Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  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 c
razy 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.

  The first-class services offered on a Pullman car were integral to the glamour and mystique of train travel, and those services were provided by black men with direct or family ties to slavery, a background the company unofficially thought vital to the psychology of the job. Dressed in spotless uniforms of jacket and necktie, the porters were expected to meet a customer’s every demand, or indignity, with an obliging smile. Besides stocking linens and amenities and preparing berths and cars for each run, porters brushed clothes, cleaned the cuspidors and lavatories, and shined shoes (by now a Micheaux specialty). They slept in the “smokers,” the men’s toilets.

  Pullman porters were paid $25 to $40 weekly, depending on length of service. But porters were expected to furnish, out of their own earnings, the polish and rags used for shining shoes. They paid for their company-assigned uniforms and regular laundering, as well as any food they bought on the train. These and other requirements, which slashed their salaries in half, forced the porters to survive largely on tips.

  In 1894, a bitter, national porter strike marked the first organized uprising against such institutionalized inequities. Only in 1925, after a long struggle, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized, becoming the first major black trade union. Portering was considered by many “a continuation of the slavery the war [Civil War] supposedly ended,” as Jack Santino observed in Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle, his study of the Pullman porters. At the same time, it was among the best of all possible jobs available to ordinary black men of the time—offering, besides income and tips, exciting travel and a certain cachet.

  Visiting the main Pullman office in Chicago twice a week, Oscar grew frustrated by his inability to get past the chief clerk. He already had a wide circle of acquaintances, and one day a friend advised him to leapfrog the clerk and approach the superintendent of hiring directly. So the next day Micheaux waylaid the boss as he arrived, making an appeal to the top man even as the chief clerk stared at him furiously. The superintendent left Oscar outside at the railing, but after a few minutes called him inside and asked for references. Micheaux provided letters from employers and friends, after which the superintendent asked if he could afford the company’s uniform. When Oscar said yes, he was directed to the company tailor, and to a man who tutored porters in a Pullman car dubbed “The School.”

  “The School” sat in a nearby railroad yard for just such tutoring purposes. According to Micheaux, always a ready learner, he absorbed all that was necessary for portering in one day, while other new employees had been in “The School” for five days before they graduated alongside him. All that night, his feverish thoughts about his first assignment, “perhaps to some distant city I had never seen,” had him tossing and turning.

  When he arrived at porter headquarters the next day, however, Micheaux discovered that the office was crammed with qualified black men waiting for a mere handful of assignments, including old fellows who were “emergies,” or emergency substitutes, as well as previously discharged or retired employees, who showed up hoping not enough regulars would materialize. He watched with sinking spirits as the sign-out clerk favored the familiar faces, passing up the “emergies” and most new employees. Finally, the clerk called out Oscar’s name, and asked him if he felt confident about serving his first car. When Micheaux declared that he was, the clerk paused suspensefully, then delegated him to the Fort Wayne yards in the West District, to prepare the Atlanta sleeper for its next excursion to Washington, D.C. “Put away the linens,” the clerk ordered, “put out combs, brushes, and have the car in order when the train backs down.”

  Micheaux “fairly flew” to Sixteenth Street, where the yards held “not less than seven hundred” passenger and Pullman cars, which had to be cleaned and prepared daily for their runs. After searching and searching, the novice porter found the Atlanta. “O wonderful name!” Micheaux later wrote ecstatically. “She was a brand new observation car just out of the shops. I dared not believe my eyes, and felt that there must be some mistake; surely the company didn’t expect to send me out with such a fine car on my first trip.”

  Boarding nervously, Micheaux got busy, making the Atlanta “fairly presentable” in time for the rush of arriving passengers, who called out to have their grips stowed, deflectors arranged for their windows, and other routine requests and
special favors. Despite the anxiety and confusion he felt, Oscar performed well, though at Pittsburgh he was “chagrined” to learn that his sleeper was going to be turned around and sent back to Chicago.

  According to the Pullman employment card of “Oscar Michaux,” this first portering occurred on December 7, 1902. Micheaux had been in Chicago for less than a year; he was a month shy of nineteen years of age.

  Having passed his trial by fire, Micheaux was put into the rotation and began to make frequent long trips, gradually visiting all of America’s major cities east of the Mississippi. He finally made it to the nation’s capital, and discovered that Washington, D.C. had quite a substantial Black Belt, too. As Micheaux later wrote, he “had never seen so many colored people. In fact, the entire population seemed to be Negroes.”

  Yet Micheaux preferred the rural west, and by February he had wangled a spot on a continuing run that took him through Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho, to Portland, Oregon. In The Conquest he rhapsodized about the time he spent gazing out the windows at the wide-open lands, the train hugging the curves as it climbed high in the Rockies, “their ragged peaks towering above in great sepulchral forms, filling me alternately with a feeling of romance or adventure.” It was exhilarating. “I never tired of hearing the t-clack of the trucks,” he wrote, “and the general roar of the train as it thundered over streams and crossings throughout the days and nights across the continent to the Pacific coast. The scenery never grew old, as it was quite varied between Chicago and North Platte. During the summer it is one large garden farm, dotted with numerous cities, thriving hamlets and towns, fine country homes so characteristic of the great middle west, and is always pleasing to the eye.”