Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only

by Patrick McGilligan

  Micheaux’s ingenuous foreword to The Masquerade explained that he had decided to write “an historical novel.” Then, digging through “my old file of motion picture scenarios,” he had alighted on his script for Chesnutt’s story, which he had filmed once in the silent era and again with sound. He’d always felt that The House Behind the Cedars needed more of the “turbulent, grave and exciting” pre–Civil War context, he wrote, the kind of history that inspired his own family’s migration north, and thus was an untold part of his own life story. Reworking Chesnutt’s novel, emphasizing historical personalities and events, would permit him to depict the momentous Dred Scott Decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the abolitionist John Brown, and other background leading up to the War Between the States. “I am very happy, in the meantime, for the privilege of having known Mr. Chas. W. Chesnutt, who died in 1932, and acknowledge with gratitude, the assistance provided by his book of that period,” Micheaux wrote.

  Indeed, the first half of The Masquerade, the American history that forms a prelude to the fictional narrative, is the most interesting, with Micheaux ennobling Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists (John Brown is described as “an artist at dying”). But readers also get a hint of things to come in these early chapters, where Micheaux reprinted full pages of direct transcription from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and Lincoln’s 1861 presidential inaugural address.

  When Micheaux shifts the story to Chesnutt’s “Fayetteville,”* the reader is introduced to the characters from The House Behind the Cedars, with only slight variations on the names given them by the original author. As he had in both screen versions, Micheaux dropped the chunk of flashback in the middle of the novel that described life “under the old regime,” instead leading the sequence of events with the backstory of Rena’s mother. Again, as with both films, Micheaux radically altered Chesnutt’s ending—the very last chapter of the book.

  To the rest of what Chesnutt had written, Micheaux added tiny bits at the beginning and end of some (not all) chapters, and made interpolations (especially in the Southern vernacular), cuts, minor supplements and word changes. But otherwise—in his story sequence, characters, and virtually all of his dialogue—Micheaux replicated Chesnutt’s novel exactly. Micheaux’s Chapters 26 through 48 correspond directly with Chesnutt’s 9 through 33. Virtually all the language is identical.

  Out of four hundred pages of The Masquerade, Micheaux copied nearly two hundred from Chesnutt’s novel, almost line for line.

  As one small sample, consider Rena’s eloquent letter to George Tryon, her tortured white suitor, after he finds out that she is teaching in a nearby school. When Tryon writes to ask her if they might meet and discuss “what has passed between us,” Rena sends this response:

  CHESNUTT’S VERSION

  GEORGE TRYON, ESQ.

  Dear Sir,

  I have requested your messenger to say that I will answer your letter by mail, which I shall now proceed to do. I assure you that I was entirely ignorant of your residence in this neighborhood, or it would have been the last place on earth in which I would have set foot.

  As to our past relations, they were ended by your own act. I frankly confess that I deceived you; I have paid the penalty, and have no complaint to make. I appreciate the delicacy which has made you respect my brother’s secret, and thank you for it. I remember the whole affair with shame and humiliation, and would willingly forget it.

  As to a future interview, I do not see what good it would do either of us. You are white, and you have given me to understand that I am black. I accept the classification, however unfair, and the consequences, however unjust, one of which is that we cannot meet in the same parlor, in the same church, at the same table, or anywhere, in social intercourse; upon a steamboat we would not sit at the same table; we could not walk together on the street, or meet publicly anywhere and converse, without unkind remark. As a white man, this might not mean a great deal to you; as a woman, shut out already by my color from much that is desirable, my good name remains my most valuable possession. I beg of you to let me alone. The best possible proof you can give me of your good wishes is to relinquish any desire or attempt to see me. I shall have finished my work here in a few days. I have other troubles, of which you know nothing, and any meeting with you would only add to a burden which is already as much as I can bear. To speak of parting is superfluous—we have already parted. It were idle to dream of a future friendship between people so widely different in station. Such a friendship, if possible in itself, would never be tolerated by the lady whom you are to marry, with whom you drove by my schoolhouse the other day. A gentleman so loyal to his race and its traditions as you have shown yourself could not be less faithful to the lady to whom he has lost his heart and his memory in three short months.

  No, Mr. Tryon, our romance is ended, and better so. We could never have been happy. I have found a work in which I may be of service to others who have fewer opportunities than mine have been. Leave me in peace, I beseech you, and I shall soon pass out of your neighborhood as I have passed out of your life, and hope to pass out of your memory.

  Yours very truly,

  ROWENA WALDEN

  Here is the version Micheaux published as his own work, with the slight variations from Chesnutt’s wording marked in bold:

  MICHEAUX’S VERSION

  GEORGE TRYON, ESQ.

  Dear Sir:

  I have requested your messenger to say that I will answer your letter by mail, which I shall now proceed to do. I assure you that I was entirely ignorant of your residence in this neighborhood, or it would have been the last place on earth in which I should have set foot.

  As to our past relations, they were ended by your own act. I frankly confess that I deceived you; I have paid the penalty and have no complaint to make. I appreciate the delicacy which has made you respect my brother’s secret, and thank you for it. I remember the whole affair with shame and humiliation, and would willingly forget it.

  As to a future interview, I do not see what good it will do either of us. You are white and you have given me to understand that I am black. I accept the classification, however unfair, and the consequences, however unjust, one of which is that we cannot meet in the same parlor, in the same church, at the same table, or anywhere, in social intercourse; upon a steamboat we would not sit at the same table; we could not walk together on the street, or meet anywhere publicly and converse, without unkind remark. As a white man this might not mean a great deal to you; as a woman, shut out already by my color from much that is desirable, my good name remains my most valuable possession. I beg of you to let me alone. The best possible proof you can give me of your good wishes is to relinquish any desire or attempt to see me. I shall have finished my work here in a few days. I have other troubles, of which you know nothing, and my meeting with you would only add to a burden which is already as much as I can bear. To speak of parting is superfluous—we have already parted. It was idle to dream of a future friendship between two people so widely different in station. Such a relation, if possible in itself, would never be tolerated by the lady whom you are to marry, with whom you drove by the schoolhouse the other day. A gentleman so loyal to his race and tradition as you have shown yourself, could not be less faithful to the lady to whom he has lost his heart and his memory in three short months.

  No, Mr. Tryon, our romance is ended, and better so. We could never, under the circumstances later discovered, have been happy. I have found a work in which I may be of service to others who have fewer opportunities than mine have been. Leave me in peace, I beseech you, and I shall soon pass out of your neighborhood as I have passed out of your life, and as I hope to pass out of your memory.

  Yours very truly,

  ROWENA NORTHCROSS

  Micheaux did make one meaningful change in the story, replacing Chesnutt’s tragic ending with the happy finale he had used in both film versions. In the last chapter of The Masquerade, Rena would recover from her debilitating illness (fat
al in Chesnutt’s novel), with her childhood friend Frank waiting by her bedside. Frank proposes, and after marriage, like many black people of the post-Reconstruction Era—including Micheaux—they will leave Fayetteville for “a booming and growing town called Chicago.” Frank plans to go into construction, with Rena as his bookkeeper.

  Micheaux has Rena’s uncomprehending white suitor, George Tryon, arrive in town just in time for Rena and Frank’s wedding. A neighbor informs George, who is standing outside her house, that Rena is marrying a childhood sweetheart. He rides away, stunned, and muttering, “Childhood sweetheart…,” consoling himself with the thought that “if she was marrying a childhood sweetheart, she must have been in love before she ever met him.”

  Not a terrible ending, but in the context, it hardly mattered. The first half of the book and last chapter notwithstanding, The Masquerade was a blatant piracy of Charles W. Chesnutt’s work. After years of adapting it to his own ends, Micheaux had finally assimilated Chesnutt’s masterpiece as his own.

  Of all the questionable things he had done to survive and keep going, this was the worst. He had often borrowed from other produced or published works. He had frequently used material transcribed from courtrooms or newspapers. He had flirted blithely with copyright infringement. He had dodged subpoenas and shaved the law. But until The Masquerade, his own creativity had never been in doubt.

  It was a bizarre act, one for which there is no simple excuse, or easy explanation. Unless Micheaux had been struck down by some kind of silent illness, a stroke, something that diminished his capacity. Unless he sat at his desk in a stupor while writing The Masquerade, laboriously copying out another author’s words. Perhaps Micheaux was unaware of what he was doing, or only half-aware; strong, independent man that he’d always been, perhaps he was unwilling or unable to confess his frailty.

  He seemed in fair fettle in March 1947, signing autographs at publication parties hosted by two Harlem bookshops, the National Memorial Bookstore at 2107 Seventh Avenue, and the Washington Bookstore at 2084 Seventh Avenue, and then traveling to Washington, D.C., for an NAACP luncheon feting authors. But The Masquerade, even in several editions, wouldn’t sell more than fifteen thousand copies, according to Micheaux’s own numbers. This time the paucity of reviews was a blessing; no one noticed the rank plagiarism. Indeed, it has escaped most scholars, as the book is rare, out of print, and almost universally ignored.

  “I wouldn’t be quite so critical about it,” said sympathetic scholar J. Ronald Green, “given Micheaux’s general naïveté and unprivileged background in intellectual matters. I would tend to look at it as a major folk artist being drawn repeatedly to a story and accomplishment that he admired, but wanted to do some work on.”

  By the spring of 1947, Micheaux was telling his wife that the book business appeared to have bottomed out, and he thought he should attempt “to get back into pictures as soon as possible,” in Alice B. Russell’s words.

  As always, once decided, he took action. Once committed, he began planning his moves.

  Most of his old associates were out of the race picture business. It would take forever to drum up investors. He would have to keep the budget down and pay all the upfront costs himself, drawing from his savings. He could limit expenses by shooting the entire film in Chicago, lots of exteriors, mostly with amateur actors.

  There was one story no one could accuse him of stealing. For his final fling at filmmaking, Micheaux chose the subject most familiar and natural to him. His own life story had been the basis of his first novel way back in 1913, then the first motion picture he wrote, directed, and produced, and other films and books in the years since. Now he would make a movie of The Wind from Nowhere: his “one man’s story” and its lessons for the race, his tale of struggle and conquest, of trust and innocence betrayed.

  His 1943 novel had been characterized in publicity as a prospective “stage play,” so it is possible that a script already existed and all Micheaux had to do was rewrite it as a motion picture. Visitors to 40 Morningside Avenue found Micheaux nursing his weight and health, and snapping his fingers with ideas. He wasn’t exactly up and dancing, but the old bustle and ebullience was back.

  It was true that Micheaux would be taking a tremendous risk with this venture, using up all his “little money” on the production’s operating budget. And he wouldn’t be able to go out on the road, selling the new movie like he used to. Still, he knew how to sketch and describe air castles. This was going to be his greatest film, one of epic length and unlimited box-office potential. As he had since his very first picture, Micheaux planned “a big plot and long story,” the most super of all his super-productions: “Like Gone With the Wind,” he kept saying. Micheaux found a New York distributor willing to stake a Broadway premiere, and after the opening, black theaters coast to coast would clamor for the picture. Maybe, finally, white audiences would show up, too.

  Lorenzo Tucker stopped by one day, and Micheaux confided part of his dream had always been “to have this thing so I can sit in my office and just ship these things out. That’s the way the boys do it out on the coast!”

  Late in the summer of 1947 the race-picture pioneer left for Chicago, accompanied by his wife, who would help him finalize the script, make arrangements with a studio and laboratory, scout locations, and cast the film.

  World War II changed prospects for the Negro in America. Black Americans had served dutifully and with distinction, and they came back from the war a force for social progress. They were being employed and educated as never before under government grants. They were slowly moving into all sectors of the economy, agitating for equality.

  Race pictures had long since been relegated to a worse than ever marginal existence, in part—ironically—because the war had helped to raise Hollywood’s consciousness. Soon Hollywood would embark on a new round of earnest antiprejudice pictures like Pinky (about “passing”) and Intruder in the Dust (about lynching), co-opting subject matter—and, in the latter case, lead actor Juano Hernandez—from Micheaux and the handful of producers still stubbornly turning out race pictures. To some, these postwar Hollywood “preachments” would seem weak tea; others would see them as auguries of better things to come.

  Feature-length motion pictures were no longer produced in post–World War II Chicago. The old Essanay Studios had been whittled away and long abandoned. The only technical work was in advertisements, industrials, local radio, or a few fledgling television operations. Show business venues had dwindled in the city’s Black Belt, and local black entertainers were struggling harder than ever to carve out remunerative careers. The sound and lighting and camera unions were lily-white.

  Most of the professionals Micheaux had known in the late 1930s, during his last fling of film activity, were retired or deceased. Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender, had passed away in 1940. Nahum David Brascher, the onetime head of the Associated Negro Press, whose column in the Defender had long been friendly to Micheaux, died in 1945, leaving Micheaux with no up-to-date contacts at the still-thriving black newspaper.

  In bygone days, Micheaux’s activities had rated front-page coverage. His current stature was such that the Defender carried only a small item in its “Swinging the News” column, noting that the race-picture producer was in town “seeking talent for the 20–reel movie epic” he was planning “to be filmed here and”—the old ballyhoo—“in Hollywood.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Micheaux found quarters in a comfortable hotel on Fifty-first Street on the South Side, along with their chauffeur and “odd jobs” man. The chauffeurs were always temporary hires; people who encountered Micheaux on this trip recall that this one was a black gentleman named Obie, who drove them everywhere in Micheaux’s ebony limousine.

  Micheaux made arrangements with a South Side community center that was willing to donate rehearsal space. He leased a studio at a former radio news station on Twenty-ninth Street, ordered sets built and equipment brought in. Who can guess at his thoughts as he
toured his old Black Belt neighborhood, and picked out two or three brownstones that might stand in for the residences of the major characters in the story, characters and places that evoked bittersweet memories of Chicago before World War I?

  He engaged a local assistant director, a black college graduate with a broadcasting résumé. The audio and camera crew he hired were, by necessity, white—members of the all-white local, which enforced union employment. That included the director of photography, a man named Marvin Spoor, whom everyone called Major Spoor. Spoor was related to George K. Spoor, who had founded Essanay in Chicago at the turn of the century, though these days the Major mostly shot television, commercials, and industrials.

  When it came time to cast his new production, Micheaux put out feelers and flyers to black churches, high schools, colleges. The majority of the cast, as it ended up, hailed from Chicago; nearly all were making their first—in most cases, only—screen appearances.

  A local girl, Verlie Cowan, was picked to play Linda Lee, the preacher’s daughter who marries the homesteader. Her hellcat sister, Terry, would be played by Yvonne Machen, a Chicagoan with New York experience; she had been part of the replacement cast of Anna Lucasta on Broadway. Harris Gaines, a son of prominent Chicago civil rights activists, had done some radio work in New York; he would play the Reverend, in this rendition called Doctor Lee. Alice B. Russell, who also served as producer, would portray the Reverend’s wife.

  It was Mrs. Micheaux who found Myra Stanton, phoning her mother to tell her that Mr. Micheaux wanted to consider her daughter for the part of Deborah Stewart, the Scottish girl with Negro blood. “How he found out about me we never knew,” Stanton recalled. Micheaux might have seen Stanton’s photograph in one of the magazines of the Ebony empire, the black-owned Johnson Publishing Company, which was headquartered in Chicago. Stanton was a local model but also a college student, brainy as well as pretty.