Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (15 page)

Still, to Micheaux it sometimes seemed that the Jews thrived mysteriously. When he thought “deeply into the conditions of his [own] race, who protested loudly that they were being held down,” as he wrote later, he “compared them with the Jew—went away back to thousands of years before. Out of the past he could not solve it…

“All had begun together. The Jew was hated, but was a merchant enjoying a large portion of the world commerce and success. The Negro was disliked because of his black skin—and sometimes seemingly for daring to be human.”

For a man transfixed by such an “intricate, delicate subject” as the relative fates of Negroes and Jews, the drama and subtext of the Leo Frank trial, which opened in July 1913, was mesmerizing, challenging his own prejudices and race loyalty. Indeed, the spectacle of a lowly black man testifying against a powerful Jew in a section of the South suffused with racism and anti-Semitism riveted much of the nation.

The factory sweeper Conley admitted to writing the cryptic, incriminating notes found near the slain thirteen-year-old, but said he did so—and helped dispose of the body—at the behest of Frank, the true killer. At times in his public appearances, Conley appeared quick-witted; other times he adopted the guise of “a mumbling, subliterate Rastus,” in the words of Steve Oney in his authoritative book
And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.
But the black factory sweeper's testimony was vital to the prosecution, whose evidence against Frank was otherwise circumstantial.

Micheaux later claimed that he sat in the courtroom as an observer during the four-week trial in the summer of 1913. That is plausible, though in one book he also suggests that he spent six months in Atlanta
after
the trial, when the city was still buzzing about it. Regardless, film scholar Matthew Bernstein has concluded that the two movies Micheaux later based on the case—
The Gunsaulus Mystery
in 1921 and
Lem
Hawkins' Confession
(a.k.a.
Murder in Harlem
) in 1935—indicate that he “clearly knew the details of the case and the prosecution's brief against Frank as they were reported in the city papers.”

And it wasn't just the main Atlanta newspapers that Micheaux absorbed: More important, Micheaux read the nation's black press. “The consensus of many black newspapers,” wrote Bernstein, was “that Conley's claims were true and that Leo Frank was a duplicitous, lecherous murderer. The black press's attitude to the case arose in part from anger over the amount of attention Frank's fate received when so many black lynching victims never even got a trial.”

The consensus today is that Frank was “framed” by an overzealous, anti-Semitic prosecution, but even as late as 2003 Oney's heavily researched book backed away from certainty about the genuine perpetrator. Though it depicts Conley as a cunning liar, Oney's book also casts a measure of doubt on Frank's ultimate innocence.

At the time, Frank's guilty verdict spurred two years of protests and editorials, largely from outside the South, with the campaign to free him led by prominent Jewish and liberal organizations. After failed appeals to higher courts, Frank had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by the governor of Georgia, on his last day in office. In August 1915, however, a mob stormed the prison where Frank was held, abducting and lynching him. Photographs of his hanged body, surrounded by gawking crowds, were seen around the world. To the spectacle of a Jew convicted by a black man's testimony was now added the rarity of a Southern lynching of a white man.

In
The Forged Note,
Micheaux brought his alter ego Sidney Wyeth into the case by acquainting him with two cosmopolitan “mixed race” strangers passing through Atlanta. Their business in the city is vague. Only after their departure does Wyeth discover that they were operatives working for “The Great Detective” (his appellation for the renowned detective William J. Burns, who was involved in the Leo Frank case). Their job had been to penetrate the Negro areas of town (or “view the case from a ‘dark angle,'” in Micheaux's words) on behalf of Frank's defense team.

Micheaux may have taken literary license with the two mixed race detectives. (As time went on, he would show a penchant for black sleuths in his novels and films.) But they gave the author an excuse to brood over the case, which divided Jews and black America. Indeed, historians regard
the Frank case as a watershed in black-Jewish relations: “the first well-focused incident of national interest in which the needs of blacks and Jews seemed to have been in direct conflict,” according to historian Eugene Levy. “Apart from the Frank case there seems to have been little hostility towards Jews among black leaders of the early twentieth century.”

In
The Forged Note,
Sidney Wyeth clearly sides with the black press. He is inclined to believe that Jim Dawkins, the Conley character, is telling the truth, and that “the Jew” is guilty. Dawkins was one “lucky Negro,” according to Wyeth, to have transformed himself from obvious lynch mob target to star witness. But Micheaux's own authorial perspective is more complicated: Elsewhere in the book he scoffs at the paltry evidence in the case, while taking note of the public hysteria. And his novel even savages the rabble-rousing Populist publisher Tom Watson (dubbed “The Big Noise”), a notorious anti-Semite who strenuously inveighed against Frank, stirring up common opinion against the Jewish factory owner.

 

There is another way to date Micheaux's stay in the South. Much of
The Forged Note
concerned a young olive-complexioned woman named Mildred, “possibly twenty-one or -two” and “exquisitely beautiful,” who buys a copy of “The Tempest” in Cincinnati and develops a crush on Wyeth. Mildred harbors a secret that is withheld from the reader. She pursues Wyeth to the South, though their paths crisscross for much of the book without meeting up. Eventually, Wyeth departs for New Orleans, with Mildred trailing him there.

The Louisiana interlude is fascinating. Wyeth stumbles across the site of a onetime slave market, marked with a plaque. This triggers disturbing visions of the past—the first time Micheaux directly confronts the horror and tragedy of slavery in his work. His time in the South had deepened his awareness of history, stirring his anger and pride; his 1913–1915 immersion into the Jim Crow world was crucial to his later, most ambitious films, about the old South and the legacy of slavery.

At the end of the story Sidney Wyeth and Mildred finally come together, proclaim their love for each other, and make plans to move to the Rosebud. And just as Micheaux, in his foreword to
The Forged Note,
in
sisted that “Slim,” “T. Toddy,” “Legs,” “John Moore,” and other rogues in the novel were based on actual people he had met—“and I really knew them”—there must have been a real-life counterpart for Mildred.

One could not mistake the loving dedication on the opening page:

 

TO ONE WHOSE NAME DOES NOT APPEAR.
*

The dedication was dated New Orleans, Louisiana, August 1, 1915.

 

Micheaux wrote parts of
The Forged Note
on the road, parts in South Dakota, and parts in Sioux City, Iowa, where, by late 1916, he had taken up temporary residence. His second novel was printed by the same firm in Lincoln, Nebraska, but Micheaux had officially incorporated in Iowa, and now the publisher was identified as his own Western Book Supply Company. And this time his own name was emblazoned on the cover.

Sioux City was a city he knew well and had long enjoyed and appreciated. On the Missouri River in western Iowa, Sioux City was a veritable crossroads of America, with train links leading to Great Bend, St. Louis, Chicago, Gregory, South Dakota, and other places where Micheaux routinely sojourned.

The West Seventh Street area, where Micheaux resided, was a thriving neighborhood to which Southern blacks had flocked since the turn of the century, taking jobs in the meat packing industry while living in rooming houses. At the same time Seventh Street was one of the most diverse sections of Sioux City—densely populated, for example, with Jewish merchants and residents. Seventh Street was known locally as the “Jewish Mile.”

The 1917 city directory described Micheaux as a “trav. agent,” or traveling salesman of his books. He was also listed in the local “Credit Reference and Trust Book,” which advised possible investors in his publishing business to apply to the home office for a special confidential report on his dealings. That implies an official skepticism.

But it is his listing in the 1918 city directory that has raised eyebrows
among Micheaux scholars. Not the fact that he is identified as an “author,” but that he is recorded as living at 412½ W. Sixth Street with a woman called “Sarah.” Her name appears in parenthesis after his, indicating that she is his wife.

That same year, on Micheaux's World War I Draft Registration Card, the name “Sarah” pops up again, listed as the Sioux City resident's wife as of September 1, 1918.

Who is this Sarah Micheaux, named in the 1918 Sioux City directory and again on his draft registration form? Was Sarah the real name of the woman known as Mildred in
The Forged Note
(…
WHOSE NAME DOES NOT APPEAR
)?

Legally, Micheaux was still married to Orlean McCracken; as far as is known no divorce petition was ever filed. Could Micheaux have married a second time, regardless? Or could Sarah have been a sort of “sideliner”—the second wife, in a different part of the country, not uncommon among wide-ranging frontiersmen?

Whatever the case, Sarah disappears from all records shortly after Micheaux leaves Sioux City and enters the film business. No scholar has uncovered any further documentation of her existence: no birth, wedding, or death certificate. But it's hard to dispute the evidence that, for a short while at least, there must have been a second Mrs. Micheaux.

 

Living in Sioux City with his “second wife,” Micheaux spent 1916 to 1917 working on his third novel.

Why, at such an early juncture, did he choose to go back to
The Conquest,
tinkering with events and characters he had already portrayed successfully? The answer is simple, and underlies the many other times he would return to the very same story in later books and films: Micheaux couldn't set aside what had happened. The twin heartbreaks of his mixed-race romance and his marriage to the One True Woman who betrayed him, these were ineluctably yoked to his failure at the dream of homesteading. These were the mingled tragedies that defined him as an individual while at the same time—and this was the inherent tension in his life—setting forth what he viewed as object lessons for his race. With
The Homesteader,
Micheaux was taking a “second chance” with his life story in
order to drive home its moral for the race. And, perhaps, to clarify its elusive meaning for himself.

“The episode that had changed his life from ranching to writing was ever in his mind,” publicity for
The Homesteader
would explain, “and always so forcibly, until he was never a contented man until he had written it” again.

Again and again.

In this second version of his homesteading story, Micheaux would enlarge upon and deepen the portraits of his weak-willed wife and her maleficent father. The South Dakota history would be pared down, the swashbuckling of the Jackson brothers minimized. At the same time, “the Scotch girl,” who played only a minor role in
The Conquest,
would blossom in importance, providing a continuing subplot and over-arching theme.

This was the biggest shift in the retooled version of
The Conquest
that Micheaux busied himself writing in Sioux City from 1916 to 1917. Though the new work would add some details to events already described in the first novel, Micheaux's third book would be less stringently autobiographical, more fictional and melodramatic. The new novel would have mystery, action, a murder, a suicide, a genuine romance, and a happy ending.

Indeed,
The Homesteader
would have all the ingredients of a crowd-pleasing movie.

Black show business was the most delicious layer cake most of white America never tasted.

This fare was served only at private parties: functions that were segregated, cheapened by inequities and conditions, but nonetheless magical events. Some elements, notably jazz and blues, filtered into the mainstream, but there were brilliant black vaudeville artists and inspired dramatic ensembles and world-class recitalists of every specialty who were only permitted to present themselves to black audiences during this era; and if a few white people showed up, they were treated just fine and didn't have to sit in the balcony.

The lowest, most disadvantaged layer of black show business, at this time and forever after, was film. Relative to most forms of entertainment, motion pictures cost far more money to produce. Most “race pictures,” as they were called, turned little profit, and never got beyond the struggling-to-breathe stage.

Micheaux was an avid moviegoer who didn't limit himself to race pictures. Because, in his earliest novels, he used the word “show” for both stage performances and motion pictures (as in “moving picture show”), it is difficult to pinpoint when he first became hooked on movies. Probably it was upon his arrival in Chicago in 1902, when he could have watched silent one-reelers in the balconies of the Loop's grand picture palaces or in humbler Black Belt theaters. At least a dozen moving picture theaters were operating in the Black Belt by 1904, their shows interspersed with variety programs and sometimes performances by blues artists.

Micheaux attended moving pictures in South Dakota too, though it
wasn't until
The Wind from Nowhere
—his third novel recounting his homesteading experiences—that he got around to mentioning it. (“I get lonesome out here alone and often stay in town late at night, at a picture show, or hanging around a saloon.”) The town of Gregory had an all-purpose theater by 1907, an outdoor movie theater by 1914. One Gregory theater drummed up crowds by hiring a cameraman to photograph local personalities and settings; the “home-movie footage” was projected on screen between the entertainments. Micheaux might have taken note, for his own films incorporated local sites and celebrities, the places and names flaunted in publicity and advertisements.

By 1913–1915, when he was roaming the South, selling books and absorbing material for
The Forged Note,
Micheaux had already begun to “make a study” (one of his favorite expressions) of the modern medium. In fact he had become a knowledgeable student of film, collecting pointers about the style and content and even the economics of picturemaking. Commenting in
The Forged Note
on three theaters he frequented in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, he noted that they “were patronized entirely by Negroes,” but “operated and owned by white men.” This reality of black show business Micheaux recognized long before he joined the field.

The American film industry—that is, the major producers and studios just beginning to cluster and consolidate in Hollywood—was so lily-white, on screen and off, that conditions would have had to be improved one hundredfold before it could even qualify as Jim Crow. All the ownership was white, of course; and the white ownership determined the complexion of the industry, from the predominantly white writers, directors, and producers, right down to the fundamental nature of the stories filmed and the management of theaters.

If black actors appeared at all in big studio productions, it was on Hollywood's narrow terms. There were “colored actors,” but they only played “colored parts.” Once in a while these character parts were juicy, but most of the time they played to the demeaning stereotypes Donald Bogle listed in the title of his authoritative history of black film,
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks.
“We are always caricatured in almost all the photoplays we have even the smallest and most insignificant part in,” Micheaux himself wrote. A black actor was “always the ‘good old darkey',” he noted, while the truth about black Americans' “present environments and desires” remained effectively “under a cover” to white Hollywood.

Micheaux wrote those words, incredibly, in 1919. They reflected a love/hate relationship with Hollywood that would abide throughout his career. At times he would be so moved by a Hollywood picture that he'd try to re-create its formula with an all-black cast. At other times the studio's prototype appalled him so thoroughly that he'd fashion his own alternative.

Surely Micheaux was appalled by
The Birth of a Nation,
D. W. Griffith's lavish adaptation of Thomas Dixon's novel
The Clansman,
and one of the most famous films of the early silent era. Its story about two Southern families during the Civil War and Reconstruction was suffused with warped history and “blatant racism,” as film scholar Anthony Slide notes in
American Racist,
his definitive study of Dixon's life and career. Griffith's self-styled “super-production,” which stretched to twelve reels, not only condemned miscegenation (mixed-race romances) and virulently caricatured black people, but also ennobled the Ku Klux Klan and helped revitalize the then-dormant white supremacist organization, known for lynchings and spreading terror.

Though hailed by some white critics, then and now, as a landmark of early narrative cinema,
The Birth of a Nation
sparked a fierce outcry from black America. Griffith's work was “an incentive to great racial hatred,” said William Monroe Trotter, the editor of Boston's black newspaper,
The Guardian,
after being arrested in a violent altercation with police in the lobby of a theater trying to show the film. There were similar protests and demonstrations in many other cities. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) circulated to the press a flyer in which the social crusader Jane Addams condemned the picture as “pernicious.” (Many other white liberals condemned the film; Chicago mayor William H. Thompson was one of a number of U.S. mayors who temporarily banned
The Birth of a Nation
from public exhibition.)

Micheaux likely saw Griffith's “super-production” in Sioux City in 1915, though he may have seen it in Gregory, where it was also shown. (He passed through Gregory and Colome in 1915, selling
The Forged Note.
) Micheaux scholar J. Ronald Green notes that
The Birth of a Nation
controversy was covered extensively in the
Chicago Defender
and other publications Micheaux read, and concludes that he was “certainly aware” of the furor and “of the repeated calls in the black press for a champion to counter the slander of Griffith and Hollywood.”

Subconsicously, at least, Micheaux was answering that call as he put
the finishing touches on the second version of his homesteading story—the new, improved, and more cinematic
The Homesteader
—in Sioux City in 1916 and 1917.

With his first autobiographical novel,
The Conquest,
Micheaux had established a number of stock characters who nonetheless were based on real-life people. These types of characters would recur in his stories: the virginal good-girl; her nemesis, the evil vamp; the callous, hypocritical villain; the decent, firm-jawed hero. But, returning to the Rosebud for his third novel, Micheaux added a patently fictional element that allowed him to mock Griffith's fears of miscegenation.

This time, the blonde Scottish good-girl (named Agnes here) wouldn't be left behind in the drama, as happened in real life and in
The Conquest.
This time she wouldn't be a white woman, either.

This time her looks were ambiguous. Her once clearly blond hair was now long and braided, with “a chestnut glint.” The secret was in her eyes. Agnes's eyes were striking but “baffling,” Micheaux wrote. “Sometimes,” when her eyes were “observed by others they were called blue,” according to
The Homesteader,
“but upon second notice they might be taken for brown. Few really knew their exact color.”
*

At the end of the story, Agnes would follow Jean Baptiste, Micheaux's alter ego, to Chicago, and there she'd learn the truth about her lineage from a family member in the Black Belt. Though light-skinned, in the new novel the good-girl would discover that she was “of Ethiopian extraction” and had been inadvertently “passing” for white. This revelation would allow for an archetypal window-into-the-soul moment, which would become common in Micheaux books and films, with the hero gazing into the heroine's eyes and finally achieving a breakthrough, perceiving the other's true race and deeper qualities. Then, the rose-colored ending Micheaux preferred: Jean Baptiste could marry Agnes and return to the Rosebud to live happily ever after.

It was a clever gambit: By changing one critical ingredient in his life story, Micheaux had turned it into a positive “passing” parable. Since the mid-nineteenth century—with books like
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter
by William Wells Brown (about Thomas Jefferson's liaison with
slave mistress Sally Hemings) and
The Garies and their Friends
by Frank J. Webb (about the perils of mixed marriage for free Northern blacks)—a body of literature sympathetic to “passing” had grown into a popular sub-genre of American letters. Many of these were intended as melodrama, while others, such as Charles W. Chesnutt's
The House Behind the Cedars,
were widely regarded as masterpieces. The “passing” literature, because it spoke to the hidden history of slavery (black women as mistresses, or rape victims) as well as to contemporary racial prejudices (the social benefits of lighter skin), resonated deeply among black Americans, especially in Micheaux's era.

By integrating the issue into a dramatized version of his own life story, Micheaux had alighted on a theme that was at once deeply personal and broadly social: one he would explore for years to come, and one that was made to order for commercial exploitation, if
The Homesteader
should ever become a moving picture show. “The injection of the white girl who in the end turns out to be colored, was the cleverest thing that could have been done [in the story],” Micheaux reflected later, “since nothing would make more people as anxious to see a picture, than a litho reading:
SHALL THE RACES INTERMARRY
?”

 

The years immediately following the publication of
The Homesteader
would be a time of transition for Micheaux, starting with the unexpected deaths of two women who had tremendously influenced his life.

The first to succumb was his estranged wife, Orlean McCracken. Orlean was on her way to a church picnic in Chicago in mid-August 1917 when she was trampled by a runaway horse. “Tormented by a constant attack of flies,” the horse had raced around a street corner and smashed into the woman. Orlean's front-page obituary in the
Chicago Defender
decried the fact that “the injured woman was carried to the [whites-only] Rhodes Avenue hospital, where the officials refused to admit her, although they must have known the dangerous condition of the patient.” Instead, Orlean had to be taken to St. Luke's, where she died the same day.

She was still legally Mrs. Micheaux at the time of her death. But Orlean died after Micheaux had finished writing
The Homesteader,
and in
his second version of life on the Rosebud, he was less dewy-eyed about the woman who had spurned him. Her characterization in future retellings would be tinged with neurosis and madness.

The following year, Micheaux's mother passed away. It was the last in a series of tragedies that had shaken the Micheauxes. In May 1915, the family's two-story home in Great Bend was destroyed by a kitchen fire. One week later, the youngest daughter, twenty-two-year-old Veatrice, who had been visiting her sister Ida in Pueblo, Colorado, was gunned down by a jealous suitor as she returned from a downtown picture show in the company of another man.

Bell Gough Micheaux never rebounded from these heartbreaks. A stroke in May 1918 rendered her an invalid; in December, a second stroke killed her. Micheaux's mother was buried in the same gravesite as Veatrice. Micheaux attended the services, and from this point on, resolved to try to spend Christmases with his Kansas family.

 

With the sales network and contacts Micheaux had already established,
The Homesteader
quickly outsold
The Conquest
and drew enthusiastic reviews in the black press. Chicago's
The Half-Century Magazine
declared, “
The Homesteader
ranks with the best of novels yet written by a Colored author.”

It may have been the drumbeat of Micheaux's advertisements (“A novel that can be called truly great…a story of love, high resolve, and ultimate achievement”), or possibly the steady flow of mail-order copies, that caught the attention of a black postal clerk in Omaha named George Perry Johnson.

George P. Johnson was the younger brother of Noble Johnson, “one of the most active and highly paid black movie actors” in Hollywood, as Daniel J. Leab notes in
From Sambo to Superspade.
“Light-skinned, of athletic build, and projecting a powerful personality,” in Leab's words, Noble played all kinds of roles for Universal, where he was under contract, but he specialized in cowboys and Indians. Billed in black-only theaters as “the race's daredevil star,” Noble was as close as Hollywood got to a black luminary; indeed, he considered himself “the only Ethiopian motion picture star in the World.”

But Noble felt frustrated in his secondary roles for the major studios,
and he was farsighted in understanding that black audiences and theaters would welcome an alternative to white Hollywood. With a group of investors—including Clarence Brooks, another black actor—he organized the Lincoln Motion Picture Company in 1915 to produce an ambitious slate of race pictures.