Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 17

  Once in a while—as in Chicago—Micheaux would encounter a token black censor, but most were white, and Micheaux was forced to smile through their objections, misinterpretations, and paternalism, like the Pullman porter he had once been. After screening the film in Kansas, one woman on the Board of Censors handed Micheaux a written synopsis of The Homesteader she had prepared, proposing a number of minor cuts, and offering a suggestion: “You cannot imagine what a perfectly lovely and original [new] title I have given it!” she exclaimed. “A Good Old Darkey.” She “looked kindly up into my face for approval,” Micheaux recalled. The cuts had to be made, but he kept his own title.

  The issues could be murky, and some things that alarmed white censors also threw down a gauntlet to Micheaux’s natural constituency. Hollywood sometimes allowed the word “nigger” to crop up offensively in its pictures. Micheaux used it intentionally in his dialogue, and in intertitles during the silent era. His low-born black characters sometimes spoke in dialect or slang, and the n-word was part of their vernacular; when his white characters used it, the word demonstrated their prejudice. Usually, the word signaled poor education or uncouthness. (Refined, modern characters cautioned against its usage: “Don’t say ‘niggah,’ Mother,” the young daughter Julia Theresa Russell chastises her mother in Body and Soul. “It’s vulgar.”)

  For Micheaux, the n-word was a realistic part of black life, as both vernacular saying and racist insult. Time after time, however, Micheaux’s censors targeted it for elimination. And while many black moviegoers accepted its usage, some scribes on big-city newspapers also took Micheaux to task for popularizing the slur. Micheaux never gave up; he kept sneaking the word back into his films, tinkering with its frequency and context, but always returning to it.

  Micheaux fought these censorship battles himself. In a way he relished being the point man with the censors, savoring the controversies and the skirmishes that resulted. He was a guerrilla fighter, wily about skirting rules that constrained Hollywood directors. After all, he was such a smooth talker, and when talking failed, he found other ways to fight for his ideas.

  Travel was a tonic for Micheaux. It gave him time to think and write. While touring with The Homesteader, he quickly drafted a story he tentatively titled “The Lie,” the first of three films he planned for the year ahead.

  Writing to George P. Johnson in May 1919, Micheaux said he was also working on a new novel called The Ghost of Yesterday, which would be published to coincide with one of the three films he planned to produce and release in 1920. But there would be no fourth Micheaux novel that year, and none for another twenty years. The author had been bitten by “the film bug,” and from this point on he would draw on his quasi-autobiographical streak to enliven the screen, not the printed page. With this full-time switch to filmmaking, there was one loss: during his filmmaking years, the public record of Micheaux’s thoughts and deeds grows sketchy, the references to his own life story more allegorical.

  Even so, he would pile up an impressive stack of “unpublished” stories and novels, which would inspire Micheaux films for years to come.

  By the midsummer of 1919, Micheaux had begun adding dates for The Homesteader outside the Midwest and South; circulating his films always took longer than anticipated, and was more fraught with peril than the act of creativity. His staff took over the distribution in July, and the showings fanned out. But The Homesteader didn’t reach the populous black belts of most East Coast cities, even New York, for months.

  And as the prints traveled from town to town, the cuts made by local censors were rarely restored. Even Hollywood was conservative about the number of prints that were manufactured: In 1919, an average Hollywood picture might go out in thirty-five to sixty-five prints.* According to his prospectus, Micheaux could only afford four copies of The Homesteader. The handful of prints he had struck were worn and nicked by the time they arrived in smaller theaters months after their release, with footage missing and the remaining reels showing considerable wear and tear. By March 1920, according to a notation in George P. Johnson’s files, the main print of The Homesteader was already in “bad shape.”

  That small number of prints is the simplest explanation for why no one can claim to have seen The Homesteader since it was shown to initial audiences over eighty-five years ago. But wherever the first Micheaux picture was exhibited in 1919 and over the next few years, black people flooded the theaters.

  Micheaux was back in Chicago when race riots broke out there in late July 1919. The riots were sparked by a Negro boy swimming into a part of a near South Side beach that was used exclusively by whites, not far from where Micheaux sat at his desk in his office in the Loop, working on the script of his second film, “The Lie.” The boy accidentally drowned during the disturbance, which mushroomed into fighting and stone-throwing and citywide violence, resulting in the call-up of the state militia, thirty-eight black lives lost, and 537 people injured over three days.*

  Throughout America it was a bloody summer of racial tension—dubbed the “Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson—with incidents flaring into riots and arrests and beatings and lynchings across America.

  All this was happening as Micheaux was completing his scenario. He wrote with a vengeance, and “The Lie” evolved into Within Our Gates, a brave story, more socially provocative than the confessional The Homesteader. In fact, most scholars agree, Within Our Gates was Micheaux’s most explicit rebuttal to D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation. (Even the new title was a reference to the epigraph that introduced Griffith’s 1919 film, A Romance of Happy Valley: “Harm not the stranger/Within your gates/Lest you yourself be hurt.”)

  Micheaux set the story partly in Boston, a city he fondly recalled from his portering days. There, an earnest young schoolteacher, Sylvia Landry—“typical of the intelligent Negro of our times,” according to the intertitles—anguishes over “the eternal struggle of her race and of how she could uplift it.” After Sylvia’s engagement to a world traveler is broken up by a jealous cousin, the teacher accepts a job at the Piney Woods School, an academy for poor, rural black Mississippians run by a Booker T. Washington-type role model.**

  When Piney Woods finds itself in danger of bankruptcy, Sylvia must return to Boston to raise funds to rescue the school. When the schoolteacher is injured in a car accident, the owner of the car turns out to be a wealthy white philanthropist who adopts the cause of saving the school. The subplots include danger from criminals and a flickering love story. Sylvia happens to meet a gentlemanly Boston physician—another one of Micheaux’s exemplars of the race—as fashionably dressed as he is “passionately engaged in social questions.” (The doctor is introduced reading an issue of Literary Digest with Teddy Roosevelt on the cover.) Though the teacher finds herself attracted to the physician, a secret in her past inhibits her from pursuing their romance.

  The jealous cousin undergoes a change of heart, recounting the teacher’s sympathetic backstory. The film goes back in time, revealing the teacher as an unwanted baby left on a sharecropper’s doorstep. “Micheaux is alluding to what was common knowledge,” according to film scholar Pearl Bowser. “When a black female was impregnated by the plantation owner or some member of his family she was sent back to the cabin, away from the big house.”

  When the sharecropper is accused of the slaying of the wealthy white plantation owner, a white mob gathers to lynch him. Most of his family is caught and murdered. The adopted Sylvia manages to elude the mob, but she’s cornered by the wild-eyed brother of the landowner, who tries to rape her. During the struggle, however, he discovers a scar on her chest, identifying the fair-skinned Sylvia as his own biological daughter by a previous liaison.* Stricken with shame, the brother takes the girl under his care and pays for her education in Boston.

  Return to the present: The doctor recites a history lesson about the heroism of black soldiers in past wars that is both instructive and healing. Sylvia’s mother’s story is now knowable and part of their growing bo
nd.

  Although Micheaux managed to contrive a happy ending for his drama, the story was rooted in the sins of the South, with a climax that rebuked D. W. Griffith’s miscegenation hysteria (the mulatto’s near-rape of Mae Marsh in The Birth of a Nation becomes a white man’s near-rape of a black girl, who turns out to be his own daughter) and dealt with the evils of slavery, the failures of Reconstruction, and the nightmare of lynchings.

  Unquestionably, with The Homesteader, Micheaux had set a high standard for race pictures. Now, as he began filming Within Our Gates, his second, eight-reel “super-production,” he bristled with confidence. This ambitious production would require all of his formidable energy and both sides of his personality: the sweet, sunny smile that coaxed cooperation, and the burning gaze of anger and rectitude.

  His leads came straight from The Homesteader. Only Evelyn Preer could play the idealistic Boston schoolteacher, with Charles D. Lucas as the physician who falls in love with her. E. G. Tatum, Flo Clements, Jack Chenault,* S. T. Jacks, Mrs. Evelyn, William Starks, and Grant Gorman were the other principals.

  Though Micheaux had volunteered to act in The Homesteader for the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, as far as is known today he did not appear in his first production. Whether motivated by whim, vanity, thrift, or a modern impulse for self-comment, however, Micheaux did favor on-camera cameos, and some experts believe he can be glimpsed fleetingly as a gambler in the Boston part of Within Our Gates. He may have been making a statement: As scholar Corey K. Creekmur points out, he plays “the only black character in the film to use the word ‘nigger’ in an intertitle.”

  Micheaux shot the film in the fall of 1919 in and around Chicago, with interiors photographed at the Capital City Studios complex. The flashback, with its mob scenes, lynchings, and attempted rape, was the crux of the script and also the high point of the filming—a highlight that was also an ordeal for the lead actress. Having undergone physical ordeals himself, Micheaux liked to pass these experiences on to characters in his stories, sometimes to his leading men, more often to his heroines. His leading ladies learned to expect the worst.

  Struggling with her attacker (played by Grant Gorman), Preer had to engage in one of the “most realistic fights” ever filmed, she recalled. But the actress, who was making her second appearance for Micheaux, was already a trouper. Preer was “more versatile than any girl I have ever known,” in the director’s words, and willing to do anything asked of her “cheerfully and without argument.” Preer eschewed dummies or stand-ins. “This scene I consider the best I ever played in,” the leading lady of Within Our Gates boasted in a subsequent interview.

  Once again, postproduction was swift, and so was rejection by the Chicago board of censors. The board was determined to keep Within Our Gates from the general public, especially because of its flashback sequence, in which a Southern black family is surrounded by white rabble and lynched from trees, while the film’s heroine undergoes sexual assault. The story would have been objectionable to the censors at any time, but it was doubly inflammatory coming so soon after the city’s race riots.

  The censors had a long list of other complaints. Among other things, Micheaux had loaded the film with another self-serving black preacher (Leigh Whipper), who is indulged by white folk as long as he does his job of encouraging his flock to suffer patiently on this earth, in return for their eternal reward in heaven.

  Again, Micheaux rallied allies—he had Mayor Thompson on his side as well as South Side aldermen—and pushed Within Our Gates past the censors. But it took “two solid months,” according to published accounts, and some 1,200 feet of cuts—an entire reel’s worth—before the film was allowed to debut in late January. By February, however, the footage had been restored and the picture could be advertised “as originally produced” and “the biggest protest against Race prejudice, lynching, and ‘concubinage’ that was ever written or filmed,” with “more thrills and gripping, holding moments than was ever seen in any individual production.”

  But the controversy spread beyond Chicago, and resistance to the picture went beyond censorship. The Homesteader had been the story of one man’s grievances; it could have been subtitled “The Story of a Negro.” But Within Our Gates was a much broader canvas, promoted as a “preachment” and “A Story of the Negro,” that is, of the entire race. Especially after enduring their own real-life “Red Summer,” some black theaters were reluctant to show a film that culminated with a black family’s lynching. Some refused to book it. Even some moviegoers were repelled.

  George Johnson, who handled theaters in and around Omaha, lectured Micheaux about the film. “You did not take enough of the second reel [of Within Our Gates] out and regardless of the fact that the acting was better than The Homesteader, the public does not like the picture,” he wrote Micheaux. “Quite a few walked out.”

  Not for the last time, in public or in private, was Micheaux obliged to defend his storytelling philosophy. “It is true that our people do not care—nor the other races for that matter, for propaganda as much as they do for all story,” Micheaux replied evenly to Johnson. “I discovered that the first night that Within Our Gates was shown. Still, I favor a strong story at all times, since I believe that every story should leave an impression.”

  In many parts of the country, however, the public did not have the opportunity to walk in, much less out of, Within Our Gates. In Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, police visited the local black-only theater promoting the Micheaux picture, complaining about the flashback and other scenes “demonstrating the treatment during slavery times with which the negroes were treated by their masters, also shows the execution by hanging of about nine negroes for absolutely no cause.” The police easily persuaded the white manager to discontinue showings. “A very dangerous picture to show in the South,” the police captain reported to his superior. Then word was quietly passed to other Southern locales, where the race picture was barred in advance.

  Within Our Gates is the first Micheaux production to survive for current-day viewing, although the existing version is obviously damaged by both censorship gouges and general age and misuse. (Originally an eight-reeler, the film already had slimmed down to six reels by 1921, according to company advertisements.)

  From the moment its darkly comic opening title card appears on screen (“At the opening of our drama, we find our characters in the North, where the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro”), the film is an astutely written, at times beautifully directed, landmark. Even in its truncated form, it holds up as a gripping, affecting work of quality.

  Evelyn Preer’s sweet performance centers the film. And while it is true that Micheaux’s leading ladies were often subjected to harrowing extremes of nature and violence, in films like Within Our Gates the heroines are smart and strong, and they usually pull through, proving their mettle.

  Micheaux was a unique storyteller, using film methods that were as idiosyncratic and modern-minded as anything being tried in Hollywood at that time. One of his unusual techniques was repeating scenes from different subjective viewpoints to reveal the crucial missing pieces of a puzzle. Micheaux liked to fool an audience the first time, then reiterate a scene once or twice, from shifting perspectives. During the lengthy flashback of Within Our Gates, he achieves this very cleverly, without any of the usual winking, so the audience is thoroughly gulled by the question of who murdered the white landowner. The landowner’s slaying is depicted twice: once to gain the audience’s trust and muddy the waters, then a second time to bare the surprising truth.

  Micheaux was a believer in dreams and premonitions, and his films have a predilection for fantastical auguries. The eeriest example in Within Our Gates occurs during the flashback sequence. The audience meets a black man named Efrem (E. G. Tatum)—“a debased servant” of the landowner, in the words of scholar Corey K. Creekmur—whose misinformation feeds the outrage of the lynch mob. Later in the flas
hback, “surrounded by an angry white mob that grows less and less appreciative of his services and servility,” as Creekmur notes, “Efrem’s comic ‘glory’ dissolves into a nightmare image or projection of his own lynched body, his extended tongue a grotesque parody of the laughing face of the comic darky of the minstrel tradition.” His thoughts seal his own doom. “Following Efrem’s vision, the white mob chases him, clearly to realize his own grisly projection of their racist desires.”

  Micheaux’s films can be vastly entertaining, but from his first picture to his last, he was always a message bearer, and his “preachment” here—promoting hard work and education, condemning servility and criminal behavior and racism—comes through loud and clear. Writing his films the way he wrote his books, he tossed in facts and information to support his ideas, and the intertitles of Within Our Gates are peppered with statistics. He never shied away from big issues, shrewdly portraying the land peonage system that replaced slave economics in the South (a system rigged in favor of plantation owners that victimized all poor people, including whites).

  While Micheaux’s choice of subject matter is generally given high marks by contemporary film critics, his cinematic skills are often faintly ridiculed. That seems absurd, considering that he plied his craft as a true “independent filmmaker,” long before that phrase became popularized. Hollywood contract directors had large staffs that assisted their every move, expert studio departments at their beck and call, and overall production budgets ranging from $350,000 to $600,000 in the 1920s (depending on the stars). Micheaux, in contrast, worked with ragtag crews and shoestring budgets, inventing as he went along. And yet, when his resources and his imagination were in alignment, he was capable of breathtaking cinematic effects, as in his films’ frequently stunning climaxes.