Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (3 page)

Micheaux learned early to hawk his ideas as well as goods and wares, and even as a teenager he openly vented his views. This habit “didn't have the effect of burdening me with many friends,” he conceded in
The Conquest.
“Another thing that added to my unpopularity, perhaps, was my persistent declarations that there was not enough competent colored people to grasp the many opportunities that presented themselves, and that if white people could possess such nice homes, wealth, and luxuries, so in time could the colored people.”

To the boys and girls “who led in the whirlpool of the local colored society,” Micheaux recalled, he was regarded as being “of the ‘too-slow-to-catch-cold' variety.” His peers nicknamed him “Oddball,” and older people regarded him more suspiciously as “worldly, a free thinker, and a dangerous associate for young Christian folks.”

Already Micheaux had set himself apart from the common herd. He was an imaginative talker, an individualist who saw himself as a leader not a follower—a singular, even peculiar, figure among his peers. “At sixteen I was fairly disgusted with it all,” he wrote later, “and took no pains to keep my disgust concealed.”

It doesn't stigmatize Micheaux to say that he didn't get far in high school. (“I didn't finish school,” his alter ego Martin Eden confesses in Micheaux's last film,
The Betrayal.
) The 1899 report on local public schools makes it clear that, after eighth grade, teenage black and white boys alike were siphoned off by work. Certainly, however, Micheaux learned to read and write, and to “learn readily” in many ways.

Realizing that his future would be sorely limited in dull old Metropolis, Micheaux made his first courageous decision: to leave home. Some of his older siblings had come to the same conclusion: His sister Ida, after graduating from high school, took a teaching job in Carbondale, while two of his older brothers had quit before finishing their education to be
come hotel waiters in a nearby town, “much to the dissatisfaction of my mother, who always declared emphatically that she wanted none of her sons to become lackeys,” wrote Micheaux.

In due time, his older brothers Lawrence and Finis would enlist in the Spanish-American War. After decamping to Springfield, their unit was demobilized, though Lawrence elected to join a Chicago troop and was dispatched to Santiago, Cuba. It is unclear how much action Lawrence saw in his short time in the military, only that Oscar's brother died in a San Luis hospital in 1898, one of many victims of a typhoid epidemic.

It was the death of another Michaux, in fact, that helped to liberate the entire family from Massac County. Oscar's father had been struggling with work and debt when, in 1900, he fell heir to part of the estate of his younger brother, William, one of the homesteading Exodusters, who had passed away in Great Bend, Kansas. That triggered the family's move to Kansas.

By this time, Oscar himself was already gone. Metropolis had one train that went to St. Louis and another that led to Paducah, but the river town had been in a state of perpetual suspense hoping for a line upstate. When the Chicago and Eastern Railroad finally reached nearby Joppa in late 1900, Oscar hopped aboard and headed north. Almost seventeen, the future novelist and filmmaker was more than six feet tall, slender, with slightly rounded shoulders. He had a high forehead, a strong chin (like the heroes in his books), and burning brown eyes.

One final ambiguity about Oscar Micheaux: Among the limited primary sources and few surviving eyewitnesses, there is no consensus about the darkness of his skin. The handful of photographs of Micheaux are not much help: He was surely not ebony-complected, yet he was dark enough that he could never have “passed” for white—a quest of so many characters in his books and films.

In a rare mention in
Time
magazine, Micheaux was described as “chocolate-colored.” According to people who worked on his last film, in 1947, his skin was more like “coffee with cream.” To Agnes Becker, a white homesteader with little experience with black people, who became acquainted with Micheaux in South Dakota, “his tongue was so red, his teeth so white, and his face so black.” Perhaps she exaggerated. But even to fellow race-picture pioneer George P. Johnson, a black man who knew him well, Micheaux was “a Negro,” and “unmistakably so.”

Much of what is known about Micheaux's early life can be gleaned from his autobiographical novels, especially the three that cover his first thirty-five years, time spent largely in Metropolis, Chicago, and South Dakota. His first novel,
The Conquest,
is considered by biographer and historian Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor as “the most accurate of the autobiographical versions.” Scholar J. Ronald Green agreed, saying it was “fundamentally trustworthy as autobiography and history.” Again and again, in research for this book, that judgment was upheld: Available documents and accounts corroborate the details and the chronology of Micheaux's early life as recorded in his fiction.

After leaving Metropolis, according to
The Conquest,
Oscar stopped first in a town of about eight thousand people—roughly one tenth of whom were “colored”—where there was said to be work for $1.25 a day at an early car manufacturing plant. The plant employed approximately twelve hundred men, including many black laborers. According to Micheaux, he was hired and assigned to a foundry of roaring furnaces and deafening machines. Though he tried to stretch his designated hours, Micheaux was never quite able to put in a full week of work.

In any event, he didn't enjoy the hot, deafening foundry, and he found the town uninteresting. It didn't help when he developed malaria and missed days on the job, lying in bed. “I came there in June and it was some time in September that I drew my fullest pay envelope which contained sixteen dollars and fifty cents,” he later wrote.

In the early fall of that year, Micheaux recalled, “a ‘fire-eating' colored evangelist” visited the town, inaugurating a revival at a local church near the foundry. The evangelist's daily preaching and shouting drew so many hundreds that the revival spilled into an open field, with the converts “running about like wild creatures, tearing their hair and uttering prayers and supplications in discordant tones.” Oscar himself attended on several occasions, and again was struck by the hypocrisy of some he recognized in the crowd, who outside of church were not known for their virtuous behavior. Feeling the eyes of others upon him, gauging his willingness to surrender to the Lord, Oscar sat stubborn and “quite unemotional” throughout the raucous revival, and was as pleased as the outraged local aldermen when the evangelist left town.

By year's end, Oscar too was ready to move on. From a relative he heard a rumor of employment farther north, “bailing water in a coal mine in a little town inhabited entirely by negroes,” according to Micheaux. He joined the overnight shift, a twelve-hour stint for $2.25. “The work was rough and hard and the mine very dark,” he recalled. Black smoke hung above the tunnel-like room where he toiled. The damp and headaches forced him to quit after six weeks.

All along Micheaux was thinking of Chicago, where his oldest brother, William, was now working as a train waiter. But first he stopped to visit his sister Ida, who was teaching at a “colored school” in Carbondale. Eight years older, Ida hadn't laid eyes on Oscar for some time. “I had grown into a strong husky youth,” Micheaux wrote, “and my sister was surprised to see that I was working and taking care of myself so well.”

Impressed by Oscar's prospects, Ida thought her brother might be in the market for a girlfriend. Ida had a candidate in mind, a local girl from nearby Murphysboro, a few years younger than Oscar. The girl's father was a mailman. In Micheaux's novels her surname appears sometimes as Rooks, sometimes as Binga,
*
but her first name is always the same: Jessie. When Ida described the eligible girl as “the prettiest colored girl in town,” however, Oscar balked. Unconventionally handsome himself, he thought people were foolish about feminine beauty. “I was suspicious when it came
to the pretty type of girls,” he wrote, “and had observed that the prettiest girl in town was ofttimes petted and spoiled and a mere butterfly.”

In spite of his misgivings, Jessie was summoned to meet Micheaux. When she arrived, he recalled, “I found her to be demure and thoughtful, as well as pretty. She was small of stature, had dark eyes and beautiful wavy, black hair, and an olive complexion.” The two seemed to click, though Oscar did most of the talking. Jessie shyly averted her eyes and sat with folded hands, answering Oscar's stream of questions in a tiny, quavering voice.

That was in mid-winter, a Sunday morning early in 1902; Oscar left town later in the day. By 9:40 that evening, “the coldest night I had ever experienced,” he stepped off the “fast mail” express in the city of his dreams, a place that might as well have been Oz, for all its surreal qualities. Imagine a young country bumpkin of the late nineteenth century, a farm hick acquainted only with backwater towns, passing through a portal into a world of tomorrow. Chicago was “new and strange,” Micheaux recalled, and that must have been an understatement.

Trolley lines ran from downtown into the countryside. Horse-drawn vehicles shared the roads with street cars, bicycles, and the occasional chauffeur-driven automobile. The bridges were stone, the sidewalks cement. There was a lake as big as an ocean, vast public parks teeming with activity, an expanse of high-rises (at twenty-one stories, Chicago's Masonic Temple was the world's tallest building), and a public library that flowed around a block. At night the city was afire with lighted windows and corner lamps and electric signs. The streets were loud with music and laughter pouring out of the theaters and saloons. Most astonishing of all were the people thronging the streets—more black people than Micheaux had ever imagined. Although the population of the city was 98 percent white, roughly thirty thousand of Chicago's inhabitants were black.

Ninety percent of Chicago's black citizens lived in the Black Belt, the South Side neighborhood that was Micheaux's ultimate destination, though at that time plenty of white people—up to 40 percent—also dwelled there with little friction. The area ran from Twelfth to Thirty-first streets, bounded by Lake Michigan on the east and Wentworth Avenue on the west. Black physicians, attorneys, and professionals lived in splendid brick homes, while most ordinary folk dwelled in wood houses. The
newcomer wandered the streets for a long time, gawking at the sights before arriving in the residential area where his brother lived.

State Street between Twenty-sixth and Thirty-ninth was fast becoming “the centerpiece of black life in Chicago,” as Chicago historian Robin F. Bachin has written. This stretch, soon to be dubbed “the Stroll,” was jammed with sports venues, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, dance halls, and taverns, which catered to a mainly black clientele, though they weren't always owned by black people.

The Stroll was where the black and tans met and congregated, promenading day and night. “Excitement from noon to noon,” wrote Langston Hughes in his autobiographical novel
The Big Sea,
describing the thrill of experiencing the Stroll for the first time in 1918. “Midnight was like day.”

Oscar's brother lived in a rooming house at 3021 Armour Avenue, two blocks west of the Stroll, not far from the Union Stock Yards. William wasn't home to greet his brother, but his landlady welcomed the young man, who had just turned eighteen, and Oscar eagerly confided in her his dreams of striking it rich in the big city. When William came home and the landlady recounted their conversation, he scolded Oscar, telling him to keep his mouth shut so people wouldn't realize he was so “green.” William wrote their parents in Kansas, describing his little brother as “a big, awkward, ignorant kid, unsophisticated in the ways of the world,” according to Micheaux. Though Oscar tried to laugh off William's jibes, being painted as a rube in a letter that would be read by his entire family made him feel “heartsick and discouraged,” and for the first time in his life he suffered an extended attack of “the blues.”

William, who was six years older than Oscar, regarded himself as a man of the world. Oscar, on the other hand, viewed his brother as a poseur who had taken on city airs. William had been gainfully employed as a waiter on a railroad dining car, but “in a fit of independence—which had always been characteristic of him—had quit, and now in midwinter was out of a job.” Indeed, William was flat broke, “but with a lot of fine clothes and a diamond or two,” Micheaux recalled. “Most folks from the country don't value good clothes and diamonds in the way city folks do,” he observed ruefully.

On his first Sunday in Chicago, Oscar thought the two brothers might go to church together. But William got flashily dressed up for the occasion—“wearing his five dollar hat, fifteen dollar made-to-measure
shoes, forty-five dollar coat and vest, eleven dollar trousers, fifty dollar tweed overcoat and his diamonds”—and then headed off without so much as a backward glance at his brother. Oscar trailed behind, sitting alone in an opposite pew and feeling snubbed.

The Armour Avenue landlady, who was embroiled in some kind of romance with William, carried William on his back rent. But Oscar was obliged to pay six dollars a month as his share, so he urgently sought employment at the nearby stockyards (“Mecca for the down-and-out”). The $1.50–a-day work was decent but intermittent, and he drifted elsewhere. “I soon found the mere getting of jobs to be quite easy,” Micheaux wrote later in
The Conquest.
“It was getting a desirable one that gave me trouble.”

After “trying first one job, then another,” Oscar headed for the steel mills of Joliet. A few weeks of heavy toil later—wrecking and carrying around broken iron, and digging in a canal “with a lot of jabbering foreigners,” under a foreman who was a “renowned imbecile”—Oscar heard that the nearby coal chutes were paying better, and he quit the steel industry, too.

In charge of the coal chutes was a big black man who hired Oscar to extract coal from a box car, then crack and heave it into a chute; the job paid $1.50 per twenty-five tons. The trouble was, Oscar could only manage sixteen to eighteen tons a day, and his daily earnings peaked at one dollar. When the contractor took him out for a drink, trying to encourage him by telling him he'd be heaving thirty tons in no time, “I cut him off by telling him that I'd resign before I became so proficient.”

Resign he did, returning to Chicago to a less sympathetic landlady, and a brother increasingly indifferent to his troubles. Oscar signed with a hiring agency, which promptly did nothing on his behalf, swindling him out of his agency fee of three hard-earned dollars. He tried the newspapers, standing outside when the papers came off the press, grabbing one, scanning the ads, choosing a prospect, then running like crazy to the stipulated address. One way or another, the jobs were always filled before he got there. “The only difference I found between the newspapers and the employment agencies was that I didn't have to pay three dollars for the experience,” he wrote.

One day, while talking to “a small, Indian-looking Negro,” he heard of an opening for a shoeshine man in a barbershop in the supposed boom town of “Eaton” (probably Wheaton), west of Chicago. Oscar filled his
grip and “beat it,” arriving in the town on a cold, bleak day in early May. On the town's main street he found a dingy two-chair barbershop, which had just been taken over by a new proprietor with a German-speaking assistant. “They seemed to need company,” Micheaux recalled. He got the position, which paid no wages but all the fees and tips he could wangle from his shoeshine customers—and an upstairs room where he could bed down. “Shining shoes is not usually considered an advanced or technical occupation requiring skill,” Micheaux explained later. “However, if properly conducted it can be the making of a good solicitor.”

Solicitation was half the challenge: “Eaton” was in rural Illinois, where the rustic class put little stock in the regular polishing of their footwear. Oscar had to hover outside the barbershop, snatching at passersby and launching quickly into his spiel. “If I could argue them into stopping, if only for a moment, I could nearly always succeed in getting them into the chair,” Micheaux recalled.

Business was paltry, however, so he found another sideline in which he had some experience: Early in the day he would go out and find spot farm jobs, pitching hay or shocking oats for area farmers, then head to the barbershop to shine shoes by late afternoon. But the local farm youth outworked him—“Whew!”—and as the summer wore on he pined for company. So he began writing letters to Jessie, the pretty, thoughtful girl he had met in Carbondale.

Staying in “Eaton,” Oscar accumulated enough savings to open his initial bank account. The sight of his “twenty-dollar certificate of deposit,” he later reflected, opened his eyes to new horizons. Soon Oscar was dreaming of saving enough money to invest in land, or a business. It was during his time in “Eaton,” Micheaux wrote later, that he laid “the foundation of a future” for himself, with both his first savings and his first stirrings of ambition.

Now he set a fresh goal for himself: to obtain a more decent, better-paying niche as a porter on one of the Pullman Company's “magnificent sleepers”—a job that would offer him “an opportunity to see the country and make money at the same time,” in his words. And so Oscar returned to Chicago, temporarily busying himself with lawn-mowing, window-washing, and odd jobs while haunting the different Pullman offices.

“I was finally rewarded by being given a run on a parlor car by a road that reached many summer resorts in southern Wisconsin,” Micheaux wrote. He headed out on weekends, returning on Monday mornings, but
he had a hard time making much money on such minor routes—or getting the Pullman bosses, who were besieged by black men seeking porter jobs, to pay any attention to him.

 

The Pullman Palace Car Company was headquartered in Chicago. Its founder, George Pullman, pioneered the plush sleeper cars with folding upper berths that were used by the higher-paying passengers on trains. Pullman cars were available on Midwestern lines by 1865 (one carried the body of the assassinated President Lincoln from Chicago to Springfield); before long they became common in most overnight routes throughout the United States. Pullman retained ownership of the cars, leasing service to railroad lines, which switched the cars from train to train on long runs so that passengers could stay on their reserved sleepers for the entire trip. The Pullman company swiftly branched into luxury lounge, club, and dining cars.