Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (8 page)

Jackson and other wheeler-dealers often stopped for their clients to meet Micheaux, as his land was considered “the cream of the county as to location, soil, and other advantages,” in his words. “I was known as a booster,” Micheaux wrote. “Instead of being nervous over meeting me, the dealers would drive into the yards or into the fields, and as I liked to talk, introduce the prospective buyers to me, and we would engage in a long conversation at times.”

Having traveled extensively in the central states—indeed through much of America—Micheaux relaxed the nervous newcomers with his droll observations about their home counties. He also held forth about Gregory and Tripp counties, discoursing on the lay of the land and the quality of the soil in areas where homesteads were available. He spoke knowledgeably about farms that seemed “rougher and less desirable,” pointing out the fact that water for these plots could be “easily obtained in the draws and hills,” though he recognized that the more attractive high lands sold at “higher prices, and much quicker, regardless of the obvious defects.”

The Tripp County registration was set for October 7, 1908, and it would run for ten days at registration points including Gregory and Dallas. Swept up in the mania, Micheaux wrote letters to black friends and relatives, urging them to take advantage of the Tripp lottery and hasten to the plains. He later estimated that he sent letters, articles, or pamphlets to
one hundred people, as well as “different newspapers edited by colored people, in the east and other places.” When the great day dawned, however, he was disappointed and disgusted to realize that, of the thousands of people converging on Gregory and Dallas, only one new “colored person” had accepted his invitation to come and invest in land there—his own brother from Chicago! William drew a high number and returned to the Black Belt without a homestead.

The crowds on the streets of Gregory and Dallas that day were “more like the crowds on Broadway or State Street on a busy day than Main Street in a burg of the prairie,” Micheaux later wrote. Among other come-ons, Gregory had introduced an Information Bureau and ladies' rest rooms. But Dallas, where the Jackson brothers were in charge of the lavish hospitality, offered tents for gambling, and rivers of liquor. The town was crawling with gamblers of every type (“from the ‘tin horn' and ‘piker' class to the ‘fat professionals,'” in Micheaux's words), and pickpockets, con men, and prostitutes were out in force. “The sidewalks were crowded from morn till night,” Micheaux wrote. “The registration booths and the saloons never closed, and more automobiles than I had ever seen in a country town up to that time, roared, and with their clattering noise, took the people hurriedly across the reservation to the west.”

As the close of registration neared, a prairie fire sprang up. Blown by high winds, it came surging across the plains toward Dallas, threatening not only the wooden businesses and houses, but roughly ten thousand land-seekers and sightseers who had gathered in the town for the nonstop speculating and partying. Unlike Gregory, which had been intentionally built on low ground, where water collected during the rains, the new Dallas—like old Dallas—was on a hill and constantly beset by a lack of water.

Micheaux was out harvesting flax in his fields some miles away when the prairie fire was spotted late that afternoon. The approaching cloud of smoke, “with the little city lying silent before it,” reminded him of “a picture of Pompeii before Vesuvius.” Dallas rushed out its chemical fire engine and water hose, but the strong wind whisked the chemicals into the air, and the water from the hose flowed weakly for a few minutes before petering out. Ernest Jackson “bravely” led a counterattack with buckets and wet blankets. Micheaux rushed over from his claim to join in the effort. Even the neighboring Gregoryites stopped their merrymaking at the prospect of a conflagration threatening their “hated rival,” forming vol
unteer brigades that loaded water barrels into wagons before racing across the five miles to Dallas.

When the prairie fire reached Dallas, the conflagration destroyed the first magnificent residence it touched, then another and another: “ten houses went up like chaff,” Micheaux recalled. Dallas's water brigade was heavily taxed, as the flames spread. Then, all of a sudden—“like a miracle,” Micheaux wrote—“the wind quieted down, changed, and in less than twenty minutes was blowing a gale from the east, starting the fire back over the ground over which it had burned. There it sputtered, flickered, and with a few sparks went out.”

At that very moment, the first Gregory rescue wagon arrived, drawn by lathered, wild-eyed mules and overloaded with barrels. The Jacksons—“who were said to resemble Mississippi steamboat roustabouts on a hot day”—curtly informed the Gregoryites that Dallas didn't need their damn water.

The fire's miraculous early end transformed a potential death blow for Dallas into a community triumph. Perhaps foolishly, the throngs of speculators were heartened rather than scared off by the town's narrow escape. Micheaux, who had freighted “one of the first loads of lumber” to help build “New Dallas” not long before, mused privately on these dizzying events, that swiftly and sensationally transformed his world. He was living “not in a wilderness—as stated in some of the letters I had received from colored friends in reply to my letter that informed them of the opening—but in the midst of advancement and action.”

When the smoke cleared and the lottery was finished, nearly 115,000 people had registered for six thousand homesteads, and Dallas had lured the greatest number of applicants, besting Gregory with 43,000 to 7,000. The Dallas hotels, some charging a dollar a person, had raked in “small fortunes, while the saloons were said to have averaged over one thousand dollars a day,” according to Micheaux. “After the opening,” he added drily, “land sold like hot hamburger sandwiches had a few weeks before.”

 

Micheaux had learned his lesson with the first lottery he attended, and though he probably registered for a Tripp claim, his expectations weren't high, and he was prepared to bide his time for the relinquishments.

The rain had been incessant throughout the summer of 1908, and
Micheaux had become extremely proficient at cultivating his land, so much so that this man, who at first couldn't tell one horse or plow from another, was now farming with ingenious methods that made him the envy of other homesteaders. At one point Micheaux utilized a team of “eight horses pulling a [grain] binder with a seeder on behind. Harvesting and seeding at the same time was an innovation all his own,” recalled neighbor Don Coonen.

Micheaux sold his corn, flax, wheat, and oats for thirty-five hundred dollars that season. After four years of homesteading in South Dakota, he estimated that he owned land and stock “to the value of twenty thousand dollars” and “was only two thousand dollars in debt.”

But he had kept “bach”—lived as a bachelor—for too long. His land and life felt empty without a woman there to share it. He wanted a soulmate, and he even had a phrase for the ideal female he visualized, a phrase that recurs in his books and films: the “One True Woman.” And in the summer of 1908, when everyone else was being driven into a frenzy by the Tripp County lottery, Micheaux's real crisis was that he had fallen in love with someone: a white woman, the daughter of a neighboring settler.

There is no evidence of this person's identity beyond what we can deduce from Micheaux's novels. But the fact that he wrote passionately about her in three autobiographical novels—
The Conquest, The Homesteader,
and
The Wind from Nowhere
—and later depicted her in several films drawing on his life story, makes nearly every Micheaux scholar who has seriously examined the question believe that this woman existed, and that the two had an anguished, thwarted romance that exerted a lasting effect on Micheaux. Though Micheaux's fictional portraits of this woman varied somewhat in their identifying details, important elements remained the same in each incarnation.

Early in 1908, according to
The Conquest,
a Scottish family consisting of a “a widower, two sons and two daughters,” moved from Indiana onto land close to his main Gregory County claim. (In later versions there is only one daughter, though the family is still Scotch and from Indiana.) The friendly neighbors became frequent visitors; Micheaux hired one son to help out with his farming, and occasionally, when Micheaux was at the Scottish family's farm and darkness fell, he would stay overnight in the barn.

The older of the daughters was “a beautiful blonde maiden,” about twenty years of age, who was in charge of the household duties.

The young woman hadn't graduated from high school, but she kept a diary, read to her father, and wrote letters for the family. For Micheaux she was a kindred spirit, a reader and a writer, “an unusually intelligent girl,” in his words, “anxious to improve her mind.” Innocently taking her under wing, the “colored homesteader” passed on newspapers and magazines to his blonde neighbor, along with favorite books from his collection. From time to time, they would sit and discuss what they were reading. The “Scotch girl” also composed verse and wrote songs, and Micheaux helped her out there, too, apparently finding a publishing company that purchased some of her compositions and paid her fifty dollars.

“Before long, however,” Micheaux wrote, “and without any intention of being other than kind, I found myself drawn to her in a way that threatened to become serious. While custom frowns on even the discussion of the amalgamation of races, it is only human to be kind, and it was only my intention to encourage the desire to improve, which I could see in her, but I found myself on the verge of falling in love with her. To make matters more awkward, that love was being returned.”

According to Micheaux, their situation reached “a stage of embarrassment” one day, when they were reading
Othello
together, Shakespeare's famous play about a Moor whose happy marriage to a white noblewoman is poisoned by jealousy. This anecdote seems almost too good to be true, and perhaps Micheaux was adding literary flair (and a sheen of legitimacy) to the true story. Whatever happened, the event as he told it foreshadows the two greatest, recurring, romantic themes of his work: the “One True Woman,” the black soulmate he (and his protagonists) would seek; and the white woman by whom they would be tempted, only to recoil in horror at the dangerous implications of the union.

As Micheaux recalled it, the Scottish blonde was sitting at a table and he was standing over her as they reached the story's climax, in which Othello is driven by the machinations of Iago to murder his beloved Desdemona. “As if by instinct,” Micheaux wrote, she looked up, their eyes meeting. “When I came to myself,” he said, “I had kissed her twice on the lips she held up.”

After that one encounter, however, he felt torn and foolish and endeavored to keep his distance from the blonde neighbor. “During the time I had lived among the white people,” Micheaux wrote in
The Conquest,
“I had kept my place as regards custom, and had been treated with
every courtesy and respect; had been referred to in the local newspapers in the most complimentary terms…. But when the reality of the situation dawned upon me, I became in a way frightened, for I did not by any means want to fall in love with a white girl. I had always disapproved of intermarriage, considering it as being above all things the very thing that a colored man could not even think of.”

Racial intermarriage—what was called “miscegenation”—was not only against accepted custom in most parts of America at the time, in many places it was expressly illegal. Micheaux knew the South Dakota legislature was busy promoting an antimiscegenation statute, forbidding cohabitation or intermarriage between the races and making the crime punishable by a thousand-dollar fine, ten years' imprisonment, or both. That law would eventually pass in South Dakota in 1909, and in
The Conquest
Micheaux wrote of a case he had followed where “the daughter of the only colored farmer” besides himself in all of South Dakota was “prevented from marrying a white man, at the altar,” by terms of this law.

Quite apart from custom or law, Micheaux was tormented by his private thoughts on the issue. Hadn't he written to Jessie, saying that he didn't like the town barber, in part because the barber was married to a white woman? He was acutely aware of certain prominent people—famous examples in his mind—who were “of mixed blood, but never admitted it.” Among these was a wealthy banker from a northern Nebraska town whom everyone knew was “mixed blood,” though he “passed” as white. Spotting this banker's younger brother attending a baseball game in Gregory one day, surrounded by white friends, Micheaux caught his eye. “He looked away quickly, but I shall not soon forget that moment of social recognition,” Micheaux wrote.

The banker and his relatives were ashamed of their mixed-race lineage. They had no “race loyalty,” in Micheaux's opinion. Indeed, they evinced a “terror of their race; disowning and denying the blood that coursed through their veins; claiming to be of some foreign descent; in fact anything to hide or conceal the mixture of Ethiopian.” Micheaux felt he could never curse his own future children to lie and masquerade in such degrading fashion. He turned the problem over and over in his mind, disturbed by it, and disturbed that he couldn't get the subject out of his head.

One day, Micheaux happened to visit his Scottish neighbors and there he came upon the blonde maiden alone. She hadn't expected him, and it was obvious that she had been weeping. “Well, what is a fellow going to
do?” Micheaux wrote later. “What I did was to take her into my arms and in spite of all the custom, loyalty, or dignity of either Ethiopian or the Caucasian race, loved her like a lover.”