Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (12 page)

They buried the infant, Micheaux said, “on the west side of the draw.”

No historian or researcher has ever located a birth certificate for the Micheauxes' baby, much less a grave. But few scholars doubt there was a pregnancy and a stillborn child.

On Orlean's behalf, Micheaux sent a telegram to the Elder: “Baby born dead. Am well.”

 

The Reverend McCracken left at once to see his daughter, sending a telegram once he was en route by train with Orlean's younger sister. When he arrived, Micheaux thought, the Elder looked like a man who finally had the upper hand. Micheaux peered into his eyes and saw something he hadn't perceived before: “Evil.” He saw “Satan” in his father-in-law's face, he said. Yet the Reverend took a solicitous tack; it was the younger sister who upbraided Micheaux: “You and your Booker T. Washington ideas!”

The doctor told Micheaux his wife was out of danger, but she needed peace and quiet to recover her strength. With Orlean's sister and father hovering nearby, the homesteader felt useless around the house. He was also preoccupied with seeding the largest acreage he had ever sowed. He had contracted for a steam rig to break two hundred acres at three dollars per acre on the three Tripp County homesteads, and he had to haul that and other machinery from Colome, which had the nearest railroad extension. (He was intending to break one hundred Tripp County acres on his own, with horses.) He had to make a second trip from Colome to the Tripp County farms, hauling eight thousand pounds of coal in two wagons for the steam rig and other uses.

While Micheaux was hauling the coal, a balky mule caused the two wagons to lurch and topple down a sharp embankment. Micheaux jumped out just as the second wagon, which he was driving, tipped over, but he caught his foot in the brake rope, and the coal and wagon crashed over him. Luckily he was uninjured, but it took a day and a half to clear the wreckage.

Micheaux sent a message ahead to Orlean that he was delayed, trusting that she was safe in the care of her father and sister. Then, just as he was eating his supper in Colome, he learned that three colored people had arrived in town and one of them was a sick woman. “I could hardly believe what I heard,” he wrote in
The Conquest.
“My appetite vanished.” The temperature had been dropping all day, and snow was coming down as Micheaux raced to the hotel and confronted his wife, who was wheezing and trembling. Orlean was weak and conflicted, and she resented her husband's bullying manner when he demanded to know what she was doing in Colome. But she knew he cared about her, and their baby's death was not his fault, not really.

Any real conversation between the married couple was subverted by the Reverend, who only uttered “kind words” to Micheaux, but insisted on taking Orlean back to Chicago to recuperate in the bosom of her family. A quarrel flared between the men, but the Reverend was adamant; Orlean was passed back and forth like a pawn. The homesteader finally gave in, offering to write the Elder a check for the travel expenses. The Reverend declined. Orlean told her husband confidentially that she'd already drawn fifty dollars from his bank account, at her father's behest.

When Micheaux put the McCrackens on the train to Chicago, his bank account was overdrawn; on top of his loans and mortgage payments, he owed money to doctors, hired hands, and suppliers.

Forlornly, he wrote to his wife. Two weeks went by without any reply.

 

At last, desperate to speak with his wife, Micheaux took the train to Chicago at the end of April. He learned from friends that Orlean was sequestered at her Vernon Avenue home, where she was being treated by a white doctor. The local scuttlebutt held that the Reverend had rescued his daughter from a harsh life in South Dakota, where the conditions—and mistreatment by her husband—had taxed her health.

The Reverend was once again away from Chicago on church business when Micheaux arrived at the McCracken family residence. Orlean's younger sister refused to admit her brother-in-law, saying that Orlean was too ill to see him. The sister's henpecked husband sympathetically walked Oscar over to a hotel on the Stroll, and Micheaux ended up drowning his misery in “a few Scotch highballs and cocktails.”

The next day was Sunday. Micheaux phoned the McCracken house, but again and again his attempts to reach his wife were blocked by Orlean's hate-filled sister. The henpecked brother-in-law conspired to let the homesteader sneak in briefly on Tuesday while Orlean's sister was gone. He was having a tentative conversation with the listless, bedridden Orlean, when the sister returned and started screaming at him, driving him outside.

Anxious to obtain his own diagnosis of his wife's condition, Micheaux came back the next day with a Negro physician, Ulysses Grant Dailey, whom Micheaux had roomed with during Dailey's time as a medical student at Northwestern. U. G. Dailey would later become a preeminent figure, rising from a position as anatomy instructor at Northwestern to become chairman of the surgery department at Provident Hospital in Chicago, with an international reputation as an expert in his field.

Regardless of Dr. Dailey's impeccable credentials, Orlean's sister slammed the door in their faces. When the two men rushed to a nearby phone booth to call the house, the sister answered the phone. “How dare you bring a nigger doctor to our house?” she shouted. “Why, Papa has never had a Negro doctor in this house!”

Micheaux offers slightly differing renditions of this incident in
The Conquest
and
The Homesteader,
but the basic story is confirmed, remarkably, by contemporaneous accounts in the Chicago black press. Word had spread in the Black Belt that the famous homesteader, Oscar Micheaux, was in Chicago, trying to see his estranged wife, the daughter of the well-known Elder McCracken. A front-page headline in the April 29, 1911,
Chicago Defender
told the story:

The
Chicago Defender
reporter was actually an eyewitness to this sorry episode in Micheaux's life. As Micheaux and Dailey first approached the McCracken home “in hot haste,” the reporter spotted them, and lurked “a block behind” to see what would ensue. As he watched, the two men stood outside the house, “waiting for the door to be opened” for “about half an hour,” before gloomily retreating down the steps.

The reporter buttonholed Micheaux, who “admitted his wife returned with her father, but he says she came to spend the summer, for she was quite sick.” Asked why he and Dr. Dailey hadn't been allowed in to see Orlean, Micheaux said he thought perhaps his wife had gone downtown. The reporter was unconvinced. “We do know that Mr. Micheaux has only seen his wife once during his week's stay in the city,” he wrote.

As the reporter stood by waiting, Micheaux ducked into a telephone booth. “He did not seem to stay on the line; he got his party and they rang off,” he wrote. Then the
Chicago Defender
correspondent trailed Micheaux to the train station. The man who had been barred from glimpsing his own wife left on the 5:20 train that “same afternoon,” the
Defender
account noted, “and when our reporter tried to get in to see him he locked himself in his drawing room and would not see anyone.”

“He is the only colored farmer in his [Rosebud] country,” the article concluded with an imaginative flourish, “worth $150,000, all told.”

Micheaux slumped in his train seat, not only distraught but publicly humiliated.

 

Returning to South Dakota, he poured out his feelings in letters to Orlean, according to
The Conquest
, and at first his wife wrote pleasant ones in return. Then her letters turned abusive, accusatory. Finally they stopped altogether. After that, everything he learned about her came in letters from mutual friends and McCracken relatives who were sympathetic to his cause.

Micheaux resolved to go back to Chicago to try again, but first he would have to survive the summer of 1911. Since Micheaux became a
homesteader six years earlier, southern South Dakota had enjoyed only rain-filled summers and luxurious harvests. Thanks to the ample rainfall, Micheaux later wrote, he had raised “fair to good crops every year.” The area hadn't endured a severe drought since 1894. Yet old-timers and Indians knew that the weather came in erratic cycles, and a couple of veteran farmers descended from Russian Mennonites, neighbors of his sister Olive, warned Micheaux that a terrible drought was brewing.

Early in May, one rainy day brought an inch of moisture. Micheaux had just completed sowing 250 acres of flax on his wife's claim, and everything looked “beautiful and green.” But that was the last soaker in all of May. The soil soon became too dry for Micheaux to go on breaking ground. Though clouds threatened and an occasional gust of wind whipped up his hopes, the rain stayed away for weeks. The budding plants took on a “peculiar appearance,” in his words.

In mid-June, Micheaux took his sister to run an errand in Winner. Everyone was talking about the intense dry heat. He drove on to Gregory, stopping in Dallas to send Orlean a telegram offering to send her money to come to South Dakota. No reply came.

A heavy downpour in Gregory County partially salvaged his original homestead, but right away the dry heat resumed, and this time the sinister weather persisted. The nights were punctuated by thundercracks and lightning streaks, but no cloudbursts, not even drizzle. “During that time I could not find a cool place,” recalled Micheaux. “The wind never ceased during the night, but sounded its mournful tune without a pause.”

After organizing his crops and hired help, he returned to his Tripp County relinquishments. “No snow had fallen in the mountains during the winter,” he wrote, “and all the rivers were as dry as the roads.” The air was filled with clouds of dust rising from the ground. The vegetation withered, the small grain rattling like dead leaves. The crops were soon beyond redemption. “The atmosphere became stifling,” wrote Micheaux, “the scent of burning plants sickening.”

The Fourth of July Micheaux spent in Winner, hearing news of the spreading disaster.

“The railroad men who run from Kansas City to Dodge City reported that the pastures through Kansas were so dry along the route,” he later wrote, “that a louse could be seen crawling a half mile away. In parts of Iowa the farmers commenced to put their stock in pens and fed them hay from about the middle of June, there being no feed in the pastures.
Through eastern Nebraska, western Iowa, and southern Minnesota, the grasshoppers began to appear by the millions, and proceeded to head the small grain. To save it, the farmers cut and fed it to stock, in pens.”

Later that month his flax crop wilted. Then the land was assaulted by millions of army worms. Micheaux returned to Gregory County to harvest his winter wheat, which had been helped by the June rain, but his acres of flax appeared a “brown, sickly-looking mess.” He had borrowed his limit, and when he brought his weak harvest of wheat to market, it fell pitifully short of his expenses.

Before the drought, land near Gregory had sold for as high as a hundred dollars an acre, and lots a few miles away routinely sold for fifty to eighty. Now the merchants were pressured by the wholesale houses, the speculators by loan companies, and everyone felt the tightening squeeze of the banks. “No one wanted to buy,” wrote Micheaux. “Everyone wanted to sell.”

The adversity was worse in Tripp County, which had opened “when prosperity was at its zenith,” in Micheaux's words, its streets filled with “money-mad” people buying and spending without caution. Now, homesteaders old and new deserted in droves. Landholders simply up and abandoned their claims, heading back east in a steady stream of horses, wagons, and rickety hacks, their spirits vanquished. One day, as Micheaux headed north across the White River to visit neighbors, he counted forty-seven houses along his route; all but one was abandoned.

A born pragmatist, Micheaux was also an incurable optimist, not a quitter. He rejoiced when a torrential rain fell late in the summer, filling the creeks and draws, though it was too late to make a difference. And in the fall he channeled his mingled hope and bitterness into a front-page article for the
Chicago Defender,
touting new Rosebud lands opening up in Tripp County. The article was headlined:

This time bylining from Witten, Micheaux again criticized “colored Americans” who “do not take the chance advantage that these openings afford, as do the whites.” Once more, he noted the paucity of Negroes on Rosebud homesteads. “There can be but one particular excuse,” he wrote, “and that is the personal bravery that more do not take advantage of an opportunity that only comes once.”

Micheaux reeled off statistics to prove his points (“…everyone that came here five to eight years ago owns farms that are worth from five to ten times their valuation in 1904…”), and perhaps to impress readers with his status as a newly appointed “Government Crop Expert for Rosebud County.”
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