Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  Fortunately, they were interrupted by an unexpected visitor, and Micheaux was able to avoid making any false promises to Daisy. The next day he guiltily kissed her good-bye at the train station, knowing he would never see her again. She had grown “sad in appearance,” Micheaux wrote, “and looked so lonely I felt sorry for her.”

  He stopped off in Murphysboro and took Jessie for a long walk. By now it was mid-January, and they talked it over and agreed to get married in October, when Jessie could come to South Dakota and register for a Tripp County relinquishment.

  Micheaux returned to South Dakota via St. Louis and Great Bend, visiting with his family and members of the local ex-slave community in Kansas, many of whom operated thriving farms. While there, he boasted about his engagement. “Shooting jackrabbits by day and boosting Dakota to Jayhawkers half the night,” he recalled in The Conquest, he wrote to Jessie “sometime during each twenty-four hours, and for a time received a letter as often.” He talked up the glories of the Rosebud: Micheaux was eager to expand his holdings with Tripp County relinquishments, but he knew he could file only once under his own name, because of the residency requirements. If he had partners, he could find ways to double his land and loans.

  Two of his younger sisters, Olive and Ethel, were both graduating from high school in June, and they told Oscar that they’d be willing to farm relinquished claims in South Dakota, but they didn’t have the money to pay the registration and startup costs. Micheaux agreed to mortgage his land and loan them the expenses.

  But his hopes that Jessie was the One True Woman were all too swiftly dashed.

  Back in South Dakota for the winter, Micheaux continued to write her regularly. He grew “a bit uneasy” when weeks went by without any reply. Then Jessie finally wrote back with devastating news: She had heard through the grapevine that Micheaux was engaged to Daisy Hinshaw of Carbondale, and “as Daisy would be the heir to the money and property of her parents, she felt sure my marriage to Miss Hinshaw would be more agreeable.” The grapevine was wrong, but it was too late for him to disabuse Jessie; for on April 1, she explained, she had impulsively married an older man, a cook who was better suited to her humble circumstances.

  Micheaux would have been paralyzed with the blues if he hadn’t been so preoccupied by spring chores on his two farms. Even so, he felt “jilted” and nursed his hurt for months.

  The summer of 1909 was the peak of the land craze. Lot prices soared, as people competed for Tripp County relinquishments. The hotels in Gregory and Dallas filled up with lucky number-holders, novice settlers, and the usual surfeit of speculators and adventure-seekers. The roads were filled with automobiles, and many places now had telephone service.

  The harvest looked to be another prosperous one, and Micheaux had become as land-crazy as everybody else. He scouted for possible relinquishments far west of Dallas, in western Tripp County. Once again, the county’s prospective municipalities were vying for the chance to become the next railhead, the latest prairie boom town. Ernest Jackson drove around in his Packard, offering staggering prices for swaths of unsettled land over twenty miles west of Dallas.

  The town of Colome, closer to Dallas and already the bustling county seat of Tripp, tried to ignore Jackson’s machinations. The enterprising Jackson called a community meeting in Colome and announced sale prices for lots in a new town he was building farther west, which the first citizens—banking on the Jacksons’ sway with the railroad surveyors—were already calling “Winner.” As signs of confidence in its future, the town of Colome laid cement sidewalks along its streets and built a modern schoolhouse with a gymnasium. For his part, Jackson then threw a festive auction in Winner, replete with bartenders and gamblers, selling a record $84,000 in lots in two days. When the good citizens of Colome still refused to budge, Jackson bought the town’s most important buildings, cut them in half, and used huge power tractors to move them eleven miles west to Winner.

  When the time came for Micheaux to choose his Tripp County relinquishments, he oriented himself around the new center of operations for the Jackson brothers, scouting forfeited claims as far as fifteen miles northwest of Winner. He raced around in a borrowed car before pinpointing three properties. The necessary loans would come from the Jacksons’ bank in Winner.

  As it happened, Micheaux’s sister Ethel wasn’t due to turn twenty-one—the legal age for filing—by October, when the land opened up. So instead Olive would be joined on the South Dakota homesteading adventure by the family’s maternal grandmother, Louisa Gough. Though the former slave was in her mid-seventies, his grandmother “always possessed a roving spirit,” in Micheaux’s words, and she “wanted to come.”

  Micheaux mortgaged his 320 acres for $7,600, and paid in the neighborhood of $6,400 for three relinquishments: two for his sister and grandmother, and one for his wife-to-be—the One True Woman, the Mrs. Micheaux he hadn’t yet found.

  Still, he kept trying. In early September, Micheaux compiled a list of eligible candidates and hurriedly wrote letters to the top three, suggesting they meet to discuss a proposition he had in mind. One of the women was “a maid on the Twentieth Century Limited, running between New York and Chicago.” Another was the daughter of Kansas’s Negro Potato King. The third was a schoolteacher in Chicago’s Black Belt.

  “He was somewhat ashamed of himself when he addressed three letters when perhaps he should have been addressing but one,” Micheaux wrote of his alter ego Jean Baptiste in The Homesteader (the first sequel to The Conquest). “It was not fair to either of the three, he guiltily felt; but business was business with him.”

  In retrospect—and with cause to regret his actions—Micheaux said that his first choice really should have been the Negro Potato Princess, whom he had never met, but whose letters to him were always so “logical” and “agreeable.” But he had waited too long before organizing his trip, and didn’t dispatch his urgent missives until just before he left. He tarried at the Omaha train station, waiting for a telegram from the Potato Princess. But none came, so he crossed her off his list and continued on his way to Chicago.

  He arrived in late September, hoping to hear from the train maid; instead he received a telegram informing him that his second nominee had suffered a “severe attack of neuralgia” and was under a doctor’s care in New York. Thus the list dwindled to one name: Orlean McCracken, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of South Division High School in Chicago and Wilberforce University in Ohio. Micheaux had met Orlean the previous winter in Murphysboro, where she was then teaching school. He had seen her again, on trips to Chicago. He had been writing her intermittently, sending her articles and books; in her responses she had warmed to his tales of homesteading.

  Micheaux might have preferred “a farmer’s daughter,” he reflected later, but “I had lived in the city and thought if I married a city girl I would understand her, anyway. I could not claim to be in love with this girl, nor with anyone else, but had always had a feeling that if a man and woman met and found each other pleasant and entertaining, there was no need of a long courtship.”

  On the positive side, Orlean was “a kind, simple, and sympathetic person; in fact agreeable in every way.” Micheaux had found her pretty (dark-complexioned, “although not black,” with “heavy, black and attractive” hair and “coal-black” eyes), and brainy: a college graduate, Orlean was probably “the most intelligent of the three” on his list.

  In Chicago, he phoned the McCracken residence. The family lived in a large stone-front house on Vernon Avenue, a fashionable area of the Black Belt referred to as “East of State,” where black professionals lived alongside the scattering of white homeowners who hadn’t yet abandoned the neighborhood. The black professionals constituted “a sort of local aristocracy,” in Micheaux’s faintly scornful words, “not distinguished so much by wealth as by the airs and conventionality of its members, who did not go to public dances on State Street and drink ‘can’ beer.” Vernon was “much unlike the south end of Dearborn Street an
d Armour Avenue where none but colored people live.” He made an appointment to see Orlean the next afternoon, which was a Saturday.

  It wasn’t until Micheaux rang the doorbell and was greeted by Orlean’s mother that he recognized Mrs. McCracken and made an unsettling connection: Orlean’s father was one of the presiding Elders of the A.M.E. Church who roamed the southern Illinois circuit—in fact, the very same Reverend McCracken who had visited his Metropolis home for Sunday supper and upbraided Oscar when he was a boy, causing a ruckus in his family.

  When Micheaux arrived, Orlean’s father was at a convention hundreds of miles away. So Micheaux and Orlean went out for dinner and a long walk in Jackson Park, talking easily. She commiserated with him over what had happened in his relationship with Jessie from Murphysboro, a tale she knew through mutual acquaintances as well as their correspondence. The walk climaxed with Micheaux’s earnest proposal that Orlean come to South Dakota, file on the relinquishment he’d earmarked for her, and become his bride. Orlean was receptive to the idea, and told Micheaux to come back the next morning and explain things to her mother.

  Micheaux did just that, and Mrs. McCracken proved amenable, though she was nervous about making any momentous decision without her husband. Orlean had a younger sister, already married, who hovered about disapprovingly, and impressed Micheaux as jealous and mean-spirited. All three women spoke of Reverend McCracken with awe, as though he were a wise potentate.

  They all attended Sunday services and sat through Bible lessons afterward. That evening, Micheaux took Orlean to see a popular revue headed by blackface comic Lew Dockstader and featuring the well-known vaudevillian Neil O’Brien and a rising young entertainer named Al Jolson. Blackface shows, generally with white men smearing their faces with cork to sing, dance, and tell jokes in “Negro dialect,” were a nineteenth-century show business phenomenon; this was one of the last major shows touring nationally. But there were also black masters of minstrelsy like Bert Williams, and the most sophisticated blackface humor cut both ways, satirizing the fatuousness of racial stereotypes and empathizing with the plight of African-Americans. “Simply condemning it all as an entertainment that pandered to White racism does not begin to account for its complexities, its confusion, its neuroses,” as John Strausbaugh observes in his thought-provoking Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imagination in American Popular Culture.

  Far from demonstrating backward tastes, Micheaux’s presence in the theater suggests his show business sophistication. As Strausbaugh notes, the white, potbellied Dockstader was “one of the premiere monologuists” in minstrelsy. One of the highlights of his act, which he likely performed in Chicago, was a blackface Teddy Roosevelt shtick that mercilessly lampooned Teddy’s “tendencies to bloviate,” in Strausbaugh’s words. Though black audience members were forced to sit in the balcony at the ornate, Louis Sullivan–designed Garrick Theater, Micheaux reveled in the show. “I laughed until my head ached,” he recalled.

  The couple spent the next day trying to reach Reverend McCracken by telephone, without success. By now, Micheaux was on the verge of panic. It was the last week of September. His sister and grandmother were due to arrive in South Dakota. The stipulated filing date for the relinquishments was October 1. If he wasn’t back in South Dakota in time, and if his wife didn’t file on the claim he had earmarked, he would lose $1,200 he had paid ahead to the bank.

  Finally, a female friend of the McCracken family offered to travel with Orlean to South Dakota as chaperone, if Micheaux would pay her fare, too. Orlean and the chaperone could then return to Chicago, with the marriage ceremony to be put off until the spring, after they had secured Orlean’s father’s approval.

  Micheaux agreed and left immediately for South Dakota, with Orlean and her chaperone trailing a day or two later. Waiting for him back home was a letter from the woman who had once topped his list, the daughter of Potato King Junius Groves, but by then it was too late. He “wistfully” tore up the letter and “flung it to the winds.”

  The relinquishment system called for claim-seekers to stand in line at the land office in Gregory. Everyone received a number, and the order of the numbers became the sequence in which people could file their preference of claims, hours or days hence. The line started forming after lunch on the last day of September, and Micheaux got his sister and grandmother in line early, then took Orlean’s place in line, so she could have a soft bed in a hotel.

  By sunset the line was packed, and the street in front of the land office had become “a surging mass of humanity,” in Micheaux’s words. Cold set in with the darkness. Hot coffee and sandwiches were hawked. Drunks mingled with the crowd. People linked arms and sang songs, or told campfire stories to keep up their spirits. “I held the place for my fiancée through the night, and although I had become used to all kinds of roughness, sitting up in the street all the long night was far from pleasant,” Micheaux recalled.

  Squatters arrived in the predawn, and soon places near the door were selling for as high as fifty dollars. By daybreak, roughly 1,700 people stood waiting for the land office to open. “An army of tired, swollen-eyed and dusty creatures they appeared,” Micheaux wrote.

  His bride-to-be and grandmother received numbers 138 and 139, and were relegated to the second day of filing for a relinquishment, while his sister received number 170 and had to wait a few days longer. Orlean filed on a 160–acre parcel on “the northwest quarter of section 34 in township 100, range 79, 5th Meridian” in Tripp County. Louisa Gough and Olive Micheaux filed on 160–acre parcels near to each other’s and Orlean’s, in the southwest quarter of Township 101.

  After Orlean completed her paperwork, she and her chaperone returned to Chicago, while Micheaux proceeded to his grandmother’s and sister’s claims. Within a week he had built frame houses on the two properties, and a week later Oscar’s grandmother and sister were living on their homesteads. After Orlean joined them, Micheaux later wrote proudly, he could boast of having personally increased South Dakota’s sparse colored population by three.

  The winter of 1909–1910 was a brutal one. Shortly after the Micheaux women moved in, what the homesteader remembered as “one of the biggest snowstorms I had ever seen” swept across South Dakota, dumping snow for days. The blizzard was followed by warm weather, then more snowfall and freezing. At times the drifts rose above four feet. Many of the novice homesteaders had moved onto lands twenty and fifty miles from stockpiles of fuel, and they suffered. Thinking ahead, Micheaux had hauled enough coal to last the winter for himself, his grandmother, and sister; and Louisa Gough and Olive Micheaux could always find food in the small town of Witten, not far from their farms.

  The crops also suffered. Micheaux’s wheat was unthreshed when the early snows came. “The corn in the fields had not been gathered,” Micheaux remembered, “nor was it all gathered before the following April.”

  Letters flew between South Dakota and Chicago. Micheaux and Orlean wrote back and forth, but Reverend McCracken also took up correspondence with his daughter’s betrothed. “He did not write a very brilliant letter,” Micheaux said, “but was very reasonable, and tried to appear a little serious when he referred to my having his daughter come to South Dakota and file on land. He concluded by saying he thought it a good thing for colored people to go west and take land.”

  Orlean often wrote sweetly, but at times she pressed Micheaux to make good on the engagement ring he had promised her. He equivocated about the ring. In his letters, he tried to talk her out of the frivolous expense. He knew all about rings and jewelry, and later in his novels complained about how black people were always going into debt for such gewgaws. He was already heavily mortgaged, and snowbound. He would rather put off buying a costly ring.

  Not without resentment, Micheaux finally surrendered and bought his fiancée a $40 dollar diamond, “set in a small eighteen karat ring,” having it sent to her from a company he identifies in The Conquest as Loftis Brothers & Co., which was an actual firm on Stat
e Street in Chicago that advertised heavily in the Black Belt (“Diamonds and Watches on Credit”). (By the time of The Wind from Nowhere, the ring had grown into “a blue white, sparkling solitaire” worth $250.)

  He had hoped to get married by Christmas, but the snow caused delays. Micheaux abandoned his cold “soddy” and moved into a house still standing on the old Dallas townsite. His sister and grandmother came down to take care of his place, so he could leave for Chicago and finalize wedding plans. “I could scarcely afford it,” he explained later, “but it had become a custom for me to spend Christmas in Chicago, and I wanted to know Orlean better and I wanted to meet her father.”

  The McCrackens weren’t expecting him, and when Micheaux phoned from the station and then came by in the early evening, the Elder wasn’t yet home from his travels in southern Illinois. When Orlean’s father arrived in time for dinner, Micheaux got his first clear look at the man who was only a dim memory from boyhood, but who would loom significantly hereafter in his consciousness, inspiring vivid characters and controversial themes in his novels and films.

  The Reverend Newton J. McCracken was in his late fifties, more than six feet tall. He weighed about two hundred pounds, but his small-boned frame gave him a plump appearance. “He was very dark, with a medium forehead and high-ridged nose,” Micheaux wrote in The Conquest, “making it possible for him to wear nose-glasses, the nose being unlike the flat-nosed negro.” The Elder sported a bushy mustache sprinkled with gray, and his shock of white hair, coaxed into a massive pompadour, “contrasted sharply with the dark skin and rounded features,” in Micheaux’s words.

  The Reverend McCracken was prideful of his appearance, Micheaux perceived at once. But the homesteader also detected something else beneath the surface of the Reverend’s eyes. His were not the eyes of a “deep thinking man,” Micheaux decided. “They reminded me more of the eyes of a pig, full but expressionless.”