After the studio photography in New York, the principals took the train to Roanoke to finish up scenes, and by the first week of May all the footage was on deposit in a laboratory. There it would sit for a few months while Micheaux figured out how to pay for the processing and editing. Never idle, in the meantime he would shoot another entire film, and “The Ghost of Tolston Manor” would gain a new title: A Son of Satan.
The haunted-house comedy was intended as a crowd-pleaser. The adaptation of T. S. Stribling’s Birthright would be more of a test for audiences, and for Micheaux. Like The House Behind the Cedars, Birthright was a serious, acclaimed novel that was interpreted by its admirers as a postmortem of slavery and an indictment of Jim Crow. Stribling was a white Southerner, and Birthright was the only time Micheaux embraced the work of a white author (and, along with Cedars, one of the rare instances of his filming anyone else’s story). But Stribling’s fiction appealed to Micheaux: It took place in a segregated enclave in a sleepy river town that evoked memories of Metropolis, Illinois; and it had an idealistic hero, the product of miscegenation, who was made-to-order for a Micheaux message.
Micheaux may not have known (or cared) about the color of Stribling’s skin. When Birthright was originally published in 1922, the author was flooded by letters from readers. People from the North generally praised his book, Stribling said later, while Southerners usually abused it, asking “to my astonishment,” in his words, “if I myself were not a Negro.” Also from the South came “many letters from colored people themselves,” the author said, which “as a rule, were bitter and condemned my novel.”
Before Birthright, Stribling’s byline had appeared mainly in pulp magazines and Sunday school publications. Before writing the novel, his second, Stribling, born and raised in Tennessee, had looked upon black people “precisely as the great majority of Southerners looked upon them, as a slightly subhuman folk,” in his words, “not much, perhaps, but just a little ‘sub.’” Birthright caused him to reexamine his upbringing and recognize the immorality of slavery and the Jim Crow system that was its replacement. He resolved to make Birthright the first of a trilogy, exploring “the social injustices suffered by black people in the South,” in his words.
It wasn’t hard for Stribling to understand why white Southerners didn’t like the book. He had depicted the imaginary river town of “Hooker’s Bend” as a microcosm in which whites were poisoned by their own mistreatment and degradation of blacks. His story offered many negative examples of white Southern “inhospitality” to “colored people”: everything from blanket search-warrants wielded as racial intimidation, to the “Negro-stopping” clauses in real estate contracts that permitted blacks to purchase land but not to build on or inhabit it.
Yet it took him a while to figure out what offended the black readers: not his depiction of Hooker’s Bend, but the attached hamlet of “Niggertown,” the home of the book’s hero, Harvard graduate Peter Siner. Returning home with dreams of founding a colored school, Siner befriends a “bright mulatto” named Cissie—whose ingrained servitude and inability to break away from her misery is heartbreaking. The sharply drawn residents of Stribling’s “Niggertown” speak in a crude dialect, riddled with uses of the n-word, and the author’s portrait of life in “Niggertown” was uncomfortably close to the bleak reality of the segregated South.
Though Birthright merited “great critical acclaim,” as Stribling noted, it also drew condemnation from some critics and readers. And “poor actual sales” smothered any hopes for a trilogy. The poor sales and the difficult subject matter of the novel—of no interest to Hollywood—undoubtedly explain why Micheaux was able to pick up the rights for a song, less than half of what he paid for The House Behind the Cedars.
But Micheaux was far-sighted in admiring Stribling. The author would go on to write many other books set in rural Tennessee and Alabama, often touching sensitively and intelligently on race issues. In 1933 he would win the Pulitzer Prize for The Store, the second book of a different trilogy about the Old South. What many readers saw as repellent in Stribling’s work, Micheaux recognized as true to life. Stribling’s “Niggertown” was objectionable to some, but to him it was “a sort of colored Main Street,” as the New York Age wrote of the film eventually. The story’s idealistic hero, its lowborn slang, its Jim Crow details—all of these were grist for Micheaux’s creative mill.
Even so, Micheaux set about making changes that would relieve the book’s despairing tone. Although later reviews of Birthright in papers like the New York Age suggested that he followed the novel “very closely,” the critics were fooled by the intertitles, whose dialogue was culled from the book. In fact, Micheaux added broad comedy to the story wherever possible, and changed the downbeat ending into one more in keeping with his own outlook.
Stribling’s ending had Peter Siner convincing Cissie to leave “Niggertown” with him. By that point in the story Peter has failed to build his dream school, and Cissie is pregnant by another man. Both are shamed, defeated.
In Micheaux’s version, Cissie wouldn’t end up pregnant, and Siner’s no-good nemesis, “Tump” Pack, would be dealt with decisively. Peter’s dream of building a school would not be lost, merely deferred. The too-noble hero, the too-sweet ingenue, and the sugary finale were a recurrent flaw of Micheaux’s films, but these contortions were no less typical of Hollywood productions of the period. And Micheaux’s idealism was genuine—even if it was also genuinely at odds with his practicality and realism.
The cast Micheaux collected was cause for celebration.
At the heart of T. S. Stribling’s story was Cissie, the cream-colored beauty (she is “almost a white girl,” according to the novel) who is mired in “the uncouthness of Niggertown,” even though her instinctual intelligence sometimes trumps Siner’s Harvard education. It was a job that called for a consummate actress who could convey levels of depth. Despite her talent and appeal, Shingzie Howard always had been a placeholder for Evelyn Preer. And now, after several years away from Micheaux and his films, Preer was once again available.
There were two important characters vying for Cissie’s affections. One was Peter Siner, who aspires to edify his race, but who is cheated by a white racist banker and stuck with a “Negro-stopper” deed that makes him a local laughingstock.
The other was loud, burly Tump Pack, a decorated soldier on his way home from the war when Peter first meets him in a Jim Crow train car crossing the Ohio River. Though accorded a hero’s welcome in Hooker’s Bend, Tump is a brutal simpleton. Jealous over the friendship growing between Peter and Cissie, Tump attacks Peter, who is so startled that he flattens him with a wild, un-Harvardlike kick to the groin. After being arrested and released, Tump takes to carrying a gun, vowing to shoot Peter on sight.
Casting about for actors to play the rivals, Peter Siner and Tump Pack, Micheaux had a brainstorm. As the loutish Tump, he chose Salem Tutt Whitney; for the well-intentioned Peter, he picked J. Homer Tutt. It was a wonderful joke for knowledgeable audience members: In real life, Whitney and Tutt were brothers. Tutt was the younger, shorter one with a high-pitched squeak; Whitney the giant with a voice that shook the rafters. Veterans of black show business for a quarter century, they were top-drawer singers, songwriters, comedians, actors, playwrights, and producers of their own Smart Set revue (and many Smarter Set updates), touring widely with original musical shows of such high quality that even white newspapers sometimes took notice.
The fourth principal was the reliable Lawrence Chenault, playing the white Captain Renfrew, who is secretly Peter’s father. Himself a Harvard man, Renfrew quietly pays Peter’s tuition, and when Peter’s mother dies abjectly, he brings the young man into his household under the pretext of having him edit his memoirs.
The cast came from New York to Roanoke for the filming, and principal photography began in July 1923. Micheaux had rewritten Stribling’s story, opening up the novel to add some action. He gave Stribling’s story a new ending that was not only more
cinematic—including a long jailbreak sequence in which Cissie escapes after being arrested for larceny, and flees through a swamp with bloodhounds on her trail—but ultimately happier.
The chase sequence included a moment when the ever-plucky Preer had to cross “a swinging bridge made of board,” then climb a high hill, stumble and fall, rolling down the hillside. “I still have a scar on my ankle which lingers from the many bruises I got on this long roll,” the actress told the Pittsburgh Courier in 1927. “I am not complaining, because Mr. Oscar Micheaux, the director, wanted to use a dummy for the scene, but I said, ‘No.’” The bloodhounds doing the chasing “were brought direct from the police station,” Preer recalled, “but took a liking to me.” The only way Micheaux could coax the affectionate dogs into playing their parts was for Preer to hold out chunks of meat, call to the bloodhounds, and then sprint ahead of the animals yelping after her.
The chase sequence also included a vignette in which the fleeing Cissie waded through deep, stagnant water in order to effect her supposed escape. “So I played the dummy again,” according to Preer, “and in the water I went, which I didn’t expect to be more than waist deep, but which really came up to my neck and nearly drowned me. My back being to the camera, I expressed my feelings freely to Mr. Micheaux as I waded out.”
After shooting was over, Micheaux worked for six months on postproduction and a release schedule for the four films he had brewing: Deceit, A Son of Satan, The House Behind the Cedars, and Birthright.
For once he did convince a “big white association” to help him distribute his pictures. The Pathé Exchange normally handled Mack Sennett comedies, Our Gang two-reelers, and Will Rogers Westerns, and Pathé wouldn’t work very hard looking for new venues for race pictures. The bookings themselves were still Micheaux’s responsibility. But the exchange operated offices in major cities that could be used as safe shipping points.
Deceit, Micheaux’s daring anticensorship picture, was introduced to audiences first, late in 1923. It didn’t take long for real-life censors to recognize it as their worst possible nightmare: a film that ridiculed them and their profession. In the North, Micheaux could usually satisfy officials with cuts, but Southern states tended to delay suspicious films interminably with elaborate protocol. Northern as well as Southern bookings of Deceit had to be canceled at the eleventh hour, with the advertising already paid and lines forming.
D. Ireland Thomas reported many such “miss outs” in his column. Accompanied by “businessmen” interested in investing in Micheaux’s future productions, Thomas himself showed up at his Charleston, S.C., theater in late November for a screening of Deceit, “according to a contract that I hold with Mr. Micheaux.” When the race-picture producer arrived, he “informed me that I could not get the feature booked for that date and offered another feature that had already played Charleston. That was all right, so far as I was concerned, as I had expected some disappointment and had prepared for it, but this disappointment has hurt Mr. Micheaux, and I am sorry.”
Deceit’s release was scattershot, at best. Censorship and “miss outs” like the Charleston debacle made it the least successful, least widely seen of Micheaux’s pictures at a time when he desperately needed revenue. But Micheaux had made Deceit whimsically; now, having made his feelings for the censors clear, he just as whimsically jettisoned it.
The failure of Deceit, however, put more pressure on Micheaux to make his next release a success. Though Birthright had been filmed most recently, the editing was completed quickly and smoothly, and Evelyn Preer’s name gave the Stribling adaptation obvious marquee potential. Stribling’s novel was also well-known (in part, unfortunately, because it had offended some readers). Micheaux scheduled the national premiere for the Temple Theatre on East Fifty-fifth Street in Cleveland.
Micheaux himself did not attend the movie’s week-long run there in the first week of January 1924. Instead his brother Swan traveled with the print, sweet-talking future race-picture investors along the way. And among those in attendance was Charles W. Chesnutt, author of The House Behind the Cedars.
Swan took the stage on behalf of his absent brother, reading a statement from Micheaux acknowledging expected “criticisms” of the film, but hoping that audiences might be “willing to look deeper” into the complexities of the story.
“I am told almost daily by super-sensitive members of my race that, in producing Colored motion pictures, I should show nothing bad,” Micheaux’s statement read, “that I should not picture us speaking in dialect, shooting craps, boot-legging, drinking liquor, fighting, stealing, or going to jail; that I should, in effect, portray only the better side of our lives—and they have promptly gone to sleep on such pictures when offered.
“This story, as told by an old Negro, living in a little town on the banks of the Tennessee river, at a point where the state lines of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee intersect, is a true story; and to have attempted transposing it to the screen without having him do any of the things objected to would have destroyed the origin of theme and story.
“I have heard many criticisms of the book; I expect some criticism of the picture. But to those willing to look deeper…”
The Cleveland audience certainly did not doze, or sleep. Many applauded the latest Micheaux film. Some flinched from what they watched.
At least one expert on gritty African-American stories was impressed. Micheaux’s longstanding debts notwithstanding, Charles W. Chesnutt once again admired the filmmaker’s work. Micheaux’s stirring adaptation of Stribling’s story boded well for Chesnutt’s own novel. Indeed, the author was happy to learn from Swan that Micheaux’s screen adaptation of his favorite book was nearly ready for release.
Chesnutt followed up with a letter to Micheaux himself, reminding him that he was still owed his final payment. He complimented Micheaux on Birthright, saying that “it was very well done, and was certainly extremely realistic. Neither the author nor the picture flattered the negro one particle, and they both showed up the southern white in his least amiable characteristics, which seem always to come to the front in his dealings with the negro.”
There was no immediate reply. Micheaux, never inclined to part with one hundred dollars in the best of circumstances, was busy preparing for the January 14 unveiling of Birthright at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem—an occasion threatened at the eleventh hour by New York censors, who were insisting on cuts (including all “sacrilegious” material, offensive language, shooting of craps, and so on) in at least five of the ten reels. The state board, which monitored the largest market for Micheaux’s pictures, handled so many films that some simply got lost in the shuffle. So perhaps Micheaux did make the trims, although censors usually didn’t attend premieres. This one went ahead as scheduled.
The East Coast critics agreed almost unanimously with Chesnutt’s assessment. The New York Age hailed Birthright as “the best colored moving picture that has so far been produced.” Though the film version “drags at times,” the reviewer noted, it was faithful to the book (“All of the ignorant prejudices and many of the crimes of both races in this town is graphically depicted”), and its cast was superb. Evelyn Preer was singled out as “exceptionally good,” as was Salem Tutt Whitney as Tump Pack (“the best part ever seen him in”), and J. Homer Tutt as Peter Siner (“succeeds in bringing some life to [his] character,” who was less credible in the novel).
For once, Micheaux even got away with the n-word. “Many comments were uttered [by audience members], regarding the film, some of praise, others of condemnation,” wrote Walley Peele in the Philadelphia Tribune, another black newspaper, “the main exception being taken to several subtitles and the broad use of the word ‘nigger.’” But the n-word was pardonable, wrote Peele, considering how Micheaux’s film was set in the vague past and in the South. The film was “educational” about the inequities of Jim Crow, “not one made to wound your feeling; but one to help each individual who witnessed it to do their own share in bettering the con
ditions which go to make such stories possible.” Micheaux “has never before in his career achieved so great a success.”
“Micheaux has made a really great picture,” J. A. Jackson rhapsodized in Billboard. “It is a modern Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and may not be popular in some quarters, a fact that will but confirm its value.”
In some quarters Micheaux’s film was exceedingly unpopular. The farther South Birthright traveled—this film about inequality in an antebellum river town—the greater the effort required to sneak it into theaters.
Booking the film in Virginia, which was still at this point a second headquarters for Micheaux, was a case study in his sneaky practices. In February 1924, Birthright was shown in theaters in at least three cities in the state—Roanoke, Norfolk, and Lynchburg. But the Virginia censorship board was alerted by complaints from outraged white citizens, and the board promptly sent communiqués to mayors and police chiefs throughout the state, advising officials that Birthright reportedly contained “many objectionable features,” and that it “is an audacious violation of the law to display this picture, and theater managers exhibiting it are liable to prosecution.”
“Reportedly”: For the Virginia censors could not claim to have seen the offensive drama. Micheaux had not submitted Birthright for the state board’s approval. But bordering states were good about swapping censorship warnings, and Virginia had heard that Maryland had balked at licensing the film because “it touches upon the relations existing between whites and blacks in a manner calculated to cause race friction.”
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 24