Audiences were happy to meet Tucker, but it was just as vital for black exhibitors to shake his hand. They might shell out bigger advances if “The Colored Valentino” was going to star in the next Micheaux film.
“In those days, Rudolph Valentino was very, very popular,” Tucker recalled in one interview. “They said I looked like him. I did look a little like him, but to me, personally, I didn’t think so.”
“If you really want to know,” the actor mused another time, “I was even lighter than Valentino himself.”
The irony was bittersweet: Tucker was “lighter than Valentino,” but his light skin prevented him from getting higher-paying jobs in Hollywood pictures. The white studios had what film historian Donald Bogle has called a “blackface fixation.” Thus Micheaux’s “passing” theme had a professional corollary in the Hollywood system; and other Micheaux actors like ex-Lafayette Players Andrew Bishop and Charles Moore ran into the same dilemma as Tucker. They might have played “white” characters in Micheaux films, but they were considered “too white” for the Hollywood studio producers “searching for dark subjects with bulging eyes and thick lips,” according to Chappy Gardner in his Pittsburgh Courier column.
“I never got any white press at all,” Tucker recalled, “and very few people outside of the black community ever heard of me.”
Then, when someone like William Fountaine, who had a medium complexion, lucked into a Hollywood part, his background with Micheaux was trivialized. Though he had been the leading man in Micheaux’s The Dungeon and The Virgin of Seminole, the MGM press release for Hallelujah! claimed that Fountaine was “discovered on the street” in New York by King Vidor, who promptly “sent him to have a screen test.” Fountaine would be cast as the shady gambler Hot Shot in Vidor’s “all-Negro” feature, a rarity from a major Hollywood studio.
“Lorenzo Tucker’s light complexion was perhaps the central anomaly of his life,” wrote Richard Grupenhoff in The Black Valentino: The Stage and Screen Career of Lorenzo Tucker. “Although he had black blood in him, he was light-skinned, and he could have chosen to pass as white and hide his ancestry. Instead, he remained true to his heritage, a decision that often left him stranded between the two worlds of black and white.”
Micheaux never found another leading lady with the histrionic talent and marquee wattage of Evelyn Preer. But under his rough tutelage, the dapper, likable Tucker emerged as his most reliable leading man.
The two “part-talkies” were Easy Street (which some scholars believe was a remake of Micheaux’s earlier “ghost” film, “Jasper Landry’s Will”) and A Daughter of the Congo (Micheaux’s adaptation of Henry Francis Downing’s Liberian novel). Their filming was spread out over late 1929 and early 1930.
Easy Street was a Harlem story involving a gang of city slickers who swindle an old man. The oldster was played by Richard B. Harrison, a son of fugitive slaves, born in Ontario, who had toured Canada and the United States as early as the turn of the century, presenting recitals of Shakespeare, literature, and poetry. Once again Micheaux’s casting acumen was ahead of the white world, which didn’t hear about the sexagenarian actor until February 1930, when the musical Biblical fable Green Pastures opened on Broadway. Harrison’s bravura performance as De Lawd, which led an all-black cast, convinced many critics he was actor of the year.*
Besides Tucker and Harrison, the cast featured William Clayton Jr. as a sinister criminal and member of the gang—which was headed by Alice B. Russell, proof that Mrs. Micheaux’s parts were growing and branching out in variety.
If Easy Street was a kind of chamber work, A Daughter of the Congo was a grandiose project, a loose rendition of Henry Francis Downing’s 1917 novel The American Cavalryman, which required an exotic “African” setting, a large cast of principals and extras, aerial scenes, and singing and dancing numbers. Katherine Noisette would head the cast as a beautiful mulatto, lost as a baby in Africa. Her father was Charles Moore, who makes a fortune as a New York banker “passing” as white. (When his sister tells the banker that he should be ashamed of his racial deceit, he blithely explains, “There are thousands of Negroes doing the same thing.”) Comes word from Liberia that the mulatto child has been identified as a female Tarzan, brought up by natives, now grown into a beautiful jungle woman. On her way to marry a powerful tribal chief (Salem Tutt Whitney), the mulatto and her female companion (Wilhelmina Williams) are captured by Arab slave traders. Her father will pay anything for her rescue. The heroics fall to a U.S. cavalry officer (Lorenzo Tucker) loaned to the African republic.
All this, however, would have to be realized on a rock-bottom budget. Micheaux had to trick up a faux Africa inside a studio, and shoot his aerial scenes over Long Island. “We spent hours taking off and landing in those old biplanes,” recalled Tucker. “It was dangerous, but it was exciting too. And we flew all over Long Island, as another plane followed alongside us with a camera and shot us looking over the side, like we were searching the jungles below.”
A Daughter of the Congo was shot at warp speed and then propelled into theaters in the spring of 1930. Micheaux was desperate to pump up his cash flow, now down to a trickle. He was also desperate to circumvent the hassles of censorship. Censorship entailed costs, delays, and inevitable deletions of the very un-Hollywoodlike highlights that Micheaux had embedded in the African film, to stir what he liked to call “mouth to mouth advertising”: the scene straight from Downing’s novel, for example, where the mulatto and her friend take a dip in a jungle pool, “with breasts unduly exposed,” in the words of the eventual censorship report.
The opening was set for April 5 at the Renaissance, the only major Harlem theater run by black men, the Charity brothers. But state censors shut the picture down after two days, insisting that A Daughter of the Congo did not have an up-to-date approval seal. In fact, the new film was affixed with a seal left over from The Millionaire; Cleo Charity, the theater’s manager, claimed that Micheaux had assured him that the correct seal was forthcoming.
The morning after A Daughter of the Congo was pulled, agents for the state censorship board arranged to meet with Micheaux at the Renaissance. The race-picture pioneer “admitted that he rented this picture to Mr. Charity, and also admitted freely that he was entirely in the wrong in having rented for exhibition this picture before it was licensed. He and Mr. Charity agreed to take the picture from the screen that day.”
When the suspicious agents returned later in the afternoon, however, A Daughter of the Congo was still on the marquee, and still playing to audiences. This time, when they tracked Micheaux down, he claimed that he’d spoken personally with the head censor in Albany, who gave him special permission for temporary exhibition. The agents tried to contact the head censor, who was on a train, incommunicado. They didn’t sort it out until April 10, and when they did they concluded that Micheaux never had spoken with the censor.
The unlicensed film was ordered withdrawn, and Micheaux was forced to make cuts. In the meantime, A Daughter of the Congo had sold to capacity in Harlem for five days.
Audiences lapped it up, but this time the critics ganged up on Micheaux with a vengeance, calling his latest production cheapjack and humdrum. The black press charged that A Daughter of the Congo fell down on all levels, from its story elements to the “part-talkie” technology to its cultural sensitivity. In their eyes, the film lagged far behind the burgeoning achievements of Hollywood, and they blamed the lapse on Micheaux.
“Most of the actors overact, and Mr. Micheaux has succeeded again in distorting a story so that intelligent continuity is destroyed,” wrote John Mack Brown in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. The musical turn of Daisy Harding, a soprano familiar at Harlem church functions, was singled out by Brown as the film’s “one bright spot.”
The widely read Theophilus Lewis was even more scathing in the New York Age, one of Harlem’s two principal newspapers. Though he’d been impressed by Micheaux’s previous productions as “the work of a man of remarkable personal a
bility, handicapped only by a lack of financial resources,” Lewis noted, he had been brought up short by the “unpardonable” offenses of A Daughter of the Congo.
“The picture is thoroughly bad from every point of analysis,” wrote Lewis, “from the continuity, which is unintelligible, to the caption writing, which is a crime.”
The crowd scenes were directed as though the performers “had been cautioned to be careful and not knock the camera over,” Lewis said. He offered some praise for the intelligent emoting of Salem Tutt Whitney, but dismissed the overall production quality as vastly inferior to Hollywood.
Far worse, according to Lewis, were the racial transgressions in Micheaux’s film. The New York Age columnist scorned A Daughter of the Congo for its “persistent vaunting of interracial color fetishism,” raising the issue, like other critics before him, of the director’s “artificial association of nobility with lightness and villainy with blackness.” Making his own informal tally of the skin colors of Micheaux’s characters, Lewis found the balance skewed. “All the noble characters are high yellows; all the ignoble ones are black,” he wrote. “Only one of the yellow characters is vicious, while only one of the black characters, the debauched president of the republic, is a person of dignity.”
Micheaux’s Africans behaved as though they were “preposterously stupid,” Lewis complained, whereas even “white movie magnates” in Hollywood had become more “Negro-conscious” lately. Major white-studio productions such as Three Feathers, Thunderbolt, Hearts in Dixie and Hallelujah! had made earnest and “honest efforts to present Negro character as faithfully as they present Caucasian character,” according to Lewis.
Lewis wrapped up his scolding on a mildly forgiving note. “Every man, no matter what line he works in, has at least one bad job under his hat,” the New York Age columnist concluded. “Perhaps A Daughter of the Congo was the one bad production Mr. Micheaux was booked to make. Now that he has got it out of his system, let us hope he will return to form and repeat his sound work of earlier days.”
Micheaux had been accused of many things in his career, but this was the first time he was accused of being shamelessly slapdash. It was a charge that lingers with some critics today—but one that overlooks the sheer force of Micheaux’s will power, which kept him going even when dire circumstances threw off his artistic barometer.
Whether A Daughter of the Congo was truly wretched, or whether the few who saluted Micheaux’s African flight of fancy (the Pittsburgh Courier hailed the picture as “tensely realistic”) were more on target, will never be known, unless, by some miracle, a print of the “lost” work should materialize today. Perhaps the only film that could truly measure up to its notoriety would be a documentary about its making. “The Making of A Daughter of the Congo”: That would be a record of daring, ingenuity, chicanery, and tenacity.
Micheaux had made two dozen motion pictures since The Homesteader. Barely solvent, he took a thorough drubbing by censors and critics for this pair of “part-talkie” films. Few expected him to rise from the mat.
Micheaux had compounded his problems with his usual ballyhoo, releasing “all-talking” advertisements for Easy Street and A Daughter of the Congo when the films were really only “part-talkies.” Hallelujah! and the other recent Hollywood pictures cited by Theophilus Lewis were exciting largely because they were indeed “all-talking, singing, and dancing.” Not all members of the black press hailed such major white-studio productions as social advances, however; historian Donald Bogle has pointed out the contrast between white and black journalists’ reactions. Many of the latter found fault with the stereotypes in Hallelujah!, especially the “spiritual-singing, crap-shooting characters.”* But Hallelujah! was handsomely produced, using the latest technology—and, indisputably, offered more black faces than usual on the screen.
Most theaters in black neighborhoods wanted to book the latest Hollywood “all-talkies.” Many that couldn’t afford the changeover to sound simply went bust. According to one report, at one time there were as many as fifteen “race moving picture managers and proprietors” in Washington, D.C. By 1930, there were two.
As “talkies” boomed, race pictures shriveled, and by 1930 there were more black theaters in Washington, D.C. than there were race picture producers in the entire country. The white Southerner Richard E. Norman; the Johnson brothers, Noble and George; Harry Gant and Ira McGowan’s short-lived Los Angeles company; Robert Levy’s high-minded Reol Productions; the Royal Gardens of Chicago; the Maurice Film Company; and the Colored Players Corporation of Philadelphia—all these and many others gave up the ghost, their fleeting existence all but forgotten today.
Having spurred a gold rush, race pictures left behind a ghost town. One newspaper columnist wrote that the famous race-picture pioneer Oscar Micheaux had fallen on “evil days.” And though he was no longer universally regarded as “great,” by the early 1930s Micheaux was for all intents and purposes “the only.” In a list of Christmas wishes for 1930, the Pittsburgh Courier’s Floyd G. Snelson Jr., published this wish for Micheaux in his column: “Some new hits for his moving pictures.”
Micheaux was proud of living in Harlem, and in his novels he derided certain luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance who chose to live in New York’s more upscale neighborhoods. So it must have been humbling for this distinguished citizen to walk the streets of Harlem in that winter of 1930, when the newspapers were writing his obituary. One might imagine him as a figure out of one of his stories, bowing his head, holding onto his hat, trailing his long Russian coat behind him—Czar Oscar leaning into the whipping wind and snow.
For all his sociability and communication skills, however, Micheaux was a solitary, private man, who never quite fit into the Harlem Renaissance. In most ways, the Renaissance passed him by. Indeed, Micheaux only half-lived in Harlem; he was always on the run, hopping trains in and out of town, seldom intersecting with the intellectual ferment of the time.
By 1930 the Renaissance was at its zenith. Yet Micheaux and his films came in for “profound silence and neglect from his intellectual contemporaries,” as film historian Clyde Taylor has noted. Though Micheaux personally knew some of the poets, artists, and writers who dominated the cultural movement that celebrated black life in Harlem and America—people like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston—Micheaux didn’t hold membership in the same social, political, or intellectual circles.
They were middle-class, college-educated; Micheaux was low-born, a primitive. They were modernists—some of them militants—who repudiated authors like Charles W. Chesnutt and Henry Francis Downing, dismissing their novels about “passing” as quaint.* These Harlem literary lights enjoyed close connections with New York’s best publishing houses; Micheaux was a self-published novelist, whose fiction was intended for ordinary folk. Those who registered his work at all looked down on his “execrable” English, in the estimate of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the widow of poet Laurence Dunbar, who met Micheaux in Pennsylvania in the 1920s. (Even Micheaux’s film scenarios reeked of “bad English,” Dunbar-Nelson thought.)
Among Harlem’s cultural leaders, Micheaux was alone in preferring motion pictures as a medium. In 1967, when Langston Hughes cowrote a book called Black Magic—“A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment”—film was treated almost as an aside. Micheaux himself was mentioned noncommittally, as part of a sweeping single sentence covering race cinema.
Writer Carlton Moss recalled talking about Micheaux and race pictures with Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Rudolph Fisher (author of the first black detective novel), Renaissance chronicler Arna Bontemps, and other Harlem eminences, but what he discovered was that they considered Hollywood a cultural junkyard, and race pictures just more garbage for the heap. “They saw Micheaux as an illiterate person,” recalled Moss. “And this they could not accept. Because the big thrust at that time was to prove that you were as literate as whoever the accepted figure was on the national scale.”
“Those circles,” said Moss on another occasion, “never took Micheaux efforts seriously. One prominent writer was known to be working on a play about Micheaux. He called it, ‘Let’s Make Movies.’ It was a comedy on Micheaux’s filmmaking. Few who criticized him, admitted to ever having seen his films.”
Nor did Micheaux care to develop a circle of his own. He was, as ever, a lone wolf who slipped in and out of circles. Among his friends were a few loyalists, actors like Lawrence Chenault, William E. Fountaine, or Lorenzo Tucker. But in the dark winter of 1930—no darker, Micheaux would have said, than his loneliest time on a South Dakota homestead—he trusted one person alone: Alice B. Russell, his pillar of constancy and resolve. In films he sometimes idealized women as intelligent, beautiful, ladylike, moral exemplars. Mrs. Micheaux seemed that ideal sprung to life.
From her he drew strength and purpose. As had become his custom, Micheaux spent Christmas of 1930 and the week leading up to the New Year and his forty-seventh birthday with the Russell family, dividing the holiday season between their 48 Morningside Avenue flat in Harlem and his wife’s family’s house on Greenwood Avenue in Montclair, New Jersey. The ex-homesteader had dubbed the Greenwood Avenue place “The Homestead.”
But his death notices were premature. Micheaux had been building a lifeline to new angels, and in January 1931 he reincorporated in Albany with unlikely partners—Leo Brecher and Frank Schiffman. They took his name off the masthead, and renamed his company Fayette Pictures. Micheaux was listed as the nominal president (“titular head,” according to the publicity), with Brecher as vice-president, Schiffman as secretary.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 30