Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (6 page)

Micheaux made friends easily everywhere he went. A big man who loomed over people, he had a salesman's ebullience that won people over. And, one way or another, he was always selling himself. Though he was indeed “well enough acquainted” with a number of prosperous white people, his close friends were members of his own race, and they spanned a spectrum from doctors and lawyers to fellow porters and humble workingmen, not to mention a long list of ne'er-do-wells. He was always coy about lady friends in his fiction, pretending chaste habits. Men “like to be modest,” he wrote in one book, “to appear like they have no loves. It creates sympathy.” But he pursued women in several cities, and wrote to more than one.

“Love is something I had longed for more than anything else,” Micheaux wrote in
The Conquest,
“but my ambition to overcome the vagaries of my race by accomplishing something worthy of note, hadn't given me much time to seek love.”

Foremost in his mind, at Christmas 1904, was Jessie, whom he had come to think of as a possible bride. When he returned from South America, he hastened to Carbondale to visit his sister, and then called on Jessie at her home in nearby Murphysboro. He had grown “tall and rugged,” he boasted in
The Conquest,
but Jessie was also “much taller.” His sister and Jessie's mother excused themselves so the two young people could sit on the settee alone.

Micheaux told Jessie of his “big plans and the air castles I was building on the great plains of the west.” Taking her hand, he was just about to
declare his love for Jessie when “I caught myself and dared not go farther with so serious a subject when I recalled the wild, rough, and lonely place out on the plains.” First, he vowed silently, he would develop his land into a proper home for a husband and wife.

Micheaux returned to St. Louis and his Pullman job, spending most of the winter on excursions to Florida and Massachusetts. He took repeated runs to Boston, where he explored the Roxbury community and immersed himself in sightseeing. Along with the usual landmarks, he was keen to see Trinity Church, home of the Episcopalian clergyman Phillips Brooks, whose collected sermons he had read. A man who revered education, he also paid what must have been poignant visits to the Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Smith College in Northampton, Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge. He joined other tourists at historical sites in downtown Boston, inspecting the Old North Church, the Paul Revere house, the U.S.S.
Constitution,
Faneuil Hall, “and a thousand other reminders of the early heroism, rugged courage, and farseeing greatness of Boston's early citizens.”

Wherever he traveled as a porter, he also kept up with vaudeville and plays and concerts. His appetite for show business had probably begun with the summer riverboat shows that passed through Metropolis when he was growing up. In Chicago his tastes broadened. He had learned to enjoy everything from classical music to spoken recitals to blackface comedy. In writing about the shows he treasured from his travels, he never mentioned that in Boston's “white” theater district, as in the theater districts of all other American cities, he had to endure “nigger heaven” (the widely-used term for the balcony to which black ticket-holders were relegated) and other offensive protocols of segregation—perhaps because the racism was so widely taken for granted.

In Boston, Micheaux was captivated by a performance of Verdi's
Rigoletto,
with the Australian diva Nellie Melba as Gilda and the young Italian tenor Enrico Caruso as the womanizing Count. The Pullman porter's love of music extended to the Irish tenor Chauncy Olcott (composer of “My Wild Irish Rose,” among other songs), and he made a point of seeing
Terence,
Olcott's new musical set in Ireland. Micheaux also recalled attending a “gorgeous and bloodcurdling” revival of
Siberia,
a play that incorporated the infamous Kishinev massacre of 1903. (Two hundred people crowded onstage for the climax, depicting the slaughter of Jews on the streets of Kishinev.)

Micheaux would never again have as much idle time on his hands as he did between runs in Boston during that winter of 1905. After the winter he quit Pullman, vowing never again to porter, and paid Jessie one last visit in Murphysboro. But this visit left him dissatisfied, and as he looked ahead to homesteading in South Dakota, he began to feel “a little lonely,” he wrote later. “With the grim reality of the situation facing me, I now began to steel my nerves for a lot of new experience which soon came thick and fast.”

His savings had crept back up to $3,000 by the time he left St. Louis for Bonesteel around the first of April 1905.

 

When Slater, his locator, met him in Bonesteel, the town was abuzz with the news that Dallas, the fledgling town perched on a hill near Micheaux's homestead, was being promoted as the next railhead after Bonesteel. Micheaux could have sold his new land immediately for a “neat advance over what I had paid,” but he insisted that he had no intention of selling; he was there to farm the land. This didn't please Slater, and automatically set the newcomer apart from many other area homesteaders, who were more interested in speculation than actually tilling the soil.

As the two men rode in Dad Burpee's red stagecoach over the thirty miles to Dallas, Micheaux couldn't help but notice many brand new structures in the rival towns, “strung in a northwesterly direction across the country,” in Micheaux's words, like stars forming a constellation. “It was a long ride,” he wrote later, “but I was beside myself with enthusiasm.”

Arriving in Dallas, “the scene of much activity,” Micheaux found that his reputation as the first and only “colored homesteader” had preceded him. “When I stepped from the stage before the post office,” he recalled, “the many knowing glances informed me that I was being looked for.” Slater introduced him to the Dallas postmaster, then ushered him into the presence of the most important man in town: Ernest A. Jackson, the president of both the bank and the townsite company that was touting Dallas as the best railhead.

Jackson was the second of three sons of Frank D. Jackson, who had served as the Republican governor of Iowa from 1894 to 1896, and who now presided over the Royal Union Insurance Company in Des Moines,
bankrolling the family's real estate and commercial ventures. Jackson's father and his two brothers, Frank and Graydon, were also officers of the Dallas bank; they directed the family's area investments, which included two huge cattle ranches. One, the Mulehead, northeast of Bonesteel, eventually swelled to 169,000 acres.

The Jacksons maintained a cozy relationship with Marvin Hughitt, the hard-driving leader of the Chicago & North Western, who had built his railroad up from a regional carrier into one of the nation's largest. Dubbed “King Marvin,” Hughitt had spearheaded the opening of South Dakota to railroads, initially after gold was discovered in the Black Hills. Farsighted in championing train lines to the Missouri River, Hughitt believed that rail routes would pave the way for settlers, whose growing numbers would in turn provide freight for trains, making his investment profitable. The railroad platted the towns, then subcontracted the tracks, the roads, and the buildings.

Besides money and connections, indispensable in all their dealmaking, the Jacksons evinced something else that Micheaux admired: they had swagger. The Jacksons built frontier towns with more ease than other people carved whistles out of wood, manipulating the land sales, anointing townsites, making each new settled place the hub of an area, the county seat, the prime market, the main railhead—before moving on to the next bargain locale.

Meeting Ernest Jackson's gaze, Micheaux shook the muckety-muck's hand. Surprisingly—or not, considering Micheaux's cultivated ability to relate to rich white people—the newly arrived homesteader felt an instant bond with the town's most prominent citizen. “My long experience with all classes of humanity had made me somewhat of a student of human nature,” Micheaux wrote later in
The Conquest,
“and I could see at a glance that here was a person of unusual aggressiveness and great capacity for doing things.”

That night, over dinner at the hotel he owned, Jackson offered to buy Micheaux's relinquishment and double his investment. “I am not here to sell,” Micheaux declared. “I am here to make good, or die trying.” They sized each other up, and were mutually impressed. “I admired the fellow,” Micheaux decided. Jackson reminded him of “characters in plays that I greatly admired, where great courage, strength of character, and firm decision were displayed.” Jackson seemed the embodiment of the ruthless
capitalist dubbed “The Octopus” in
The Lion and the Mouse,
an absorbing stage drama Micheaux had watched in Boston. Jackson also evoked Otis Skinner's swashbuckling scoundrel, Colonel Philippe Bridau, from another play Micheaux recalled seeing,
The Honor of the Family
—a dramatization of Balzac's
La Rabouilleuse.

The next day, after a good night's sleep, Micheaux ventured out to look over his claim. But for sections burned during a winter prairie fire, the land was as stunningly beautiful as he remembered.

Drawing five hundred dollars from Ernest Jackson's bank on his Chicago account, Micheaux returned to Bonesteel intending to purchase an inexpensive team of horses. There was only one problem: he didn't really know one horse from another. The Michaux family had never had more than a couple of horses in Metropolis. “I looked at so many teams,” Micheaux wrote later, “that all of them began to look alike. I am sure I must have looked at five hundred different horses, more in an effort to appear as a conservative buyer than to buy the best team.”

Finally he bought “a team of big plugs” from a man whom he later ascertained was a notorious grafter, and who subsequently bragged widely of having effected the sale by gulling a “coon.” One of the horses was old and rode awkwardly; the other was a four-year-old gelding with two feet “badly wire cut.” Micheaux also bought lumber for a small house and barn, along with an old wagon, “one wheel of which the blacksmith had forgotten to grease.” Then he “worked hard all day getting loaded and wearied, sick and discouraged.” It wasn't until five o'clock in the afternoon that he was ready to start the thirty-mile drive back to Dallas.

After two miles the big old horse began to hobble, and Micheaux's wagon wheels started to smoke. The sun went down, and a cold east wind came up—the kind of evil, frigid blowing that shot through one's bones and became, in Micheaux's fiction and films, a symbolic obstacle to a decent man's character and ambitions. “The fact that I was a stranger in a strange land, inhabited wholly by people not my own race, did not tend to cheer my gloomy spirits,” Micheaux wrote later. Rosebud country “might be all right in July, but never in April.”

He turned around and headed back to Bonesteel for the night. The next day he sold the hobbled horse at a considerable loss, then hired a new horse and drove to Dallas, stopping in Herrick briefly to engage a sod mason who was also a carpenter. It took them five days to dig a well
and erect a small frame barn and house. The barn was big enough for three horses, and the sod house was roughly the same size: fourteen by sixteen.

The low, oblong sod house had a hipped roof of two by fours and was covered by plain boards with tar paper; the sod was grass turned downward, laid side by side, its cracks filled with sand. There were two small windows, one door, and the floor was buffalo grass. In one corner stood Micheaux's bed (“large, wide, dirty—'tis true—but a warm bed, nevertheless”), in another a small table. There was a bin for horse's grain, and for cooking and warmth a monkey stove with an oven on the pipe (“a little two-hole burner gasoline”).

Micheaux moved in at the end of the first week of April. Already feeling overwhelmed, he wrote another plaintive letter to Jessie.

 

The horses were always straying, and it took time before Micheaux learned that there was no such thing as a cheap horse worth the savings. He acquired a local reputation as a patsy for horse traders, he recalled. “Whenever anybody with horses to trade came” to Dallas, Micheaux recalled, “they were advised to go over to the sod house north of town and see the colored man. He was fond of trading horses, yes, he fairly doted on it.”

He had the same trouble buying mules to help break out his claim. “Back on our farm in southern Illinois,” he wrote later, “mules were thought to be capable of doing more work than horses and eat less grain.” The team he bought, named Jack and Jenny, were lazy and balkish. He tried whipping them, but that didn't help much. He swapped Jack to a passing trader and acquired a new mule, except this one was not only lazy but fiendish. Micheaux seemed cursed with fiendish mules, once getting spiked in the temple so hard that he was out cold for hours; the incident was almost his “ending,” he recalled. So he became known as a patsy for mule traders, too.

Growing up in southern Illinois he had been the family salesman, doing as little plowing as possible. Now he learned the hard way that different kinds of plows were best for different kinds of soil. His was a gummy soil, especially in April after a long winter. Micheaux started out with a standard square-cut, which caused the roots and grasses to clump
on the blade, prompting the plow, pulled by ornery mules, to hop and skip across the ground. Not for some time did he discover that a long, slanting “breaking plow” severed the deep roots more cleanly. That entire first summer, he never went fifty feet without having to stop and recoup.

Anecdotes about Micheaux's troubles with horses, mules, and plows entertained area homesteaders, nearly all of them white. Reviewing Micheaux's fictionalized accounts, one gets the sense that a perpetual cluster of neighbors and passersby stood on the sidelines, observing his struggles with mixed admiration and bemusement.