Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  That was “about 400 of the 16,000 movie houses” in America, according to Time magazine.

  The New York Amsterdam News said the number of “so-called Negro theaters” was always inflated, “owing to certain competitive theaters that squawk about first-run pictures.” These theaters refused to exhibit a “sepia picture” if they couldn’t claim exclusivity; the same self-destructive competitive spirit prevailed that Richard E. Norman and George P. Johnson had bemoaned in the 1920s. The Pittsburgh Courier put the national total at closer to 270, once the houses in major cities that welcomed a “mixed population” (that is, mixed-neighborhood theaters willing to play a few race pictures, usually at midnight shows) were eliminated.

  One persistent problem was that fewer than half the Negro or “mixed population” theaters boasted black managers, and still only a fraction were owned by black people. Micheaux, who was banned from the Brecher-Schiffman theaters in Harlem, depended increasingly on a group of theaters controlled by black businessmen in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In burgs like Elyria, Ohio or Monessen, Pennsylvania, he had to settle for the one-shot end-of-day showings dubbed “Midnight Rambles.”

  To shore up his bookings, Micheaux took scouting trips with a new Man Friday, Carman Newsome. Born in Kansas, Newsome was the grandson of a freed slave, an elderly rancher who had long been a neighbor of the Micheaux family. As a teenager in the 1920s, Newsome had moved with his family to Ohio, enrolling in Central High School, a black school famed as a hotbed of musical prodigies. Newsome taught himself to play the tenor saxophone and clarinet and formed his own big band, leading a shifting aggregation that, at one time, featured trumpeters Freddie Webster and Harry “Pee Wee” Jackson, both of whom later played with jazz great Jimmie Lunceford. Cleveland was one of those cities Micheaux passed through regularly, and on one trip in the mid-1930s he encountered the young musician leading the house band at the Cedar Gardens.

  Micheaux told Newsome to look him up if he ever came to Harlem. When Newsome moved there in 1936, he found the music competition fierce and took the sales job offered to him by the race-picture pioneer.

  Despite his traveling tutorials from Micheaux, Newsome, the world’s most mild-mannered personality, didn’t turn out to be much of a salesman. But Micheaux was keeping an eye on him for other reasons. The light-skinned Newsome was so tall and handsome, so physically striking that wherever he went, women fluttered and swooned. Micheaux was half irritated by his Man Friday’s easygoing charm, and wrote him into his 1946 novel The Story of Dorothy Stanfield as his “Clark Gable–looking” employee Carter Thompson. “He didn’t have two ounces of brains,” Micheaux wrote ungenerously of Thompson/Newsome.

  But by the time Lorenzo Tucker quit again after Temptation—his tenth or eleventh Micheaux film, and his last—the newest graduate of Micheaux’s school for stars would be ready for his close-ups.

  Remarkably, in the following year Micheaux would dash off three more pictures: Swing!, God’s Stepchildren, Birthright.

  Swing! was a diverting piffle largely designed to launch Carman Newsome as “The Dark Gable.” The tale, which shifted between Alabama and Harlem, followed the fortunes of a goodhearted cook named Mandy (Cora Green), who is much in demand among white households but also dishes up “Chitlin’ Suppers” for the Alley C and South Highlands neighborhood of Birmingham. Her husband is a hustler, chronically out of work. He’s been two-timing Mandy with a “high yaller” named Eloise, who is cuckolding her own husband, a fireman. When Mandy finally figures out her husband’s unfaithfulness, she abandons him for new horizons in New York.

  Micheaux refocused the Harlem half of the story on an alter ego who reflected his own artistry and preoccupations: the tall, good-looking impresario Ted Gregory (played by Newsome). Ted is trying to launch a new musical revue, aided by his loyal secretary Lena (Dorothy Van Engle). The “high yaller” from Birmingham materializes as the show’s lead, though, like certain actors Micheaux could mention, she “drinks like a fish” and has a habit of missing rehearsals. Something interesting happens with the casting when the action shifts north: Though the “high yaller” and her firefighter have different names in the Harlem scenes, both couples are played by Helen Diaz and Alex Lovejoy, and they seem to be the same characters.* Whether Micheaux was playing a “doubling” game with audiences, or simply giving two favorite actors a chance to “double” their performances (and low salaries), is unclear—but the double-casting adds to the fun.

  The conflicts and crises continue. While inebriated, the “high yaller” breaks her leg, and without a guaranteed headliner the “colored” producers pull out of the show, plunging the impresario into despair. “This show can’t get to first base with a Blues singer, a Mammy lead,” Ted says, voicing a Micheaux plaint on the history and pitfalls of black show business. “They look for it in this type of show…Of all the Colored shows that have gone by the boards, no Negro has ever produced one. From Williams and Walker to The Green Pastures, they’ve all been sponsored by white men. No Negro has ever been in on the money, or the profits.”

  Lena, who knows Mandy from Birmingham, finds her a job, sewing costumes. While Mandy is inept at costuming (most of the actual sewing is being done by Lena, played by the expert real-life seamstress Van Engle), she can torch-sing with the best of them. Lena urges Ted to take a chance on Mandy. Ted finds a rich white backer who agrees to fund a Broadway opening with Mandy as the star, and the show goes on—a quintessential Micheaux pipedream.

  Newsome and Van Engle made a charming couple. The petite, dynamic Green, who played Mandy, had been in vaudeville since she was a teenager; during the making of Swing! she was being showcased in Leonard Harper’s latest revue at Connie’s Inn, where her act (just as in the film) combined comedy and torch songs. Hazel Diaz, the “high yaller,” was a nightclub singer turned actress. Micheaux filled out his cast with the usual parade of chorus girls, street-urchin tap dancers, a female trombonist, and muscle dancer Consuelo Harris, whose specialty was an acrobatic and licentious bump-and-grind.

  “We don’t have the money to spend on big sets and many retakes,” Carman Newsome, Micheaux’s “road” ambassador and new leading man, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, somewhat defensively, on a publicity visit to his hometown. “We mostly shoot with one ‘take’ but if it isn’t good or isn’t what our director wants we have gone as high as seven ‘takes’ for one scene. We try to make the very best pictures we can.”

  Besides all the self-references, Swing! was sprinkled with Micheaux’s social criticism, especially in the form of disapproving portraits of shiftless men, two-timers, gamblers, and welfare bums. And, if nothing else, the 1938 film is still worth watching today for a last look at the sweetly affecting Dorothy Van Engle, who got married, became a librarian, and never acted again.

  As always Micheaux followed Hollywood trends, closely watching the movies that poached on his territory, sometimes reacting adversely to their fallacies, sometimes creating his own all-black variants. The self-important Imitation of Life, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1934, particularly incensed him, as its story—about a lovable Mammy’s daughter running away from her true skin color—stole his “passing” theme and ideas and turned them around into a sheeny Hollywood soap opera. Not only was Imitation of Life more technically proficient than Micheaux could dream to afford, by the end the film had turned into a bathetic weeper.

  Micheaux realized that he could turn a profit by making an imitation of Imitation of Life. After all, wasn’t he the legitimate master of that theme? Weren’t his films the most authentic account of the realities and texture of black America?

  He would envision his next project, God’s Stepchildren, as the ultimate “passing” story, reworking and critiquing the Hollywood clichés from his own unique perspective. Micheaux wasn’t shy about citing the negative inspiration of Imitation of Life, identifying the 1934 film in the Sack Amusement Enterprises trailer for God’s Stepchildren as one of two acclai
med and successful studio productions that had influenced his latest movie. The other was a product of white Hollywood that had nothing to do with race, a William Wyler picture from 1936 called These Three, based on Lillian Hellman’s celebrated play, The Children’s Hour.

  On crucial matters Mrs. Micheaux always concurred with her husband. And the script for God’s Stepchildren was based on an unpublished short story, “Naomi, Negress,” again written by someone other than Micheaux. The publicity and advertising were coy about its source, but in one interview Carman Newsome allowed that the author was none other than Alice B. Russell, the first and only time she penned the story for a Micheaux film. God’s Stepchildren would become a summary achievement for husband and wife.

  The first part of God’s Stepchildren was a riff on the Hellman play, which concerned a group of teachers whose lives are ruined by malicious students spreading lesbian gossip about them (the Hollywood version avoided censorship by leaving the lesbian undertones ambiguous). The Micheaux script would similarly start with “these three”: a middle-aged, upstanding seamstress named Mrs. Saunders; a distraught stranger trying to abandon her unwanted mixed-race baby; and the mixed-race infant girl, whom the seamstress agrees to adopt.

  The adopted child grows into a beautiful lightskinned mulatto, who agonizes over the fact she has been adopted into a Negro family. This is “Naomi, Negress,” whose racial identity is betrayed only by the color of her eyes. (“Over in the shadows, they seem to be blue,” says Mrs. Saunders, the seamstress. “But here in the daylight they’re brown. That’s the Negro in her.”) Naomi could easily “pass” for white. Herself a stepchild, she sneers at other black people as “God’s stepchildren.” Though the Saunders family lives in “Coloredtown,” Naomi refuses to mingle with black children and tries to sneak into the whites-only school across town. Her black teacher tries to nurture her, but a hostile Naomi spreads rumors about the teacher’s intimacy with another instructor, causing a community uproar. Her stepmother and Naomi’s older brother Jimmie, realizing Naomi is mentally imbalanced, defuse a riot of parents by telling the truth about her. Naomi is sent away to a convent.

  Cut to ten years later: Jimmie has grown into an honest, handsome fellow; working as a Pullman porter, he has saved thousands of dollars and dreams of buying and farming land. His sweetheart is the daughter of the goodhearted schoolteacher from the first half of the story. Jimmie resists the efforts of a ne’er-do-well friend to persuade him to invest his earnings in a “numbers” racket. Instead, he becomes Micheaux’s spokesman for “our group,” voicing disdain toward fellow members of his race who have drifted into a lazy or criminal life.

  “Their idea of success is to seek the line of least resistance,” Jimmie tells his girlfriend. “A Negro hates to think. He’s a stranger to planning.”

  Along comes the seemingly angelic Naomi, “cured” by her convent term. Yet Naomi nurses a strange crush on her handsome older brother, and she resists her stepmother and brother’s well-intentioned efforts to marry her off to Clyde, a family friend. “Nice fellow, industrious,” argues her stepmother. But Naomi, who is filled with self-loathing and still phobic about race, finds the dark-skinned Clyde “funny-looking,” with his flat nose and other “typical Negro” features. Jimmie spurns Naomi’s weird advances. Clyde hears voices inside his head (Naomi is tricking him from a hiding place), but marries Naomi anyway.

  The opening scene is replayed at the end of the story, when Naomi walks out on Clyde and her newborn, giving over her baby boy to her own stepmother, Mrs. Saunders. Naomi has cast her lot with white people. “I’m leaving the Negro race,” Naomi tells the self-sacrificing seamstress. Though hurt and astonished, Mrs. Saunders replies sympathetically, “I did the best I could, but I failed…Now I can only say I’m sorry for you, Naomi. Sorry from the bottom of my heart, and I pray the Lord to forgive you and guide you to God knows whatever.”

  Naomi is unfazed. “If you see me, you don’t know me, even if you pass me on the street…” she declares—a powerful line lifted almost directly from the similarly climactic final encounter between the pale-skinned daughter (Fredi Washington) and her “Mammy” (Louise Beavers) in Imitation of Life. The Hollywood picture had concluded with Mammy’s death and the daughter sobbing her repentance—a mildly uplifting finale. But in his best films Micheaux was an unblinking realist, and his response to Imitation of Life was his toughest ending.

  Years pass in God’s Stepchildren. Jimmie marries the schoolteacher’s daughter, they raise a family. Naomi’s little boy grows up as one of their extended brood, a reality of black America that was often honored in Micheaux pictures. Jimmie and Mrs. Saunders love and care for Naomi’s little boy as their own.

  True to her vow, Naomi has cut off all contact with those who love her, but can’t find happiness with white people. (Surviving records indicate that censors struck a violent scene in which the audience would have learned that Naomi has gotten married to a white husband, who beats and deserts her when he discovers she is a “Negress.”) Homeless and destitute, she takes to lurking outside the Saunders’ house, peeking in the windows for a glimpse of her lost child. Like characters in other Micheaux pictures, the boy possesses extrasensory perception; one night he insists that he spies a strange but familiar face outside the windows. Jimmie and Mrs. Saunders rush onto the porch to search around, but when they get there Naomi is gone.

  Gone to a bridge overlooking a rushing river, where the film concludes with a stunning montage. Happy images of the intergenerational Saunders family are intermingled with shots of Naomi’s sad fate. The tortured “Negress” is glimpsed under glowering skies, teetering on a bridge railing, then plunging into the waters, her hat swirling past in the current. The final title card quotes Galatians 6:7: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

  Louise Beavers’s Hollywood “Mammy” had been a stereotype, however subtly written and performed. Micheaux steered clear of caricature with his version of Imitation of Life, making Mrs. Saunders a powerful, positive woman who works hard for her livelihood and independence. It’s no accident that this key character has a profession, seamstress, in common with his wife’s mother; no accident, either, that Mrs. Micheaux wrote herself into the role.

  Indeed, Alice B. Russell was at the center of this extraordinary project in several ways. She had long been a reliable performer in Micheaux’s films, but God’s Stepchildren would be anchored by her rueful smile and Zen-like presence. Besides writing “Naomi, Negress,” she also starred in the film, and was credited as the producer.

  Apart from Carman Newsome (as Jimmie) and Ethel Moses (as the schoolteacher/daughter), the cast included Charles “Daddy” Moore, whose many appearances for Micheaux had begun with The Homesteader; Moore played the school principal in the first half of the story. Alex Lovejoy was Jimmie’s gambler-friend, Jacqueline Lewis played Naomi as a girl, and Gloria Press was the adult Naomi.

  The plethora of outdoor scenes suggests that parts of God’s Stepchildren were photographed in a rural locale, perhaps near Dallas, Texas, where the Sack brothers had invested in a low-budget production facility used by Spencer Williams. But the bulk of the movie was shot in New York and New Jersey in the summer of 1937, with a cobbled-together white crew including editors Leonard Weiss and Patricia Rooney from West Coast Service Studio on Fifty-seventh Street and Recording Laboratories of America on Thirty-eighth Street, respectively; and sound engineer Ed Schabbehar from Producers Service Studio in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Lester Lang was back as Micheaux’s director of photography.

  Micheaux took as much time as he could shooting God’s Stepchildren, and then he refused to rush the editing of this important “preachment” film—one of two or three pictures, in any event, that he was editing simultaneously.

  The third project produced during this impressive spurt, the sound version of Birthright, was shot in late 1937.

  This was another remake of a silent hit, and likely another film for which Micheaux appropriated the rights. His fondness f
or T. S. Stribling’s novel was bolstered by his nostalgia for Evelyn Preer, whose acclaimed performance as Cissy, the good soul mired in “Niggertown,” had helped make the silent picture a hit. Casting Ethel Moses as Cissy in the remake was a testament to Micheaux’s belief in her budding talent and drawing power. The versatile brothers J. Homer Tutt and Salem Tutt Whitney weren’t available for the other two main characters, but Alex Lovejoy would play “Tump” Pack, the returned World War I veteran who makes trouble for Cissy and the idealistic Harvard graduate Peter Siner; and Peter Siner himself would be portrayed by Carman Newsome.

  The Sack years were characterized by gradual budget tightening, and Birthright is the first of Micheaux’s three 1937 productions to look sorely pinched for funds. It’s not clear if any of the movie was shot in the South; press items reported filming in “the heart of South Jamaica,” between 109th and 110th Avenues, with immigrant Jamaicans standing in for Southern blacks. However, the photography had a vitality as well as austere beauty, thanks to cameraman Robert J. Marshall, who also shot low-budget Yiddish features for Edgar Ulmer.

  Others in the acting ensemble included Hazel Diaz and Alice B. Russell, who was again credited as the film’s producer. The musical sequences were humdingers. And though Stribling’s story was streamlined by the script, though looks and likability were Carman Newsome’s main attributes, Micheaux’s perspective on Jim Crow practices and the squalor of Southern segregation was still unique, still bracing. He might have soft-pedaled such issues in his “gat-gam-and-jazz” musicals for much of the 1930s, but in God’s Stepchildren and Birthright, Micheaux evoked the fire and brimstone of old.