Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (24 page)

“To go farther,” Micheaux's younger brother wrote to the author, doing his utmost to gild the lily, “we will arrange to have you at our Studio during the time of production.”

Wary of accepting an extra two hundred dollars on promise from a company that hadn't paid him a penny thus far, the author said he would mull the matter over with his publisher. In any event, Chesnutt was planning to visit Chicago in late August. At that time, he said, he could meet with Micheaux and speak with the
Defender
executives himself.

 

Micheaux was busy during most of the late spring and summer, hop-scotching around the Eastern and Atlantic states, and making forays into the South.

He saved money by staying, often, with theater operators or at the local “colored” YMCA, and especially in the segregated South it was sometimes hard to arrange where to eat or sleep. Even the northernmost Southern states held pitfalls for a proud black man. In late May he found himself in Petersburg, Virginia, not far from Richmond, when he was “commanded to doff his headpiece” in the lunchroom of the train station. He stoutly refused. “Whereupon,” according to an account in the
Chicago Defender
, “the white attendant loudly told him that that was a rule which applied to ‘every niggah.'” The situation might have deteriorated from there, if the attendant wasn't distracted by worse misbehavior from “a member of his own race.”

Matters didn't improve the following day, however, when Micheaux tried to order breakfast at a local restaurant attached to a hotel, entering
a dining room occupied by only two white men. The proprietess anxiously beckoned him over and “respectfully entreated him to please be ‘seated in the rear' until the ‘white folks' finished their meal.” Furious, Micheaux departed.

On trips like this one he added bookings, but also he had experiences that reinforced his determination to make movies that preached against Jim Crow and racism and inequality. In Petersburg, Virginia, Micheaux “got all the material for a ‘movie' de luxe,” reported the
Chicago Defender
, which knew the autobiographical tendencies of the race-picture pioneer.

 

Petersburg, Virginia, was on the road north to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, home to a considerable number of black state government employees.

Armed with his extensive knowledge of the country from his train travel—and the government reports he liked to read—Micheaux would swoop down on a sizable black community, where he would be passed from house to house of doctors, lawyers, preachers, teachers, and librarians, meeting as many middle-class black folks as he could and selling them copies of his novels. Wherever he found buyers for his books, he pitched investment in his films, a time-consuming ritual that always improved his finances, and sometimes added to his retinue.

One day he found himself in the living room of the Howard family in Steelton, Pennsylvania, not far from Harrisburg. A man who always yearned for the family he would never have, Micheaux admired nothing more than a close-knit, hardworking black family. When he met a man he liked, he'd want to meet the man's wife, and then invite both to come and work for him. He often cast husbands and wives and even, when the occasion arose, their children in his motion pictures.

Mr. Howard was a high-school principal, his wife a professional elocutionist who taught and gave recitals. One of their daughters was a New York teacher, and their youngest girl had just graduated from high school. During Micheaux's visit, a pair of portraits displayed on the family's baby grand piano caught his eye: one of the young graduate looking intelligent in her cap and gown, another of her looking radiant in an evening gown. “You know, I think I could use her in my movies,” Micheaux told her parents.

The director came back later to meet the girl, Elcora “Shingzie”
Howard. Micheaux struck the young woman at once as a sort of genius. He was “garrulous,” but the rush of words, like scenes in his novels or films, was “brilliant” with facts, anecdotes, social observation, and self-deprecating humor. Micheaux towered in size, but had a courtly manner and a winning smile. “He would come into a room and just dominate it with his sheer personality,” said Howard.

Petite and fair-skinned, Howard spoke French and Spanish and played the piano. Micheaux seemed even more impressed to learn she could type and take shorthand. So instead of asking her if she could act, he invited her to New York to be a secretary in his office. That was how he worked sometimes, taking bright young people under his wing and waiting to see if they fit into his hurly-burly world. He assured the Howards that he would look out for their daughter's welfare; they consented, knowing that Shingzie could live with her sister, the teacher, in the city.

All this time he was trying to shore up his organization. Management was divided between Chicago and Harlem, but Micheaux had established a southern outpost in Roanoke, Virginia, and a western branch in Beaumont, Texas, both places with enterprising black businessmen who ran a few theaters and were eager to book Micheaux's “All-Colored” pictures into their outlets, while helping to peddle them elsewhere.

 

In early August, Micheaux met again with Charles W. Chesnutt, this time in Chicago. After visiting the
Chicago Defender,
however, the author of
The House Behind the Cedars
decided to withhold serialization from his Micheaux contract, for the newspaper had offered him higher terms directly. Still, Micheaux persuaded Chesnutt to agree to the original five-hundred-dollar contract, as long as the first payment arrived by September 1.

Having foreseen these complications—and still stalling on handing over the first hundred dollars, which he needed for more urgent purposes—Micheaux had already penned another scenario and launched the filming of his sixth production,
Deceit,
shooting initial interiors at the Solax Studio, an all-in-one production plant in Fort Lee.

Deceit
was one of the most amazing projects of Micheaux's amazing career. Imagine a Hollywood director, whose films have been targeted by censorship, creating an autobiographical film about that very topic.
Imagine the scenario as a full-throttle assault on the pettiness and sanctimony of censorship boards. Imagine characters based on actual censors. Such a thing could never have happened in Hollywood, where deference to the moral guardians of the screen was a deeply ingrained part of the studio system.

Deceit
was the story of a first-time race-picture producer whose film, titled “The Hypocrite,” encounters a stone wall of narrow-minded censors. The race-picture producer's name is Alfred Du Bois; and “The Hypocrite” is—what else?—
The Homesteader,
playfully restaged as the film-within-a-film under attack.

One of the censors Du Bois must cope with is a black preacher, based on an actual member of the Chicago board, Reverend A. J. Bowling, who was appointed especially to oversee films with a “Negro theme.” Among the preachers who join in protesting Du Bois's film is Christian P. Bentley, “an arch enemy of his [Du Bois's] youth” (i.e., the Reverend Newton J. McCracken). Like
The Homesteader,
“The Hypocrite” is banned, until Du Bois appeals the ban, wins the right to have the film judged by a new, impartial audience, and the hypocritical censors are defeated. Everything in the film was drawn from Micheaux's own history of clashes with Chicago censors.

To play Du Bois, his latest alter ego, Micheaux lured Norman Johnstone away from his career as an opera singer. Evelyn Preer returned as the producer's secretary, who believes in him with all her heart. And Bentley, the facsimile McCracken, was played by A. B. DeComathiere, who was making a specialty of villains for Micheaux. The remainder of the cast included Cleo Desmond, a luminary of the original Lafayette Players, and Louis DeBulger from
The Gunsaulus Mystery.
Micheaux looked on anyone in his circle as fair game for small roles: Ira McGowan, who was still managing the New York office, was asked to fill one minor part, while Leonard Galezio, the white cameraman, also acted a role—as one of the white censors.

As was his wont, Micheaux put Preer through another knock-down-drag-out, this time with Cleo Desmond. (The first tussle between women is in Micheaux's third novel,
The Homesteader,
but “catfights” would become a peculiar, recurring highlight of his films, guaranteed to rouse audiences.) In “The Hypocrite”—the film-within-a-film—the evil Desmond forces her sister Preer to flee the prairie for Chicago; after receiving a letter from her husband begging her to return to their farm, Preer tries
to leave home, but Desmond blocks her path. The script described a struggle, with Preer biting Desmond's hand.

“I believe in being realistic,” Preer recalled, “so I really bit her, which made her forget we were only playing, and I'm telling you she became a sash-weight to me, right there. And oh, how we fought. For two days I saw my teeth prints on her fingers.”

Micheaux kept the cameras rolling.

Micheaux finished
Deceit
in Chicago in September, but the film wouldn't find its way into theaters for two years—not because it required especially intricate editing, nor even because it attracted the wrath of censors. The truth was simpler: by the time he finished the photography, Micheaux was once again nearly broke.

 

Working for Micheaux in New York, Shingzie Howard was one of a handful of office staff. She took dictation and wrote letters for the race-picture producer; when events warranted, she even picked up scissors and helped him splice footage together on the various incomplete productions that had been temporarily expelled from editing facilities. “He trained us to do that,” Howard recalled. “He was painstaking in showing me how to cut neatly and how to overlap, which was very important to him. I would spend hours [cutting] until my back would hurt.”

Micheaux would dash out to give a talk to an organization, selling some books and collecting a wad of money. “He sold
himself,
” Howard said. “If the Elks were having an affair, for example, if they were having a convention or something, he'd be introduced on the stage as this prolific writer, or this maker of movies. That's all they'd have to say: ‘He makes movies.' Then he would sell his books, have them stacked [and ready].”

Other times he'd be off chasing footage of some unusual sight he thought might be useful in a future film. “He would go some place with a cameraman and take a scene and he'd come back and say, ‘Make something out of it!'” she recalled.

One time a wealthy woman came to visit Micheaux, dressed in a beautiful mink coat. He invited her into his inner office, eyeing the mink. The boss's glance flitted to his secretary. He made a quick call, a cameraman materialized, and while the woman waited for him (“the lady never knew it,” Howard recalled), Micheaux draped the coat on his secretary
and had her walk through several rooms of the building and then stroll around outside.

“Make something out of it!”

By the time Micheaux was ready to start his next new production, he'd also be ready to make something out of Shingzie Howard.

 

But Micheaux's dire financial conditions only worsened. Micheaux had to retrench, to make his movies even more cheaply, in order to keep going. So, as he'd done in the past, he changed places—retreating to Roanoke, Virginia, where there was budding black prosperity and a brand-new group of supporters and investors.

Roanoke was a small, provincial Southern city. There were no motion picture studios, per se. But Micheaux could shoot outdoors most of the year, and the vicinity could simulate any type of wilderness. The Allegheny Mountains lay to the west, the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east, toward the Atlantic.

And Roanoke's population was one quarter black. Locally, three men of color were partners in healthy real estate and theater ventures. William B. F. Crowell was district manager of the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company, which billed itself as “the largest Negro insurance company in the world.” C. Tiffany Tolliver, co-owner of the Ideal Cafe, was a young go-getter from a vaudeville family. (Active in the Republican Party, Tolliver even visited the White House in 1923 to confer with President Coolidge's secretary “over the political situation in the State of Virginia as it affects the Negro.”) A. F. Brooks was a successful realtor, one of the state's wealthiest black persons. The three co-owned the Hampton Hotel and the nearby Hampton Theatre, which seated eight hundred people. They had plans to build other black theaters in the South and had set up the Congo Film Service to distribute race pictures and help promote Micheaux's films.

By mid-September, Micheaux had established himself in fresh quarters at the Hampton Hotel on First Street, owned by his Roanoke partners. Sitting at his desk, he shuffled the stories in his file like cards in a deck, trying to decide the best future lineup.
The House Behind the Cedars
remained high on his radar, but Micheaux still hadn't mailed the first rights payment to Charles W. Chesnutt. To his younger brother Swan was
delegated the awkward task of explaining the continued postponement: “We have been disappointed in not receiving returns for several shipments in the past month,” Swan Micheaux wrote. In late September a certified check finally did arrive in Cleveland, although it appears that this was a replacement check for an earlier one that bounced, and the bank dunned the Micheaux company with surcharges.

The second check, due on October 1, also failed to materialize on deadline. Later that month, Micheaux himself wrote from Roanoke, enclosing the second installment and admitting that he had “laid off six months in order to put our Company into such financial shape as to commence production again in March and continue without a letup, as we have been forced to do in the past, due to insufficient capital to let us get far enough ahead…