Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  Bell Michaux was a deeply religious woman, baptized a Christian and then “united” at age twelve with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, an offshoot of Methodism launched by black Americans in 1787. Bell became a “shouting Methodist,” in Micheaux’s words: When she began to “get happy” at services, her children knew it was time to steal outdoors. Throughout her life she was active in charity and church affairs. Much of the family’s social activity, in Illinois and later Kansas, revolved around church events; especially when they lived in the country, the Michauxes hosted Elders and schoolteachers to Sunday supper.

  There is some evidence Oscar Micheaux himself was a deeply religious man. Micheaux was persistently autobiographical in his work, and in his second novel, The Forged Note, he describes his alter ego Sidney Wyeth as “a hopeless believer.” But he seems not to have maintained a commitment to any particular church, and in his books and films he presented a complex, skeptical attitude toward organized religion, and especially toward preachers, with their “assuming and authoritative airs.”

  This attitude may have had its roots in an incident in Metropolis, when he was a boy of about five. One Sunday after services, a group of Elders wearing Prince Albert coats and clerical vests came in wagons to visit the Michaux farm, accompanied by one of the family’s favorite Sunday schoolteachers. The older brothers went hunting for rabbit and quail to supply the special occasion, and when dinner was served the Elders seemed to devour everything in sight. Afraid he was going to be left out of the feast, little Oscar crawled into the lap of his favorite teacher and began gobbling his share. Suddenly, he found himself staring into the “angry eyes” of a tall, stout minister, whose flirtation with the teacher had been interrupted by his actions. The minister upbraided the boy for his bad manners. The boy defended himself, but Bell Michaux uncharacteristically thrashed Oscar, and afterward Oscar’s father quarreled with his wife over the incident.

  This story may be apocryphal, but Michaux relates it convincingly in his third autobiographical novel The Homesteader, even giving the teacher and the A.M.E. Elder characters transparent pseudonyms (as he often would in his fiction). In real life, the Elder was Rev. Newton J. McCracken; thirty years later, in a reworking of The Homesteader called The Wind from Nowhere, Micheaux would suggest that McCracken even had presided over his baptism.

  Later, the same Rev. McCracken would reappear, disastrously, in Micheaux’s life.

  Metropolis, the hub of Massac County, was on the Illinois-Kentucky border, just north of Paducah, Kentucky, across the Ohio River. It was a river town straight out of Mark Twain, dominated by the vast, snaking Ohio, which served Metropolis “as a water supply and as a frequent topic of everyday conversation,” according to town historian George W. May. Lumber and flour mills were at the core of local industry, and trade and travel were conducted by horse and wagon (farms were still tractorless, of course), or by steamboat, though the Golden Age of the steamboat was past. Showboats stopped at Metropolis during the summer, bringing plays and recitals. Otherwise the place “lingered in a state of dull lethargy,” in Micheaux’s words.

  Farm life was too busy to be strictly dull. Just as his son would do later in South Dakota, Calvin Michaux bought and sold several tracts of land around Metropolis, sometimes working more than one farm at a time. About four years before Oscar was born, Calvin paid another six hundred dollars to purchase “the undivided one-third of the west-half (½) of the north east quarter (¼) of Section Thirty-Three (33) in Township fifteen (15), South Range 5 (5), east”—a forty-acre plot in Brooklyn Precinct, just over the line from his adjacent Washington Precinct land. The family then took up residence on the Brooklyn farm, closer to Metropolis.

  Later, when Oscar was in school, they sold part of the Brooklyn farm and moved into “Township Numbered (16) South of Range Numbered (5) East,” another few miles closer to town. The family kept inching nearer to Metropolis, Micheaux later wrote, “not so much to get off the farm or to be near more colored people (as most of the younger Negro farmers did) as to give the children better educational facilities.” In fact, the Michauxes lived on the east side of Metropolis, while most of the black population clustered on the west side in an area locally dubbed “Colored Town.”

  Jim Crow was the way of life in Metropolis, a Southern hamlet in a Northern state. The well-built and -equipped main school was centrally located, but the “colored school” was a substandard facility tucked away in “Colored Town.” Though Illinois law guaranteed public education for black people, the issue of whether to mingle the races in the same building or classroom was left to the municipalities, and most Illinois towns and cities maintained separate schools for the races, with separate budgets that guaranteed black people would receive less funds and an inferior education. Southern Illinois was so notorious in its unequal distribution of financial resources that, in 1885, state leaders approved a special bill “designed to protect the liberties of Negroes in the less advanced counties of Southern Illinois.”

  Micheaux remembered the “colored school” of Metropolis as “an old building made of plain boards standing straight up and down with batten on the cracks,” administered by two or three teachers. Students of both sexes and every age were crowded into spartan classrooms. Micheaux and his classmates were part of the phenomenon Booker T. Washington described, in Up from Slavery, as “a whole race trying to go to school” after the Great Emancipation—young people sitting alongside illiterate octogenarians, who aspired to read the Bible before they died. As one mark of their ambition, black families in Metropolis had to pay an annual tuition for the privilege of sending their children to the school—a fee identical to that paid by white folks across town with a better school and manifestly greater resources. No refunds were made for sickness or expulsion. Disobedience was met with physical punishment.

  But Calvin and Bell Michaux, who put extra food on the table for teachers and preachers, set aside the necessary funds for their childrens’ education. Though Metropolis High School graduated its first class in 1877, the first “colored graduating class” didn’t make it past the high hurdles until 1896. That year twenty-nine white students graduated from high school, but so did seven who were “colored,” including the oldest Michaux child, Ida.

  By the time Oscar entered school a few years later, the situation had improved slightly. Although the scope and curricula of the white and “colored” schools was still unequal, the local superintendent of public education boasted of narrowing the gap with good equipment and a supply of “the choicest and most attractive books” for the library. (Metropolis would maintain separate schools for white and “colored” children into the 1950s.)

  Apart from general history, mathematics, and science courses, the “colored school” emphasized reading, writing, and the arts. Students were taught to practice dictation and write form letters and searching essays. They were expected to read certain literary works before promotion. They discussed art, poetry, and music “as agencies of communication between the soul and external things,” according to the superintendent’s report.

  All this was grist for a boy who would grow into an insatiable reader and tireless writer. Yet his later reflections on his education suggest that Micheaux was just as deeply affected by its shortcomings. He described his Metropolis schooling as “inadequate in many respects.” In his books he criticized his teachers (who were paid much less than white teachers and were often recent graduates of the “colored school”) as “inefficient,” and bemoaned the distance between his home and the school on the west side of town.

  Though he exalted teachers in his books and films, they often disappointed him in real life. Teaching was his first wife’s profession, and that was an ill-fated marriage; when he traveled from city to city to sell his novels, he found that local teachers didn’t always rush to purchase copies.

  Micheaux insisted he always received “good grades” in his Metropolis school days, but felt unappreciated by those who tutored him.
“About the only thing for which I was given credit was in learning readily,” Micheaux recollected, “but was continually critiqued for talking too much and being too inquisitive.”

  By now his father owned some eighty acres and was considered “fairly well-to-do, that is for a colored man,” but the Michauxes were merely land-rich and felt constantly beset by upkeep and debt. With springtime came rougher toil and a different set of learning experiences, though Oscar’s three older brothers assumed the brunt of the farm chores. Oscar, the fifth-born, was considered the family shirker, always complaining “that it was too cold to work in the winter, and too warm in the summer,” as he himself conceded. The Michauxes made ends meet by selling fruit, vegetables, and eggs, and soon—out of “disgust” at his “poor service in the field”—Calvin Michaux reassigned his young teenage son to take the family’s goods to the local meat and garden market, a huge open-air building in the center of Metropolis.

  At the market, Oscar bloomed. He discovered his métier: a born talker, he was a natural salesman. “I met and became acquainted with people quite readily,” Micheaux recalled. He soon developed little tricks, giving “each and every prospective customer” a singular greeting, or suggestion, “which usually brought a smile and a nod of appreciation as well as a purchase.” He noticed “how many people enjoy being flattered, and how pleased even the prosperous men’s wives would seem if bowed to with a pleasant, ‘Good Morning!’”

  When one older brother complained that Oscar had it easy at the market, Calvin let the brother try his hand at salesmanship. But the brother found himself tongue-tied with customers; he was no match for Oscar’s garrulous personality. One of Oscar’s surprising talents was approaching well-dressed white folk, hailing Metropolis’s most distinguished citizens by name. (In his very first novel, the autobiographical The Conquest, as if to prove his point, he tossed off one example: Mrs. Quante of the Riverside Flouring Mills, wife of the mayor, no less.) The older brother sulkily returned to heavy farm work; Oscar got the regular job as the family pitch man. “I always sold the goods,” Micheaux boasted, “and engaged more for the afternoon delivery.”

  For pocket pennies, the resourceful young man also performed odd jobs wherever he could find them. Micheaux wasn’t above taking a homemade box out onto the streets and shining shoes on his knees.

  But Metropolis was “gradually losing its usefulness by the invasion of railroads,” in Micheaux’s words, and as a teenager he could barely tolerate the culture of the backward river town. And he didn’t spare the black populace: Probably the most controversial aspect of Micheaux’s books and films is his sharp-tongued criticism of his own race, a trait rooted deep in his Metropolis boyhood. He rarely itemized the faults of white people as a group, for Micheaux knew white people primarily as individuals—some as dire enemies, but a few as prosperous, generous friends. “Oscar Micheaux’s body of work,” as scholar Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor has written, “shows little curiosity or interest in white society beyond the cordial relationships and a few enduring friendships.”

  Beginning in Metropolis—and throughout most of his life, with the notable exception of his time in nearly all-white South Dakota—Micheaux strongly criticized the community he knew best, the people he understood as well as he understood himself. He was especially hard on what he saw as the ignoble tendencies of his own race.

  In his first novel, The Conquest, Micheaux railed against the hypocrisy of churchgoers among the “colored churches” of Metropolis, both the Baptist congregation and the A.M.E. church patronized by his own family. Too many of the men, it seemed to Micheaux, prayed, sang, and shouted on Sundays, while stealing and drinking and fighting during the rest of the week. The colored folk of Metropolis, he complained harshly, “were in the most part wretchedly poor, ignorant, and envious. They were quite set in the ways of their localisms, and it was quite useless to talk to them of anything that would better oneself.”

  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 become 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 pi
oneer George P. Johnson, a black man who knew him well, Micheaux was “a Negro,” and “unmistakably so.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  1900–1904 BLACK METROPOLIS

  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.