Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (11 page)

By Micheaux's reckoning, there were only “eleven Negro farmers” in all of South Dakota. “Isn't it enough to make one feel disgusted,” he asked, “to see and read of thousands of poor white people going west every day and in ten or fifteen years' time becoming prosperous and happy, as well as making the greatest and happiest place on earth.

“In writing this I am not overlooking what the Negro is doing in the south, nor the enterprising ones of the north, but the time is at hand—the Negro must become more self-supporting. Farm lands are the bosses of wealth. Land is increasing by strides at the present time….

“I am not trying to offer a solution of the Negro problem, for I don't feel there is any problem further than the future of anything, whether it be a town, state, or race.”

For this remarkable article, proclaiming his name and views to black America, he also created a new persona. Up to this time, he had always spelled his last name “Michaux,” signing it thus on employment cards and legal documents. Though it was a rite of passage for ex-slave families to alter the surname inherited from their masters, the Michauxes had apparently never bothered to do so—until now. Oscar's change was slight: With the addition of an
e,
he became “Micheaux.”

 

As the snows melted and spring tasks accelerated, Micheaux fretted about the date of his marriage, which was still up in the air. His letters implored Orlean to “condescend” to a wedding in Gregory. If she failed to take up residence in South Dakota by May, she would risk losing her claim. Every time Micheaux went to Chicago the 750-mile trip took one day each way, costing eighty dollars for the train fare. He couldn't afford to keep abandoning the farm; he had corn to gather, oats, wheat, and barley to seed. He tried to explain his precarious finances, “that it was a burden rather than a luxury to be possessed of a lot of raw land, until it could be cultivated and made to yield a profit.” The McCrackens, however, seemed to
consider him a rich landowner roosting on miles and miles of fertile acres.

“My letters,” Micheaux recalled, “were in vain.”

Orlean's replies tapered off. In the third week of April, Micheaux received a letter from Orlean saying that she had decided against marriage and was returning her receipt for the relinquishment to him, “with thanks for my kindness and hopes for future success,” in Micheaux's words.

This letter, which he received on a Friday, forced Micheaux into drastic action. “While I did not think she had treated me just right, I would not allow a matter of a trip to Chicago to stand in the way of our marriage,” he wrote later. “I had the idea her father was indirectly responsible.”

He rode into Gregory on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning boarded a train. From Omaha he sent Orlean a telegram. In Chicago he found his sweetheart at home with the other McCrackens, minus the Elder, who was once again away in southern Illinois. Orlean sulked upon Micheaux's arrival, but soon was nestling in his arms. The younger sister openly inveighed against the marriage and homesteading. The mother was more easily won over, but the family decided they must send a special delivery letter to the Reverend.

In a day the special delivery reply came back, saying that Micheaux had to convince the Reverend, in person, that he was marrying his daughter for love, not merely for the sake of a homestead claim.

The sister, previously Micheaux's enemy, now started giving Oscar advice. Flatter the Elder, she urged the homesteader. “The more I thought of his greatness,” Micheaux later wrote, “the more amused I became. I might have settled the matter easily if I had no objection to flattering him.”

The next morning the Reverend McCracken arrived home and greeted Micheaux in the parlor, “surveying me as I entered, just as a king might have done a disobedient subject.” The family gathered around to hear the father speak, but Micheaux interrupted with a pronouncement of his own: It was true that he hadn't professed his love for Orlean when he first came to woo her, he admitted, but he had grown fond of the schoolteacher, and now they were looking forward with optimism and affection to a future together.

When Orlean spoke up to concur, the Reverend seemed satisfied.
With his imperious air he gave them his permission to proceed to the courthouse and obtain a marriage license—something the two had actually done the previous day. And so, “rather sheepishly,” they “stammered out something” and went downtown and “bought a pair of shoes instead.”

The great occasion was set for the next afternoon. The Elder tried hard to secure an A.M.E. bishop to preside over the ceremony, but one of the local bishops was sick and the other was out of town, so they had to accept the services of a lesser light. “Some twenty or more” friends and relatives assembled in the McCracken home to witness the exchange of vows, with Orlean wearing her sister's wedding dress and veil. (“The dress was becoming and I thought her very beautiful,” Micheaux wrote after.) As for the groom, he borrowed a “Prince Albert coat and trousers to match” from Orlean's sister's husband, his new brother-in-law, which were “too small and tight, making me uncomfortable.”

Everyone kissed their congratulations; wine was poured for toasts; ice cream and cake were served. Someone played the piano for a little dancing. Then a tremendous wind came up, a storm broke, and the guests rushed to leave, buffeted by wind and drenched by the downpour. In retrospect, Micheaux said, he should have recognized the wind and storm as auguries.

In
The Conquest,
Micheaux suggests that the newlyweds spent their wedding night at the home of a family friend. In real life, the marriage of the well-known Elder's daughter to that emergent public personality, Oscar Micheaux, was announced in the
Chicago Defender.
“They left the same night,” the newspaper reported, “on the Golden Gate Limited for their home” in South Dakota.

The
Defender
wasn't the only newspaper that reported on Micheaux's nuptials. Another paper, this one with a predominantly white readership, congratulated the couple and wished them “a happy journey over life's seas.” The
Gregory Times Advocate,
the homesteader's local paper, never—in this or any prior mention of Micheaux—characterized him by race or skin color. “About sixty of my white neighbors gave us a charivari, and my wife was much pleased to know there was no color prejudice among them,” Micheaux wrote in
The Conquest.

The newlyweds temporarily moved into the rented house in old Dallas. Micheaux was relieved that hired hands had taken good care of his Gregory County lands while he was gone, and early in May he and his wife went up to Orlean's claim near Witten in Tripp County, to raise a sod house. At the same time Micheaux pitched in on his grandmother's and sister Olive's homesteads (his sister briefly returned home to Kansas to attend another sister's high school graduation). Micheaux shuttled back and forth between his farms in the two counties; rather than construct all new buildings on Orlean's relinquishment, he decided to move some outbuildings from his original homestead near Gregory to the Tripp County claims, about forty miles overland.

Her new husband's busy schedule left Orlean alone for long spells, and Micheaux's grandmother and sister Olive befriended the new spouse. Though she wasn't much of a cook, Micheaux recalled, Orlean was a good housekeeper and a singer with a pretty voice whose songs cheered up her husband.

In June, the couple returned to Gregory County. The bills were start
ing to come in from banks, and Micheaux was worried about his cash flow. He could gather his corn and shell and haul it to Winner, a much longer distance than nearby Gregory, but he'd get a higher price at the Tripp County elevators. Once again Orlean was left alone for stretches, and the initial luster of prairie life began to dim.

She received letters from home, reporting familiar names and exciting events in the city, but they only made her pine for Chicago's Black Belt. Her relatives wrote asking for money so that they could buy her items from South Side shops and send them to her out on the prairie. When Orlean asked Micheaux for an allowance to cover the costs, though, Micheaux found himself in a “trying” position, he later recalled. “What I wanted in the circumstances I now faced was to be allowed to mold my wife into a practical woman,” but instead, on top of his obligations to the banks, he was being continually dunned by his wife and her family.

The Reverend McCracken wrote Orlean regularly, and she entreated Micheaux to write back to his father-in-law, as a show of respect. In
The Conquest,
Micheaux admits that he probably should have written a few “Dear Father” letters, but he disliked the Elder too much to “play the hypocrite.”

Micheaux had his hands full. He was busy supervising five farms in two far-flung counties, coping with the exigencies of farming on the prairie. The first two weeks in June blew hot and dry, and “considerable damage” was done to the expected yield of the farms in Tripp and Gregory counties alike. Rain came toward the end of the month, partially salvaging Micheaux's crops in Gregory County. But by then Orlean was having crying jags, becoming “a veritable clinging vine,” according to Micheaux. They had “ugly little quarrels.” His portrait in
The Conquest
suggests that their lovemaking lapsed. One quarrel blew up so badly that it terrified them both, and they made amends, vowing to argue no more.

Some time in late June, Orleans blushingly told Micheaux that she was pregnant. Her husband was touched and thrilled, but he persuaded Orlean that it was too soon to inform the Reverend, who had written to announce he was coming to visit at the end of the summer.

 

Micheaux dreaded the Reverend McCracken's arrival. His difficult circumstances had been aggravated, suddenly, by a legal challenge filed
against Orlean's claim. A banker in a small town in Tripp County, a bitter rival of the Jacksons, had charged that Mrs. Micheaux had never properly established residence on her relinquishment—which was partly true, as the married couple spent most of the summer of 1910 near Gregory.

When the Reverend arrived, he was full of himself as usual. But he also seemed heartened and genuinely enthusiastic about the Rosebud country, and Orlean was so happy to see her father that Micheaux felt momentarily relieved.

Yet neither man could stay away from “the race question,” which inevitably led to friction. As Micheaux described it in
The Conquest,
their arguments echoed greater discussions going on within black America over how to overcome widespread racial injustice. At the same time, Micheaux's fictionalized recollections suggest that the homesteader was drawn into heated debate with his father-in-law as much by their mutual arrogance and clash of personalities as by their disagreements over social issues.

The Reverend “had the most ancient and backward ideas concerning race advancement I had ever heard,” wrote Micheaux later. “He was filled to overflowing with condemnation of the white race and eulogy of the negro. In his idea the negro had no fault, nor could he do any wrong, or make any mistake. Everything had been against him, and according to the Reverend's idea, was still.”

Father- and son-in-law clashed over “mixed schools,” that is, over the integration of public education. Here the Elder was a traditionalist, opposed to intermingling the races. “They are like everything else the white people control,” the Elder declared. “They are managed in a way to keep the colored people down.” Micheaux objected vehemently, and was surprised when Orlean, who had taught in colored schools, weighed in firmly on his side, against her adored father.

Only a small minority of colored people would vote for separate schools if they had the choice, Micheaux argued. “The mixed schools give the colored children a more equal opportunity and all the advantage of efficient management,” the homesteader insisted. “Another advantage of mixed schools is, it helps to eliminate so much prejudice.”

On issues of race, the two headstrong men were destined never to find common ground. When Micheaux tried to shift the talk to money matters, however, he realized that the Reverend was an impractical man who
understood little about business and finance. Orlean's father was awestruck by the fact that Micheaux held checking accounts in different cities. When Micheaux mentioned James J. Hill, the famous empire builder of the Great Northern Railway Company—a living legend among railroad men and capitalists—the Reverend looked blank. “My face must have expressed my disgust at his ignorance,” wrote Micheaux later, “and he a public man for thirty years.”

Then, setting his chin, Micheaux brought up his idol Booker T. Washington, and “his life and his work in the uplift of the Negro.” He anticipated the Reverend's negative reaction, and he wasn't disappointed. “He was bitterly opposed to the Educator,” wrote Micheaux. The argument grew so fierce that Orlean's father finally “lost all composure.” But the Elder “found himself up against a brick wall” in Micheaux, while “attempting to belittle Mr. Washington's work.”

For Micheaux, that was the clincher: He diagnosed his father-in-law as a superstitious, unintelligent fraud. Born a slave, the Elder had never been to school; he didn't even possess a theological degree, Micheaux concluded. He certainly didn't read very much, and what he did read was restricted to “colored newspapers” that by and large reinforced his own narrow views. The Reverend McCracken “was a member in good standing of the reactionary faction of the negro race, the larger part of which are African M.E. ministers,” Micheaux decided.

Later, he rued some of their arguments. “I might have been more patient with the Reverend,” the homesteader told himself afterward, “if he had not been so full of pretense.”

For the moment, Micheaux bit his tongue and resolved to stay off of controversial subjects. The Reverend, too, seemed content to switch to small talk. And then Micheaux was surprised to find himself immensely entertained by the Reverend's stories about the great preachers and bishops he had known on the circuit, and his funny, colorful, often salacious gossip about the private lives of women in his various congregations.

 

Before the Reverend left, they all got into a spring wagon to make the long trek to Orlean's claim. Micheaux used the trip to move another building between the counties. Orlean's father tried to be helpful and positive, but his conversations with Orlean, sympathizing about the
hardships of homesteading, while telling fond stories about folks back in Chicago, only fed her homesickness.

Micheaux was glad to see the Reverend go, just as the contest was being heard against Orlean's claim. The Micheauxes were represented by a local attorney, who felt the law and the evidence were on their side. A ruling wasn't expected for several weeks.

With Orlean's pregnancy growing, they settled in for the coming winter. “The crop was fair,” Micheaux wrote, “but prices were low on oats and corn, and my crops consisted mostly of those cereals.” Almost everything he earned went into loan payments, interest, taxes, and expenses. Micheaux told his wife that money was too tight to support a trip to Chicago that Christmas, but in truth he wasn't eager to spend time with his father-in-law, who still didn't know that Orlean was pregnant. The Reverend sent a series of letters insisting that they visit, asking what kind of holiday supper they preferred, what Orlean would like for Christmas gifts, and so on. When Micheaux wrote back saying that he couldn't afford to abandon his land, the Reverend offered to pay their train fare. When Micheaux wrote to say he couldn't possibly accept such charity, the Reverend arranged for them to borrow the money from a cousin who worked in one of the Gregory saloons. The episode mortified Micheaux. Orlean, for her part, was torn: She preferred to travel to Chicago, but she also wanted to please her husband.

“The poor girl, with a child on the way, was as helpless as a baby,” Micheaux wrote.

They moved many of their belongings onto the Tripp County relinquishment, though they continued to live in old Dallas. As Christmas neared, Micheaux's sister took Orlean home with her for a visit to her Tripp County land, and that is when a letter from the Reverend arrived for Orlean at the Gregory post office. When Micheaux opened the letter, he found a money order and instructions for Orlean to hasten to Chicago, with her husband to follow if he was willing. Micheaux became “the maddest man” in Gregory, returning the money order with “a curt little note.” When Orlean returned to the Gregory County farm, she confessed that she'd asked her father for the train fare. They tried to talk the problem through. Micheaux reminded Orlean that a trip to Chicago would reveal her pregnancy, which they had agreed to keep secret from her father and family. Orlean reluctantly agreed to stay in South Dakota until the baby was born.

Reconciled after their talk, the couple celebrated Christmas with a chicken dinner. The baby was due in March, and Micheaux's grandmother came to stay with them for the worst of the winter. By the end of February, Orlean was growing “exceedingly fretful,” according to Micheaux, and insisted she ought to give birth to her first child on her own homestead. As soon as weather permitted, Micheaux bundled his wife and grandmother up in a spring wagon and sent them ahead to Tripp County, following with “a load of furniture,” making the journey, he wrote, “in a day and a half.” With close neighbors pitching in to help the two women out, Micheaux went back for the livestock and a coal shed he planned to buy at a lumberyard in Burke.

The round trip between Tripp County and Burke, more than one hundred miles in total, would take Micheaux a few days at least, especially considering the extra burden of the coal shed, which he was going to have sawed in half and loaded onto two wagons. He would write about this crucial trip first in
The Conquest
and then again in that book's sequel,
The Homesteader,
redressing telling omissions in the earlier version. In
The Homesteader,
Micheaux confessed that he stopped in Gregory to attend a Lyceum concert, its performers “consisting of Negroes,” in his words, including a certain lady entertainer he had known back in Chicago. After the concert, he tarried in town and “renewed” his acquaintance with the lady.

In Gregory he also met up with his sister Olive, who was returning from a sojourn to Kansas, and saw her off to Tripp County, where Micheaux expected her to join his grandmother in assisting Orlean.

He continued east to Burke to collect the coal shed. In
The Conquest,
after arriving on Saturday he goes right to work buying the coal shed. In
The Homesteader
—in a dubious coincidence—“the same concerters” he had partied with in Gregory were billed for an evening performance in Burke. Once again Micheaux tarried, lingering through the weekend.

On Monday morning, Micheaux purchased the shed, hiring men to help him rig it for the transfer to Tripp County. Another windstorm came up, mocking and impeding his life's goals, as the wind always seems to do in his fiction. That day he made it only as far as Colome. On his way out of town the next morning, his front axle broke; the tongue of one wagon followed soon after. Repairs had to be made. By the time he pulled into Winner, “tired and weary,” it was nightfall.

He was only fifteen miles or so from Orlean's homestead, the next day,
when he was met by a neighbor. Orlean had abruptly gone into labor in his absence. Friends had been trying to reach him by phone at all the towns along the way. Though a local doctor and Micheaux's relatives had attended at the birth, the baby was born breech and died. The news “struck me like a hammer,” Micheaux wrote.

The neighbor hastened to assure him Orlean's condition was stable. “When I got to the claim I was weak in every way,” Micheaux recalled in
The Conquest.
“My wife seemed none the worse, but my emotions were intense when I saw the little dead boy. Poor little fellow! As he lay stiff and cold I could see the image of myself in his features.”