Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

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by Patrick McGilligan


  Micheaux tried enlisting a locator, but the first one he approached declined to escort him. When he finally found a second one, a buggy-driver at a livery stable, the second man, called Slater, told him that the first locator had already warned him that he’d be a fool “to waste his money hauling a d—nigger around the reservation,” because surely Micheaux didn’t have enough money to buy a decent relinquishment.

  Micheaux flushed angrily. “Show me what I want,” he declared, “and I will produce the money.” He demanded to be driven to the far west end of Gregory County, where the relinquishments were said to be cheaper, the soil richer. The two men rode in silence for the three miles from Bonesteel to the reservation line, from which the newly opened lands stretched for thirty miles to the west.

  This was Micheaux’s first tour of the Rosebud, the land he had dreamed of and read about, and in person it seemed to him as beautiful as “the hollow of God’s hand.” The land cast a spell over him. “To the Northeast the Missouri River wound its way, into which empties the Whetstone Creek, the breaks of which resembled miniature mountains, falling abruptly, then rising to a point where the dark shale sides glistened in the sunlight,” he rhapsodized in The Conquest. “It was my longest drive in a buggy. We could go for perhaps three or four miles on a table-like plateau, then drop suddenly into small canyon-like ditches and rise abruptly to the other side.”

  After about fifteen miles, they arrived at the village of Herrick, “a collection of frame shacks with one or two houses, many roughly constructed sod buildings, the long brown grass hanging from between the sod, giving it a frizzled appearance.” Here they paused to listen to “a few boosters and mountebanks,” who gestured and declaimed with “rustic eloquence” on the virtues of Herrick as the prospective county seat and “the coming metropolis of the west.” Herrick was vying to replace the present county seat of Fairfax, about twenty miles east.

  Another eight or nine miles to the northwest, they came upon Burke, a similarly unimpressive podunk striving to become the next county seat. Around Burke, Micheaux noticed, the land was sandy and full of pits, “into which the buggy wheels dropped with a grinding sound, and where magnesia rock cropped out of the soil.” Too sandy for proper farming, he decided, so the pair drove on. Micheaux was growing apprehensive.

  They passed a growing number of spring-fed streams. Then, three miles west of Burke, they ascended a steep hill topped by a grassy plateau. “There lays one of the claims,” said the locator, pointing.

  “I was struck by the beauty of the scenery,” Micheaux wrote later, “and it seemed to charm and bring me out of the spirit of depression the sandy stretch brought upon me. Stretching for miles to the northwest and to the south, the land would rise in a gentle slope to a hogback, and as gently slope away to a draw, which drained to the south. Here the small streams emptied into a larger one, winding along like a snake’s track, and thickly wooded with a growth of small hardwood timber.

  “It was beautiful. From each side the land rose gently like huge wings, and spread away as far as the eye could reach.”

  On a small rise, at the highest point of the relinquishment, rested a marker: “SWC, SWQ, Sec. 29-97-72 W. 5th P.M.” Slater translated for Micheaux: “The southwest corner of the southwest quarter of section twenty-nine, township ninety-seven, and range seventy-two, west of the fifth principal meridian.”

  Nearby to the south could be glimpsed yet another budding town, the hilltop burg of Dallas. To the northwest about four miles was Gregory. All around was beautiful country and blue skies.

  They headed back to Bonesteel, where Micheaux dreamed all night of his perfect relinquishment. The original claim had been drawn by a girl who lived across the Missouri, and the next day they set out to visit the girl and her parents. He had expected to pay as much as $1,800 for relinquished land, but now he recognized that he wouldn’t have to pay that much for a claim as far west as Gregory. He dickered with the girl and her parents, getting the price slashed to $375. Then he dickered with Slater, the locator, knocking his two hundred dollar fee down to eighty.

  Micheaux paid the first installment of $160 on his 160 acres in Chamberlain on October 14, 1904. Then, because it was too late in the season to plant crops or build on the land, he returned to St. Louis.

  From St. Louis he wrote to his erstwhile sweetheart Jessie in Murphysboro. Their correspondence had been intermittent of late, and Micheaux couldn’t decide how he felt about the younger girl. But she was about to graduate from high school, and in her letters she hailed him as “grand and noble, as well as practical” for having invested in a relinquished homestead. He promised to visit her at Christmas.

  After Teddy Roosevelt won the November 1904 presidential election, Micheaux took a Pullman job with a “special party, consisting mostly of New York capitalists and millionaires,” traveling from St. Louis down through the Southwest, crossing the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, Texas, then cutting across central Mexico by way of Torreón, Zacatecas, Aguascalientes, Guadalajara, Puebla, and Tehauntapec. They sailed from Salina Cruz down the west coast to Valparaíso, Chile, heading inland to Santiago, and from there via the Trans-Andean railway to western Argentina.

  At Mendoza, they visited an ancient city that had been destroyed and rebuilt fifty years earlier after an earthquake and fire, but fears of the bubonic plague sweeping Brazil sent the party scurrying back to Valparaíso, where they promptly set sail for Salina Cruz. They spent time originally intended for a tour of Argentina “snoopin’ around the land of the Montezumas,” which was filled with “gaudy Spanish women and begging peons,” in Micheaux’s words. Finally, after trekking into the highlands to visit the cathedrals of Cuernavaca, they headed north, passing through Puebla, San Luis Potosí, and Monterrey, en route to Laredo, Texas.

  For a man with wanderlust, this was a high point of his life; though he would later boast of international travel in his film publicity, it’s unlikely that Micheaux ever again traveled so freely or extensively outside U.S. borders. And there were other benefits to the trip: “I became well enough acquainted with the liberal millionaires and so useful in serving their families,” Micheaux wrote later, “that I made $575 on the trip, besides bringing back so many gifts and curiosities of all kinds that I had enough to divide up with a good many of my friends.”

  Micheaux made friends easily everywhere he went. A big man who loomed over people, he had a salesman’s ebullience that won people over. And, one way or another, he was always selling himself. Though he was indeed “well enough acquainted” with a number of prosperous white people, his close friends were members of his own race, and they spanned a spectrum from doctors and lawyers to fellow porters and humble workingmen, not to mention a long list of ne’er-do-wells. He was always coy about lady friends in his fiction, pretending chaste habits. Men “like to be modest,” he wrote in one book, “to appear like they have no loves. It creates sympathy.” But he pursued women in several cities, and wrote to more than one.

  “Love is something I had longed for more than anything else,” Micheaux wrote in The Conquest, “but my ambition to overcome the vagaries of my race by accomplishing something worthy of note, hadn’t given me much time to seek love.”

  Foremost in his mind, at Christmas 1904, was Jessie, whom he had come to think of as a possible bride. When he returned from South America, he hastened to Carbondale to visit his sister, and then called on Jessie at her home in nearby Murphysboro. He had grown “tall and rugged,” he boasted in The Conquest, but Jessie was also “much taller.” His sister and Jessie’s mother excused themselves so the two young people could sit on the settee alone.

  Micheaux told Jessie of his “big plans and the air castles I was building on the great plains of the west.” Taking her hand, he was just about to declare his love for Jessie when “I caught myself and dared not go farther with so serious a subject when I recalled the wild, rough, and lonely place out on the plains.” First, he vowed silently, he would develop his land into a proper hom
e for a husband and wife.

  Micheaux returned to St. Louis and his Pullman job, spending most of the winter on excursions to Florida and Massachusetts. He took repeated runs to Boston, where he explored the Roxbury community and immersed himself in sightseeing. Along with the usual landmarks, he was keen to see Trinity Church, home of the Episcopalian clergyman Phillips Brooks, whose collected sermons he had read. A man who revered education, he also paid what must have been poignant visits to the Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Smith College in Northampton, Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge. He joined other tourists at historical sites in downtown Boston, inspecting the Old North Church, the Paul Revere house, the U.S.S. Constitution, Faneuil Hall, “and a thousand other reminders of the early heroism, rugged courage, and farseeing greatness of Boston’s early citizens.”

  Wherever he traveled as a porter, he also kept up with vaudeville and plays and concerts. His appetite for show business had probably begun with the summer riverboat shows that passed through Metropolis when he was growing up. In Chicago his tastes broadened. He had learned to enjoy everything from classical music to spoken recitals to blackface comedy. In writing about the shows he treasured from his travels, he never mentioned that in Boston’s “white” theater district, as in the theater districts of all other American cities, he had to endure “nigger heaven” (the widely-used term for the balcony to which black ticket-holders were relegated) and other offensive protocols of segregation—perhaps because the racism was so widely taken for granted.

  In Boston, Micheaux was captivated by a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto, with the Australian diva Nellie Melba as Gilda and the young Italian tenor Enrico Caruso as the womanizing Count. The Pullman porter’s love of music extended to the Irish tenor Chauncy Olcott (composer of “My Wild Irish Rose,” among other songs), and he made a point of seeing Terence, Olcott’s new musical set in Ireland. Micheaux also recalled attending a “gorgeous and bloodcurdling” revival of Siberia, a play that incorporated the infamous Kishinev massacre of 1903. (Two hundred people crowded onstage for the climax, depicting the slaughter of Jews on the streets of Kishinev.)

  Micheaux would never again have as much idle time on his hands as he did between runs in Boston during that winter of 1905. After the winter he quit Pullman, vowing never again to porter, and paid Jessie one last visit in Murphysboro. But this visit left him dissatisfied, and as he looked ahead to homesteading in South Dakota, he began to feel “a little lonely,” he wrote later. “With the grim reality of the situation facing me, I now began to steel my nerves for a lot of new experience which soon came thick and fast.”

  His savings had crept back up to $3,000 by the time he left St. Louis for Bonesteel around the first of April 1905.

  When Slater, his locator, met him in Bonesteel, the town was abuzz with the news that Dallas, the fledgling town perched on a hill near Micheaux’s homestead, was being promoted as the next railhead after Bonesteel. Micheaux could have sold his new land immediately for a “neat advance over what I had paid,” but he insisted that he had no intention of selling; he was there to farm the land. This didn’t please Slater, and automatically set the newcomer apart from many other area homesteaders, who were more interested in speculation than actually tilling the soil.

  As the two men rode in Dad Burpee’s red stagecoach over the thirty miles to Dallas, Micheaux couldn’t help but notice many brand new structures in the rival towns, “strung in a northwesterly direction across the country,” in Micheaux’s words, like stars forming a constellation. “It was a long ride,” he wrote later, “but I was beside myself with enthusiasm.”

  Arriving in Dallas, “the scene of much activity,” Micheaux found that his reputation as the first and only “colored homesteader” had preceded him. “When I stepped from the stage before the post office,” he recalled, “the many knowing glances informed me that I was being looked for.” Slater introduced him to the Dallas postmaster, then ushered him into the presence of the most important man in town: Ernest A. Jackson, the president of both the bank and the townsite company that was touting Dallas as the best railhead.

  Jackson was the second of three sons of Frank D. Jackson, who had served as the Republican governor of Iowa from 1894 to 1896, and who now presided over the Royal Union Insurance Company in Des Moines, bankrolling the family’s real estate and commercial ventures. Jackson’s father and his two brothers, Frank and Graydon, were also officers of the Dallas bank; they directed the family’s area investments, which included two huge cattle ranches. One, the Mulehead, northeast of Bonesteel, eventually swelled to 169,000 acres.

  The Jacksons maintained a cozy relationship with Marvin Hughitt, the hard-driving leader of the Chicago & North Western, who had built his railroad up from a regional carrier into one of the nation’s largest. Dubbed “King Marvin,” Hughitt had spearheaded the opening of South Dakota to railroads, initially after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. Farsighted in championing train lines to the Missouri River, Hughitt believed that rail routes would pave the way for settlers, whose growing numbers would in turn provide freight for trains, making his investment profitable. The railroad platted the towns, then subcontracted the tracks, the roads, and the buildings.

  Besides money and connections, indispensable in all their dealmaking, the Jacksons evinced something else that Micheaux admired: they had swagger. The Jacksons built frontier towns with more ease than other people carved whistles out of wood, manipulating the land sales, anointing townsites, making each new settled place the hub of an area, the county seat, the prime market, the main railhead—before moving on to the next bargain locale.

  Meeting Ernest Jackson’s gaze, Micheaux shook the muckety-muck’s hand. Surprisingly—or not, considering Micheaux’s cultivated ability to relate to rich white people—the newly arrived homesteader felt an instant bond with the town’s most prominent citizen. “My long experience with all classes of humanity had made me somewhat of a student of human nature,” Micheaux wrote later in The Conquest, “and I could see at a glance that here was a person of unusual aggressiveness and great capacity for doing things.”

  That night, over dinner at the hotel he owned, Jackson offered to buy Micheaux’s relinquishment and double his investment. “I am not here to sell,” Micheaux declared. “I am here to make good, or die trying.” They sized each other up, and were mutually impressed. “I admired the fellow,” Micheaux decided. Jackson reminded him of “characters in plays that I greatly admired, where great courage, strength of character, and firm decision were displayed.” Jackson seemed the embodiment of the ruthless capitalist dubbed “The Octopus” in The Lion and the Mouse, an absorbing stage drama Micheaux had watched in Boston. Jackson also evoked Otis Skinner’s swashbuckling scoundrel, Colonel Philippe Bridau, from another play Micheaux recalled seeing, The Honor of the Family—a dramatization of Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse.

  The next day, after a good night’s sleep, Micheaux ventured out to look over his claim. But for sections burned during a winter prairie fire, the land was as stunningly beautiful as he remembered.

  Drawing five hundred dollars from Ernest Jackson’s bank on his Chicago account, Micheaux returned to Bonesteel intending to purchase an inexpensive team of horses. There was only one problem: he didn’t really know one horse from another. The Michaux family had never had more than a couple of horses in Metropolis. “I looked at so many teams,” Micheaux wrote later, “that all of them began to look alike. I am sure I must have looked at five hundred different horses, more in an effort to appear as a conservative buyer than to buy the best team.”

  Finally he bought “a team of big plugs” from a man whom he later ascertained was a notorious grafter, and who subsequently bragged widely of having effected the sale by gulling a “coon.” One of the horses was old and rode awkwardly; the other was a four-year-old gelding with two feet “badly wire cut.” Micheaux also bought lumber for a small house and barn, along with an old wagon, “one wheel of which the blacksmith had forgo
tten to grease.” Then he “worked hard all day getting loaded and wearied, sick and discouraged.” It wasn’t until five o’clock in the afternoon that he was ready to start the thirty-mile drive back to Dallas.

  After two miles the big old horse began to hobble, and Micheaux’s wagon wheels started to smoke. The sun went down, and a cold east wind came up—the kind of evil, frigid blowing that shot through one’s bones and became, in Micheaux’s fiction and films, a symbolic obstacle to a decent man’s character and ambitions. “The fact that I was a stranger in a strange land, inhabited wholly by people not my own race, did not tend to cheer my gloomy spirits,” Micheaux wrote later. Rosebud country “might be all right in July, but never in April.”

  He turned around and headed back to Bonesteel for the night. The next day he sold the hobbled horse at a considerable loss, then hired a new horse and drove to Dallas, stopping in Herrick briefly to engage a sod mason who was also a carpenter. It took them five days to dig a well and erect a small frame barn and house. The barn was big enough for three horses, and the sod house was roughly the same size: fourteen by sixteen.

  The low, oblong sod house had a hipped roof of two by fours and was covered by plain boards with tar paper; the sod was grass turned downward, laid side by side, its cracks filled with sand. There were two small windows, one door, and the floor was buffalo grass. In one corner stood Micheaux’s bed (“large, wide, dirty—’tis true—but a warm bed, nevertheless”), in another a small table. There was a bin for horse’s grain, and for cooking and warmth a monkey stove with an oven on the pipe (“a little two-hole burner gasoline”).

  Micheaux moved in at the end of the first week of April. Already feeling overwhelmed, he wrote another plaintive letter to Jessie.

  The horses were always straying, and it took time before Micheaux learned that there was no such thing as a cheap horse worth the savings. He acquired a local reputation as a patsy for horse traders, he recalled. “Whenever anybody with horses to trade came” to Dallas, Micheaux recalled, “they were advised to go over to the sod house north of town and see the colored man. He was fond of trading horses, yes, he fairly doted on it.”

 

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