Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (7 page)

“You can't find a better metaphor than a Pullman porter pushing a plow,” one neighbor, Don Coonen, averred years later. “He must have gone through the agonies of hell.”

It rained through most of June, but Micheaux persevered despite the rain and mud, even as the Dallas postmaster pointed him out to bystanders in town: “Just look at that fool nigger a-working in the rain.”

Breaking the land was grueling in the sun, and even worse during steady rainfall. Mosquitoes filled the air. The days were always long, the nights longer and “awfully lonesome.” Through his small windows Micheaux watched the clouds shifting and reforming in the vast covering sky. He often dropped off to sleep reading by moonlight. A believer in dreams, he hoped his fancies would foretell happiness and prosperity. His films are full of dreams and nightmares, omens and supernatural visitations, and characters whose “second sight” presages coming events.

One pleasure of Micheaux's early fiction is that he also positions himself on the sidelines, using his narrative voice to comment on his own follies and foibles. In
The Conquest,
especially, he exhibits a keen sense of himself as a quasi-comic hero, though always with the heightened consciousness of a black man who knew he stood apart from and was regarded skeptically by the surrounding community of white homesteaders.

Marriages between white men and Indians were not uncommon in Gregory County, and a few Indians had married Buffalo Soldiers. But Micheaux never lost sight of the fact that his skin color made him a genuine rarity, a “novelty” among the predominantly white homesteaders. He met and talked with white families who had children, “in some instances twenty years of age,” Micheaux wrote later, “who had never seen a colored man. Sometimes the little tads would run from me, screaming as though they had met a lion, or some other wild beast of the forest.” His
neighbors quickly learned the name Oscar, he wrote later, but fumbled over the pronunciation and spelling of his “odd surname.” He sometimes got deliveries that were marked, simply, “Colored Man, Dallas.”

There was only “one other colored person” residing in Dallas, Micheaux wrote Jessie, “a barber, who was married to a white woman, and I didn't like him.” This was the first time in his life Micheaux had lived surrounded by white people, many of them European immigrants—Germans, Swedes, Irish, Czechs, Russians, Danes, and Austrians—still conversing in their mother tongues. “Only about one [homesteader] in every eight or ten was a farmer,” Micheaux recalled. “They were of all vocations in life and all nationalities, excepting negroes, and I controlled the colored vote. This was one place where being a colored man was an honorary distinction.”

In spite of everything, by September Micheaux had proven his mettle beyond any doubt. His persistence impressed all his neighbors. In the summer of 1905, he later estimated, he pulled a plow fourteen hundred miles to break the bulk of his claim, planting corn, oats, and flax, and fencing off vast sections of his property. He broke over 120 acres, more than most “other real farmers, who had not broken over forty acres, with good horses and their knowledge of breaking prairie.”

He had made a home for himself, and triumphed among his peers, showing himself to be not only a hardworking farmer but in many small ways a good neighbor. He was less and less a “novelty” Negro. He had a growing circle of friends among the white settlers. “I began to be regarded in a different light,” Micheaux wrote.

Winter came early in South Dakota, and the groundbreaking and planting halted. With extra time on his hands, Micheaux sought other work. The long distances between his homestead and others didn't bother him; when he wasn't riding a horse or buggy, he was a familiar figure striding across the fields, hiring himself out to neighbors. One of the many tasks Micheaux performed for the Jackson brothers was freighting coal and supplies between Bonesteel and Dallas.

When the cold set in and the winds worsened, there was little respite. Neighbors who visited him recalled Micheaux lying in bed, his little stove burning fiercely and blankets up around his shoulders, the corner of a book peeking out.

Micheaux got in the habit, that first year, of heading to Chicago around Thanksgiving for Christmas and the New Year, staying for as long as possible. He caught up with friends, celebrated his birthday on the second of January, and attended all the shows downtown and in the Black Belt. He was impressed by the new stock company that had taken over the Pekin Theater at the corner of Twenty-seventh and State. The Pekin Players were among the nation's first professional black theater troupes, mounting original plays as well as Broadway hits and old standards restaged with all-black casts. Charles Moore and Lawrence Chenault were two of the regulars in Micheaux films he first applauded on stage at the Pekin.

That winter of 1905–1906, he also traveled to Murphysboro to visit
Jessie and spent what he called the “happiest week of my life” with her. Then he picked up some extra money portering on runs to the South. Returning to South Dakota as the winter started to ebb, he fell to brooding about Jessie, who was being pressed by a competing Murphysboro suitor, “a three dollar a week menial,” in Micheaux's contemptuous words. His rival's growing friendship with Jessie made Micheaux jealous and miserable. He resolved to forget all about Jessie, but suffered attacks of the blues, mingled with daydreams of himself and his ideal wife on the prairie.

 

Land surveyors and train agents visited Gregory County in the spring of 1906, and rumors flew they were mapping the long-awaited extension of the railroad. The route of the extension would decide future train stops, and that would determine the ultimate fate of the sparring towns, while richly increasing the value of land along the new route. Each of the Gregory County towns had newspapers, bankers, and civic boosters campaigning for itself.

Bonesteel, which had claimed the railhead since 1901, complacently believed that it would be another ten years before the trains passed it by, time it would spend consolidating its status as a prairie capital. If the extension went through Burke and hit Gregory, then it was a cinch to skip Dallas, which fell a little to the south and on irregular high land. By the same token, if the extension chose Dallas, then it was bound to avoid Burke and Gregory.

The Jacksons kept buying up all available land, while talking up the advantages of Dallas. The brothers bought drinks and dinner for their clients and handed out expensive cigars as they consummated their deals. Their opponents in the other towns derided the Jacksons as “windjammers and manipulators of knavish plots,” in Micheaux's words. But Oscar himself found the power brokers shrewd and personable. All three brothers were “college-bred boys, with a higher conception of things in general; were modern, free, and up-to-date”; in his view, they far outclassed the local rubes.

Because of his friendship with the Jacksons, and because he had worked as a porter, Micheaux found that other settlers considered him a “railroad expert,” and sought out his opinion on the future of the railroad. His relinquishment was halfway between Dallas and Gregory; had
he purchased it because someone had tipped him off about the extension decision? What did he know of the Jacksons' multifarious schemes? Suddenly viewed as an insider, the “only colored homesteader” found himself an increasingly welcome visitor wherever he roamed.

Then, just as the surveyor rumors rose to a fever, Ernest Jackson mysteriously disappeared from the vicinity. Promoters in the other towns seized on the anxiety provoked by his absence to convince the nervous merchants of Dallas to evacuate. A man was hired to bring horses, block and tackle, and massive wagons, and he hauled the main buildings out of Dallas, literally sawing the bigger structures in half to facilitate the operation. Some were taken to Burke, others to Gregory. Soon little was left of Dallas, excepting a two-story bank, a two-story hotel, a saloon, and a few lesser buildings, all owned by the Jacksons.

When Ernest Jackson reappeared, furious at what had transpired in his absence, he confided the details of his mysterious trip to Micheaux. He and other businessmen had gone to see Marvin Hughitt in Chicago, asking for a peek at the blueprints of the Gregory County survey. Hughitt had told them the extension probably wouldn't include Dallas. Knowing this secret, the Jacksons now made a magnanimous show of offering to move their various enterprises into Gregory and consolidate with that town, which would give Gregory a clear edge over Burke, but the Gregory town fathers, “with the flush of victory and the sensation of empire builders,” in Micheaux's words, scorned their overtures. The Jacksons, seething, continued to plot.

Micheaux was royally entertained by everything that was going on, making mental if not actual scribbled notes that would prove useful in crafting his first novel,
The Conquest.

 

The summer of 1906 was another thoroughly wet one, wonderful for the crops. Micheaux managed to break the rest of the ground he intended to plow, planting wheat along with more corn and flax.

His horse sense was improving: He bought better horses, and added machinery. He spent $3,000 on another relinquishment, north of Gregory and closer to the Missouri River, increasing his holdings to 320 acres. He divided his time between the two Gregory County farms, breaking the ground of the second homestead.

Though he felt bereft of romance, he was also wary of crossing unspoken lines with any of the local ladies—some of them potentially eligible, many of them friendly with him, but all of them white. Though not everyone who spoke this way meant to offend him, Micheaux now and then heard himself referred to by the ugly word “nigger,” which was common parlance among the white settlers.

One neighbor woman to his southeast tried to make him feel at ease, sometimes inviting Micheaux inside to sit down and eat supper with the family. “He'd say, ‘Nope,' he wouldn't do it,” remembered Dick Siler, another neighbor. “‘I'll have some dessert,' he'd say. And what he liked for dessert was homemade bread and milk. He'd have half a loaf of bread and drink a half gallon of milk, and that'd be his dessert. He'd always have that, but you had to bring it outdoors, he wouldn't come in the house.”

At times Micheaux was a mixer, known for attending the harvest barn dances hosted by local Bohemian families. He enjoyed the food and music, but shied away from the white women who tried to pull him into dancing. (He bared his thoughts on such missed chances via the lead character in
The Wind from Nowhere
: “He wasn't dancing with any white girl, for everybody to be looking at them.”) He mingled more with the children, amusing them by singing, according to colloquial accounts, the schottishe “Any Rags,” popularized at the turn of the century by ragtime artist Arthur Collins. If he danced at all, it was with the children, and then everyone was delighted—the women envious—because Micheaux was a free-spirited dancer.

Micheaux tried to picture Jessie living with him on his claim, but couldn't quite conjure her there; nor could he shake his feelings of jealousy. He was writing at intervals to another young woman living in Carbondale named “Daisy Hinshaw” (at least that is the name he lends her in
The Conquest
), whom he had known back in Metropolis, where she used to come to visit her cousins. She was older than Jessie, “not very good-looking but had spent years in school and in many ways was unlike the average colored girl,” in his words.

He also developed a long-distance relationship with an attractive “St. Louis octoroon,” a trained nurse who wrote him engaging letters. But three of his best horses died that fall, he was distracted by hard work, and he let the St. Louis correspondence lapse. When the wet summer turned into an early, frigid winter, Micheaux almost froze in “my little old soddy.” The temperature could drop to twenty-five below zero, with the
wind screaming and howling. The snow piled into huge sculpted drifts and long ridges that formed “one endless, unbroken sheet of white frost and ice.” Inside seemed as cold as outside. “Sod houses are warm as long as the mice, rats, and gophers do not bore them full of holes, but as they had made a good job tunneling mine, I was left to welcome the breezy atmosphere.”

He visited Chicago only briefly over Thanksgiving and Christmas, talking up the golden opportunities on the plains. Like his alter egos in his novels and films, however, Micheaux realized that he often grated on “poor listeners,” and could “warm up” to a subject “until it evolved into sort of a lecture.”

 

Back in South Dakota, Ernest Jackson vanished again. This time, he returned with the same block-and-tackle man to uproot and haul the Bank of Dallas to a new, unspecified location. No one, not even Micheaux, knew where the bank building was headed, as it ground slowly across the prairie toward Gregory. After a few miles, the bank made a sudden, surprising swerve to the northwest; by sundown it had been deposited on the side of a hill five miles west of Gregory, just short of the Tripp County line.

Jackson then opened the doors of his bank to invite customers in for loans. The few remaining Dallas buildings followed. Jackson named the impromptu settlement “New Dallas.” In recent weeks much of the land surrounding the spot had mysteriously traded hands, with ownership passing to the Jacksons. The brothers were back in business, and the fierce competition between Gregory and New Dallas (which soon dropped the “New”) resumed.

In the meantime, Gregory had been awarded the railhead. Micheaux moved his post office address to Gregory, while keeping his money safe in Ernest Jackson's Bank of Dallas. It was a pattern he would repeat throughout his life: moving between places, dispersing his savings among banks in different towns and cities, the better to divide risk and elude creditors. Even now, besides South Dakota, Micheaux was maintaining accounts in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.

Gregory was the bigger, more established town; in frontier terms it was almost a city—“a great place to visit,” in Micheaux's words—with
several banks and crowded hotels and teeming saloons, not to mention a slew of gambling dens and brothels. Without going into much detail, Micheaux said that he spent many a long night “answering the call of the wild” in the pleasure joints of Gregory and other nearby towns.

Adding to the excitement, in the summer of 1907, was the belief that four thousand homesteads in Tripp County, immediately to the west, would soon be opened to claims and settlement under another government lottery. Tripp County land would be more expensive land than Gregory County, but still a bargain at six dollars per acre. Congress had passed the necessary legislation in March, and the bill awaited President Theodore Roosevelt's signature. Many of the homesteaders in Gregory County were preparing to sell their land at a profit, and reinvest the proceeds in Tripp.

Another rainy summer passed, the crops bountiful. Strangers and speculators poured into Gregory County. Everyone was certain that the Tripp homesteads would be twice as lucrative, and land prices rocketed. “The atmosphere seemed charged with drunken enthusiasm,” Micheaux wrote later. “Everybody had it. There was nothing to fear.”

By now, Gregory and Dallas were vying fiercely for the upper hand. Each town boasted that it offered the cheapest water, the finest hotels, free escorted tours of the countryside, and optimal land. (“Whenever anything like a real building goes up in a little town on the prairie, with their collection of shacks,” Micheaux observed drily, “it is always called ‘the best building' between there and somewhere else.”) But Gregory didn't have Ernest Jackson, that “king of reasoning,” in Micheaux's words, who welcomed visitors to a “luxuriously furnished” office, its walls “profusely decorated” with portraits of “prominent capitalists and financiers of the middle west, some of whom were financing the schemes of the fine looking young men” smoking the cigars and dispensing the contracts.

Again Jackson confided in Micheaux, telling the black homesteader that Marvin Hughitt had promised him a personal favor. King Marvin had agreed to extend the extension
past
Gregory, for the sake of all those big ranchers who didn't want to drive their herds of cattle through five miles of settled farm country. Usually, as Micheaux understood, it took ten or twenty years for a railroad to extend its railhead. But the first train had come to Gregory on a Sunday in June 1907. And the extension would arrive in the new Dallas by September.

Micheaux savored every morsel of the drama, later writing it all down.

 

In Micheaux's fourth summer of homesteading, the summer of 1908, the land excitement reached an orgasmic pitch.

Automobiles spread like a rash across Gregory County, bearing speculators driving buyers around the countryside. Ernest Jackson led “booster trade excursions” in his gleaming Packard, “making clever speeches” and inviting prospects back to Dallas for free wining and dining at the hotel and businesses he owned. A man of trains, Micheaux never developed the same ardor for automobiles—when traveling in cars later in life, he preferred to be chauffeured—and now he noted “the exhaust of the engine making a cracking noise” as he stood in his Rosebud fields, watching the boosters roll by. “The motion, added to the speed, seemed to thrill and enthuse the investor, until he bought whether he cared or not,” Micheaux observed.