Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (4 page)

The first-class services offered on a Pullman car were integral to the glamour and mystique of train travel, and those services were provided by black men with direct or family ties to slavery, a background the company unofficially thought vital to the psychology of the job. Dressed in spotless uniforms of jacket and necktie, the porters were expected to meet a customer's every demand, or indignity, with an obliging smile. Besides stocking linens and amenities and preparing berths and cars for each run, porters brushed clothes, cleaned the cuspidors and lavatories, and shined shoes (by now a Micheaux specialty). They slept in the “smokers,” the men's toilets.

Pullman porters were paid $25 to $40 weekly, depending on length of service. But porters were expected to furnish, out of their own earnings, the polish and rags used for shining shoes. They paid for their company-assigned uniforms and regular laundering, as well as any food they bought on the train. These and other requirements, which slashed their salaries in half, forced the porters to survive largely on tips.

In 1894, a bitter, national porter strike marked the first organized uprising against such institutionalized inequities. Only in 1925, after a long struggle, was the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters organized, becoming the first major black trade union. Portering was considered by many “a continuation of the slavery the war [Civil War] supposedly ended,” as
Jack Santino observed in
Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle,
his study of the Pullman porters. At the same time, it was among the best of all possible jobs available to ordinary black men of the time—offering, besides income and tips, exciting travel and a certain cachet.

Visiting the main Pullman office in Chicago twice a week, Oscar grew frustrated by his inability to get past the chief clerk. He already had a wide circle of acquaintances, and one day a friend advised him to leapfrog the clerk and approach the superintendent of hiring directly. So the next day Micheaux waylaid the boss as he arrived, making an appeal to the top man even as the chief clerk stared at him furiously. The superintendent left Oscar outside at the railing, but after a few minutes called him inside and asked for references. Micheaux provided letters from employers and friends, after which the superintendent asked if he could afford the company's uniform. When Oscar said yes, he was directed to the company tailor, and to a man who tutored porters in a Pullman car dubbed “The School.”

“The School” sat in a nearby railroad yard for just such tutoring purposes. According to Micheaux, always a ready learner, he absorbed all that was necessary for portering in one day, while other new employees had been in “The School” for five days before they graduated alongside him. All that night, his feverish thoughts about his first assignment, “perhaps to some distant city I had never seen,” had him tossing and turning.

When he arrived at porter headquarters the next day, however, Micheaux discovered that the office was crammed with qualified black men waiting for a mere handful of assignments, including old fellows who were “emergies,” or emergency substitutes, as well as previously discharged or retired employees, who showed up hoping not enough regulars would materialize. He watched with sinking spirits as the sign-out clerk favored the familiar faces, passing up the “emergies” and most new employees. Finally, the clerk called out Oscar's name, and asked him if he felt confident about serving his first car. When Micheaux declared that he was, the clerk paused suspensefully, then delegated him to the Fort Wayne yards in the West District, to prepare the Atlanta sleeper for its next excursion to Washington, D.C. “Put away the linens,” the clerk ordered, “put out combs, brushes, and have the car in order when the train backs down.”

Micheaux “fairly flew” to Sixteenth Street, where the yards held “not
less than seven hundred” passenger and Pullman cars, which had to be cleaned and prepared daily for their runs. After searching and searching, the novice porter found the Atlanta. “O wonderful name!” Micheaux later wrote ecstatically. “She was a brand new observation car just out of the shops. I dared not believe my eyes, and felt that there must be some mistake; surely the company didn't expect to send me out with such a fine car on my first trip.”

Boarding nervously, Micheaux got busy, making the Atlanta “fairly presentable” in time for the rush of arriving passengers, who called out to have their grips stowed, deflectors arranged for their windows, and other routine requests and special favors. Despite the anxiety and confusion he felt, Oscar performed well, though at Pittsburgh he was “chagrined” to learn that his sleeper was going to be turned around and sent back to Chicago.

According to the Pullman employment card of “Oscar Michaux,” this first portering occurred on December 7, 1902. Micheaux had been in Chicago for less than a year; he was a month shy of nineteen years of age.

 

Having passed his trial by fire, Micheaux was put into the rotation and began to make frequent long trips, gradually visiting all of America's major cities east of the Mississippi. He finally made it to the nation's capital, and discovered that Washington, D.C. had quite a substantial Black Belt, too. As Micheaux later wrote, he “had never seen so many colored people. In fact, the entire population seemed to be Negroes.”

Yet Micheaux preferred the rural west, and by February he had wangled a spot on a continuing run that took him through Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho, to Portland, Oregon. In
The Conquest
he rhapsodized about the time he spent gazing out the windows at the wide-open lands, the train hugging the curves as it climbed high in the Rockies, “their ragged peaks towering above in great sepulchral forms, filling me alternately with a feeling of romance or adventure.” It was exhilarating. “I never tired of hearing the t-clack of the trucks,” he wrote, “and the general roar of the train as it thundered over streams and crossings throughout the days and nights across the continent to the Pacific coast. The scenery never grew old, as it was quite varied between Chicago and North
Platte. During the summer it is one large garden farm, dotted with numerous cities, thriving hamlets and towns, fine country homes so characteristic of the great middle west, and is always pleasing to the eye.”

He was struck by the picturesque American Falls of the Snake River in Idaho, where the federal government had constructed a seventy-mile canal and converted “about a quarter of a million acres of Idaho's volcanic ash soil into productive lands that bloom as the rose.” He mused about one day settling near Snake River, “investing in some of its lands and locating, if I should happen to be compelled by stress of circumstances, to change my occupation.”

Around February, Micheaux banked his first one hundred dollars earned as a Pullman porter; his financial “modesty and frugality” would become a fixed lifetime habit. He soon realized, however, that he'd never be able to save much money out of his twenty-five-dollar monthly salary—considering that he had to pay for summer and winter uniforms at his own expense (twenty and twenty-two dollars, respectively); train meals (albeit discounted for employees); the regular laundering of his outfit; and rent for intervals spent in Chicago (no longer with his brother).

The tips were good for about another hundred dollars per month, Micheaux calculated, but that still wasn't enough for a man who aspired to leave portering behind one day and do something grand with his life. That was the evil genius of the Pullman system, which kept porters on a taut leash. No wonder cheating and stealing from customers—and management—was so widespread, even, to an extent, “sanctioned by the company,” wrote Micheaux.

One lucrative tactic was the practice of “knockdowns,” which Micheaux called “a veritable disease among the colored employees.” At one point in the long runs, tickets were sold on board; the company revenue was always underreported by the white conductors, and the porters participated in the conspiracy in exchange for their “skim,” or “knockdown.” “‘Good Conductors,'” wrote Micheaux, “a name applied to ‘color blind' cons, were worth seventy-five, and with the twenty-five dollars salary from the company, I averaged two hundred dollars a month for eighteen months.”

The Portland run was as far as you could get from headquarters, and tailor-made for knockdowns. For a year and a half, Micheaux worked this and other routes, savoring the “great opportunity of observa
tion” train life afforded. He relished the colorful gamut of people as much as the diversity of places. The passengers often wanted to hear themselves talk, and he listened as they unbosomed themselves. Western sheepherders spoke to him of the tricks of sheepherding, farmers of farming.

As in Metropolis, Micheaux talked easily with affluent white people; equally important, he was also a good, watchful listener. In his novel
The Forged Note,
Micheaux's alter ego, Sidney Wyeth, has a carousing, ragtime-playing friend who complains, “I've never seen you drink anything stronger than beer when you've been with me. You seem to go along with me, to see me and the others act a fool.”

Passengers wise and foolish were worth observing; besides advice, travelers gave him valued gifts of whiskey, cast-off clothing, and books. Passengers often left reading matter behind in the sleeping cars, and Micheaux absorbed everything he got his hands on: newspapers, muckraking articles in magazines, government land reports, history books, and novels. He absorbed a wide variety of literature, from Shakespeare's plays to detective stories (he was an unabashed fan of the Nick Carter dime novels) as well as popular Westerns such as Owen Wister's
The Virginian.
He avidly followed the works of the now-forgotten novelist and journalist Maude Radford Warren, who taught literature at the University of Chicago, and who wrote a series of stories extolling the achievements of women pioneers out West.

“What I liked best was some good story with a moral,” Micheaux wrote later, and he praised Warren's stories as “very practical and true to life.” He enjoyed their travelogue quality, too, even seeking out the real-life settings of her tales. “Another feature of her writings which pleased me,” he wrote, “was the fact that many of the characters, unlike the central figures in many stories, who all become fabulously wealthy, were often only fairly successful and gained only a measure of wealth and happiness, that did not reach prohibitive proportions.”

As the trips accumulated, so did the money in his bank account. The knockdowns and graft certainly helped. But Micheaux was continually worried about the notorious company practice of employing incognito “spotters,” as the company detectives were called, and he had the queasy feeling that he was mired in wrongdoing and doomed to be caught. “While I was considered very fortunate by my fellow employees,” Micheaux explained later, “the whole thing filled me with disgust. I suf
fered from a nervous worry and fear of losing my position all the time, and really felt relieved when the end came and I was free to pursue a more commendable occupation.”

The finis was writ between Granger, Washington, and Portland, when Oscar had a run-in with a boozy Irish conductor who was clever at knockdowns but reluctant to yield the porter's fair share. The conductor tried to whittle down Oscar's slice of the extra, and the two had an argument. The debate was settled in Micheaux's favor, but the conductor had been “spotted,” and was promptly fired. “They ‘got' me on that trip” too, Micheaux wrote.

In the end, Oscar decided that the enormously profitable Pullman business was “greedy and inhuman,” oppressing its black porters with “near-slave” wages and conditions. He maintained in
The Conquest
that he had “no apologies or regrets to offer” for his part in the knockdowns and other cheating.

He didn't mention the exact cause of his dismissal, but the company discharge records of “Oscar Michaux” state that he was let go on May 31, 1904, for “Abstracting $5.00 from purse of lady passe.”

 

So that was that. The “stress of circumstances” compelled Oscar to change his profession, or—to use a trick he worked more than once as a filmmaker—to change places.

To the end of his life, Micheaux nurtured a love and nostalgia for Chicago. It was a great and beautiful city, his first home away from Metropolis, which he had abandoned permanently. At the same time, Chicago disappointed, even “disgusted” him in certain ways. The Black Belt had its seamy side, marked by gambling dens, brothels, and a prevalent loafer and criminal presence. Several times in his novels Micheaux complained of the conspicuous “beer cans, drunken men and women” of the Stroll, though Chicago's black underworld also enlivened his films.

While he found cities marvelous, in many ways Micheaux remained a small-town creature, a man of the soil who preferred travel and open land and untamed territory. The Pullman job had hooked him on traveling, and he daydreamed about living out West. Oscar felt “the spirit of Horace Greeley” ringing in his ears. “I come of pioneer stock,” he wrote in his
1943 novel,
The Wind from Nowhere.
“It seems to run in our family and blood to make conquest.”

He decided he ought to buy land somewhere on the vanishing frontier, but how and where? Micheaux considered the Snake River area in Idaho, but worried that the surroundings might be too arid. He thought hard about Iowa, until one day he spoke with an Iowa farmer in a smoking room during a train trip. The farmer told Micheaux he had paid eighty dollars per acre for his agricultural holdings in that state.

Eighty dollars an acre! “I concluded on one thing,” Micheaux explained later, “and that was, if one whose capital was under eight or ten thousand dollars, desired to own a good farm in the great central west he must go where the land was new or raw and undeveloped.”

Until he figured things out, he would continue to work hard and save money. Micheaux decamped to St. Louis, Missouri, where he presented a set of non-Pullman references, and underwent the same tutoring, and was promptly hired by the Southwest Division of the very same company that had just fired him, with the Chicago office none the wiser. Rooming on Pine Street in the Ville neighborhood of St. Louis, Oscar went back to work portering for Pullman on short runs to the west and south, while biding his time on his grander ambitions.