Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (59 page)

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According to the Bureau of Land Management, a township is a major subdivision of land under the survey system and is approximately six miles square containing more than 20,000 acres. “A township is identified by its relationship to a base line and a principal meridian,” according to the BLM website. “The Section Number identifies a tract of land, usually one mile square, within a township. Most townships contain thirty-six sections. Standard sections contain 640 acres. A section number identifies each section within a township.”

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Like many writers and filmmakers, Micheaux liked to play games with names. “Binga” was an in-joke allusion to a prominent black entrepreneur who established the first black-owned bank in Chicago, Jesse C. Binga. Binga probably took early shares in Micheaux's publishing and film company.

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It's unclear if Micheaux ever held such a job, which was how he was identified in the article. “Rosebud County” does not exist, and, though it may have been a typo, Micheaux was not adverse to inventing a county, or a title for himself.

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Upon its republication in 1921, the author of
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
was revealed to be one of the forefathers of the Harlem Renaissance, the poet, composer, and musician James Weldon Johnson, who had written anonymously in 1912 partly as a literary device, and partly because he was then serving as the U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua. Though the novel was regarded, at the time that Micheaux read it, as veiled autobiography, it turned out to be entirely a fiction of Johnson's concoction.

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Actually, that was much more than Martin Eden's output; in the novel London says repeatedly that Eden wrote “three thousand words a day.”

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Not to be confused with Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette's Progressive Party. Harrop tried to enlist Henry Ford as his party's presidential candidate in 1924, but Ford demurred and Robert R. Pointer was the presidential aspirant of the People's Progressive Party. Later, Harrop withdrew and endorsed La Follette.

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There is no mention of Jews in
The Conquest,
but in Micheaux's second version of his life story,
The Homesteader
—written after his stay in Atlanta and
The Forged Note
—the Rosebud homesteader gained a conspicuously Jewish neighbor, Isaac Syfe, whose unsavory portrait contained a whiff of anti-Semitism. Syfe was part of a small group of like-minded friends, including an ex-preacher, engaged in nefarious activities on the prairie.

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Micheaux's wording was probably inspired by W. E. B. DuBois's inscription for
The Quest for the Silver Fleece
(1911), which reads, “To One Whose Name May Not Be Written.”

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The racial subtext to this motif is that blue or green eye colors are seldom seen in African-Americans unless there is an interracial lineage.

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According to film historian Scott Eyman, whose book
The Speed of Sound
chronicles the end of the silent era, “A reel of film was 1,000 feet. Running at the silent speed of 16 to 18 frames a second was the norm, around 10–12 minutes per reel.” But the norms varied.

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Bull's Eye
was a 1917 Universal serial starring Eddie Polo, with Noble Johnson in a supporting role.

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Founded by the Chicago-born pioneering motion picture producer and entrepreneur William N. Selig, the Selig Polyscope complex of buildings and acreage, bounded by Irving Park Boulevard, Claremont and Western Avenues, and Byron Street, had been in operation since 1896, though actual production had started to languish in 1917.

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Black theater and film scholar Sister Francesca Thompson also bears the distinction of being the daughter of actress Evelyn Preer and actor Edward Thompson, both of whom played leads for the Lafayette Players and in Micheaux films. In articles and books she is one of the best published sources on her mother and father as well as the Players.

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The one- to three-day bookings and humble ticket prices were geared to the lower economics of poor black communities and helps to explain why, throughout his film career, it was so difficult for Micheaux to turn a profit. In the white, first-run theaters in the downtowns of major U.S. cities at this time, the going rate for tickets to Hollywood pictures was $1 or $1.50. Audiences were paying up to three dollars for best seats to some D. W. Griffith films in New York, in 1919.

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Indeed, the low number of prints is one key reason why the majority of Hollywood's silent films are also “lost.”

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Incidentally, the Chicago Commission on Race Relations later determined that discriminatory practices of moviegoing contributed to the anger that fueled the riot. Black people in Chicago were routinely “turned away from big downtown theaters, guided to second rate seats, or forced to move at the request of white patrons,” according to Mary Carbine in “The Finest Outside the Loop: Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1905–1928.”

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Piney Woods was—is—an actual all-black boarding school in rural Mississippi. Such real-life references were a constant pleasure of Micheaux's films. White Hollywood, by comparison, maintained busy legal departments that attempted to avoid expensive consent agreements and infringement lawsuits by disguising the actual names of people and places.

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Actress Evelyn Preer recalled the ending to that near-rape scene (missing from the incomplete print as it exists today) as being “my lover broke down the door and leaped on the villain's back.” But nothing in the only extant version of
Within Our Gates
explains whether the white assailant in the scene is the schoolteacher's father by previous rape, or concubinage. “This suggests that these scenes may have offended some censor boards, theater owners, or archivists,” wrote Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence in their book
Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences.

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This may be Lawrence Chenault, making his first appearance for Micheaux billed under another name.

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Walton, a pioneering critic of race pictures for the
New York Age
and
Amsterdam News,
had been a part-owner and manager of the Lafayette Theater at the time the Lafayette Players were organized, in 1916. Later, he was appointed Minister (Ambassador) to Liberia on behalf of the U.S. government, serving in that capacity from 1935 to 1946, before returning to journalism.

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Shortly after filming
Synbol of the Unconquered,
Thompson suffered an illness which caused his death in 1922, at age 34.

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This letter, incidentally, went on to demonstrate Micheaux's technical know-how, deriding the camerawork of
A Prince of His Race
as inferior and attributing the inferiority “to the use of some Cooper-Hewitt banks alternating current[s] which flicker alternately through all the interiors and refuse to permit a fade-out with any degree of smoothness at all.”

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Though, in this letter, Chesnutt does not specify which Micheaux picture he saw, it must have been
Within Our Gates
or
The Brute.

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In 1921, “race detectives” existed only in short stories and magazine fiction. Scholars generally pinpoint Rudolph Fisher's
The Conjure Man,
published in 1932, as the first black detective novel written by a black American.

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The Afro-American
was (and is) based in Baltimore and is sometimes referred to as
The Baltimore Afro-American.
But there were Washington, D.C. and other local editions, and the newspaper ranged over the mid-Atlantic in its coverage, circulating widely in many black belts south of Harlem. In its heyday it was as national a black newspaper as the
Chicago Defender
or the
Pittsburgh Courier.

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The one hundred dollar weekly salary was more than Micheaux normally paid his leads and the gross-income clause was also unusual. But this was canny dealmaking on Micheaux's part, demonstrating Robeson's naïveté. Certainly no Micheaux picture ever had grossed $40,000, and if one ever happened to do so over time, Micheaux would be the only person to know about it.

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Not white or Hollywood enough for some theaters or critics, Micheaux films were “too white” and Hollywoodish for others. There was less consensus among black film reviewers than there was among white critics, who were in a better position to form big-city organizations like the New York Film Critics to at least pretend a united front with their annual “best” awards. Sylvester Russell, who had railed against Micheaux's “objectionable race features” earlier in the decade, now complained, for example, that “all the features of artifice in scenario and scenic calculations to which the white man has resorted, Mr. Micheaux has now acquired.”

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“Marcus Garland” may have started filming and shut down. But the project was resurrected as the 1932 race picture
The Black King,
which was written and directed by Donald Heywood, and starred A. B. DeComathiere as the Marcus Garvey figure.

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“Vanity” is a title that no scholar has been able to authenticate as a published Zora Neale Hurston story. Likewise, the Mary White Ovington play, if it actually existed, was unproduced.