Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 19
Harlem was the new mecca, the new capital of Black America. There was a general feeling among black Americans that New York might succeed where Chicago had failed. In his contemporary book Negro Life in New York’s Harlem, the African-American writer Wallace Thurman compared the two: “As the great south side black belt of Chicago spreads and smells with the same industrial clumsiness and stock yardish vigor of Chicago,” Thurman wrote, “so does the black belt of New York teem and rhyme with the cosmopolitan crosscurrents of the world’s greatest city.” Clumsy, smelly Chicago was the hope of yesteryear. Harlem, the cosmopolitan black belt of New York, augured the freedom of tomorrow, “a dream city pregnant with wide-awake realities,” in Thurman’s words.
And by the year 1928, Harlem would have a population of two hundred thousand black people, all of them potential paying customers for a dreamer named Oscar Micheaux. He could reincorporate in Delaware, drawing fresh investors from the many other black belts that were strung along the eastern seaboard. He’d have close proximity to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, which had proven crucial markets for his pictures.
He publicly announced that he was transferring his headquarters to New York. Not that he would ever leave Chicago entirely behind: Apart from its value as a center of distribution to the Midwest—and his close contacts at the Chicago Defender, which for years he would continue to use as a launchpad for national publicity—Chicago was the city Micheaux knew best. It would endure as a symbol and setting in his films and books. He’d visit regularly, keep up with acquaintances, and shoot all or parts of many future films in Chicago.
“The better studio possibilities, together with the fact that the screen artists of the race are available in greater numbers in the big city, and disinclined to leave, has prompted the Micheaux Film Corporation to make their future productions in the vicinity of New York,” the official press release announced.
Putting his younger brother Swan in charge of his reduced Chicago operations, Micheaux left for New York in September. Along the way he planned to stop off in Cleveland to meet with the well-known author Charles W. Chesnutt, with whom he had corresponded, hoping to acquire the screen rights to some of Chesnutt’s stories and novels. While en route Micheaux also intended to finish the script for his fourth film, which he was calling “The Wilderness Trail.”
“The Wilderness Trail” would be, in part, a return to “preachment”—tempting more censorship and controversy. Just as Micheaux couldn’t stop himself from arguing politics with the Reverend McCracken, he couldn’t refrain from writing “strong stories” about home truths. So he would weave another lynch mob into his latest scenario, and would offer bad as well as good role models for the race. But Micheaux was always experimenting, changing the proportions of his ingredients, and as he became a more nuanced and capable filmmaker, he tried different recipes. This time the “preachment” would be heavily leavened with humor and sentiment.
Micheaux’s script concerned yet another “colored homesteader” who falls in love with a female settler whom he believes to be white, but who turns out to be a member of his own race. Again and again in his books and films Micheaux relived his rupture with the Scottish blonde maiden on the Rosebud, trying to find, in fiction, an idealized solution to the real-life failure that still haunted him. “He probably regretted that decision all his life,” observed Micheaux scholar J. Ronald Green, “and undoubtedly there is an element of obsession in his repeated plots in which the perennial object of his desire is finally obtained because of a dramatic reversal of her race.”
This time, however, the Scottish girl was a “beautiful quadroon” named Eve, who is aware of her racial identity. Living in Selma, Alabama at the beginning of Micheaux’s story, Eve learns that her grandfather, a Negro prospector, has died and left her a claim to a homestead in the Northwest. She travels to “Oristown” (a pseudonym for Bonesteel, South Dakota, that Micheaux first used in The Conquest) to lay claim to the land.
Arriving in Oristown, Eve attempts to check into a hotel. The clerk is “a Negro but masquerading as white,” according to published synopses, who loathes his own race. In his youth the clerk had tried to carry off a romance with a white woman, until one day his mother accidentally interrupted their embrace. His mother’s darker skin revealed the clerk’s true identity, and the romance was ruined. (In a flashback, he throttles his own mother over the incident.)
Though Eve is light-skinned, her eyes “betray her origins” to the clerk, and he refuses to give her a regular room, instead showing her to a barn. That night, a great storm wells up, and Eve becomes afraid and rushes outside the barn. Tossed about by Micheaux’s customary excesses of wind and rain, she stumbles around the wilderness, lost and hungry, until Hugh Van Allen, a black homesteader with a nearby farm, rescues her.
Van Allen is one of Micheaux’s paragons. Goodhearted and hardworking, he grows fond of Eve, but their love goes unrequited; they share an interracial tension similar to that which tortured Jean Baptiste and Agnes in The Homesteader. And it’s just as misleading because Eve’s fair skin has convinced Van Allen that Eve is a white woman, yet Eve doesn’t realize her neighbor has this mistaken impression.
Van Allen becomes a target of the hotel clerk’s enmity. After learning that Van Allen’s land contains oil, the clerk conspires with other ne’er-do-wells to scare the colored homesteader off his property. Micheaux ridicules the purity of the Ku Klux Klan with these hatemongers—one a horse-thief “Indian Fakir” wearing a fez, another a former British clergyman turned swindler; two cowboys, one white and the other a half-breed Indian; and their leader, the Negro hotel clerk “masquerading as white.” This motley group rides forth at midnight, wearing white robes and carrying torches, calling themselves a brigade of the “Knights of the Black Cross.”
Their attempt to lynch the colored homesteader is foiled by Eve and other settlers who ride to Van Allen’s rescue. Oil is discovered; Van Allen becomes a millionaire. In time he is visited by Eve, who is collecting for a Committee for the Defense of the Colored Race. Until this moment, Van Allen had “never dared to declare his love” for Eve, “for fear of being scornfully rejected.” Now, he realizes that she is “of his own blood.” Now, the couple is free to love and marry.
As it went before the cameras, Micheaux gave his final script a strong title: The Symbol of the Unconquered.
To play Eve, the light-skinned heroine, Micheaux returned to Iris Hall, who had played one of the leads in The Homesteader. As Hugh Van Allen he cast tall, firm-jawed Walker Thompson. A former vaudeville performer based in Chicago, Thompson had graduated to the Lafayette Players, where he was amusing in comedies and sensational in dramas like The Divorce Question, in which he had played a dope fiend.* Lawrence Chenault was back as Jefferson Driscoll, the sinister clerk “passing” for white. Chenault’s mother would be Mattie Wilkes, who had toured as a soprano in the United States before joining the Lafayette Players. Leigh Whipper and Louis Dean were the horse thief and swindler.
This was the first film Micheaux produced in the East. He shot the interiors in Fort Lee, where there were fully operational studios that dated back before 1910. One of the first centers of motion picture production, the Fort Lee complex had been abandoned by the major companies when the industry moved to California, but it was still humming with activity. Besides being close to New York City, the Fort Lee terrain boasted a topography that served nearly every cinematic purpose, from seaside cliffs to tall cornfields to stand-in prairies. Indeed, some of the first American Westerns had been filmed in the Fort Lee area.
The “wilderness” of New Jersey was sufficient for Micheaux’s purposes in The Symbol of the Unconquered, which was filmed at a gallop and wrapped up entirely before Christmas. And then, because Micheaux had yet to forge strong relationships with the New York press and theater-owners, his fourth feature film was sent back to Chicago for its premiere.
And there, as before, it faced its first attempts at suppression.
Once again, Micheaux’s central motif was “passing,” and the sexual tension that transpires between a man and a woman of seemingly different races torn by their love for each other. Even when both lovers turn out to be “black,” the mainspring behind such stories was offensive to censors—not to mention the powerful subtextual idea, which is present in nearly every Micheaux book and film, that racial categorization was unjust and indeterminate.
The Chicago authorities wouldn’t condone any hint of racial intermingling. Among the cuts they demanded in Micheaux’s film:
“Subtitle Reel II—ending: ‘That they had often lynched his kind for a smaller offense…talking to a white girl on the street.’”
“Cut all views of colored man holding girl’s hand in [love] scenes.”
“Reel 4: All scenes of Englishman looking at colored girl ‘strongly desirous…’”
No director fought censorship as stubbornly as Oscar Micheaux, though he lost as often as he won. The many deletions the censors demanded, and the limited number of prints he authorized of each film, means that “of the Micheaux films that have survived,” in the words of scholar Arthur Knight, “it is unclear how near they are to Micheaux’s authorial and directorial intentions, how close they are to his original films, or most importantly, how exactly they relate to what any audiences saw and heard.” As Micheaux expert Jane Gaines also noted, contemporary reviews of his pictures often described “a film dramatically different from the one that has survived,” with different scenes, characters, and so on. In other words, no surviving Micheaux film exists as he originally intended it to be viewed.
The sole remaining print of The Symbol of the Unconquered was rescued from the Cinématheque Royale in Belgium, and it contains French and Flemish intertitles. (Micheaux scholar Charles Musser has translated the intertitles back into English.) Parts of the film are clearly altered from the original. Though clearly fragmentary—the much-censored subplot of an Englishman married to a “colored woman,” for instance, is gone—even in its compromised Belgian version, Unconquered is a significant work, showcasing a mature panoply of technique: irises, superimpositions, mirrored shots, parallel editing, and subjective point of view.
The attempted lynching sequence was the censors’ main target, and it survives merely in shards. Yet even the truncated version evinces a thrilling blend of German Expressionist–influenced lighting and camerawork, with an editing style that anticipates rapid-fire Soviet montage. Micheaux was seeing all the latest foreign as well as Hollywood films in New York, and he was up-to-date on the most avant-garde techniques. Amid a darkness made eerie by blazing torches and swirling smoke, the faux-Klan “night riders” of The Symbol of the Unconquered gallop to their failed mission in a flurry of grotesque close-ups of cutout eyes, set deeply in hoods.
Within Our Gates had been a traumatic slice of too-real history. But in The Symbol of the Unconquered, Micheaux saw to it that his “night riders” were satirized and vanquished. The film was marked throughout by sweetness and humor, and even the advertisements promised an uplifting experience for black audiences. (“See the Ku Klux Klan in Action and Their Annihilation!”) Critics and audiences preferred this adjusted mix of realism and entertainment: Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert L. Vann was among the many who hailed Micheaux’s fourth film as “a stirring tale of love and adventure,” with “impressive lessons on the folly of color” throughout the story.
If Oscar Micheaux had stopped there—after The Homesteader, The Brute, Within Our Gates, and The Symbol of the Unconquered—he would still have earned his place as a stellar figure in American film. In two years he had gone from regional curiosity as a self-published novelist to national standard-bearer in the world of race pictures—writing, directing, and producing four remarkable films against tremendous odds in a brief span of time.
One of his new friends was Nahum David Brascher, editor-in-chief of the Associated Negro Press, whose offices were in the same building as Micheaux’s. Brascher invited him to speak to the organization’s conference in Chicago in early 1921. “Moving picures have become one of the greatest revitalizing forces in race adjustment,” Micheaux told the national gathering of black journalists and editors, many of whom he already knew on a first-name basis, “and we are just beginning.”
CHAPTER TEN
1921–1922 HARLEM AND ROANOKE
The great migration of Southern blacks, along with a steady flow of arrivals from the Caribbean, tripled the number of “colored people” in New York State between 1890 and 1910, and the total accelerated dramatically after World War I. The vast majority came to New York City, whose black inhabitants, by 1920, finally outnumbered those of Washington, D.C., long in first place; Philadelphia was now ranked second, Chicago fourth. Though they found homes in every borough, colored New Yorkers increasingly packed into a section of uptown Manhattan that was previously dominated by white European immigrants, many of Jewish background. This neighborhood was known by the name of the channel connecting the Hudson and East rivers: Harlem.
By 1920, “Eighth Avenue cleanly severed black from white,” as David Levering Lewis observed in his social chronicle When Harlem Was in Vogue. “From Eighth to the Hudson River few Afro-Americans were to be found. East of Eighth to the Harlem River, from 130th to 145th Street, lay black Harlem.” Estimates of the number of black residents ran anywhere from 75,000 to 100,000, and rising. More than a Black Belt, Harlem was a city within a city, “the largest, most exciting urban community in Afro-America,” in Lewis’s words. Invisibly walled off from the rest of New York by racist barriers, Harlem had a personality and character like no other part of America. It may have had more than its share of misery, but for people of color (as well as for the color-blind), it was the epicenter of the new world.
The Jamaican-born American poet Claude McKay rhapsodized about Harlem in his 1928 novel Home to Harlem: “The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it.” The district’s “semi-underworld” was a wonderland of sound and music: “The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and ‘blues’ playing somewhere…singing somewhere, dancing somewhere!”
In early 1921, Micheaux leased an apartment on West 135th Street, opened an office in the small Franklin Theatre nearby on Lenox Avenue, and engaged a secretary. Micheaux had befriended Ira McGowan, George P. Johnson’s brother-in-law, helping him out with small loans and bringing him along in the business. Now McGowan became his “utility man” in the New York office and paymaster for the eastern states. And Micheaux hired a traveling partner, John Wade, who’d be his Man Friday on the road, booking and collecting.
The Lincoln Theatre, on 135th and Lenox, was the original home of the Anita Bush Players and still a prime showcase for black performers. A few blocks away, on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, was Harlem’s biggest theater, the 2,000–seat Lafayette, host to the Lafayette Players. In late 1921, Connie’s Inn, a basement cabaret destined to rival the more upscale Cotton Club, opened up next door to the Lafayette. (In the early 1920s, “colored customers” were still barred from attending the all-black floor shows at Connie’s and the other fanciest Harlem nightclubs, which prided themselves on their white high-society clientele.)
Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was also on 135th Street, and over on 133rd, between Lenox and Seventh, was the famed “Jungle Alley” of popular bars, nightclubs, restaurants, cabarets, and speakeasies.
With its ambitious length, unusual story, artistic reach, and overall accomplishment, The Homesteader had inspired other race-picture producers; indeed, it spawned a movement. All over America, new race-picture companies sprang into existence, trying to imitate the film’s success, which most assumed was financial as well as artistic. Micheaux’s public optimism left the impression that there was easy gold to be mined in race pictures. And the “gold rush” year for race-picture production was 1920, according to film historians Matthew Bernstein and Dana F.
White.
In Jacksonville, Florida, a white Southerner, Richard E. Norman, began to specialize in “all-colored” pictures; his Norman Film Manufacturing Concern would grow to dominate the Southeastern market. Norman’s wildly popular first film, The Green-Eyed Monster, played in theaters for years after its initial release in 1920; then Norman launched a cowboy series starring the “world’s colored champion,” Bill Pickett. Norman usually photographed and edited his films, but didn’t always direct them. In spite of modest budgets, the Norman films were well-made (The Green-Eyed Monster climaxed with a spectacular train wreck), though “by no means a comparison to Micheaux pictures in class or acting or direction,” in George P. Johnson’s words.
A white New Yorker named Robert Levy also swung over to race pictures. A founder of the Lafayette Players, Levy organized Reol Productions in late 1920. Reol went head to head with Micheaux on challenging subjects as well as casting. Lawrence Chenault would star in the high-minded The Burden of Race, Reol’s first film, in 1921. (The work doubled and tripled for former Lafayette Players in these years; the congenial and versatile Chenault, for example, would continue to act in Micheaux’s films, while also becoming a regular for Reol and Norman.)
And there were others: The Maurice Film Company in Philadelphia, the Royal Gardens Film Company in Chicago, and fly-by-night companies in many other cities took flight, some barely getting off the ground, plummeting after one or two films. Even the Lincoln Motion Picture Company had a last gasp of vehicles starring Clarence Brooks.