Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (10 page)

Far from demonstrating backward tastes, Micheaux's presence in the theater suggests his show business sophistication. As Strausbaugh notes, the white, potbellied Dockstader was “one of the premiere monologuists” in minstrelsy. One of the highlights of his act, which he likely performed in Chicago, was a blackface Teddy Roosevelt shtick that mercilessly lampooned Teddy's “tendencies to bloviate,” in Strausbaugh's words. Though black audience members were forced to sit in the balcony at the ornate, Louis Sullivan–designed Garrick Theater, Micheaux reveled in the show. “I laughed until my head ached,” he recalled.

The couple spent the next day trying to reach Reverend McCracken by telephone, without success. By now, Micheaux was on the verge of panic. It was the last week of September. His sister and grandmother were due to arrive in South Dakota. The stipulated filing date for the relinquishments was October 1. If he wasn't back in South Dakota in time, and if his wife didn't file on the claim he had earmarked, he would lose $1,200 he had paid ahead to the bank.

Finally, a female friend of the McCracken family offered to travel with Orlean to South Dakota as chaperone, if Micheaux would pay her fare, too. Orlean and the chaperone could then return to Chicago, with the marriage ceremony to be put off until the spring, after they had secured Orlean's father's approval.

Micheaux agreed and left immediately for South Dakota, with Orlean and her chaperone trailing a day or two later. Waiting for him back home was a letter from the woman who had once topped his list, the daughter of Potato King Junius Groves, but by then it was too late. He “wistfully” tore up the letter and “flung it to the winds.”

The relinquishment system called for claim-seekers to stand in line at
the land office in Gregory. Everyone received a number, and the order of the numbers became the sequence in which people could file their preference of claims, hours or days hence. The line started forming after lunch on the last day of September, and Micheaux got his sister and grandmother in line early, then took Orlean's place in line, so she could have a soft bed in a hotel.

By sunset the line was packed, and the street in front of the land office had become “a surging mass of humanity,” in Micheaux's words. Cold set in with the darkness. Hot coffee and sandwiches were hawked. Drunks mingled with the crowd. People linked arms and sang songs, or told campfire stories to keep up their spirits. “I held the place for my fiancée through the night, and although I had become used to all kinds of roughness, sitting up in the street all the long night was far from pleasant,” Micheaux recalled.

Squatters arrived in the predawn, and soon places near the door were selling for as high as fifty dollars. By daybreak, roughly 1,700 people stood waiting for the land office to open. “An army of tired, swollen-eyed and dusty creatures they appeared,” Micheaux wrote.

His bride-to-be and grandmother received numbers 138 and 139, and were relegated to the second day of filing for a relinquishment, while his sister received number 170 and had to wait a few days longer. Orlean filed on a 160–acre parcel on “the northwest quarter of section 34 in township 100, range 79, 5th Meridian” in Tripp County. Louisa Gough and Olive Micheaux filed on 160–acre parcels near to each other's and Orlean's, in the southwest quarter of Township 101.

After Orlean completed her paperwork, she and her chaperone returned to Chicago, while Micheaux proceeded to his grandmother's and sister's claims. Within a week he had built frame houses on the two properties, and a week later Oscar's grandmother and sister were living on their homesteads. After Orlean joined them, Micheaux later wrote proudly, he could boast of having personally increased South Dakota's sparse colored population by three.

 

The winter of 1909–1910 was a brutal one. Shortly after the Micheaux women moved in, what the homesteader remembered as “one of the
biggest snowstorms I had ever seen” swept across South Dakota, dumping snow for days. The blizzard was followed by warm weather, then more snowfall and freezing. At times the drifts rose above four feet. Many of the novice homesteaders had moved onto lands twenty and fifty miles from stockpiles of fuel, and they suffered. Thinking ahead, Micheaux had hauled enough coal to last the winter for himself, his grandmother, and sister; and Louisa Gough and Olive Micheaux could always find food in the small town of Witten, not far from their farms.

The crops also suffered. Micheaux's wheat was unthreshed when the early snows came. “The corn in the fields had not been gathered,” Micheaux remembered, “nor was it all gathered before the following April.”

Letters flew between South Dakota and Chicago. Micheaux and Orlean wrote back and forth, but Reverend McCracken also took up correspondence with his daughter's betrothed. “He did not write a very brilliant letter,” Micheaux said, “but was very reasonable, and tried to appear a little serious when he referred to my having his daughter come to South Dakota and file on land. He concluded by saying he thought it a good thing for colored people to go west and take land.”

Orlean often wrote sweetly, but at times she pressed Micheaux to make good on the engagement ring he had promised her. He equivocated about the ring. In his letters, he tried to talk her out of the frivolous expense. He knew all about rings and jewelry, and later in his novels complained about how black people were always going into debt for such gewgaws. He was already heavily mortgaged, and snowbound. He would rather put off buying a costly ring.

Not without resentment, Micheaux finally surrendered and bought his fiancée a $40 dollar diamond, “set in a small eighteen karat ring,” having it sent to her from a company he identifies in
The Conquest
as Loftis Brothers & Co., which was an actual firm on State Street in Chicago that advertised heavily in the Black Belt (“Diamonds and Watches on Credit”). (By the time of
The Wind from Nowhere,
the ring had grown into “a blue white, sparkling solitaire” worth $250.)

He had hoped to get married by Christmas, but the snow caused delays. Micheaux abandoned his cold “soddy” and moved into a house still standing on the old Dallas townsite. His sister and grandmother came down to take care of his place, so he could leave for Chicago and finalize
wedding plans. “I could scarcely afford it,” he explained later, “but it had become a custom for me to spend Christmas in Chicago, and I wanted to know Orlean better and I wanted to meet her father.”

The McCrackens weren't expecting him, and when Micheaux phoned from the station and then came by in the early evening, the Elder wasn't yet home from his travels in southern Illinois. When Orlean's father arrived in time for dinner, Micheaux got his first clear look at the man who was only a dim memory from boyhood, but who would loom significantly hereafter in his consciousness, inspiring vivid characters and controversial themes in his novels and films.

The Reverend Newton J. McCracken was in his late fifties, more than six feet tall. He weighed about two hundred pounds, but his small-boned frame gave him a plump appearance. “He was very dark, with a medium forehead and high-ridged nose,” Micheaux wrote in
The Conquest,
“making it possible for him to wear nose-glasses, the nose being unlike the flat-nosed negro.” The Elder sported a bushy mustache sprinkled with gray, and his shock of white hair, coaxed into a massive pompadour, “contrasted sharply with the dark skin and rounded features,” in Micheaux's words.

The Reverend McCracken was prideful of his appearance, Micheaux perceived at once. But the homesteader also detected something else beneath the surface of the Reverend's eyes. His were not the eyes of a “deep thinking man,” Micheaux decided. “They reminded me more of the eyes of a pig, full but expressionless.”

The family potentate presided at the head of the table in a “ceremonious manner.” The Reverend talked freely, but proved a “poor listener.” He liked to vent his ideas on religion and politics, especially “the so-called Negro problem,” in Micheaux's scornful words. Micheaux had to stifle his sharp disagreement. Micheaux had always been a strong proponent of Booker T. Washington, whose portrait would be seen hanging on walls in his films as often as Abraham Lincoln's. Micheaux endorsed the Great Educator's philosophy of hard work, learning, conciliation with the South, and a gradual uplifting of the race. The Reverend, with his bourgeois airs, scoffed at the Tuskegee founder as a man whose time had passed, too much of an accommodationist in light of the widespread racism, state-sanctioned segregation, and racially motivated mob violence of the era.

Perhaps more than his views, the cleric's manner put Micheaux off.
The Reverend talked as though he himself had money and education, but the homesteader suspected he had little of either. “Although he never cut off my discourse in any way,” recalled the equally prideful Micheaux, “he didn't listen as I had been used to having people listen, apparently with encouragement in their eyes, which makes talking a pleasure, so I soon ceased to talk.” The family treated the Reverend as though pearls spilled from his mouth, and as Orlean herself stood over the pontificating Elder, stroking his hair, Micheaux realized that she was her father's obedient favorite.

Altogether it was an awkward evening, but not disastrous, and on the Sunday that followed Micheaux accompanied the McCrackens to church services. During the week, he stole Orlean away to see shows downtown. They had their first tiff after watching a production of Alexandre Bisson's melodrama
Madame X.
Micheaux found the story of a weak husband plagued by a flighty, immoral wife “pathetic.” Though Madame X redeemed herself in a courtroom climax, Micheaux detested the tear-jerking ending, in which she succumbed to her absinthe addiction. Orlean was one of many in the balcony who were sobbing into their handkerchiefs by the end of the show; Oscar was irritated to find even himself choking back tears. He and Orlean argued about the play all the way home.

He was happier with
The Fourth Estate
by Joseph Medill Patterson, a former crusading reporter who was the son of the editor and publisher of the
Chicago Tribune.
This drama about a muckraking publisher in love with the daughter of the target of one of his exposés had “strength of character and a happy finale,” in Micheaux's words, “instead of weakness and an unhappy ending.” It was the kind of story that would always appeal to Micheaux, whose books and films often featured strong, noble heroes, idealized ingenues, and turnabout happy finales.

He could only afford a week away from his farming responsibilities, and the week was soon up without any resolution as to the when and where of the nuptials. Micheaux wanted Orlean to come back with him to Gregory and be married “quietly.” The Reverend kept insisting they be wed properly and festively at home in Chicago.

Talking with his Black Belt friends, Micheaux confessed his prejudices against the Reverend, and he was gratified to learn that many of them, too, considered the Elder an arrogant hypocrite. McCracken was rumored to tyrannize his gentle-hearted wife, and to be a profligate wom
anizer with one or two illegitimate children in another city. Despite his prominence within the A.M.E. Church, his salary was dependent on tithing; in actuality, Micheaux learned, the family barely scraped by.

All this gnawed at Micheaux as he returned to cold, snowy South Dakota in early 1910.

At least his sister and grandmother were doing well. They returned to their Tripp County farms where the grandmother, considering the fact she was an ex-slave nearing eighty, was well-known among her fellow homesteaders as a “colorful character,” according to an account in the
Gregory Times Advocate.
Neighbors brought her dried beans and apples when the snows caught her short, and though Micheaux kept her stocked with coal, “every once in a while,” according to the newspaper, Oscar's grandmother could be glimpsed “walking along with a gunny sack and a big stick. She would pick something up and put it in her sack.” Neighbors “figured out that she was picking up buffalo chips to burn for fuel.”

Olive was also well liked. One neighbor, a Mrs. Bartels, “thought she was a well-informed girl and loved to talk to her,” reported the
Gregory Times Advocate.
Like her brother, however, Olive was acutely aware that she and her grandmother were the only “colored homesteaders” for miles around. Olive “would only come and visit when no one else was there. If someone came during her visit, she would immediately get up and leave. Bartels said, ‘She seemed to fear that even though I accepted her as a friend, these other people might not.'”

It would be a long, punishing winter. Micheaux poured himself into letters to Orlean, trying to persuade his fiancée to come to Gregory and accept a humble marriage ceremony. He received letters back from her and the Reverend, arguing for a gala wedding with family and friends in Chicago.

Then the homesteader wrote something else: his first bylined article.

The front page of the March 19, 1910,
Chicago Defender
was the showcase for his open letter to black America headlined
WHERE THE NEGRO FAILS
and datelined Gregory, South Dakota. In this, his first known piece of published writing, Micheaux urged readers of the nation's most widely read black newspaper to do exactly what he had done: follow the advice of Horace Greeley and
Go West!

“I return from Chicago each trip I make,” the citizen of Rosebud wrote, “more discouraged each year with the hopelessness of his foresight (the young Negro). His inability to use common sense in looking into his
future is truly discouraging when you look into the high cost of living. The Negro leads in the consumption of produce and especially meat, and then his fine clothes—he hasn't the least thought of where the wool grew that he wears and describes himself as being ‘classy.' He can give you a large theory on how the Negro problem should be solved, but it always ends that (in his mind) there is no opportunity for the Negro.”