Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (29 page)

The chase sequence also included a vignette in which the fleeing Cissie waded through deep, stagnant water in order to effect her supposed escape. “So I played the dummy again,” according to Preer, “and in the water I went, which I didn't expect to be more than waist deep, but which really came up to my neck and nearly drowned me. My back being to the camera, I expressed my feelings freely to Mr. Micheaux as I waded out.”

 

After shooting was over, Micheaux worked for six months on postproduction and a release schedule for the four films he had brewing:
Deceit, A Son of Satan, The House Behind the Cedars,
and
Birthright.

For once he did convince a “big white association” to help him distribute his pictures. The Pathé Exchange normally handled Mack Sennett comedies, Our Gang two-reelers, and Will Rogers Westerns, and Pathé wouldn't work very hard looking for new venues for race pictures. The bookings themselves were still Micheaux's responsibility. But the exchange operated offices in major cities that could be used as safe shipping points.

Deceit,
Micheaux's daring anticensorship picture, was introduced to audiences first, late in 1923. It didn't take long for real-life censors to rec
ognize it as their worst possible nightmare: a film that ridiculed them and their profession. In the North, Micheaux could usually satisfy officials with cuts, but Southern states tended to delay suspicious films interminably with elaborate protocol. Northern as well as Southern bookings of
Deceit
had to be canceled at the eleventh hour, with the advertising already paid and lines forming.

D. Ireland Thomas reported many such “miss outs” in his column. Accompanied by “businessmen” interested in investing in Micheaux's future productions, Thomas himself showed up at his Charleston, S.C., theater in late November for a screening of
Deceit,
“according to a contract that I hold with Mr. Micheaux.” When the race-picture producer arrived, he “informed me that I could not get the feature booked for that date and offered another feature that had already played Charleston. That was all right, so far as I was concerned, as I had expected some disappointment and had prepared for it, but this disappointment has hurt Mr. Micheaux, and I am sorry.”

Deceit
's release was scattershot, at best. Censorship and “miss outs” like the Charleston debacle made it the least successful, least widely seen of Micheaux's pictures at a time when he desperately needed revenue. But Micheaux had made
Deceit
whimsically; now, having made his feelings for the censors clear, he just as whimsically jettisoned it.

 

The failure of
Deceit,
however, put more pressure on Micheaux to make his next release a success. Though
Birthright
had been filmed most recently, the editing was completed quickly and smoothly, and Evelyn Preer's name gave the Stribling adaptation obvious marquee potential. Stribling's novel was also well-known (in part, unfortunately, because it had offended some readers). Micheaux scheduled the national premiere for the Temple Theatre on East Fifty-fifth Street in Cleveland.

Micheaux himself did not attend the movie's week-long run there in the first week of January 1924. Instead his brother Swan traveled with the print, sweet-talking future race-picture investors along the way. And among those in attendance was Charles W. Chesnutt, author of
The House Behind the Cedars.

Swan took the stage on behalf of his absent brother, reading a statement from Micheaux acknowledging expected “criticisms” of the film,
but hoping that audiences might be “willing to look deeper” into the complexities of the story.

“I am told almost daily by super-sensitive members of my race that, in producing Colored motion pictures, I should show nothing bad,” Micheaux's statement read, “that I should not picture us speaking in dialect, shooting craps, boot-legging, drinking liquor, fighting, stealing, or going to jail; that I should, in effect, portray only the better side of our lives—and they have promptly gone to sleep on such pictures when offered.

“This story, as told by an old Negro, living in a little town on the banks of the Tennessee river, at a point where the state lines of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee intersect, is a true story; and to have attempted transposing it to the screen without having him do any of the things objected to would have destroyed the origin of theme and story.

“I have heard many criticisms of the book; I expect some criticism of the picture. But to those willing to look deeper…”

The Cleveland audience certainly did not doze, or sleep. Many applauded the latest Micheaux film. Some flinched from what they watched.

At least one expert on gritty African-American stories was impressed. Micheaux's longstanding debts notwithstanding, Charles W. Chesnutt once again admired the filmmaker's work. Micheaux's stirring adaptation of Stribling's story boded well for Chesnutt's own novel. Indeed, the author was happy to learn from Swan that Micheaux's screen adaptation of his favorite book was nearly ready for release.

Chesnutt followed up with a letter to Micheaux himself, reminding him that he was still owed his final payment. He complimented Micheaux on
Birthright,
saying that “it was very well done, and was certainly extremely realistic. Neither the author nor the picture flattered the negro one particle, and they both showed up the southern white in his least amiable characteristics, which seem always to come to the front in his dealings with the negro.”

There was no immediate reply. Micheaux, never inclined to part with one hundred dollars in the best of circumstances, was busy preparing for the January 14 unveiling of
Birthright
at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem—an occasion threatened at the eleventh hour by New York censors, who were insisting on cuts (including all “sacrilegious” material, offensive language, shooting of craps, and so on) in at least five of the ten reels. The state board, which monitored the largest market for Micheaux's
pictures, handled so many films that some simply got lost in the shuffle. So perhaps Micheaux did make the trims, although censors usually didn't attend premieres. This one went ahead as scheduled.

The East Coast critics agreed almost unanimously with Chesnutt's assessment. The
New York Age
hailed
Birthright
as “the best colored moving picture that has so far been produced.” Though the film version “drags at times,” the reviewer noted, it was faithful to the book (“All of the ignorant prejudices and many of the crimes of both races in this town is graphically depicted”), and its cast was superb. Evelyn Preer was singled out as “exceptionally good,” as was Salem Tutt Whitney as Tump Pack (“the best part ever seen him in”), and J. Homer Tutt as Peter Siner (“succeeds in bringing some life to [his] character,” who was less credible in the novel).

For once, Micheaux even got away with the n-word. “Many comments were uttered [by audience members], regarding the film, some of praise, others of condemnation,” wrote Walley Peele in the
Philadelphia Tribune,
another black newspaper, “the main exception being taken to several subtitles and the broad use of the word ‘nigger.'” But the n-word was pardonable, wrote Peele, considering how Micheaux's film was set in the vague past and in the South. The film was “educational” about the inequities of Jim Crow, “not one made to wound your feeling; but one to help each individual who witnessed it to do their own share in bettering the conditions which go to make such stories possible.” Micheaux “has never before in his career achieved so great a success.”

“Micheaux has made a really great picture,” J. A. Jackson rhapsodized in
Billboard.
“It is a modern
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
and may not be popular in some quarters, a fact that will but confirm its value.”

In some quarters Micheaux's film was
exceedingly
unpopular. The farther South
Birthright
traveled—this film about inequality in an antebellum river town—the greater the effort required to sneak it into theaters.

Booking the film in Virginia, which was still at this point a second headquarters for Micheaux, was a case study in his sneaky practices. In February 1924,
Birthright
was shown in theaters in at least three cities in the state—Roanoke, Norfolk, and Lynchburg. But the Virginia censorship board was alerted by complaints from outraged white citizens, and the board promptly sent communiqués to mayors and police chiefs throughout the state, advising officials that
Birthright
reportedly contained “many objectionable features,” and that it “is an audacious viola
tion of the law to display this picture, and theater managers exhibiting it are liable to prosecution.”

“Reportedly”: For the Virginia censors could not claim to have seen the offensive drama. Micheaux had not submitted
Birthright
for the state board's approval. But bordering states were good about swapping censorship warnings, and Virginia had heard that Maryland had balked at licensing the film because “it touches upon the relations existing between whites and blacks in a manner calculated to cause race friction.”

A letter was sent to the Harlem and Roanoke addresses of Micheaux's company, advising the producer of his breach of law, along with a copy of the “circular warning” furnished to all state officials and theaters. Micheaux did not reply.

The board then demanded an explanation from C. Tiffany Tolliver, the Roanoke businessman listed as an officer of the company on its letterhead. Through his attorney, Tolliver committed what was an unpardonable sin to Micheaux: He disowned the picture, denying “any present connection” with
Birthright
or the Micheaux Film Corporation.

As for the theater managers who showed
Birthright,
they insisted that they'd done so because the print they received bore the Virginia state seal—which, after an investigation, the board concluded had probably been “fraudulently detached from one of the other pictures licensed for the Micheaux Film Corporation and attached to the photoplay under investigation.”

The censorship chairman contemplated prosecuting Micheaux if he could be located, but in February the state attorney general advised him that it would be enough to ban future Micheaux productions from Virginia theaters until the company offered
Birthright
for censorship, bringing itself “within the pale of the law.”

Remarkably, eight months went by before the issue was taken up. In mid-October 1924, at the tail end of a barnstorming tour of theaters in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, Micheaux passed through Roanoke. There, from his office, Micheaux wrote to Virginia censorship officials as though he were hearing of the problem for the first time. (His letterhead still listed the soon-to-be-deposed traitor, C. Tiffany Tolliver, as his company's vice president.)

Micheaux's letter was a masterpiece of cunning and dissembling.

“The only reason the entire matter happened,” Micheaux said in his October 14, 1924, letter to the chairman of the Virginia censorship
board, “is because until a few months ago this was a one man's Corporation, with everything from writing the story, directing, cutting, financing, booking and distributing the pictures—and collecting, dependent upon me. At one time we had several exchanges; but the most my exchange men did was to fail to do anything but collect all the money I could sell our pictures for, and talk about me because they could not collect—and keep for themselves—more. Result, I have been traveling so fast over all this country trying to get matters in shape, the first being to get rid of a lot of worthless thieving men—and then to try [to] visit all the theatres in person where our pictures play, and book the pictures and satisfy a lot of exhibitors who had a grouch for what some of our agents ‘pulled' on them before I got rid of them.”

It was purely accidental, Micheaux explained, that
Birthright
had played Virginia theaters without permission that previous winter. He had left a print of the movie in Baltimore, he explained, ordering that it be sent on to Virginia after the Maryland censor's deletions were made. But the Maryland state board surprised Micheaux by confiscating the print until the cuts were reviewed and affirmed, at which point a company representative, W. B. Hunter, went before the Maryland board and “adjusted the matter.”

By then it was too late for “engagements booked solid in the few houses we have to play in Virginia,” explained Micheaux. Advertisements had been placed and “it was either miss-out and pay a lot of advertising damage, or take [a] chance. We took the chance. We played three or four [Virginia] towns and the print went into North Carolina, from where we intended bringing it to your board; but before we got to it, you heard about it—and you know the rest.”

Trying to shame the censors into sympathizing with him, Micheaux reminded the board of the chronic injustices he suffered as an ordinary black man, much less a race-picture producer, traveling in the South. “I intended writing,” Micheaux continued in his letter, “telling you the truth as done above and make [an] apology; but I was covering the south, riding in cinder-ridden Jim Crow cars all night, and was just so tired and distracted half the time that I never felt like [it]—or was ever composed to set down and explain the why of.

“I am sorry it happened. It was not intentional. You had been most considerate—even sociable with me, and I shall not soon forget the pleasant hour I spent at the board about a year ago. I remarked at the time that
I had a picture that I wanted you to see and give me a criticism on.
Birthright
was that picture. Even at that time I had to almost fly to Huntington, W. Va., from here, and get the print of
Deceit
in person (a theater had played it but had made no kind of effort whatever to send it to Richmond as requested); and if I had not gone there at [my] expense and in person, I could not have got it to you, and it was due to play in Virginia the next day after you reviewed it.