Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (60 page)

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One mystery, among the many about Alice B. Russell, is the exact year of her birth, which fluctuates in official documents. The 1900 census, which shows her birth as June 30, 1889, is probably the most reliable. A few years were shaved off in the 1910 census. Her 1926 marriage certificate suggests she was born in 1893. Her social security application attests she was born in 1899. Her obituary and death certificate indicate 1892.

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“Because of his fair skin and Venezuelan background,” wrote Bernard L. Peterson Jr. in his authoritative
Profiles of African-American Stage Performers and Theater People, 1816–1960,
Monagas “was thought by the White cast to be White himself, since it was the custom at that time for Black roles to be often played by White actors.”

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Downing died at age 82 in February 1928, shortly before the release of
Thirty Years Later.

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But records are spotty and it is possible Russell, immediately after her marriage to Micheaux, took roles in
The Millionaire
and
Thirty Years Later,
which preceded
The Broken Violin.

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A unique musical combining comedy, drama, fantasy, folklore, and spiritual reflection, with some ninety-five black performers among the cast and chorus,
Green Pastures
was hailed by critics, including J. Brooks Atkinson of the
New York Times,
who said it was “best described as Uncle Remus's ‘Story of the Bible.'” Harrison played De Lawd on Broadway, road, and revival companies for a total of 1,675 performances, before collapsing in his dressing room before the show at the Mansfield Theatre in 1935, dying shortly thereafter.

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There were reports in the black press that the
Hallelujah!
cast challenged the “objectionable phrases” in the Hollywood script and that their salaries were “one-fifth to one-tenth of what they should have been” for white actors. According to a July 15, 1930 piece in
The Baltimore Afro-American,
one-time Micheaux actor William E. Fountaine had a scene in which he was supposed to call a black character a “big coon.” “O, my God!” he complained aloud, “you don't mean for me to say that, I know. Not me. Why, man, I wouldn't dare go back to Harlem.”

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Henry Francis Downing was a relatively obscure author, better known in London than America, and by 1928, the year Charles W. Chesnutt received the NAACP Spingarn Medal for his lifetime of literary accomplishment, his books were out of print.

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Lorenzo Tucker said Micheaux himself thought there was weak acting by the novice male lead. Tucker “insisted that a second version of the film [
The Exile
] was made shortly after the first version,” wrote Richard Grupenhoff in his biography of the actor, “because Micheaux was unhappy with the performance of Stanley [Stanleigh] Morrell in the title role. Tucker said that numerous scenes were shot over with him in the lead role, which probably accounts for the posters that announce him as a leading player. If Micheaux did make another version of
The Exile
it has been lost, or else he abandoned the idea of completing the second version.”

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Leo Rosten's reliable
The Joys of Yiddish
lists several definitions for “shvartzer,” including, simply, “black,” and “unskilled,” while noting that the term and its variants were “‘inside' words among Jews—cryptonyms for Negro servants or employees.” Rosten wrote: “Since the growth of the civil rights movement, these uses have declined.”

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Some filmographies indicate that Mrs. Micheaux took this producing credit on several of her husband's last silent films before surrendering it briefly on
The Exile.
Interestingly, the “A. Burton Russell” allowed theater owners and managers to assume Micheaux's producer was a man.

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The third story in
Ten Minutes to Live
may well have been recycled from
Harlem After Midnight,
which also makes mention of the kidnapping of “a wealthy Jew” and has Micheaux acting a law-enforcement role.

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While
The Afro-American
was sympathetic to the complaints of the hometown vaudevillians, the Baltimore paper acknowledged, when reporting the lawsuit, that “act-lifting is one of the most overworked practices of the stage,” and that Micheaux was hardly alone if he indulged in such borrowings.

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A product of Chicago's Black Belt, Ralph Metcalfe was a storied sprinter, a record-holder in college, who finished third in the 200-meter dash in the 1932 Summer Olympics and second in the 1936 Summer Olympics (behind Jesse Owens). He earned a gold medal as part of the 4-by-100-meter relay team that set a world record in 1936. Later, Metcalfe became a Chicago city councilman and U.S. congressman.

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The actual note in the case contained similar language and colloquialisms and misspellings: “he said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.”

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Hazel Diaz plays Eloise in Birmingham and Cora in Harlem, while Alex Lovejoy is Lem in the South and “Big Yellow” in New York. The name “Lem” might remind audiences of Lovejoy's starring role in a previous Micheaux production,
Lem Hawkins' Confession.

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The capital letters are Muse's stylistic device in his original column.

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Jones the son is well known to film fans for playing Darth Vader in the
Star Wars
series. Since the late 1950s, he has had a long, high-profile career on Broadway and in other media, playing everything from leads in Shakespeare to recurring roles in television series. His famous voice is instantly recognizable in commercials or, for example, as the call-out of CNN. Jones wrote about his father and Micheaux in his autobiography
Voices and Silences.

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Although lynchings understandably haunt the African-American psyche to this day, in truth, lynchings had become more aggressively publicized and prosecuted, and by the end of the 1930s there was a decline in their frequency across America. Lynching statistics are notoriously unreliable, but data kept by the Tuskegee Institute shows a drop-off beginning in 1936.

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The “talking parrot” was Micheaux's curious grace note, but the main reference is to the blues song “Stagger Lee,” which is based on the myth of “Stacker Lee.”

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Chesnutt's hometown in North Carolina, disguised with another name in
The House Behind the Cedars,
is expressly identified by Micheaux in
The Masquerade.

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Like Sack Amusement Enterprises before it, Astor went over to foreign-language films almost entirely, and subsequently achieved tremendous success, in the early 1960s, as a distributor of Italian and French New Wave films, bringing
La Dolce Vita
and
Last Year in Marienbad,
for example, to American moviegoers.