Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 12

  After some negotiation, the Woodruff Company agreed to print one thousand copies of Micheaux’s novel at seventy-five cents per copy, one third of the amount to be paid upfront, before the manuscript went to press.

  “The book is entitled ‘The Conquest’ and is a novel story of the development of the Rosebud Country,” Micheaux grandly announced in his March 20, 1913, letter from Lincoln to the Gregory Times Advocate. That same week, local newspapers posted an official foreclosure notice on Micheaux’s original homestead near Gregory. The amount due on the mortgage was $1,888.27. Except for the site farmed by his sister Olive, whose husband helped save it from creditors, all of Micheaux’s land would eventually be foreclosed.

  After concluding his arrangements with the printing firm, Micheaux returned to South Dakota. To bankroll his initial press run, he went to work collecting advance sales for his as-yet-unpublished novel—a strategy he would return to some years later for his underfinanced motion picture projects.

  In the first week of April 1913, he was in Gregory, handing out dummy copies of Chapter One and taking advance orders from friends and neighbors for $1.50 per book (accruing seventy-five cents profit on each copy sold). The local paper reported that Micheaux was “meeting with great success,” and the editors (who of course knew him personally) said they could “heartily recommend it as an interesting story if the first chapter is any criteria.” Micheaux collected 142 orders in Gregory and Dallas on his first day of pitching the book; in Winner he tallied 153. Within two weeks, Micheaux could boast fifteen hundred orders, enough to start the printing with two runs.

  A month later he was back in Gregory flourishing “a few advance copies” of The Conquest, which he had subtitled “The Story of a Negro Pioneer.” The novel was 311 pages, bound in cloth, with sixteen full-page illustrations by “Negro artist” William McKnight Farrow, a well-known Chicagoan who taught at the Art Institute. Though Micheaux dedicated the book to Booker T. Washington, he took no credit himself; following the example of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the cover said only that the novel was written “by a Negro Pioneer.”

  “The book has had a wonderful [advance] sale,” enthused the Gregory Times Advocate, “and is pronounced by those who have read it as being an excellent story.”

  Later, Micheaux would explain that he left his name off The Conquest because “identifying himself as the author of a book he was trying to sell would diminish its value.” After all, his name meant little outside of Chicago and Rosebud country, and he was hoping to sell the book throughout black and (he hoped) white America. Omitting his name also evoked the mystique of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, though most of the book’s initial sales went to friends and neighbors in South Dakota, where Micheaux’s authorship was taken for granted and widely confirmed in the local press.

  “My folks knew him and liked him,” recalled Merrit Hull, the son of a homesteader, in a letter to a Western journal fifty years later. “My mother read the book out loud. My parents commented on it at times as they read it.”

  And there was much to comment upon. The Conquest was filled with local references, which Rosebud residents savored. Even today, contemporary historians consider it one of the best eyewitness accounts of the early twentieth century land boom in South Dakota, with its feuds among Gregory County and Tripp County towns over train routes, county governance, and other commercial bragging rights. Micheaux took pains to ensure the authenticity of his story, sketching in local celebrities, from notorious outlaws to town drunks. Names were usually disguised, but sometimes barely.

  Frank, Ernest, and Graydon Jackson, the brothers whose bank helped underwrite the book’s publication, are “the Nicholsons” in The Conquest. The Jacksons undoubtedly bought a stack of copies for themselves, for the swaggering brothers were treated at length—colorfully, warmly, even heroically.

  Yet there was also a gripping personal drama in the midst of the Rosebud history. Micheaux’s account of his originally fumbling experience as a homesteader was honest and vivid. The white South Dakota readers of the first printings of The Conquest were undoubtedly taken aback by the candid ruminations of “the only colored homesteader” among them: his account of his abortive love affair with a white farmer’s daughter, his search for a One True Woman, and his marriage to an ideal lady of his own race, whose father turns out to be a monster. They might have been surprised to find themselves not only immersed in his story, but moved, especially by its heartbreaking ending, when the man they all knew, their friend and neighbor “Oscar Devereaux,” is utterly rejected by “Orlean McCraline.”

  The book’s final, painful line: “That was the last time I saw my wife.”

  As The Conquest made clear, Micheaux was still separated from Orlean, still distraught over their rift and unsure whether the relationship might ever be repaired. Later he would describe being impressed by a sermon he heard during a Catholic service in Gregory, in which the pastor denounced the iniquities of divorce. Micheaux, too, considered himself an “enemy of divorce.”

  Early in 1913, the challenge against his wife’s land resurfaced. Though the case initially had been settled in her favor, it was referred to an appeals board in Washington, D.C. Then, as the summer began, Micheaux received startling news from the lawyer who represented him in the D.C. hearing: The Tripp County banker contesting Orlean’s claim had undertaken a secret trip to Chicago, offering to purchase the farm from the Reverend McCracken. Micheaux had spent “$2,500 for the land and $500 attorney’s fees for winning it” in the courts, in his words, yet now Micheaux found out his wife’s father had sold it to the rival banker for a mere $300.

  The banker got the idea, Micheaux’s lawyer explained, from reading The Conquest!

  This was the final crushing blow to Micheaux’s marriage. He was forced by the sale of Orlean’s land to vacate the Tripp County claim he himself had selected and farmed and done so much to build into a home. Infuriated, he publicly vowed legal action against his father-in-law, announcing a $10,000 lawsuit for “alienating of his wife’s affections” in the July 31, 1913, edition of the Gregory Times Advocate. Interestingly, as Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor points out in her biography of Micheaux, “it is the only local article uncovered to date that identifies him as a Negro”—as though reading The Conquest had decisively underscored this point among the local populace.

  “An hour later his grip was packed,” Micheaux wrote of himself in The Homesteader. “He went that afternoon back to Tripp County. His three hundred acres of wheat had failed, so he was unencumbered. He returned to Winner, and the next morning boarded a train for Chicago.”

  In Chicago, Micheaux engaged James W. White, “a Negro attorney with offices in the Loop district,” who filed a claim against the Elder. There was special satisfaction in having Reverend McCracken served with papers in Micheaux’s old hometown of Metropolis, where McCracken happened to be visiting. Micheaux advised the sheriff that Orlean’s father could probably be found at the local Odd Fellows Hall, “where Negroes might be easily found,” in Micheaux’s words.

  The Chicago Defender gleefully reported the lawsuit as a front-page story on August 2, 1913. Below the headline (REV. M’CRACKEN SUED FOR $10,000) flowed a stack of bemused subheads, including, “LOCHINVAR OF THE WEST MUST RIDE THE LAW FOR THE WIFE’S AFFECTIONS” and “Rancher Becomes Angry—Writes a Book, Whose Ad Appears on Another Page, Giving Full Particulars of His Love Affairs.”

  Flabbergasted and humiliated, McCracken promptly hired his own lawyer—a white one. Micheaux became very friendly with James White, and took pleasure in staying with his own attorney in White’s house on Vernon Avenue in the Black Belt, just a couple of blocks away from the McCracken residence. Micheaux never said if he glimpsed his wife Orlean again, but he gave the evil eye to the Elder whenever they crossed paths.

  “Whose ad appears on another page”: Micheaux was determined to reap the rewards of the disaster, placing ads for The Conquest (still advertised as “by a Negro pionee
r”) in the same newspapers carrying news of the lawsuit. His litigation became the first instance of a cunning pattern in his career: whenever possible, Micheaux exploited current events, including his own scandals and misfortunes, as marketing opportunities. Everywhere he went in the Black Belt, the homesteader was hallooed and clapped on the shoulder. He caught up with the latest revues and plays, and was among the packed audiences enjoying a new phenomenon at the Grand and States theaters. Here, in the fall of 1913, were shown some of the earliest all-colored two-reel comedies produced by a “race man,” William Foster, a member of the old Pekin Theatre group.

  For the first time, black audiences had the opportunity to watch motion pictures that reflected their culture, their lives, their idea of entertainment. When these earliest “race pictures” were shown, according to the Chicago Defender, it was like a revolution breaking out: “Patrons jumped up and shouted, some laughed so loud that ushers had to silence them.”

  Micheaux didn’t extract quite as much fun from his lawsuit. The case was heard and settled in mid-September, and the final disposition is unclear from the surviving records. But McCracken wasn’t worth $10,000, as Micheaux well knew, and a scribbled note on one document in the case file indicates that the suit was settled for $300, the amount of money McCracken had received for the deed to Orlean’s land.

  To Micheaux, the suit had been a matter of honor, not money. “I do not care for the financial loss I have sustained,” he told the Defender. Ever the memoirist, he later incorporated the litigation into The Homesteader—his rewrite of The Conquest—even identifying by name the actual banker in Tripp County, Eugene Crook, who had precipitated his betrayal. He also wrote in The Homesteader that the Chicago A.M.E. bishops were so upset by the negative publicity and gossip concerning the Reverend McCracken’s shabby treatment of Micheaux, that the Elder’s manifest ambitions for rising in the church hierarchy were ruined. That was victory enough.

  Out of his days of despair, Micheaux had re-created himself, and set about forging a new destiny. As often happened in his career, touching bottom only spurred him to greater effort and higher ambition. Now he felt renewed, reborn as an author, and even as an author, he was a man of action.

  Though his land still needed farming, and there were mortgages to be straightened out with the banks, it’s unclear whether he ever returned to the Rosebud country for any length of time. After eight years as a homesteader, in mid-1913 Micheaux began a long period of itinerancy. Starting in the Midwest and then widening his travels to the East and South, he shuttled between major towns and cities, selling The Conquest.

  Outside South Dakota, the challenges multiplied. “He did not find his new field of endeavor so profitable,” Micheaux wrote of himself in The Homesteader, “when he began to work among strangers.” At first Micheaux tried to hand The Conquest over to established traveling salesmen, especially ones with experience selling hair goods or complexion creams in Negro neighborhoods. But he was discouraged by the shipping logistics and the high commissions the salesmen demanded. So Micheaux decided to set up his own sales network, hiring agents in different cities, and—though most of the business would be done by mail order, or door-to-door—making arrangements wherever possible for individual shops, bookstores, and libraries to carry his book.

  He began by visiting newspaper offices in Des Moines, Sioux City, Omaha, Lincoln, and other cities whose proximity to the Rosebud ensured the editors’ curiosity. He coaxed news items and reviews from papers, coming away with a handful of glowing notices. (Sample from the Des Moines Register and Leader: “An unpretentious narrative and should prove an inspiration to young men, both white and black.”)

  Armed with these snippets of acclaim, Micheaux shaped his publicity for more distant places. By August 1913 he was already running advertisements for the third printing of The Conquest in many black newspapers besides the Chicago Defender. After the McCracken lawsuit was settled, Micheaux struck out for Detroit, Michigan; Dayton, Cleveland, and Cincinnati in Ohio; New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia on the East Coast; and Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans in the Deep South. In his second novel, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races, Micheaux recounts some of this time he spent on the road, roughly from late 1913 into the summer of 1915, hawking copies of The Conquest (called “The Tempest” in The Forged Note).

  “The distribution and sales operation he organized in the course of the trip was important to his later success in marketing his films,” according to Micheaux scholar J. Ronald Green, “and the second novel is worth reading for that information alone.”

  Most of The Forged Note took place in the South. The central figure is traveling salesman Sidney Wyeth, a Micheaux alter ego who doesn’t admit to having written the book he is selling. Wyeth is altogether a more guarded personality, more of a watcher and listener, than Oscar Devereaux in The Conquest. During his sales trips Wyeth comes into contact with all types of humanity—mostly black people, though he has Jim Crow–tainted encounters with the white world that include a trumped-up arrest and appearance in an Atlanta courtroom.

  Micheaux’s second novel is more episodic and self-consciously literary than his first. Once again, the story is full of his pungent social observations and political opinions. Of course, Booker T. Washington is praised, but Washington died in 1915, and by the time he finished his second book (ironically, considering his arguments with Reverend McCracken), Micheaux had moved on politically to embrace other views. (It could be said that his politics were as catholic as his interests in entertainment.) In The Forged Note, in fact, Micheaux would use Wyeth’s voice to extol the militant W. E. B. DuBois, who had risen to eclipse Washington as the master “propagandist for his race,” in the words of historian David Levering Lewis. At one point in the story Wyeth cites DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk as “the only book in sociology that stands out as a mark of Negro literature,” and recommends the journal DuBois edited (The Crisis, disguised as “The Climax” in Micheaux’s novel) as “the only magazine edited by, and in the interest of this race.”

  Once again, Micheaux may well have enlisted ghost collaborators on The Forged Note; the language is a departure from the first book—rife with “forthwiths,” “betooks,” and “thithers,” as well as long stretches of “Negro dialect.” Like The Conquest, however, The Forged Note was also based on the reality of Micheaux’s experiences, and its real-life allusions were unmistakable. Examining the section of the novel that takes place in “Attalia”—Micheaux’s fictionalized Atlanta—urban historian Dana F. White has documented a correlation “between ‘fictional’ and ‘factual’ characters, places and events” that is as “relatively straightforward” as the Metropolis, Rosebud, and Chicago parallels in The Conquest. Micheaux plays word games with names and places, but readers familiar with Atlanta can pick out real streets, neighborhoods, and landmark buildings, as well as thinly disguised portraits of well-known newspaper editors, businessmen, preachers, lawyers, and judges of the era.

  One way to date Micheaux’s actual stay in Atlanta, which covered several weeks if not months, concerns his fascination with a notorious crime that occurred in the city on Saturday, April 26, 1913, which was Confederate Memorial Day. A thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Phagan went to the National Pencil Factory on that day to pick up her wages. Phagan, who had quit school at age ten for her first job at a textile mill, was employed by the factory to operate a machine that inserted rubber into the metal tips of pencils. She never returned home, and at 3:30 A.M. on the following Sunday she was found strangled, and possibly raped, at the rear of the factory basement. At first the main suspect was a black night watchman, but suspicion switched to Leo Frank, the superintendent and part-owner of the factory. Phagan was white, Frank was Jewish, and it soon developed that the main witness against Frank, a man claiming to be his unwilling accomplice, was another black man, James Conley, a factory sweeper.

  Jews were an abstraction to Micheaux, a child of southern Illinois who’
d spent his early adult years homesteading in South Dakota.* But he’d also spent time in Chicago and roaming the country by train, of course, and during those years he noticed that Jews were often the chief lenders and landlords and businessmen in America’s Black Belts. Among the businesses they owned were major theater chains in black neighborhoods. He could name some Jews who were important benefactors of black communities, people like Julius Rosenwald, a clothier who became president of Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and then devoted himself to funding hundreds of YMCAs and thousands of “colored schools” in the South. In The Forged Note Micheaux wrote appreciatively about such “northern philanthropists,” that is, north of the Deep South.

  Still, to Micheaux it sometimes seemed that the Jews thrived mysteriously. When he thought “deeply into the conditions of his [own] race, who protested loudly that they were being held down,” as he wrote later, he “compared them with the Jew—went away back to thousands of years before. Out of the past he could not solve it…

  “All had begun together. The Jew was hated, but was a merchant enjoying a large portion of the world commerce and success. The Negro was disliked because of his black skin—and sometimes seemingly for daring to be human.”

  For a man transfixed by such an “intricate, delicate subject” as the relative fates of Negroes and Jews, the drama and subtext of the Leo Frank trial, which opened in July 1913, was mesmerizing, challenging his own prejudices and race loyalty. Indeed, the spectacle of a lowly black man testifying against a powerful Jew in a section of the South suffused with racism and anti-Semitism riveted much of the nation.

  The factory sweeper Conley admitted to writing the cryptic, incriminating notes found near the slain thirteen-year-old, but said he did so—and helped dispose of the body—at the behest of Frank, the true killer. At times in his public appearances, Conley appeared quick-witted; other times he adopted the guise of “a mumbling, subliterate Rastus,” in the words of Steve Oney in his authoritative book And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. But the black factory sweeper’s testimony was vital to the prosecution, whose evidence against Frank was otherwise circumstantial.