Then, setting his chin, Micheaux brought up his idol Booker T. Washington, and “his life and his work in the uplift of the Negro.” He anticipated the Reverend’s negative reaction, and he wasn’t disappointed. “He was bitterly opposed to the Educator,” wrote Micheaux. The argument grew so fierce that Orlean’s father finally “lost all composure.” But the Elder “found himself up against a brick wall” in Micheaux, while “attempting to belittle Mr. Washington’s work.”
For Micheaux, that was the clincher: He diagnosed his father-in-law as a superstitious, unintelligent fraud. Born a slave, the Elder had never been to school; he didn’t even possess a theological degree, Micheaux concluded. He certainly didn’t read very much, and what he did read was restricted to “colored newspapers” that by and large reinforced his own narrow views. The Reverend McCracken “was a member in good standing of the reactionary faction of the negro race, the larger part of which are African M.E. ministers,” Micheaux decided.
Later, he rued some of their arguments. “I might have been more patient with the Reverend,” the homesteader told himself afterward, “if he had not been so full of pretense.”
For the moment, Micheaux bit his tongue and resolved to stay off of controversial subjects. The Reverend, too, seemed content to switch to small talk. And then Micheaux was surprised to find himself immensely entertained by the Reverend’s stories about the great preachers and bishops he had known on the circuit, and his funny, colorful, often salacious gossip about the private lives of women in his various congregations.
Before the Reverend left, they all got into a spring wagon to make the long trek to Orlean’s claim. Micheaux used the trip to move another building between the counties. Orlean’s father tried to be helpful and positive, but his conversations with Orlean, sympathizing about the hardships of homesteading, while telling fond stories about folks back in Chicago, only fed her homesickness.
Micheaux was glad to see the Reverend go, just as the contest was being heard against Orlean’s claim. The Micheauxes were represented by a local attorney, who felt the law and the evidence were on their side. A ruling wasn’t expected for several weeks.
With Orlean’s pregnancy growing, they settled in for the coming winter. “The crop was fair,” Micheaux wrote, “but prices were low on oats and corn, and my crops consisted mostly of those cereals.” Almost everything he earned went into loan payments, interest, taxes, and expenses. Micheaux told his wife that money was too tight to support a trip to Chicago that Christmas, but in truth he wasn’t eager to spend time with his father-in-law, who still didn’t know that Orlean was pregnant. The Reverend sent a series of letters insisting that they visit, asking what kind of holiday supper they preferred, what Orlean would like for Christmas gifts, and so on. When Micheaux wrote back saying that he couldn’t afford to abandon his land, the Reverend offered to pay their train fare. When Micheaux wrote to say he couldn’t possibly accept such charity, the Reverend arranged for them to borrow the money from a cousin who worked in one of the Gregory saloons. The episode mortified Micheaux. Orlean, for her part, was torn: She preferred to travel to Chicago, but she also wanted to please her husband.
“The poor girl, with a child on the way, was as helpless as a baby,” Micheaux wrote.
They moved many of their belongings onto the Tripp County relinquishment, though they continued to live in old Dallas. As Christmas neared, Micheaux’s sister took Orlean home with her for a visit to her Tripp County land, and that is when a letter from the Reverend arrived for Orlean at the Gregory post office. When Micheaux opened the letter, he found a money order and instructions for Orlean to hasten to Chicago, with her husband to follow if he was willing. Micheaux became “the maddest man” in Gregory, returning the money order with “a curt little note.” When Orlean returned to the Gregory County farm, she confessed that she’d asked her father for the train fare. They tried to talk the problem through. Micheaux reminded Orlean that a trip to Chicago would reveal her pregnancy, which they had agreed to keep secret from her father and family. Orlean reluctantly agreed to stay in South Dakota until the baby was born.
Reconciled after their talk, the couple celebrated Christmas with a chicken dinner. The baby was due in March, and Micheaux’s grandmother came to stay with them for the worst of the winter. By the end of February, Orlean was growing “exceedingly fretful,” according to Micheaux, and insisted she ought to give birth to her first child on her own homestead. As soon as weather permitted, Micheaux bundled his wife and grandmother up in a spring wagon and sent them ahead to Tripp County, following with “a load of furniture,” making the journey, he wrote, “in a day and a half.” With close neighbors pitching in to help the two women out, Micheaux went back for the livestock and a coal shed he planned to buy at a lumberyard in Burke.
The round trip between Tripp County and Burke, more than one hundred miles in total, would take Micheaux a few days at least, especially considering the extra burden of the coal shed, which he was going to have sawed in half and loaded onto two wagons. He would write about this crucial trip first in The Conquest and then again in that book’s sequel, The Homesteader, redressing telling omissions in the earlier version. In The Homesteader, Micheaux confessed that he stopped in Gregory to attend a Lyceum concert, its performers “consisting of Negroes,” in his words, including a certain lady entertainer he had known back in Chicago. After the concert, he tarried in town and “renewed” his acquaintance with the lady.
In Gregory he also met up with his sister Olive, who was returning from a sojourn to Kansas, and saw her off to Tripp County, where Micheaux expected her to join his grandmother in assisting Orlean.
He continued east to Burke to collect the coal shed. In The Conquest, after arriving on Saturday he goes right to work buying the coal shed. In The Homesteader—in a dubious coincidence—“the same concerters” he had partied with in Gregory were billed for an evening performance in Burke. Once again Micheaux tarried, lingering through the weekend.
On Monday morning, Micheaux purchased the shed, hiring men to help him rig it for the transfer to Tripp County. Another windstorm came up, mocking and impeding his life’s goals, as the wind always seems to do in his fiction. That day he made it only as far as Colome. On his way out of town the next morning, his front axle broke; the tongue of one wagon followed soon after. Repairs had to be made. By the time he pulled into Winner, “tired and weary,” it was nightfall.
He was only fifteen miles or so from Orlean’s homestead, the next day, when he was met by a neighbor. Orlean had abruptly gone into labor in his absence. Friends had been trying to reach him by phone at all the towns along the way. Though a local doctor and Micheaux’s relatives had attended at the birth, the baby was born breech and died. The news “struck me like a hammer,” Micheaux wrote.
The neighbor hastened to assure him Orlean’s condition was stable. “When I got to the claim I was weak in every way,” Micheaux recalled in The Conquest. “My wife seemed none the worse, but my emotions were intense when I saw the little dead boy. Poor little fellow! As he lay stiff and cold I could see the image of myself in his features.”
They buried the infant, Micheaux said, “on the west side of the draw.”
No historian or researcher has ever located a birth certificate for the Micheauxes’ baby, much less a grave. But few scholars doubt there was a pregnancy and a stillborn child.
On Orlean’s behalf, Micheaux sent a telegram to the Elder: “Baby born dead. Am well.”
The Reverend McCracken left at once to see his daughter, sending a telegram once he was en route by train with Orlean’s younger sister. When he arrived, Micheaux thought, the Elder looked like a man who finally had the upper hand. Micheaux peered into his eyes and saw something he hadn’t perceived before: “Evil.” He saw “Satan” in his father-in-law’s face, he said. Yet the Reverend took a solicitous tack; it was the younger sister who upbraided Micheaux: “You and your Booker T. Washington ideas!”
The doctor
told Micheaux his wife was out of danger, but she needed peace and quiet to recover her strength. With Orlean’s sister and father hovering nearby, the homesteader felt useless around the house. He was also preoccupied with seeding the largest acreage he had ever sowed. He had contracted for a steam rig to break two hundred acres at three dollars per acre on the three Tripp County homesteads, and he had to haul that and other machinery from Colome, which had the nearest railroad extension. (He was intending to break one hundred Tripp County acres on his own, with horses.) He had to make a second trip from Colome to the Tripp County farms, hauling eight thousand pounds of coal in two wagons for the steam rig and other uses.
While Micheaux was hauling the coal, a balky mule caused the two wagons to lurch and topple down a sharp embankment. Micheaux jumped out just as the second wagon, which he was driving, tipped over, but he caught his foot in the brake rope, and the coal and wagon crashed over him. Luckily he was uninjured, but it took a day and a half to clear the wreckage.
Micheaux sent a message ahead to Orlean that he was delayed, trusting that she was safe in the care of her father and sister. Then, just as he was eating his supper in Colome, he learned that three colored people had arrived in town and one of them was a sick woman. “I could hardly believe what I heard,” he wrote in The Conquest. “My appetite vanished.” The temperature had been dropping all day, and snow was coming down as Micheaux raced to the hotel and confronted his wife, who was wheezing and trembling. Orlean was weak and conflicted, and she resented her husband’s bullying manner when he demanded to know what she was doing in Colome. But she knew he cared about her, and their baby’s death was not his fault, not really.
Any real conversation between the married couple was subverted by the Reverend, who only uttered “kind words” to Micheaux, but insisted on taking Orlean back to Chicago to recuperate in the bosom of her family. A quarrel flared between the men, but the Reverend was adamant; Orlean was passed back and forth like a pawn. The homesteader finally gave in, offering to write the Elder a check for the travel expenses. The Reverend declined. Orlean told her husband confidentially that she’d already drawn fifty dollars from his bank account, at her father’s behest.
When Micheaux put the McCrackens on the train to Chicago, his bank account was overdrawn; on top of his loans and mortgage payments, he owed money to doctors, hired hands, and suppliers.
Forlornly, he wrote to his wife. Two weeks went by without any reply.
At last, desperate to speak with his wife, Micheaux took the train to Chicago at the end of April. He learned from friends that Orlean was sequestered at her Vernon Avenue home, where she was being treated by a white doctor. The local scuttlebutt held that the Reverend had rescued his daughter from a harsh life in South Dakota, where the conditions—and mistreatment by her husband—had taxed her health.
The Reverend was once again away from Chicago on church business when Micheaux arrived at the McCracken family residence. Orlean’s younger sister refused to admit her brother-in-law, saying that Orlean was too ill to see him. The sister’s henpecked husband sympathetically walked Oscar over to a hotel on the Stroll, and Micheaux ended up drowning his misery in “a few Scotch highballs and cocktails.”
The next day was Sunday. Micheaux phoned the McCracken house, but again and again his attempts to reach his wife were blocked by Orlean’s hate-filled sister. The henpecked brother-in-law conspired to let the homesteader sneak in briefly on Tuesday while Orlean’s sister was gone. He was having a tentative conversation with the listless, bedridden Orlean, when the sister returned and started screaming at him, driving him outside.
Anxious to obtain his own diagnosis of his wife’s condition, Micheaux came back the next day with a Negro physician, Ulysses Grant Dailey, whom Micheaux had roomed with during Dailey’s time as a medical student at Northwestern. U. G. Dailey would later become a preeminent figure, rising from a position as anatomy instructor at Northwestern to become chairman of the surgery department at Provident Hospital in Chicago, with an international reputation as an expert in his field.
Regardless of Dr. Dailey’s impeccable credentials, Orlean’s sister slammed the door in their faces. When the two men rushed to a nearby phone booth to call the house, the sister answered the phone. “How dare you bring a nigger doctor to our house?” she shouted. “Why, Papa has never had a Negro doctor in this house!”
Micheaux offers slightly differing renditions of this incident in The Conquest and The Homesteader, but the basic story is confirmed, remarkably, by contemporaneous accounts in the Chicago black press. Word had spread in the Black Belt that the famous homesteader, Oscar Micheaux, was in Chicago, trying to see his estranged wife, the daughter of the well-known Elder McCracken. A front-page headline in the April 29, 1911, Chicago Defender told the story:
MR. OSCAR MICHEAUX IN CITY;
Seemed to Be in Family Mix-Up,
Yet Would Not Speak; Seen
With Dr. Daily at Father-in-
Law’s Door, But Neither He
Nor the Doctor Were Admitted;
Dr. Bryant (White) is Their Family Physician, Is
Thought is the Cause of the Lockout.
The Chicago Defender reporter was actually an eyewitness to this sorry episode in Micheaux’s life. As Micheaux and Dailey first approached the McCracken home “in hot haste,” the reporter spotted them, and lurked “a block behind” to see what would ensue. As he watched, the two men stood outside the house, “waiting for the door to be opened” for “about half an hour,” before gloomily retreating down the steps.
The reporter buttonholed Micheaux, who “admitted his wife returned with her father, but he says she came to spend the summer, for she was quite sick.” Asked why he and Dr. Dailey hadn’t been allowed in to see Orlean, Micheaux said he thought perhaps his wife had gone downtown. The reporter was unconvinced. “We do know that Mr. Micheaux has only seen his wife once during his week’s stay in the city,” he wrote.
As the reporter stood by waiting, Micheaux ducked into a telephone booth. “He did not seem to stay on the line; he got his party and they rang off,” he wrote. Then the Chicago Defender correspondent trailed Micheaux to the train station. The man who had been barred from glimpsing his own wife left on the 5:20 train that “same afternoon,” the Defender account noted, “and when our reporter tried to get in to see him he locked himself in his drawing room and would not see anyone.”
“He is the only colored farmer in his [Rosebud] country,” the article concluded with an imaginative flourish, “worth $150,000, all told.”
Micheaux slumped in his train seat, not only distraught but publicly humiliated.
Returning to South Dakota, he poured out his feelings in letters to Orlean, according to The Conquest, and at first his wife wrote pleasant ones in return. Then her letters turned abusive, accusatory. Finally they stopped altogether. After that, everything he learned about her came in letters from mutual friends and McCracken relatives who were sympathetic to his cause.
Micheaux resolved to go back to Chicago to try again, but first he would have to survive the summer of 1911. Since Micheaux became a homesteader six years earlier, southern South Dakota had enjoyed only rain-filled summers and luxurious harvests. Thanks to the ample rainfall, Micheaux later wrote, he had raised “fair to good crops every year.” The area hadn’t endured a severe drought since 1894. Yet old-timers and Indians knew that the weather came in erratic cycles, and a couple of veteran farmers descended from Russian Mennonites, neighbors of his sister Olive, warned Micheaux that a terrible drought was brewing.
Early in May, one rainy day brought an inch of moisture. Micheaux had just completed sowing 250 acres of flax on his wife’s claim, and everything looked “beautiful and green.” But that was the last soaker in all of May. The soil soon became too dry for Micheaux to go on breaking ground. Though clouds threatened and an occasional gust of wind whipped up his hopes, the rain stayed away for weeks. The budding plants took on a “peculiar appearance,
” in his words.
In mid-June, Micheaux took his sister to run an errand in Winner. Everyone was talking about the intense dry heat. He drove on to Gregory, stopping in Dallas to send Orlean a telegram offering to send her money to come to South Dakota. No reply came.
A heavy downpour in Gregory County partially salvaged his original homestead, but right away the dry heat resumed, and this time the sinister weather persisted. The nights were punctuated by thundercracks and lightning streaks, but no cloudbursts, not even drizzle. “During that time I could not find a cool place,” recalled Micheaux. “The wind never ceased during the night, but sounded its mournful tune without a pause.”
After organizing his crops and hired help, he returned to his Tripp County relinquishments. “No snow had fallen in the mountains during the winter,” he wrote, “and all the rivers were as dry as the roads.” The air was filled with clouds of dust rising from the ground. The vegetation withered, the small grain rattling like dead leaves. The crops were soon beyond redemption. “The atmosphere became stifling,” wrote Micheaux, “the scent of burning plants sickening.”
The Fourth of July Micheaux spent in Winner, hearing news of the spreading disaster.
“The railroad men who run from Kansas City to Dodge City reported that the pastures through Kansas were so dry along the route,” he later wrote, “that a louse could be seen crawling a half mile away. In parts of Iowa the farmers commenced to put their stock in pens and fed them hay from about the middle of June, there being no feed in the pastures. Through eastern Nebraska, western Iowa, and southern Minnesota, the grasshoppers began to appear by the millions, and proceeded to head the small grain. To save it, the farmers cut and fed it to stock, in pens.”
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 10