Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (2 page)

His father Calvin, who could neither read nor write, left the childrearing to his wife, Bell. From dawn to dusk, Michaux's father had his hands full clearing land of tough, deep-rooted trees, stumps, and rocks. Each season brought a new round of planting, gardening, and harvesting; the marketing was year-round, and hunting and fishing kept food on the family table in between. Calvin Michaux was a paragon of hard work and devotion to others; though he “never said much,” according to Micheaux, he offered a shining example.

Oscar's mother carried more of the disciplinary duties, but was also more loving and indulgent toward her middle child than his father was. Uneducated herself, Bell Michaux treasured books and education, and instilled in her children an appreciation for high ideals. Among her heroes was Booker T. Washington, who in 1881 had risen from slavery to become the first head of the newly established Tuskegee Institute, a vocational school for African-Americans; the Great Educator became a family role model.

Even in middle age, Oscar “could quote profusely from [Booker T.] Washington,” recalled Carlton Moss, who acted in two Micheaux productions in the early 1930s. “One of his favorites,” Moss remembered, was a brief recitation on civil rights, its words part Washington and part Micheaux: “It is true, very true indeed, that the Afro-American does not receive all he is entitled to under the Constitution. Volumes could be filled with the many injustices he has to suffer and which are not right before God and man. Yet, when it is considered that other races in other
countries are persecuted even more than the black man in parts of the United States, there should be no reason why the Afro-American should allow obvious prejudice to prevent his taking advantage of opportunities around him.”

One Washington maxim Micheaux liked to quote: “It is at the bottom of life we should begin and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

Bell Michaux was a deeply religious woman, baptized a Christian and then “united” at age twelve with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, an offshoot of Methodism launched by black Americans in 1787. Bell became a “shouting Methodist,” in Micheaux's words: When she began to “get happy” at services, her children knew it was time to steal outdoors. Throughout her life she was active in charity and church affairs. Much of the family's social activity, in Illinois and later Kansas, revolved around church events; especially when they lived in the country, the Michauxes hosted Elders and schoolteachers to Sunday supper.

There is some evidence Oscar Micheaux himself was a deeply religious man. Micheaux was persistently autobiographical in his work, and in his second novel,
The Forged Note,
he describes his alter ego Sidney Wyeth as “a hopeless believer.” But he seems not to have maintained a commitment to any particular church, and in his books and films he presented a complex, skeptical attitude toward organized religion, and especially toward preachers, with their “assuming and authoritative airs.”

This attitude may have had its roots in an incident in Metropolis, when he was a boy of about five. One Sunday after services, a group of Elders wearing Prince Albert coats and clerical vests came in wagons to visit the Michaux farm, accompanied by one of the family's favorite Sunday schoolteachers. The older brothers went hunting for rabbit and quail to supply the special occasion, and when dinner was served the Elders seemed to devour everything in sight. Afraid he was going to be left out of the feast, little Oscar crawled into the lap of his favorite teacher and began gobbling his share. Suddenly, he found himself staring into the “angry eyes” of a tall, stout minister, whose flirtation with the teacher had been interrupted by his actions. The minister upbraided the boy for his bad manners. The boy defended himself, but Bell Michaux uncharacteristically thrashed Oscar, and afterward Oscar's father quarreled with his wife over the incident.

This story may be apocryphal, but Michaux relates it convincingly in his third autobiographical novel
The Homesteader,
even giving the
teacher and the A.M.E. Elder characters transparent pseudonyms (as he often would in his fiction). In real life, the Elder was Rev. Newton J. McCracken; thirty years later, in a reworking of
The Homesteader
called
The Wind from Nowhere,
Micheaux would suggest that McCracken even had presided over his baptism.

Later, the same Rev. McCracken would reappear, disastrously, in Micheaux's life.

 

Metropolis, the hub of Massac County, was on the Illinois-Kentucky border, just north of Paducah, Kentucky, across the Ohio River. It was a river town straight out of Mark Twain, dominated by the vast, snaking Ohio, which served Metropolis “as a water supply and as a frequent topic of everyday conversation,” according to town historian George W. May. Lumber and flour mills were at the core of local industry, and trade and travel were conducted by horse and wagon (farms were still tractorless, of course), or by steamboat, though the Golden Age of the steamboat was past. Showboats stopped at Metropolis during the summer, bringing plays and recitals. Otherwise the place “lingered in a state of dull lethargy,” in Micheaux's words.

Farm life was too busy to be strictly dull. Just as his son would do later in South Dakota, Calvin Michaux bought and sold several tracts of land around Metropolis, sometimes working more than one farm at a time. About four years before Oscar was born, Calvin paid another six hundred dollars to purchase “the undivided one-third of the west-half (½) of the north east quarter (¼) of Section Thirty-Three (33) in Township fifteen (15), South Range 5 (5), east”—a forty-acre plot in Brooklyn Precinct, just over the line from his adjacent Washington Precinct land. The family then took up residence on the Brooklyn farm, closer to Metropolis.

Later, when Oscar was in school, they sold part of the Brooklyn farm and moved into “Township Numbered (16) South of Range Numbered (5) East,” another few miles closer to town. The family kept inching nearer to Metropolis, Micheaux later wrote, “not so much to get off the farm or to be near more colored people (as most of the younger Negro farmers did) as to give the children better educational facilities.” In fact, the Michauxes lived on the east side of Metropolis, while most of the black population clustered on the west side in an area locally dubbed “Colored Town.”

Jim Crow was the way of life in Metropolis, a Southern hamlet in a Northern state. The well-built and -equipped main school was centrally located, but the “colored school” was a substandard facility tucked away in “Colored Town.” Though Illinois law guaranteed public education for black people, the issue of whether to mingle the races in the same building or classroom was left to the municipalities, and most Illinois towns and cities maintained separate schools for the races, with separate budgets that guaranteed black people would receive less funds and an inferior education. Southern Illinois was so notorious in its unequal distribution of financial resources that, in 1885, state leaders approved a special bill “designed to protect the liberties of Negroes in the less advanced counties of Southern Illinois.”

Micheaux remembered the “colored school” of Metropolis as “an old building made of plain boards standing straight up and down with batten on the cracks,” administered by two or three teachers. Students of both sexes and every age were crowded into spartan classrooms. Micheaux and his classmates were part of the phenomenon Booker T. Washington described, in
Up from Slavery,
as “a whole race trying to go to school” after the Great Emancipation—young people sitting alongside illiterate octogenarians, who aspired to read the Bible before they died. As one mark of their ambition, black families in Metropolis had to pay an annual tuition for the privilege of sending their children to the school—a fee identical to that paid by white folks across town with a better school and manifestly greater resources. No refunds were made for sickness or expulsion. Disobedience was met with physical punishment.

But Calvin and Bell Michaux, who put extra food on the table for teachers and preachers, set aside the necessary funds for their childrens' education. Though Metropolis High School graduated its first class in 1877, the first “colored graduating class” didn't make it past the high hurdles until 1896. That year twenty-nine white students graduated from high school, but so did seven who were “colored,” including the oldest Michaux child, Ida.

By the time Oscar entered school a few years later, the situation had improved slightly. Although the scope and curricula of the white and “colored” schools was still unequal, the local superintendent of public education boasted of narrowing the gap with good equipment and a supply of “the choicest and most attractive books” for the library. (Metropolis
would maintain separate schools for white and “colored” children into the 1950s.)

Apart from general history, mathematics, and science courses, the “colored school” emphasized reading, writing, and the arts. Students were taught to practice dictation and write form letters and searching essays. They were expected to read certain literary works before promotion. They discussed art, poetry, and music “as agencies of communication between the soul and external things,” according to the superintendent's report.

All this was grist for a boy who would grow into an insatiable reader and tireless writer. Yet his later reflections on his education suggest that Micheaux was just as deeply affected by its shortcomings. He described his Metropolis schooling as “inadequate in many respects.” In his books he criticized his teachers (who were paid much less than white teachers and were often recent graduates of the “colored school”) as “inefficient,” and bemoaned the distance between his home and the school on the west side of town.

Though he exalted teachers in his books and films, they often disappointed him in real life. Teaching was his first wife's profession, and that was an ill-fated marriage; when he traveled from city to city to sell his novels, he found that local teachers didn't always rush to purchase copies.

Micheaux insisted he always received “good grades” in his Metropolis school days, but felt unappreciated by those who tutored him. “About the only thing for which I was given credit was in learning readily,” Micheaux recollected, “but was continually critiqued for talking too much and being too inquisitive.”

By now his father owned some eighty acres and was considered “fairly well-to-do, that is for a colored man,” but the Michauxes were merely land-rich and felt constantly beset by upkeep and debt. With springtime came rougher toil and a different set of learning experiences, though Oscar's three older brothers assumed the brunt of the farm chores. Oscar, the fifth-born, was considered the family shirker, always complaining “that it was too cold to work in the winter, and too warm in the summer,” as he himself conceded. The Michauxes made ends meet by selling fruit, vegetables, and eggs, and soon—out of “disgust” at his “poor service in the field”—Calvin Michaux reassigned his young teenage son to take the family's goods to the local meat and garden market, a huge open-air building in the center of Metropolis.

At the market, Oscar bloomed. He discovered his métier: a born talker, he was a natural salesman. “I met and became acquainted with people quite readily,” Micheaux recalled. He soon developed little tricks, giving “each and every prospective customer” a singular greeting, or suggestion, “which usually brought a smile and a nod of appreciation as well as a purchase.” He noticed “how many people enjoy being flattered, and how pleased even the prosperous men's wives would seem if bowed to with a pleasant, ‘Good Morning!'”

When one older brother complained that Oscar had it easy at the market, Calvin let the brother try his hand at salesmanship. But the brother found himself tongue-tied with customers; he was no match for Oscar's garrulous personality. One of Oscar's surprising talents was approaching well-dressed white folk, hailing Metropolis's most distinguished citizens by name. (In his very first novel, the autobiographical
The Conquest,
as if to prove his point, he tossed off one example: Mrs. Quante of the Riverside Flouring Mills, wife of the mayor, no less.) The older brother sulkily returned to heavy farm work; Oscar got the regular job as the family pitch man. “I always sold the goods,” Micheaux boasted, “and engaged more for the afternoon delivery.”

For pocket pennies, the resourceful young man also performed odd jobs wherever he could find them. Micheaux wasn't above taking a homemade box out onto the streets and shining shoes on his knees.

But Metropolis was “gradually losing its usefulness by the invasion of railroads,” in Micheaux's words, and as a teenager he could barely tolerate the culture of the backward river town. And he didn't spare the black populace: Probably the most controversial aspect of Micheaux's books and films is his sharp-tongued criticism of his own race, a trait rooted deep in his Metropolis boyhood. He rarely itemized the faults of white people as a group, for Micheaux knew white people primarily as individuals—some as dire enemies, but a few as prosperous, generous friends. “Oscar Micheaux's body of work,” as scholar Betti Carol VanEpps-Taylor has written, “shows little curiosity or interest in white society beyond the cordial relationships and a few enduring friendships.”

Beginning in Metropolis—and throughout most of his life, with the notable exception of his time in nearly all-white South Dakota—Micheaux strongly criticized the community he knew best, the people he understood as well as he understood himself. He was especially hard on what he saw as the ignoble tendencies of his own race.

In his first novel,
The Conquest,
Micheaux railed against the hypocrisy of churchgoers among the “colored churches” of Metropolis, both the Baptist congregation and the A.M.E. church patronized by his own family. Too many of the men, it seemed to Micheaux, prayed, sang, and shouted on Sundays, while stealing and drinking and fighting during the rest of the week. The colored folk of Metropolis, he complained harshly, “were in the most part wretchedly poor, ignorant, and envious. They were quite set in the ways of their localisms, and it was quite useless to talk to them of anything that would better oneself.”