Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (22 page)

Though Eve is light-skinned, her eyes “betray her origins” to the clerk, and he refuses to give her a regular room, instead showing her to a barn. That night, a great storm wells up, and Eve becomes afraid and rushes outside the barn. Tossed about by Micheaux's customary excesses of wind and rain, she stumbles around the wilderness, lost and hungry, until Hugh Van Allen, a black homesteader with a nearby farm, rescues her.

Van Allen is one of Micheaux's paragons. Goodhearted and hardworking, he grows fond of Eve, but their love goes unrequited; they share an interracial tension similar to that which tortured Jean Baptiste and Agnes in
The Homesteader.
And it's just as misleading because Eve's fair skin has convinced Van Allen that Eve is a white woman, yet Eve doesn't realize her neighbor has this mistaken impression.

Van Allen becomes a target of the hotel clerk's enmity. After learning that Van Allen's land contains oil, the clerk conspires with other ne'er-do-wells to scare the colored homesteader off his property. Micheaux ridicules the purity of the Ku Klux Klan with these hatemongers—one a horse-thief “Indian Fakir” wearing a fez, another a former British clergyman turned swindler; two cowboys, one white and the other a half-breed Indian; and their leader, the Negro hotel clerk “masquerading as white.” This motley group rides forth at midnight, wearing white robes and carrying torches, calling themselves a brigade of the “Knights of the Black Cross.”

Their attempt to lynch the colored homesteader is foiled by Eve and other settlers who ride to Van Allen's rescue. Oil is discovered; Van Allen becomes a millionaire. In time he is visited by Eve, who is collecting for a Committee for the Defense of the Colored Race. Until this moment, Van Allen had “never dared to declare his love” for Eve, “for fear of being
scornfully rejected.” Now, he realizes that she is “of his own blood.” Now, the couple is free to love and marry.

 

As it went before the cameras, Micheaux gave his final script a strong title:
The Symbol of the Unconquered.

To play Eve, the light-skinned heroine, Micheaux returned to Iris Hall, who had played one of the leads in
The Homesteader.
As Hugh Van Allen he cast tall, firm-jawed Walker Thompson. A former vaudeville performer based in Chicago, Thompson had graduated to the Lafayette Players, where he was amusing in comedies and sensational in dramas like
The Divorce Question
, in which he had played a dope fiend.
*
Lawrence Chenault was back as Jefferson Driscoll, the sinister clerk “passing” for white. Chenault's mother would be Mattie Wilkes, who had toured as a soprano in the United States before joining the Lafayette Players. Leigh Whipper and Louis Dean were the horse thief and swindler.

This was the first film Micheaux produced in the East. He shot the interiors in Fort Lee, where there were fully operational studios that dated back before 1910. One of the first centers of motion picture production, the Fort Lee complex had been abandoned by the major companies when the industry moved to California, but it was still humming with activity. Besides being close to New York City, the Fort Lee terrain boasted a topography that served nearly every cinematic purpose, from seaside cliffs to tall cornfields to stand-in prairies. Indeed, some of the first American Westerns had been filmed in the Fort Lee area.

The “wilderness” of New Jersey was sufficient for Micheaux's purposes in
The Symbol of the Unconquered,
which was filmed at a gallop and wrapped up entirely before Christmas. And then, because Micheaux had yet to forge strong relationships with the New York press and theater-owners, his fourth feature film was sent back to Chicago for its premiere.

And there, as before, it faced its first attempts at suppression.

Once again, Micheaux's central motif was “passing,” and the sexual tension that transpires between a man and a woman of seemingly different races torn by their love for each other. Even when both lovers turn out
to be “black,” the mainspring behind such stories was offensive to censors—not to mention the powerful subtextual idea, which is present in nearly every Micheaux book and film, that racial categorization was unjust and indeterminate.

The Chicago authorities wouldn't condone any
hint
of racial intermingling. Among the cuts they demanded in Micheaux's film:

“Subtitle Reel II—ending: ‘That they had often lynched his kind for a smaller offense…talking to a white girl on the street.'”

“Cut all views of colored man holding girl's hand in [love] scenes.”

“Reel 4: All scenes of Englishman looking at colored girl ‘strongly desirous…'”

 

No director fought censorship as stubbornly as Oscar Micheaux, though he lost as often as he won. The many deletions the censors demanded, and the limited number of prints he authorized of each film, means that “of the Micheaux films that have survived,” in the words of scholar Arthur Knight, “it is unclear how near they are to Micheaux's authorial and directorial intentions, how close they are to his original films, or most importantly, how exactly they relate to what any audiences saw and heard.” As Micheaux expert Jane Gaines also noted, contemporary reviews of his pictures often described “a film dramatically different from the one that has survived,” with different scenes, characters, and so on. In other words, no surviving Micheaux film exists as he originally intended it to be viewed.

The sole remaining print of
The Symbol of the Unconquered
was rescued from the Cinématheque Royale in Belgium, and it contains French and Flemish intertitles. (Micheaux scholar Charles Musser has translated the intertitles back into English.) Parts of the film are clearly altered from the original. Though clearly fragmentary—the much-censored subplot of an Englishman married to a “colored woman,” for instance, is gone—even in its compromised Belgian version,
Unconquered
is a significant work, showcasing a mature panoply of technique: irises, superimpositions, mirrored shots, parallel editing, and subjective point of view.

The attempted lynching sequence was the censors' main target, and it survives merely in shards. Yet even the truncated version evinces a thrilling blend of German Expressionist–influenced lighting and camera
work, with an editing style that anticipates rapid-fire Soviet montage. Micheaux was seeing all the latest foreign as well as Hollywood films in New York, and he was up-to-date on the most avant-garde techniques. Amid a darkness made eerie by blazing torches and swirling smoke, the faux-Klan “night riders” of
The Symbol of the Unconquered
gallop to their failed mission in a flurry of grotesque close-ups of cutout eyes, set deeply in hoods.

Within Our Gates
had been a traumatic slice of too-real history. But in
The Symbol of the Unconquered,
Micheaux saw to it that his “night riders” were satirized and vanquished. The film was marked throughout by sweetness and humor, and even the advertisements promised an uplifting experience for black audiences. (“See the Ku Klux Klan in Action and Their Annihilation!”) Critics and audiences preferred this adjusted mix of realism and entertainment:
Pittsburgh Courier
publisher Robert L. Vann was among the many who hailed Micheaux's fourth film as “a stirring tale of love and adventure,” with “impressive lessons on the folly of color” throughout the story.

If Oscar Micheaux had stopped there—after
The Homesteader, The Brute, Within Our Gates,
and
The Symbol of the Unconquered
—he would still have earned his place as a stellar figure in American film. In two years he had gone from regional curiosity as a self-published novelist to national standard-bearer in the world of race pictures—writing, directing, and producing four remarkable films against tremendous odds in a brief span of time.

One of his new friends was Nahum David Brascher, editor-in-chief of the Associated Negro Press, whose offices were in the same building as Micheaux's. Brascher invited him to speak to the organization's conference in Chicago in early 1921. “Moving picures have become one of the greatest revitalizing forces in race adjustment,” Micheaux told the national gathering of black journalists and editors, many of whom he already knew on a first-name basis, “and we are just beginning.”

The great migration of Southern blacks, along with a steady flow of arrivals from the Caribbean, tripled the number of “colored people” in New York State between 1890 and 1910, and the total accelerated dramatically after World War I. The vast majority came to New York City, whose black inhabitants, by 1920, finally outnumbered those of Washington, D.C., long in first place; Philadelphia was now ranked second, Chicago fourth. Though they found homes in every borough, colored New Yorkers increasingly packed into a section of uptown Manhattan that was previously dominated by white European immigrants, many of Jewish background. This neighborhood was known by the name of the channel connecting the Hudson and East rivers: Harlem.

By 1920, “Eighth Avenue cleanly severed black from white,” as David Levering Lewis observed in his social chronicle
When Harlem Was in Vogue.
“From Eighth to the Hudson River few Afro-Americans were to be found. East of Eighth to the Harlem River, from 130th to 145th Street, lay black Harlem.” Estimates of the number of black residents ran anywhere from 75,000 to 100,000, and rising. More than a Black Belt, Harlem was a city within a city, “the largest, most exciting urban community in Afro-America,” in Lewis's words. Invisibly walled off from the rest of New York by racist barriers, Harlem had a personality and character like no other part of America. It may have had more than its share of misery, but for people of color (as well as for the color-blind), it was the epicenter of the new world.

The Jamaican-born American poet Claude McKay rhapsodized about Harlem in his 1928 novel
Home to Harlem
: “The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it.” The district's “semi-underworld” was a wonderland of sound and music: “The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and ‘blues' playing somewhere…singing somewhere, dancing somewhere!”

In early 1921, Micheaux leased an apartment on West 135th Street, opened an office in the small Franklin Theatre nearby on Lenox Avenue, and engaged a secretary. Micheaux had befriended Ira McGowan, George P. Johnson's brother-in-law, helping him out with small loans and bringing him along in the business. Now McGowan became his “utility man” in the New York office and paymaster for the eastern states. And Micheaux hired a traveling partner, John Wade, who'd be his Man Friday on the road, booking and collecting.

The Lincoln Theatre, on 135th and Lenox, was the original home of the Anita Bush Players and still a prime showcase for black performers. A few blocks away, on 131st Street and Seventh Avenue, was Harlem's biggest theater, the 2,000–seat Lafayette, host to the Lafayette Players. In late 1921, Connie's Inn, a basement cabaret destined to rival the more upscale Cotton Club, opened up next door to the Lafayette. (In the early 1920s, “colored customers” were still barred from attending the all-black floor shows at Connie's and the other fanciest Harlem nightclubs, which prided themselves on their white high-society clientele.)

Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association was also on 135th Street, and over on 133rd, between Lenox and Seventh, was the famed “Jungle Alley” of popular bars, nightclubs, restaurants, cabarets, and speakeasies.

 

With its ambitious length, unusual story, artistic reach, and overall accomplishment,
The Homesteader
had inspired other race-picture producers; indeed, it spawned a movement. All over America, new race-picture companies sprang into existence, trying to imitate the film's success, which most assumed was financial as well as artistic. Micheaux's public optimism left the impression that there was easy gold to be mined in race pictures. And the “gold rush” year for race-picture production was 1920, according to film historians Matthew Bernstein and Dana F. White.

In Jacksonville, Florida, a white Southerner, Richard E. Norman, began to specialize in “all-colored” pictures; his Norman Film Manufacturing Concern would grow to dominate the Southeastern market. Norman's wildly popular first film,
The Green-Eyed Monster,
played in theaters for years after its initial release in 1920; then Norman launched a cowboy series starring the “world's colored champion,” Bill Pickett. Norman usually photographed and edited his films, but didn't always direct them. In spite of modest budgets, the Norman films were well-made
(The Green-Eyed Monster
climaxed with a spectacular train wreck), though “by no means a comparison to Micheaux pictures in class or acting or direction,” in George P. Johnson's words.

A white New Yorker named Robert Levy also swung over to race pictures. A founder of the Lafayette Players, Levy organized Reol Productions in late 1920. Reol went head to head with Micheaux on challenging subjects as well as casting. Lawrence Chenault would star in the high-minded
The Burden of Race,
Reol's first film, in 1921. (The work doubled and tripled for former Lafayette Players in these years; the congenial and versatile Chenault, for example, would continue to act in Micheaux's films, while also becoming a regular for Reol and Norman.)

And there were others: The Maurice Film Company in Philadelphia, the Royal Gardens Film Company in Chicago, and fly-by-night companies in many other cities took flight, some barely getting off the ground, plummeting after one or two films. Even the Lincoln Motion Picture Company had a last gasp of vehicles starring Clarence Brooks.

This parade of imitators wasn't lost on Micheaux. It rankled him that some of the Johnny-come-lately producers were white men—including “some Jews,” in his words, people like Levy and the owners of the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia. In 1926, the Colored Players produced a thoughtful drama called
A Prince of His Race;
the film was hailed by some as a masterpiece, but Micheaux sniffed at it.
A Prince of His Race
“appears to draw [audiences] very well, although mighty badly acted and poorly photographed,” he wrote to Richard E. Norman.
*

Micheaux did enjoy
The Green-Eyed Monster,
though, and saw
Norman as a man not unlike himself. Even though he was a white man, Norman wasn't a dilettante mining for gold. He was devoted to race pictures, a man who wrote, photographed, edited, and directed his own films when necessary. And he wasn't Jewish.

The Jewish producers, complained Micheaux, didn't understand the nuances of black life. Worse yet, they booked their films into all the wrong theaters. “We could help them a great deal,” Micheaux wrote, “but since they seem to think they know it all, and regard all of us who have endured through the years gone by as dubbs, and know nothing[s], I am letting them find out for themselves the things we have learned from experience.”

Jewish or not, most of the new race-picture producers were frankly commercial (so was Richard E. Norman, for that matter). Micheaux's aesthetic motivations, on the other hand, were different: He made films in large part to hold a mirror up to his race, for better and for worse.

Micheaux had to keep up his reputation in that regard, and to that end he was in the midst of negotiations with an elder statesman of race realism, Charles W. Chesnutt. Regarded today as a major figure of early African-American fiction, Chesnutt was an author Micheaux could admire, “a mature gentleman with a keen sense of literary art,” in Micheaux's words. When the director first met with Chesnutt in Cleveland in late 1920, it was to discuss Chesnutt's first book, a short story collection called
The Conjure Woman
from 1900. Having read
The Conjure Woman,
Micheaux thought it might make a good film.

In the course of conversation, though, Chesnutt brought up his first and most famous novel, 1901's
The House Behind the Cedars.
After hearing the author rhapsodize about
Cedars
—his most successful book—Micheaux read the novel himself, and soon decided it would make the better film. Not unlike
The Homesteader,
it was a story about the tragic impossibility of interracial romance, a theme that couldn't help but resonate with Micheaux.

Arguably the greatest of all “passing” novels,
The House Behind the Cedars
concerned Rena Walden, a beautiful “bright mulatto” in North Carolina, whose brother has changed his name and moved away from his family in order to “pass” as white among genteel society. Years after becoming prosperous and successful, the brother returns home to invite Rena into his life. She agrees to join him in his new home elsewhere in South Carolina, “passing” herself to take care of his young child. While
there she meets a white aristocrat, who falls in love with her. When events reveal her secret, her life—and the lives of her friends and family—is wrecked.

Chesnutt himself was a light-skinned black man, as much a “bright mulatto” as Rena, so the character was of “mine own people,” as he once put it. “Like myself, she was a white person with an attenuated streak of dark blood, from the disadvantages of which she tried in vain to escape, while I never did,” the author wrote. Meeting Chesnutt, Micheaux was reminded of the heroes of his own films: though categorized and stigmatized by racism, the author had rejected falseness and pity and lived an honest, honorable life.

Like many of Chesnutt's other works,
The House Behind the Cedars
was set in the fictional town of “Patesville,” a substitute for Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he had grown up. Rena's mother in the story is the mistress of a white man, and her character was patterned after Chesnutt's own paternal grandmother, who bore children from a similar interracial liaison. Thus
The House Behind the Cedars
was not only his most widely read book, but “my favorite child,” in his words, in some ways a quasi-autobiographical story (another echo of
The Homesteader
). Chesnutt longed to see the story filmed, but filmed properly.

Micheaux was eager to oblige. He wrote to Chesnutt from Harlem, offering five hundred dollars—for him a stratospheric sum—for the screen rights. But he could only promise a mere twenty-five dollars as down payment. The offer was disappointing to Chesnutt, who knew that even five hundred dollars was a pittance compared to what Hollywood could afford to pay for well-known books. (Just a few years later, for example, producer Sam Goldwyn would pay $125,000 for the screen rights to Harold Bell Wright's
The Winning of Barbara Worth.
) Still, Micheaux was persuasive, and Chesnutt was convinced, first in person and then in correspondence.

From the outset of the lively correspondence that ensued between the two men, Micheaux warned Chesnutt that his film version would inevitably tinker with the novel. “Any story that deals with the relation between these two races in the manner as portrayed in this book is, to say the least, a very delicate subject,” Micheaux said in a January 18, 1921, letter. All changes would be “necessary changes that I consider practical.”

There were obvious as well as subtle differences between literature and film, Micheaux explained, setting Chesnutt up for changes in much the
same way the Johnson brothers had tried warning him just two years earlier. The word “nigger,” for example, was conspicuous in Chesnutt's novel. It was also prevalent in Micheaux's pictures, part and parcel of his populist approach. But the word had encountered censorship, and Micheaux had heard the critical caveats. Since “in the last few years, the Negro race has risen almost in a unit against the use of the word nigger, coon, darky, etc.,” Micheaux told Chesnutt, the dialogue or intertitles would minimize such language, which otherwise was natural in a story set in post-Civil War North Carolina.

“Understand me, for being a writer myself,” he averred, “I find that being compelled to abstain from the use of these words, a very great deal of originality is lost in portraying the lives of the race to which we belong.

“But public sentiment is stronger than even originality, and, regardless of how much I may object to having or using a word which everyone know[s] would likely be used in a conversation or a controversy, the Negroes of this country will not stand for any of these words flashed on the screen. Of course,” Micheaux added tactfully, “I am aware that twenty years have elapsed since the writing of this story and no way seek to criticize it.”

From his earliest letters, Micheaux demonstrated how his thoughts raced ahead of his actual writing of the script. Micheaux suggested to Chesnutt that he might begin the screen version of
The House Behind the Cedars
with a chapter drawn from the middle of the novel, an extended flashback that reveals Rena's mother as the mistress of a “rich and liberal” white protector, whose paternity accounts for her light-skinned brood. The film ought to open with that backstory, Micheaux said, and then proceed chronologically. “This is a very strong start,” Micheaux explained. “Fading out at this point, a title reading ‘Ten years later' would bring us to where the story now starts. From there on I find parts that you have described in places only mildly that I would intensify very greatly, while other more carefully drawn out I would in many instances be compelled to omit or change altogether.”

Many of Micheaux's suggestions had less to do with what was realistic than with what was financially “practical,” he admitted. While Chesnutt's novel had Rena meet her white beau at a gala racetrack occasion, such a scene “would require a great many people dressed in costumes of that period, which would entail an expense so large that the limited amount of
returns which we can look forward to would not justify [the outlay],” he wrote.

Even as it stood, the bulk of Chesnutt's story took place “shortly after the Civil War,” Micheaux noted, and the production “will require such minute detailing to avoid the camera catching some modern incident.” In general, the filmmaker warned Chesnutt that he would try to avoid elaborate crowd and street setups in bringing his story to the scene.