Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Read online

  The family potentate presided at the head of the table in a “ceremonious manner.” The Reverend talked freely, but proved a “poor listener.” He liked to vent his ideas on religion and politics, especially “the so-called Negro problem,” in Micheaux’s scornful words. Micheaux had to stifle his sharp disagreement. Micheaux had always been a strong proponent of Booker T. Washington, whose portrait would be seen hanging on walls in his films as often as Abraham Lincoln’s. Micheaux endorsed the Great Educator’s philosophy of hard work, learning, conciliation with the South, and a gradual uplifting of the race. The Reverend, with his bourgeois airs, scoffed at the Tuskegee founder as a man whose time had passed, too much of an accommodationist in light of the widespread racism, state-sanctioned segregation, and racially motivated mob violence of the era.

  Perhaps more than his views, the cleric’s manner put Micheaux off. The Reverend talked as though he himself had money and education, but the homesteader suspected he had little of either. “Although he never cut off my discourse in any way,” recalled the equally prideful Micheaux, “he didn’t listen as I had been used to having people listen, apparently with encouragement in their eyes, which makes talking a pleasure, so I soon ceased to talk.” The family treated the Reverend as though pearls spilled from his mouth, and as Orlean herself stood over the pontificating Elder, stroking his hair, Micheaux realized that she was her father’s obedient favorite.

  Altogether it was an awkward evening, but not disastrous, and on the Sunday that followed Micheaux accompanied the McCrackens to church services. During the week, he stole Orlean away to see shows downtown. They had their first tiff after watching a production of Alexandre Bisson’s melodrama Madame X. Micheaux found the story of a weak husband plagued by a flighty, immoral wife “pathetic.” Though Madame X redeemed herself in a courtroom climax, Micheaux detested the tear-jerking ending, in which she succumbed to her absinthe addiction. Orlean was one of many in the balcony who were sobbing into their handkerchiefs by the end of the show; Oscar was irritated to find even himself choking back tears. He and Orlean argued about the play all the way home.

  He was happier with The Fourth Estate by Joseph Medill Patterson, a former crusading reporter who was the son of the editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. This drama about a muckraking publisher in love with the daughter of the target of one of his exposés had “strength of character and a happy finale,” in Micheaux’s words, “instead of weakness and an unhappy ending.” It was the kind of story that would always appeal to Micheaux, whose books and films often featured strong, noble heroes, idealized ingenues, and turnabout happy finales.

  He could only afford a week away from his farming responsibilities, and the week was soon up without any resolution as to the when and where of the nuptials. Micheaux wanted Orlean to come back with him to Gregory and be married “quietly.” The Reverend kept insisting they be wed properly and festively at home in Chicago.

  Talking with his Black Belt friends, Micheaux confessed his prejudices against the Reverend, and he was gratified to learn that many of them, too, considered the Elder an arrogant hypocrite. McCracken was rumored to tyrannize his gentle-hearted wife, and to be a profligate womanizer with one or two illegitimate children in another city. Despite his prominence within the A.M.E. Church, his salary was dependent on tithing; in actuality, Micheaux learned, the family barely scraped by.

  All this gnawed at Micheaux as he returned to cold, snowy South Dakota in early 1910.

  At least his sister and grandmother were doing well. They returned to their Tripp County farms where the grandmother, considering the fact she was an ex-slave nearing eighty, was well-known among her fellow homesteaders as a “colorful character,” according to an account in the Gregory Times Advocate. Neighbors brought her dried beans and apples when the snows caught her short, and though Micheaux kept her stocked with coal, “every once in a while,” according to the newspaper, Oscar’s grandmother could be glimpsed “walking along with a gunny sack and a big stick. She would pick something up and put it in her sack.” Neighbors “figured out that she was picking up buffalo chips to burn for fuel.”

  Olive was also well liked. One neighbor, a Mrs. Bartels, “thought she was a well-informed girl and loved to talk to her,” reported the Gregory Times Advocate. Like her brother, however, Olive was acutely aware that she and her grandmother were the only “colored homesteaders” for miles around. Olive “would only come and visit when no one else was there. If someone came during her visit, she would immediately get up and leave. Bartels said, ‘She seemed to fear that even though I accepted her as a friend, these other people might not.’”

  It would be a long, punishing winter. Micheaux poured himself into letters to Orlean, trying to persuade his fiancée to come to Gregory and accept a humble marriage ceremony. He received letters back from her and the Reverend, arguing for a gala wedding with family and friends in Chicago.

  Then the homesteader wrote something else: his first bylined article.

  The front page of the March 19, 1910, Chicago Defender was the showcase for his open letter to black America headlined WHERE THE NEGRO FAILS and datelined Gregory, South Dakota. In this, his first known piece of published writing, Micheaux urged readers of the nation’s most widely read black newspaper to do exactly what he had done: follow the advice of Horace Greeley and Go West!

  “I return from Chicago each trip I make,” the citizen of Rosebud wrote, “more discouraged each year with the hopelessness of his foresight (the young Negro). His inability to use common sense in looking into his future is truly discouraging when you look into the high cost of living. The Negro leads in the consumption of produce and especially meat, and then his fine clothes—he hasn’t the least thought of where the wool grew that he wears and describes himself as being ‘classy.’ He can give you a large theory on how the Negro problem should be solved, but it always ends that (in his mind) there is no opportunity for the Negro.”

  By Micheaux’s reckoning, there were only “eleven Negro farmers” in all of South Dakota. “Isn’t it enough to make one feel disgusted,” he asked, “to see and read of thousands of poor white people going west every day and in ten or fifteen years’ time becoming prosperous and happy, as well as making the greatest and happiest place on earth.

  “In writing this I am not overlooking what the Negro is doing in the south, nor the enterprising ones of the north, but the time is at hand—the Negro must become more self-supporting. Farm lands are the bosses of wealth. Land is increasing by strides at the present time….

  “I am not trying to offer a solution of the Negro problem, for I don’t feel there is any problem further than the future of anything, whether it be a town, state, or race.”

  For this remarkable article, proclaiming his name and views to black America, he also created a new persona. Up to this time, he had always spelled his last name “Michaux,” signing it thus on employment cards and legal documents. Though it was a rite of passage for ex-slave families to alter the surname inherited from their masters, the Michauxes had apparently never bothered to do so—until now. Oscar’s change was slight: With the addition of an e, he became “Micheaux.”

  As the snows melted and spring tasks accelerated, Micheaux fretted about the date of his marriage, which was still up in the air. His letters implored Orlean to “condescend” to a wedding in Gregory. If she failed to take up residence in South Dakota by May, she would risk losing her claim. Every time Micheaux went to Chicago the 750-mile trip took one day each way, costing eighty dollars for the train fare. He couldn’t afford to keep abandoning the farm; he had corn to gather, oats, wheat, and barley to seed. He tried to explain his precarious finances, “that it was a burden rather than a luxury to be possessed of a lot of raw land, until it could be cultivated and made to yield a profit.” The McCrackens, however, seemed to consider him a rich landowner roosting on miles and miles of fertile acres.

  “My letters,” Micheaux recalled, “were in vain.”
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br />   Orlean’s replies tapered off. In the third week of April, Micheaux received a letter from Orlean saying that she had decided against marriage and was returning her receipt for the relinquishment to him, “with thanks for my kindness and hopes for future success,” in Micheaux’s words.

  This letter, which he received on a Friday, forced Micheaux into drastic action. “While I did not think she had treated me just right, I would not allow a matter of a trip to Chicago to stand in the way of our marriage,” he wrote later. “I had the idea her father was indirectly responsible.”

  He rode into Gregory on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning boarded a train. From Omaha he sent Orlean a telegram. In Chicago he found his sweetheart at home with the other McCrackens, minus the Elder, who was once again away in southern Illinois. Orlean sulked upon Micheaux’s arrival, but soon was nestling in his arms. The younger sister openly inveighed against the marriage and homesteading. The mother was more easily won over, but the family decided they must send a special delivery letter to the Reverend.

  In a day the special delivery reply came back, saying that Micheaux had to convince the Reverend, in person, that he was marrying his daughter for love, not merely for the sake of a homestead claim.

  The sister, previously Micheaux’s enemy, now started giving Oscar advice. Flatter the Elder, she urged the homesteader. “The more I thought of his greatness,” Micheaux later wrote, “the more amused I became. I might have settled the matter easily if I had no objection to flattering him.”

  The next morning the Reverend McCracken arrived home and greeted Micheaux in the parlor, “surveying me as I entered, just as a king might have done a disobedient subject.” The family gathered around to hear the father speak, but Micheaux interrupted with a pronouncement of his own: It was true that he hadn’t professed his love for Orlean when he first came to woo her, he admitted, but he had grown fond of the schoolteacher, and now they were looking forward with optimism and affection to a future together.

  When Orlean spoke up to concur, the Reverend seemed satisfied. With his imperious air he gave them his permission to proceed to the courthouse and obtain a marriage license—something the two had actually done the previous day. And so, “rather sheepishly,” they “stammered out something” and went downtown and “bought a pair of shoes instead.”

  The great occasion was set for the next afternoon. The Elder tried hard to secure an A.M.E. bishop to preside over the ceremony, but one of the local bishops was sick and the other was out of town, so they had to accept the services of a lesser light. “Some twenty or more” friends and relatives assembled in the McCracken home to witness the exchange of vows, with Orlean wearing her sister’s wedding dress and veil. (“The dress was becoming and I thought her very beautiful,” Micheaux wrote after.) As for the groom, he borrowed a “Prince Albert coat and trousers to match” from Orlean’s sister’s husband, his new brother-in-law, which were “too small and tight, making me uncomfortable.”

  Everyone kissed their congratulations; wine was poured for toasts; ice cream and cake were served. Someone played the piano for a little dancing. Then a tremendous wind came up, a storm broke, and the guests rushed to leave, buffeted by wind and drenched by the downpour. In retrospect, Micheaux said, he should have recognized the wind and storm as auguries.

  In The Conquest, Micheaux suggests that the newlyweds spent their wedding night at the home of a family friend. In real life, the marriage of the well-known Elder’s daughter to that emergent public personality, Oscar Micheaux, was announced in the Chicago Defender. “They left the same night,” the newspaper reported, “on the Golden Gate Limited for their home” in South Dakota.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1909–1912 HAMMER BLOWS

  The Defender wasn’t the only newspaper that reported on Micheaux’s nuptials. Another paper, this one with a predominantly white readership, congratulated the couple and wished them “a happy journey over life’s seas.” The Gregory Times Advocate, the homesteader’s local paper, never—in this or any prior mention of Micheaux—characterized him by race or skin color. “About sixty of my white neighbors gave us a charivari, and my wife was much pleased to know there was no color prejudice among them,” Micheaux wrote in The Conquest.

  The newlyweds temporarily moved into the rented house in old Dallas. Micheaux was relieved that hired hands had taken good care of his Gregory County lands while he was gone, and early in May he and his wife went up to Orlean’s claim near Witten in Tripp County, to raise a sod house. At the same time Micheaux pitched in on his grandmother’s and sister Olive’s homesteads (his sister briefly returned home to Kansas to attend another sister’s high school graduation). Micheaux shuttled back and forth between his farms in the two counties; rather than construct all new buildings on Orlean’s relinquishment, he decided to move some outbuildings from his original homestead near Gregory to the Tripp County claims, about forty miles overland.

  Her new husband’s busy schedule left Orlean alone for long spells, and Micheaux’s grandmother and sister Olive befriended the new spouse. Though she wasn’t much of a cook, Micheaux recalled, Orlean was a good housekeeper and a singer with a pretty voice whose songs cheered up her husband.

  In June, the couple returned to Gregory County. The bills were starting to come in from banks, and Micheaux was worried about his cash flow. He could gather his corn and shell and haul it to Winner, a much longer distance than nearby Gregory, but he’d get a higher price at the Tripp County elevators. Once again Orlean was left alone for stretches, and the initial luster of prairie life began to dim.

  She received letters from home, reporting familiar names and exciting events in the city, but they only made her pine for Chicago’s Black Belt. Her relatives wrote asking for money so that they could buy her items from South Side shops and send them to her out on the prairie. When Orlean asked Micheaux for an allowance to cover the costs, though, Micheaux found himself in a “trying” position, he later recalled. “What I wanted in the circumstances I now faced was to be allowed to mold my wife into a practical woman,” but instead, on top of his obligations to the banks, he was being continually dunned by his wife and her family.

  The Reverend McCracken wrote Orlean regularly, and she entreated Micheaux to write back to his father-in-law, as a show of respect. In The Conquest, Micheaux admits that he probably should have written a few “Dear Father” letters, but he disliked the Elder too much to “play the hypocrite.”

  Micheaux had his hands full. He was busy supervising five farms in two far-flung counties, coping with the exigencies of farming on the prairie. The first two weeks in June blew hot and dry, and “considerable damage” was done to the expected yield of the farms in Tripp and Gregory counties alike. Rain came toward the end of the month, partially salvaging Micheaux’s crops in Gregory County. But by then Orlean was having crying jags, becoming “a veritable clinging vine,” according to Micheaux. They had “ugly little quarrels.” His portrait in The Conquest suggests that their lovemaking lapsed. One quarrel blew up so badly that it terrified them both, and they made amends, vowing to argue no more.

  Some time in late June, Orleans blushingly told Micheaux that she was pregnant. Her husband was touched and thrilled, but he persuaded Orlean that it was too soon to inform the Reverend, who had written to announce he was coming to visit at the end of the summer.

  Micheaux dreaded the Reverend McCracken’s arrival. His difficult circumstances had been aggravated, suddenly, by a legal challenge filed against Orlean’s claim. A banker in a small town in Tripp County, a bitter rival of the Jacksons, had charged that Mrs. Micheaux had never properly established residence on her relinquishment—which was partly true, as the married couple spent most of the summer of 1910 near Gregory.

  When the Reverend arrived, he was full of himself as usual. But he also seemed heartened and genuinely enthusiastic about the Rosebud country, and Orlean was so happy to see her father that Micheaux felt momentarily relieved.

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t neither man could stay away from “the race question,” which inevitably led to friction. As Micheaux described it in The Conquest, their arguments echoed greater discussions going on within black America over how to overcome widespread racial injustice. At the same time, Micheaux’s fictionalized recollections suggest that the homesteader was drawn into heated debate with his father-in-law as much by their mutual arrogance and clash of personalities as by their disagreements over social issues.

  The Reverend “had the most ancient and backward ideas concerning race advancement I had ever heard,” wrote Micheaux later. “He was filled to overflowing with condemnation of the white race and eulogy of the negro. In his idea the negro had no fault, nor could he do any wrong, or make any mistake. Everything had been against him, and according to the Reverend’s idea, was still.”

  Father- and son-in-law clashed over “mixed schools,” that is, over the integration of public education. Here the Elder was a traditionalist, opposed to intermingling the races. “They are like everything else the white people control,” the Elder declared. “They are managed in a way to keep the colored people down.” Micheaux objected vehemently, and was surprised when Orlean, who had taught in colored schools, weighed in firmly on his side, against her adored father.

  Only a small minority of colored people would vote for separate schools if they had the choice, Micheaux argued. “The mixed schools give the colored children a more equal opportunity and all the advantage of efficient management,” the homesteader insisted. “Another advantage of mixed schools is, it helps to eliminate so much prejudice.”

  On issues of race, the two headstrong men were destined never to find common ground. When Micheaux tried to shift the talk to money matters, however, he realized that the Reverend was an impractical man who understood little about business and finance. Orlean’s father was awestruck by the fact that Micheaux held checking accounts in different cities. When Micheaux mentioned James J. Hill, the famous empire builder of the Great Northern Railway Company—a living legend among railroad men and capitalists—the Reverend looked blank. “My face must have expressed my disgust at his ignorance,” wrote Micheaux later, “and he a public man for thirty years.”