The Wind from Nowhere was self-published in early 1943, with The Book Supply Company reincorporated at Micheaux’s 40 Morningside Avenue apartment in Harlem. But the Harlem press, which had treated Micheaux’s race pictures as beneath notice for most of the preceding decade, sniffed at his first novel since 1917. Constance Curtis, the book editor of the New York Amsterdam News, told friends, “I’ve reviewed a lot of books, but I’ve never reviewed one more aptly titled than The Wind from Nowhere.” Indeed, reviews of any kind were hard to come by, which infuriated Micheaux.
But the self-publisher advertised the book heavily in black newspapers and magazines throughout America, and it sailed through multiple editions, selling a reported 30,000 copies. That would have qualified The Wind from Nowhere for the bestseller lists, if Micheaux hadn’t been working outside the mainstream New York publishing industry. “Undoubtedly,” conceded Carlton Moss, hardly a member of Micheaux’s fan club, “he placed more books by a black author in more black homes in America, than any other fiction writer.”
Micheaux also traveled widely to promote the book in bookstores and libraries and schools, and as usual in person he was an irresistible salesman of his stories and ideas. Micheaux enjoyed his time on the road, giving talks and selling The Wind from Nowhere right out of his suitcase. He liked to inscribe copies: “To one of our group…”
While on the road, Micheaux always found spare time for reading and thinking. In 1943 the papers were filled with war news, and now the reborn novelist started jotting down ideas for his next book, one that would mingle autobiography with a modern plot—something to jolt his readers, remind them of Pearl Harbor, and rally black people to the urgency of World War II.
Micheaux spent the next two years selling The Wind from Nowhere and writing The Case of Mrs. Wingate, which evolved into Micheaux’s most elaborate and audacious novel, taking his longtime bugaboos about politics, Jews, and intermarriage, and weaving a pitched melodrama exploring “Nazi activity inside black America.”
Borrowing, liberally, from W. E. B. DuBois’s Dark Princess—which at one time he had considered adapting into a film—Micheaux offered a story full of interweaving subplots and shifts in time and place.
Its true beginning was in the South, in Atlanta (“easily one of the freest towns in the South for a Negro”), where the reader was introduced to a young, college-bound black man named Kermit Early, who since high school has been pursued by a well-bred, coquettish white Southern classmate. After marrying a rich white man, this flirtatious woman, now known as Mrs. Wingate, stops by Kermit’s shoeshine stand; as he polishes her shoes, she deliberately spreads her lower limbs and shows him her private parts. Though he tries to dodge her persistent sexual advances, she doesn’t give up; she is drawn to the taboo of having sex with a black man. She successfully schemes to get Kermit into a spare room in her suburban home, then into her bed as her lover.
Mrs. Wingate tells Kermit that her husband (like Leo Frank) is “not a normal man” when it comes to sexual relations. (Then, for several pages, Micheaux reflexively revisits the true-life case that compelled his attention in a book and two films: The Forged Note, The Gunsaulus Mystery, and Lem Hawkins’ Confession. Whether or not Frank was guilty, Micheaux in the end endorsed Negro janitor James Conley’s views about the factory-owner’s stunted sexuality. Frank could only be sexually aroused by having “unnatural relations” with women, Micheaux wrote; the Jewish factory-owner wasn’t “built like other men” and “went down on women.”)
You’d think Micheaux would approve of a shoeshine boy with aspirations toward higher education, but his storytelling was iconoclastic to the end. Kermit goes on to college and life in Chicago, but Micheaux portrays him as weak-willed and pathetic. Despite his degree, Kermit becomes a “kept man” for Mrs. Wingate. His airy liberal education never leads him to meaningful employment, much less an ability to cope with the real world.
Kermit soon falls under the spell of a subversive group, operating out of Chicago and Milwaukee, which is building a fifth column of Negro Nazis who blame Jews for the problems of black America. Moving to New York, Kermit is assigned by his pro-Nazi handlers to approach the pioneering race-picture producer Sidney Wyeth, whose differences with Jewish producers and theater owners are widely known. Wyeth, by now, has gone broke making race pictures and retreated to writing fiction. As part of a pro-Nazi propaganda campaign planned for the United States, Kermit offers to arrange funding for Wyeth to make a comeback, if he will agree to make a “hate movie” inciting Negroes to riot against Jews.
Micheaux’s story skitters all over the map—from Atlanta to Chicago and New York, from Memphis to Nashville and Louisville, touching down aboard a luxury liner bound for Bremen and visiting Berchtesgaden in Germany, where Hitler is busy delivering a speech berating Jews and describing the lynching of Negroes as America’s “national pastime.” (A Japanese ambassador, looking on, smiles in agreement.) In Germany, readers meet a brother and sister of the Negro race, though half-German and light-skinned, who are dispatched to America to aid the subversion. The sister becomes conflicted by her assignment when she falls in love with Wyeth.
The New York chapters are sprinkled with autobiographical allusions and glimpses of Wyeth/Micheaux’s daily routine. Minor characters in the novel are based on the multitalented Donald Heywood, and on Irving Miller, a noted producer of black theatricals, whose wife, a dancer, had a small role in Micheaux’s 1923 film Deceit.
The most intriguing aspect of The Case of Mrs. Wingate is Micheaux’s continuing colloquy on Jews, a fellow oppressed minority, but a group whose members had too often rubbed him wrong. In fiction and films he was an early voice in the difficult history of black and Jewish relations in America, but in the end his message was complex.
At first, Micheaux’s alter ego Wyeth is bemused by the Nazis’ offer and stalls his reply. Ultimately, however, Wyeth/Micheaux rejects the “hate movie” proposition, saying that he is content as an author. Besides, his attitude toward Jews has been misunderstood. At this peak of anti-Semitic tragedy in the world, Micheaux’s alter ego waves an olive branch, insisting that he doesn’t hate Jews.
“After all they did to spoil your business?” the unsympathetic Kermit prods.
“They didn’t go into it to hurt me; to put me out of business. They went into it on the theory that they could make some money. They had a right to,” Wyeth/Micheaux replies phlegmatically.
So Kermit heads to Buenos Aires, another old Micheaux haunt, from the days when he was portering for white bigwigs on South American excursions. There Kermit tracks down the genuine article, an ex-Hollywood German émigré filmmaker, who is willing to take up the gauntlet. When the hate tract premieres in Harlem, riots break out and vandals run wild, destroying “mostly Jewish owned” businesses and merchandise.
In the meantime, the white Mrs. Wingate has become Mrs. Kermit Early. Disapproving of her black husband’s corrupt brand of Americanism, she exerts her will and he quits the subversive organization. Mrs. Early then arranges for her husband to become editor and publisher of “a struggling Negro magazine,” and they drop out of the narrative. While Kermit is never treated less than skeptically, by the end of his book Micheaux has developed a grudging admiration for his purposeful white wife—the closest he ever came to condoning the early temptation he had always condemned in his fiction: intermarriage.
The story speeds to a supercharged end, à la Dark Princess, with the remaining pro-Nazi black Americans hatching a plot to assassinate the First Lady (i.e., Eleanor Roosevelt) and plant a bomb aboard a train.
Elton Fax, the young man who had endured Micheaux’s memorable monologue on a train trip years before, learned around this time that the Harlem author was looking for an artist to create a dustjacket for his new novel. By now an established illustrator and artist for magazines and books, Fax made an appointment to visit Micheaux. “I was kind of thrilled again to meet him and see this man, genuinely so,” recalled Fax.
Now, t
he great man was massive and stooped and gruff. His winning smile had “gone with the wind.” Micheaux didn’t mention whether he remembered Fax from that train ride, a decade earlier; probably not.
The illustrator was disconcerted when Micheaux offered him “$35 or something ridiculous” for his artwork. Moreover, Micheaux demanded ownership of the piece in perpetuity, whereas the accepted practice in commissioning such illustrations was to pay for one-time use only. Still, Fax admired Micheaux, and he accepted the job, crafting “a beautiful black and white drawing,” which the author paid for and accepted. Then, to the artist’s astonishment (and without his permission), Micheaux embellished Fax’s drawing with “abominable” colors intended to evoke his glory years as a race-picture pioneer, “…the same yellows, the same blues, the same reds that went into those old lobby cards” for his many films, according to Fax. “That was his [Micheaux’s] bag,” said Fax. “That is what he knew.”
But Micheaux knew his audience, and the “colorized” Elton Fax cover helped make The Case of Mrs. Wingate a windfall success. The “mouth by mouth advertising,” as Micheaux liked to put it, made up for the paucity of reviews. Inside of a few years, with orders generated by mail, or by the author himself brandishing copies on the road, the second Micheaux novel since his return to fiction had sold a remarkable 55,000 copies: “the biggest single success” of his literary career, according to the New York Amsterdam News.
That was almost twice the profits of The Wind from Nowhere. Micheaux had learned a lot since his early self-publishing days, and now he was supplementing his company income by distributing other titles besides his own. Among them were substantial works, including New World A’Coming: Inside Black America by Roi Ottley, a former Amsterdam News staffer, whose investigative report on the condition of blacks in America incorporated research he had supervised as an editor of New York’s Federal Writer’s Project. Another work the Book Supply Company made available to stores and mail-order buyers was Strange Fruit by Lillian (Eugenia) Smith, a controversial first novel by a white Southerner about an interracial romance, a murder, and a lynching.
Between working on his novels, and traveling and selling his own books and those written by others, the World War II years elapsed swiftly and not unpleasantly for Micheaux. “His friends think he’s all through because he has suspended making pictures,” Micheaux wrote of Sidney Wyeth in The Case of Mrs. Wingate, “but he is doing far better, for himself, in the present business than he ever did in making pictures.”
Micheaux dedicated his next novel, his sixth, “To Mary J.”—Mary J. Russell, his wife’s unselfish, hardworking mother—“Whose faith and confidence in the writer has always been a source of inspiration.”
The Micheauxes stayed close to their Montclair “Homestead” while living an increasingly quiet, insular life in Harlem. People who visited their Harlem flat recall the furnishings as simple and unassuming, though Elton Fax said that Micheaux “didn’t live like a pauper by any means.” He continued to dress well and dine to satisfaction, and he still had a chauffeur on call, but the couple had few of the material trappings of affluence.
Actor Lorenzo Tucker, faithful to the mentor who had launched him into race pictures as “The Colored Valentino,” often dropped by to say hello, finding his once-energetic employer now staid and stolid with age. Micheaux was afflicted by arthritis and hypertension. “Instead of calling him Mr. Micheaux in later years,” Tucker remembered, “I called him Doc, and I called my stepfather the same thing—so he was like a father to me.”
He was “Dad” to his spouse of twenty years, Alice B. Russell. She tried to superintend his health, coaxing Micheaux into taking the occasional break from his routine. They enjoyed day trips to Long Island or to the Catskills, longer trips to the Adirondacks, driven by their chauffeur while the couple nestled in the backseat.
By early 1945, “Dad” had put the finishing touches on his third novel of the World War II years: The Story of Dorothy Stanfield. The title echoed that of the successful Mrs. Wingate, and so did the novel’s byzantine construction. But the new book was a puzzle-work, whose pieces—some clearly left over from Micheaux films—didn’t fit together with the same fluidity as The Case of Mrs. Wingate.
For the story’s centerpiece, Micheaux concocted a central romance between a mysterious Memphis woman and a lovelorn private eye (“New York’s ace Negro detective”), who is chasing a dangerous criminal cross-country. He threw in an illegal abortion and undertaking scandal in Memphis, an upstate New York rape case, a Harlem murder with Leo Frank echoes.
For the last time, Micheaux brought back his shadow self, Sidney Wyeth, who was still brooding about Jews and blacks. He included some winking autobiographical touches. Micheaux even has his characters praise Wyeth/Micheaux’s own films and books repeatedly (“A corking good story!”)—a joke that wears thin, but must have entertained his longtime readers.
But Micheaux had begun to fester. Creeping age and jealousy colored his onetime optimism and outlook on racial issues. In The Forged Note, Micheaux had included a fleeting portrait of Memphis’s Beale Street, a quarter “entirely occupied by Negroes,” but not a terrible place despite its juke-joint ways. In The Story of Dorothy Stanfield it’s full of “bums and whores and hustlers.” Whatever its drawbacks, Chicago had always been a city of hope; now, in both The Case of Mrs. Wingate and The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, the Black Belt where Micheaux once lived seemed a hotbed of Nazis, Communists, and criminals.
The shifting of emphasis from Leo Frank’s Jewishness to his sexuality was indicative of another trend in Micheaux’s work. He had always treated sex and nudity adventurously in his films, but never so crudely as in his World War II novels. When the ace race detective in The Story of Dorothy Stanfield gazes at the title character, “at her rounded breasts which seemed to extend straight out and hang down,” he has to wonder if she is wearing a girdle; he stares as “her teaties rose and fell as she breathed.” In the novel’s potboiling climax, when the black killer known as Scarface catches his lover in bed with a rich white man, he says his first impulse is “to tell you to go to the bathroom and wash your dirty——” Then this phrase appears: “(word used censored by the author).”
The book’s attacks on fellow black authors “Frank Knight” (i.e., Richard Wright) and “Ora Thurston” (i.e., Zora Neale Hurston)—who figure into the story because both had Memphis backgrounds—were gratuitous, mean-spirited.
“The best known and the most read of Negro writers,” according to Micheaux, Knight/Wright wrote “very interesting” books, but he was nevertheless a hypocrite. First, he was once a Communist; second, he was married to a Jewish woman (“most Jews at heart are Communists”); and third, he lived downtown, eschewing black Harlem. Sidney Wyeth, on the other hand, “is married to a girl of our race,” Micheaux wrote of himself. “They live in Harlem and go around among Negroes and are seen walking and riding up and down the streets of Harlem.”
Thurston/Hurston had social advantages that Wyeth/Micheaux never had; after all, her father had been a public figure (a preacher and elected mayor). And none of her books “ever got out of the first edition, which means that they did not sell well.” Her main accomplishment, he wrote, has been “getting money to live on from white people.”
Gone with the wind was Micheaux’s ability to write about himself with genuine good humor, as he had in The Conquest. Now he wore bitterness on his sleeve. In a foreword to The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, Micheaux claimed that The Case of Mrs. Wingate had been ignored by the press because he treated “race-mixing” differently from other writers; where most novelists saw to it that such intermingling ended tragically, he had dared suggest a workable marriage between a millionaire white woman and her “colored lover.” “Being plain and frank about it, such stories are against the ‘pattern’ as designed for Negroes and writers pretty well understand that ‘thou shalt not’ write such books,” he wrote.
“Eighty-five per cent of the daily newspapers an
d magazines that received copies [of The Case of Mrs. Wingate] for review ignored the book and made no mention of even having received it,” Micheaux griped. “A few gave fine reviews and praised the book highly.”
Elton Fax was asked to contribute another dustjacket illustration for The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, and with a sinking feeling he went to meet with Micheaux. They argued about his fee; later they argued about one of Fax’s sketches before Micheaux would approve it. Fax was embarrassed to hear Micheaux, with his genteel wife standing nearby, exhorting him to sex up the drawing, to lower the female figure’s cleavage. “Look here,” Micheaux demanded, “show some titties!”
Fax did his best to compromise, but that “cured me of dealing with Micheaux,” he reflected years later. Growingly isolated, the race-picture pioneer had become “a super exploiter,” Fax thought, “a supreme egotist.”
Micheaux picked up a little money and publicity with a condensed serialized version of his novel in the April 1946 The Negro. But despite Elton Fax’s artwork, sales of the peculiar, grumpy, sensationalistic The Story of Dorothy Stanfield slumped far below The Case of Mrs. Wingate and The Wind from Nowhere.
Micheaux’s World War II novels inevitably sold through their early printings, and then orders declined. The effort to reprint and continue promoting the books was too much for Micheaux, a “one-man corporation” with growing health concerns.
And whatever was happening inside Micheaux deepened, worsened.
After The Story of Dorothy Stanfield, he would write only one more novel: The Masquerade, published in early 1947.
On the face of it, this new book, his fourth since he quit making movies, was an homage to Charles W. Chesnutt and the “passing” novel The House Behind the Cedars, which Micheaux had always loved and admired: Chesnutt—the acclaimed, elegant writer, whose interest in the theme of “passing” was intensely personal, as it had always been with Micheaux; The House Behind the Cedars—a “passing” masterpiece of the sort Micheaux always wished to achieve for himself.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Page 39