Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (43 page)

The adopted child grows into a beautiful lightskinned mulatto, who agonizes over the fact she has been adopted into a Negro family. This is “Naomi, Negress,” whose racial identity is betrayed only by the color of her eyes. (“Over in the shadows, they seem to be blue,” says Mrs. Saunders, the seamstress. “But here in the daylight they're brown. That's the
Negro in her.”) Naomi could easily “pass” for white. Herself a stepchild, she sneers at other black people as “God's stepchildren.” Though the Saunders family lives in “Coloredtown,” Naomi refuses to mingle with black children and tries to sneak into the whites-only school across town. Her black teacher tries to nurture her, but a hostile Naomi spreads rumors about the teacher's intimacy with another instructor, causing a community uproar. Her stepmother and Naomi's older brother Jimmie, realizing Naomi is mentally imbalanced, defuse a riot of parents by telling the truth about her. Naomi is sent away to a convent.

Cut to ten years later: Jimmie has grown into an honest, handsome fellow; working as a Pullman porter, he has saved thousands of dollars and dreams of buying and farming land. His sweetheart is the daughter of the goodhearted schoolteacher from the first half of the story. Jimmie resists the efforts of a ne'er-do-well friend to persuade him to invest his earnings in a “numbers” racket. Instead, he becomes Micheaux's spokesman for “our group,” voicing disdain toward fellow members of his race who have drifted into a lazy or criminal life.

“Their idea of success is to seek the line of least resistance,” Jimmie tells his girlfriend. “A Negro hates to think. He's a stranger to planning.”

Along comes the seemingly angelic Naomi, “cured” by her convent term. Yet Naomi nurses a strange crush on her handsome older brother, and she resists her stepmother and brother's well-intentioned efforts to marry her off to Clyde, a family friend. “Nice fellow, industrious,” argues her stepmother. But Naomi, who is filled with self-loathing and still phobic about race, finds the dark-skinned Clyde “funny-looking,” with his flat nose and other “typical Negro” features. Jimmie spurns Naomi's weird advances. Clyde hears voices inside his head (Naomi is tricking him from a hiding place), but marries Naomi anyway.

The opening scene is replayed at the end of the story, when Naomi walks out on Clyde and her newborn, giving over her baby boy to her own stepmother, Mrs. Saunders. Naomi has cast her lot with white people. “I'm leaving the Negro race,” Naomi tells the self-sacrificing seamstress. Though hurt and astonished, Mrs. Saunders replies sympathetically, “I did the best I could, but I failed…Now I can only say I'm sorry for you, Naomi. Sorry from the bottom of my heart, and I pray the Lord to forgive you and guide you to God knows whatever.”

Naomi is unfazed. “If you see me, you don't know me, even if you pass me on the street…” she declares—a powerful line lifted almost directly
from the similarly climactic final encounter between the pale-skinned daughter (Fredi Washington) and her “Mammy” (Louise Beavers) in
Imitation of Life.
The Hollywood picture had concluded with Mammy's death and the daughter sobbing her repentance—a mildly uplifting finale. But in his best films Micheaux was an unblinking realist, and his response to
Imitation of Life
was his toughest ending.

Years pass in
God's Stepchildren.
Jimmie marries the schoolteacher's daughter, they raise a family. Naomi's little boy grows up as one of their extended brood, a reality of black America that was often honored in Micheaux pictures. Jimmie and Mrs. Saunders love and care for Naomi's little boy as their own.

True to her vow, Naomi has cut off all contact with those who love her, but can't find happiness with white people. (Surviving records indicate that censors struck a violent scene in which the audience would have learned that Naomi has gotten married to a white husband, who beats and deserts her when he discovers she is a “Negress.”) Homeless and destitute, she takes to lurking outside the Saunders' house, peeking in the windows for a glimpse of her lost child. Like characters in other Micheaux pictures, the boy possesses extrasensory perception; one night he insists that he spies a strange but familiar face outside the windows. Jimmie and Mrs. Saunders rush onto the porch to search around, but when they get there Naomi is gone.

Gone to a bridge overlooking a rushing river, where the film concludes with a stunning montage. Happy images of the intergenerational Saunders family are intermingled with shots of Naomi's sad fate. The tortured “Negress” is glimpsed under glowering skies, teetering on a bridge railing, then plunging into the waters, her hat swirling past in the current. The final title card quotes Galatians 6:7: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

 

Louise Beavers's Hollywood “Mammy” had been a stereotype, however subtly written and performed. Micheaux steered clear of caricature with his version of
Imitation of Life,
making Mrs. Saunders a powerful, positive woman who works hard for her livelihood and independence. It's no accident that this key character has a profession, seamstress, in common with his wife's mother; no accident, either, that Mrs. Micheaux wrote herself into the role.

Indeed, Alice B. Russell was at the center of this extraordinary project in several ways. She had long been a reliable performer in Micheaux's films, but
God's Stepchildren
would be anchored by her rueful smile and Zen-like presence. Besides writing “Naomi, Negress,” she also starred in the film, and was credited as the producer.

Apart from Carman Newsome (as Jimmie) and Ethel Moses (as the schoolteacher/daughter), the cast included Charles “Daddy” Moore, whose many appearances for Micheaux had begun with
The Homesteader;
Moore played the school principal in the first half of the story. Alex Lovejoy was Jimmie's gambler-friend, Jacqueline Lewis played Naomi as a girl, and Gloria Press was the adult Naomi.

The plethora of outdoor scenes suggests that parts of
God's Stepchildren
were photographed in a rural locale, perhaps near Dallas, Texas, where the Sack brothers had invested in a low-budget production facility used by Spencer Williams. But the bulk of the movie was shot in New York and New Jersey in the summer of 1937, with a cobbled-together white crew including editors Leonard Weiss and Patricia Rooney from West Coast Service Studio on Fifty-seventh Street and Recording Laboratories of America on Thirty-eighth Street, respectively; and sound engineer Ed Schabbehar from Producers Service Studio in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Lester Lang was back as Micheaux's director of photography.

Micheaux took as much time as he could shooting
God's Stepchildren,
and then he refused to rush the editing of this important “preachment” film—one of two or three pictures, in any event, that he was editing simultaneously.

 

The third project produced during this impressive spurt, the sound version of
Birthright,
was shot in late 1937.

This was another remake of a silent hit, and likely another film for which Micheaux appropriated the rights. His fondness for T. S. Stribling's novel was bolstered by his nostalgia for Evelyn Preer, whose acclaimed performance as Cissy, the good soul mired in “Niggertown,” had helped make the silent picture a hit. Casting Ethel Moses as Cissy in the remake was a testament to Micheaux's belief in her budding talent and drawing power. The versatile brothers J. Homer Tutt and Salem Tutt Whitney weren't available for the other two main characters, but Alex
Lovejoy would play “Tump” Pack, the returned World War I veteran who makes trouble for Cissy and the idealistic Harvard graduate Peter Siner; and Peter Siner himself would be portrayed by Carman Newsome.

The Sack years were characterized by gradual budget tightening, and
Birthright
is the first of Micheaux's three 1937 productions to look sorely pinched for funds. It's not clear if
any
of the movie was shot in the South; press items reported filming in “the heart of South Jamaica,” between 109th and 110th Avenues, with immigrant Jamaicans standing in for Southern blacks. However, the photography had a vitality as well as austere beauty, thanks to cameraman Robert J. Marshall, who also shot low-budget Yiddish features for Edgar Ulmer.

Others in the acting ensemble included Hazel Diaz and Alice B. Russell, who was again credited as the film's producer. The musical sequences were humdingers. And though Stribling's story was streamlined by the script, though looks and likability were Carman Newsome's main attributes, Micheaux's perspective on Jim Crow practices and the squalor of Southern segregation was still unique, still bracing. He might have soft-pedaled such issues in his “gat-gam-and-jazz” musicals for much of the 1930s, but in
God's Stepchildren
and
Birthright,
Micheaux evoked the fire and brimstone of old.

 

Swing!, God's Stepchildren,
and
Birthright
all appeared in theaters in 1938, a “Banner Year for Negro Movie Industry,” according to a headline in the
Pittsburgh Courier.
As film scholar Clyde Taylor has noted, though, 1938 was also a crisis year: Another headline—the Communist
Daily Worker'
s warning, “Negro Films Must Tell the Truth”—suggested “the opposing perspectives, the boosterism and the skepticism” that greeted each new “all-Negro” film. The skepticism came largely from urban dwellers, which included a burgeoning number of black members of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Their sweeping social critiques extended to the world of cinema.

Micheaux considered himself apolitical, in part because he resisted being pigeonholed. Though Booker T. Washington had long since disappeared from the walls of the homes of characters in all his films, he still revered the Great Educator. But he was as mixed and catholic in his politics as he was interested in nearly every category of show business and lit
erature and the arts. He briefly admired Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa movement, expressed support for Liberia, and at different times in his book and film work he had championed W. E. B. DuBois.

America's black Communists, however, were too extreme for him—too orthodox, too downbeat. Micheaux found U.S.-style Communism a “crazy ideology” that thrived on “hard luck and discontent.” True, the Party supposedly made a priority of fighting for equality and justice for minorities. But Micheaux suspected that many overeducated black men were becoming Communists simply in order to marry the rich, white, often Jewish women, who dominated Party circles in New York. (When musing about Communism in his novels, Micheaux often used
Native Son
author Richard Wright—a one-time Communist who was married to a white woman, and lived downtown, not in Harlem—as a negative example.) Yet Communism was no mere abstraction for Micheaux; some of his Harlem acquaintances, including certain actors in his productions, were Communists, and some of them he liked personally.

No doubt his hostile attitude toward Communism was exacerbated by the surprisingly antagonistic reception the U.S. branch of the Party, and affiliated left-wing groups, accorded one of his prize films:
God's Stepchildren.

Micheaux's answer to
Imitation of Life
opened quietly in mid-1938 at an RKO theater, the Regent at 116th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Critics largely ignored the race-picture pioneer's new film, but ticket sales were brisk—and the audiences included Harlem Communists who had been tipped off in advance. The Harlem Communists were affronted by the characters of Jimmie, who denounces lazy members of the race (“One Negro in a million tries to think”), and Naomi, who is so consumed with self-hatred that she deserts her baby and commits suicide. After the manager of the Regent met with a delegation of outraged viewers, but refused their demand to withdraw the picture, “a storm of protest” erupted (in the words of the
New York Age
), with members of the National Negro Congress, the Frederick Douglass Club, the Harlem Teachers Union, the International Workers Order, the American Youth Congress, the Young Communist League, the Workers Alliance, and the Harlem Committee for Better Pictures for Children assembling to picket the Regent and threaten any theater that dared exhibit the picture.

When Micheaux consented to meet with the protestors, he was called on the carpet by none other than Angelo Herndon, one of the Party's
most popular black leaders. Herndon was only nineteen in 1932 when he organized a massive rally of the jobless in Atlanta, a largely peaceful demonstration that alarmed local officials because of the biracial turnout and Herndon's avowed Communism. Herndon was arrested and charged with inciting insurrection, a capital crime; after being found guilty he was sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a Georgia chain gang.

The Herndon case, like that of the “Scottsboro boys” rape trial in Alabama that same year, was such a notorious example of Jim Crow injustice that his cause stirred support throughout the United States. In 1937 the Supreme Court threw out his conviction, declaring the Georgia insurrection statute a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Herndon was mobbed as a hero in New York and feted at a Group Theatre benefit.

Now, behind closed doors at the Regent, Herndon and other Communist spokesmen sternly lectured Micheaux. Beatrice Goodloe of the Young Communist League warned the press that the “all-star colored” film “slandered Negroes” by “holding them up to ridicule, playing light-skinned Negroes against their darker brothers.” The New York Communists demanded that Micheaux withdraw
God's Stepchildren,
or delete the degrading scenes.

Here was a new form of censorship, one that Micheaux had not expected or encouraged. Surely he was taken aback to be confronted by the heroic Herndon, whose battle with Southern injustice was known to every man and woman in Harlem. The RKO management buckled, promising to withhold
God's Stepchildren
until Micheaux altered the film. Then the race-picture pioneer met with reporters, according to the
New York Age,
and announced that he would delete “offensive portions” of
God's Stepchildren
and preview his next two pictures to “representatives of all the protesting groups” before releasing them to theaters and the general public.