Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 18

  Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, in their invaluable study Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences, have written conclusively about the lengthy backstory that forms Act Three of Within Our Gates, and the linked series of crescendos, building to a climax, in which the Boston schoolteacher’s family is hunted and slain, and she herself is nearly raped. The white mob in the film is sprinkled with American tintypes, including “patrons from the local ice cream parlor, a boy on a bicycle with a baseball bat, a man in a butcher’s apron, a woman in a gingham dress armed with a rifle,” in Bowser and Spence’s words. They congregate in an almost “festive, picnic-like atmosphere.”

  The black family temporarily eludes their white stalkers by hiding in a swamp. But the family is ferreted out, and the mob is transformed into a grotesque blur, with distorted camerawork that wouldn’t be out of place in an early German Expressionist film. (Micheaux didn’t restrict his moviegoing to Hollywood fare; later, in one of his 1940s novels, he confessed his admiration of the German masterworks that influenced all great filmmakers.)

  The violence in Within Our Gates is depicted with a luridness and savagery rare in the American cinema. The youngest boy in the family is fired on as he tries to flee. The boy pretends to have been struck down; then, when the mob turns its back, he jumps on a horse, managing to ride to safety. The parents are surrounded by the bloodthirsty mob.

  Preer has fled to a cabin, trapped by the vengeful brother of the dead white landowner. As Preer struggles with him, Micheaux returns to her family’s lynching in progress, jumping between the two nightmares. “By crosscutting the defilement of the Black woman and the lynching of the Black male for reasons that have nothing to do with crimes against white women, Micheaux demystifies pervasive racist myths,” wrote Bowser and Spence. “In this rape, it is the white man who is the sexual violator, not the Negro; and the ‘promiscuous Black female’ is not a willing participant but vigorously fights back.”

  The bravura crosscutting continues, with the lynch mob stoking a wild bonfire in order to burn the bodies of their victims. From beginning to end, the flashback of Within Our Gates is meticulously crafted, densely packed with ideas, and furious with emotion. It is one of the most powerful sequences in Micheaux’s body of work.

  Not for the fainthearted. Still, if Within Our Gates disturbed some people, the film also found many appreciative viewers. “The picture is a quivering tongue of fire,” a black schoolteacher wrote to the Chicago Defender, “the burn of which will be felt in the far distant years…

  “The spirit of Within Our Gates is the spirit of [Frederick] Douglass, Nat Turner, [William Sanders] Scarborough and [W. E. B.] DuBois rolled into one, but telling the story of the wrongs of our people better than Douglass did in his speeches, more dramatically transcendent than DuBois in his Souls of Black Folk…

  “The Birth of a Nation was written by oppressors to show that the oppressed were a burden and a drawback to the nation, that they had no real grievance, but on the other hand they were as roving lions, seeking whom they might devour. Within Our Gates is written by the oppressed and shows in a mild way the degree and kind of his oppression. That he is an asset to the nation in all phases of national life, aspiration and development. Nothing like it since Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

  One part of Micheaux’s dream—making movies that might attract droves of white patrons, just as white readers had been drawn to his novels—already had begun to evaporate, right away with The Homesteader.

  There is anecdotal evidence that some white people attended race pictures in mixed neighborhoods in big Northern cities, and even in a few theaters in the Deep South. But by and large, as even the earliest advertisements for The Homesteader conceded, “Negro productions such as this are restricted, as it were, to Negro theaters.” Micheaux couldn’t get his film into white theaters, and he couldn’t get white people into black theaters.

  Another part of the dream also died from the get-go. Micheaux, who had always mused about making big money, and whose screen stories more than once featured parvenu black millionaires, realized very quickly that race pictures were not going to make him rich. A Hollywood director of that era wouldn’t have earned less than $750 a week, with some salaries rising as high as $2,500 weekly. But Micheaux never made that kind of money in a week—not any week. Privately he always referred to his earnings as “little money,” i.e., not Big Money.

  Yet he had the optimism of the pioneering homesteader he had once been: The seeds sown today would reap a bounty in the future, good weather permitting. As long as there was cash flow, Micheaux wasn’t one to wring his hands. He knew how to stretch a dollar, and knew even better how to stretch credit.

  Publicly, he always wore the face of the optimist. Thus it was that, early in 1920, amid mounting debt, he issued a press release for the Micheaux Book and Film Company declaring the windfall success of The Homesteader and Within Our Gates—and profits for investors. A meeting of officers would convene in Sioux City, according to the release, to map out a future agenda and offer additional stock shares at $100 each. Micheaux also announced that he would publish a journal “of finish and high aspiration” devoted to “race filmdom,” called The Brotherhood.

  Even as the ink was drying on the press release, however, newspapers were reporting that the Micheaux company was on the verge of receivership. His budgets, measly in Hollywood terms, were astronomical for race pictures. (“MOST COSTLY RACIAL FILM EVER MADE,” the advertising blared.) Revenue was slow to trickle in, and hard to separate from operating expenses. Genuine profits were a figment of Micheaux’s imagination.

  George P. Johnson, boasting of inside information from people in Micheaux’s employ, privately told the Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert L. Vann that the race-picture pioneer “has made nothing for himself, but wasted lots of money on production.” The Homesteader had been “produced at a loss,” Johnson informed Vann, “but not near what his last film is. Within Our Gates is a complete failure financially.”

  Johnson wrote on the same subject to Micheaux, not without feeling. “I know and you know that you have paid dearly in cash, hard work, sacrifices, worries, to pull thru the two productions you have made,” Johnson said. “The result[s], other than accomplishing a certain prestige for Oscar Micheaux as a writer, playwright and a coming director, have not been very encouraging, especially from a personal financial standpoint.”

  The worries and crises seemed constant. Having failed to lure Johnson away from Omaha, Micheaux now decided that the only person he could trust to run business affairs in Chicago, while he was on the road, was a member of his own family. His youngest brother, Swan E. (for Emerson) Micheaux, was summoned from Great Bend, Kansas. Slender, curly-haired Swan, twenty-five years old (Oscar was thirty-six), went on the letterhead, initially, as “Secy & Treas” of the Micheaux Film Corporation (“Producers & Distributors of High Class Negro Feature Photoplays”).

  One way for Micheaux to generate more revenue would be to sell his pictures overseas, where the climate for race pictures was said to be more receptive than in some parts of America. So in the winter of 1919–1920 he left for an extended stay in New York, reportedly en route to Europe, according to newspaper items, where he intended to arrange foreign placements. Whether he himself traveled to any foreign countries is unclear (Micheaux was always “on his way to France” in letters to George Johnson, though he never actually seemed to depart). But the race-picture pioneer did disappear from sight in Chicago, for months over that winter.

  Not until May, after “extensive traveling,” was he spotted back in the city. During his absence Micheaux had written “a series of features,” according to published reports, including—a departure from the controversial Within Our Gates—several comedies. The sudden flurry of press items said that Micheaux was already at work filming his next scenario, a boxing picture, and that The Brute would be ready for release by July.

  Micheaux followed sports the way he followe
d show business, paying special attention to those athletes who might have been champions and record-holders, if professional sports were not as ruthlessly segregated, in that era, as Hollywood. Boxing was one of his passions; indeed, there is a persistent rumor, dating from the Rosebud years, that Micheaux sometimes donned gloves and took on challengers in a makeshift ring erected outside Ernest Jackson’s home in Dallas, South Dakota.

  Whatever the case, The Brute was partly an excuse for Micheaux to stage a lavish match between two luminaries of the sport, both of whom boasted connections to the legendary Jack Johnson. One was Marty Cutler, a solid fighter and sparring partner of Johnson’s—though in this film, Cutler would play the white champion, pitted, in the climax, against a black challenger played by heavyweight idol Sam Langford, Boston’s “Tar Baby.” Langford, who fought more than six hundred bouts in his twenty-two-year career (though he never won a major title), was Johnson’s worst nemesis. Johnson narrowly defeated Langford in a fifteen-round decision in 1906; thereafter, Johnson rebuffed any suggestion of a rematch. Micheaux would gleefully bill Langford as “the man Jack Johnson refused to fight.”

  Micheaux would put comedy as well as plenty of action in his third film, though the core drama of The Brute—“the most interesting part of the tale,” according to at least one critic of the time—followed the misfortunes of a naïve young woman who falls under the influence of a brutal underworld kingpin after her fiancé is lost at sea. The kingpin’s specialties are abusing women and rigging prizefights.

  Once again Evelyn Preer would play the vulnerable ingenue, with Lawrence Chenault as her “lost” fiancé (who is “found” in time to ensure a happy ending). Chenault had been a dramatic singer at the turn of the century before emerging as a crowd favorite with the Pekin Players in Chicago, and later, a heartthrob with the Lafayette Players in New York. Over time he’d become a stalwart for Micheaux—his most versatile lead, equally at ease in comic or serious roles, able to add age, play “white” (because of his relatively light complexion), villains, or, on rare occasions such as this one, the “ideal hero,” as his fellow Micheaux player Shingzie Howard put it.

  To portray “The Brute,” the underworld boss of the story, Micheaux found another actor who would go on to become a regular in his films. Originally from the West Indies, A. B. DeComathiere was a stellar athlete (football and tennis), before he turned to acting and became a formidable character actor for the Lafayette Players and other troupes. The rest of the cast—including E. G. Tatum, Flo Clements, and Mattie Edwards—already amounted to Micheaux’s informal stock company.

  Undoubtedly, the highlight of the filming was the July 8, 1920, staged showdown between Cutler and Langford at the Royal Gardens on East Thirty-first Street. Micheaux promoted the event with advertisements in the Chicago Defender, throwing the fight open to public attendance and incorporating the hundreds who attended as free extras (“See Yourself in the Movies by Being a Spectator at the Ringside During This Mighty Battle”).

  Once again, the leading lady may have suffered almost as much as the pugilists. “In one scene,” Evelyn Preer recalled, DeComathiere “was supposed to hit me in the eye and knock me to the floor, and when I got up the eye was supposed to be black. I wanted this to be so realistic that I begged Mr. Comathiere to hit me.

  “In the movies they usually play the violin to make you cry,” Preer continued, “but after Mr. Comathiere hit me, I didn’t need music, onions, or glycerin to bring tears. They were there whether they were wanted or not, and the eye was black, not just for an hour, not for just a day, but for several days.”

  For another scene—“one of Mr. Comathiere’s best,” recalled Preer—the strapping actor “chopped the door down with an ax and yanked me out and dragged me around by my hair. Another bright suggestion from me.”

  Micheaux productions never involved long schedules, but the boxing choreography and crowd scenes of The Brute took more time than usual. The filming lasted three weeks.

  “I am expecting phenomenal business,” Micheaux wrote to George P. Johnson afterward. “Not because I desire to appear boastful or egotistic, but if everybody who has seen it to date[’s] opinion is worth anything—as a Negro picture, it is in a class by itself. It has some faults—none of us have as much money to make the best picture we might think up, as fine as it should be in technical detail, tho’ this one is so much more elaborate than anything before.

  “But the acting is so fine. To the Lafayette Players I owe this,” the director added modestly. “They were able to carry out my direction as fine as I know how to give it to them.”

  For the August 1920 premiere of The Brute, the Langford-Cutler climax was reennacted with heavyweight Sam McVey (famous for lasting forty-nine brutal rounds in a 1909 Paris match) standing in for the absent Cutler. A reported ten thousand boxing fans attended the event in East Chicago, and the next day the film opened simultaneously at the Vendome in Chicago and the Vaudette in Detroit. The Brute sustained “a record breaking run” at the Vendome and other Chicago theaters, according to the press, and was seen by “thousands of people.”

  “There is a great prize fight,” said the reviewer for the Chicago Defender, “and a world of comedy.”

  Making its way to other towns and cities, The Brute continued to “stack them out,” in Swan Micheaux’s terminology, that is, draw overflow crowds. “We opened in New York City and in Philadelphia, charging from 30 to 55 cents,” Swan claimed. “Our share in both cities [in the first week], was approximately $3,000.00.” The company even manufactured extra prints, so a couple could stay in the East, while the rest circulated in the South.

  The serious-minded Micheaux had proven he could also be hilarious; the “preachment” factor in The Brute was low-key, there was exciting boxing, and there were no lynchings.

  The crowds were royally entertained by Micheaux’s rousing action film; the critics, however, had reservations. Almost overnight, Micheaux the heralded pioneer became a magnet for criticism from anyone with a notion of the ideal race picture.

  Though The Brute had been fashioned as an intentional break from more serious films like Within Our Gates, Micheaux’s boxing spectacle stirred unexpected grumbling from prestigious figures in the black press who argued that every race picture should be decorous and uplifting in its depiction of black life. Echoing Micheaux’s feuds with the Reverend McCracken, these generally big-city, middle-class critics cringed at the director’s more realistic and unblinking vision of their shared heritage.

  The well-known Lester A. Walton, an early associate of the Lafayette Players, praised The Brute in the New York Age as “a very creditable endeavor in many respects,” conceding that the fight scene was “a genuine thriller.” (“When Langford floors Cutler with a knockout wallop with his mighty right, my such a noise from the audience!”) But Walton went on to rail against a story set in a sordid underworld that echoed “the attitude of the daily press, which magnifies our vices and minimizes our virtues.”*

  The national columnist Sylvester Russell, whose jottings appeared in several black newspapers, including the Indianapolis Freeman, the Chicago Defender, and the Pittsburgh Courier, also criticized the film’s milieu: its many tavern scenes, the loose morals of its female characters, the pervasive cigarette smoking, and too-brutal violence. The Brute “was not elevating,” lamented Russell, a one-time vaudeville performer and singer turned drama critic. “All of us well-reared people sighed. Some departed.” (As one dubious alternative, Russell urged Micheaux to feature more “unadulterated blackface comedians,” which, in fact, he later often did.)

  To Micheaux, however, publicity was good, and controversy was extra publicity free of charge. In these early years of his career, praise and criticism alike seemed to roll off Micheaux’s back. He had an inner compass and fierce creative momentum.

  At the same time, Micheaux was shrewd about critics, and if they talked like censors he treated them like censors. He sought out Sylvester Russell, for example, smiled
and shook the enemy’s hand, and then launched into a heated argument with the columnist. He sought out his critics often this way during the 1920s, and though he didn’t always win them over, his sincerity and conviction gave them pause.

  From all accounts, The Brute survived reviewers’ quibbles. It proved among the most remunerative of Micheaux’s early pictures, with repeat bookings into the mid-1920s. As the prints circulated, their number and quality dwindled, and today The Brute is another “lost” film, lodged along with The Homesteader atop the wish list of Micheaux films scholars hope will one day be rediscovered in an attic—however unlikely that may seem.

  By the time The Brute had its premiere, in the waning summer of 1920, Micheaux had finalized a difficult decision, one that he had been considering for some time and had come to see as necessary and inevitable. During his long sojourn East (supposedly en route to Europe) earlier in the year, the race-picture producer had quietly laid the groundwork for a big change: He would move his home and central office to New York City—to Harlem.

  “I like Chicago,” Sidney Wyeth, his recurring alter ego, says in one Micheaux novel. “Like it better than I do New York.” But in the same breath Wyeth goes on to concede that “New York is a freer city for Negroes to live in now.”

  The 1919 riots probably crystallized Micheaux’s decision. At the turn of the century, when Micheaux first arrived in Chicago, the Black Belt had seemed alluring to slavery’s descendants. But when black soldiers returned from World War I, expecting to be rewarded for their sacrifices, they found pervasive unemployment and a deepening gulf between the races. More ex-Southerners arrived all the time, spreading across the South Side, truly blackening the belt. Rents soared and firebombings greeted newcomers to formerly predominantly white neighborhoods.

  For Micheaux, there was another constant irritant: Chicago’s provincial censorship board. Micheaux anticipated more leeway in New York. Chicago’s days as a hub of motion picture-making were over; its once-premium studios now stood empty or in disrepair. There were first-class production facilities and experienced personnel in New York, and in nearby Fort Lee, New Jersey, where Micheaux had toured the studios and felt welcomed.