Micheaux found that “the greatest difficulty he encountered was that he thought faster than he could write.” He couldn’t slow down his thinking, so he’d often break off “right in the middle of a sentence to relate an incident that would occur to him.” This was a lifelong tendency in his novels and films, whose main stories were often interrupted with digressions, social observations and data, flashbacks (even flashbacks within flashbacks)—tactics that could be lively and effective, but also tedious and confusing.

  Throughout the autumn of 1912 Micheaux labored at “his difficult task.” He was making steady progress as winter arrived and the vicious winds started to blow. Chicago now seemed a distant dream. By December, the speed demon had nearly completed a first draft of his novel, but it needed editorial polish. When Micheaux showed his two hundred handwritten pages to a friend, the friend waved off the challenge. Instead Micheaux found a lawyer named R.H. Molitor in Winner who was willing “to rearrange his scribbled thoughts,” and he struck a bargain with the lawyer for seventy-five dollars’ worth of editing. The lawyer and his wife agreed to edit, correct, and improve the writing, while also vetting the book—advising slight name changes to avoid legal repercussions, for example. By his own account, Molitor’s work may have gone even further. “I personally wrote the Chapter V,” the lawyer later asserted, inscribing his claim on an original edition of The Conquest, “which the author accepted and incorporated in this book.”

  A self-taught novelist who never graduated from high school, Micheaux harbored lifelong insecurities as a writer, and over the years he did hire ghost collaborators. As Micheaux scholar J. Ronald Green has pointed out, however, the chapter of The Conquest that Molitor claimed to have “personally” written concerned Micheaux’s real-life stint as a Pullman porter; one way or another, even this improved material was his story, his life. The lawyer/editor’s inscription went on to note that ultimately he’d been forced to sue Micheaux for his seventy-five dollars, and that Micheaux “resisted so fiercely—and tried to evade the debt by absconding—A statute in So. Dak. made it possible for me to have him jailed for so doing. Only then did…I collect.”

  It may not have been Micheaux’s first brush with lawyers, courts, or jail, and it certainly wasn’t his last.

  Over the holidays, a woman in a nearby town typed the manuscript out for Micheaux, making additional refinements in the process. Friends and neighbors spread the amazing news: The “colored homesteader” had written a book!

  By December 12, 1912, the local Dallas News was reporting that Micheaux had submitted his “serial story” to the Saturday Evening Post, and that the McClury Publishing Company of Chicago soon would publish it in book form. “Oscar, accept our congratulations,” enthused the newspaper. “We know that your story will be interesting and will assist in the efforts we are making to boost the Rosebud and tell the world of her unqualified advantages.”

  The bulletin about the Saturday Evening Post (“the editors of the publication are now reediting the works”) was prematurely optimistic or, possibly, Micheaux’s first deliberate bit of false publicity. In any case, securing publication for the book wasn’t quite so easy.

  Micheaux did send the manuscript to a Chicago publisher, and
sat back to watch the mail for the thin envelope of acceptance Martin Eden described in London’s book, as opposed to a bulky package returning all the pages. The mail brought only bulky rejections. He tried writing a few short stories, hoping these would help him break into print, but only garnered more rejections.

  Soon, however, two disparate acquaintances steered him in another direction.

  One was a white doctor, a Chicago South Sider who had been part of the U. G. Dailey circle at Northwestern. The doctor’s father, John Hamilcar Hollister—an eminent physician and, in his time, ardent abolitionist—had just self-published his autobiography, Micheaux learned. Another Micheaux contact, Roy M. Harrop—then kicking around Gregory County, later a vice-presidential candidate for the People’s Progressive Party in 1924*—said he knew something about self-publication. Harrop pointed Micheaux toward an established printing, lithography, and bookbinding firm in Lincoln, Nebraska, that would manufacture his novel for a price.

  Micheaux began an encouraging correspondence with this company, the Woodruff Bank Note Co. on Q Street in Lincoln. With his resources at an all-time low, however, he had to borrow pocket money from a friend to pay his train fare to the Jackson brothers’ main bank in Dallas. Ernest was out of town, but his brother, bank vice president Graydon Jackson, was just as sympathetic and agreed to underwrite a trip to Lincoln. With a fifty-dollar loan in hand, Micheaux bought a new suit and two days later presented himself to his prospective publishers. “They were rather surprised when they saw that he was an Ethiopian,” he wrote of the occasion in The Homesteader.