Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (36 page)

Far worse, according to Lewis, were the racial transgressions in Micheaux's film. The
New York Age
columnist scorned
A Daughter of the Congo
for its “persistent vaunting of interracial color fetishism,” raising the issue, like other critics before him, of the director's “artificial association of nobility with lightness and villainy with blackness.” Making his own informal tally of the skin colors of Micheaux's characters, Lewis found the balance skewed. “All the noble characters are high yellows; all the ignoble ones are black,” he wrote. “Only one of the yellow characters is vicious, while only one of the black characters, the debauched president of the republic, is a person of dignity.”

Micheaux's Africans behaved as though they were “preposterously stupid,” Lewis complained, whereas even “white movie magnates” in Hollywood had become more “Negro-conscious” lately. Major white-studio productions such as
Three Feathers, Thunderbolt, Hearts in Dixie
and
Hallelujah!
had made earnest and “honest efforts to present Negro character as faithfully as they present Caucasian character,” according to Lewis.

Lewis wrapped up his scolding on a mildly forgiving note. “Every man, no matter what line he works in, has at least one bad job under his hat,” the
New York Age
columnist concluded. “Perhaps
A Daughter of the Congo
was the one bad production Mr. Micheaux was booked to make. Now that he has got it out of his system, let us hope he will return to form and repeat his sound work of earlier days.”

Micheaux had been accused of many things in his career, but this was the first time he was accused of being shamelessly slapdash. It was a charge that lingers with some critics today—but one that overlooks the sheer force of Micheaux's will power, which kept him going even when dire circumstances threw off his artistic barometer.

Whether
A Daughter of the Congo
was truly wretched, or whether the few who saluted Micheaux's African flight of fancy (the
Pittsburgh
Courier
hailed the picture as “tensely realistic”) were more on target, will never be known, unless, by some miracle, a print of the “lost” work should materialize today. Perhaps the only film that could truly measure up to its notoriety would be a documentary about its
making.
“The Making of
A Daughter of the Congo
”: That would be a record of daring, ingenuity, chicanery, and tenacity.

Micheaux had made two dozen motion pictures since
The Homesteader.
Barely solvent, he took a thorough drubbing by censors and critics for this pair of “part-talkie” films. Few expected him to rise from the mat.

 

Micheaux had compounded his problems with his usual ballyhoo, releasing “all-talking” advertisements for
Easy Street
and
A Daughter of the Congo
when the films were really only “part-talkies.”
Hallelujah!
and the other recent Hollywood pictures cited by Theophilus Lewis were exciting largely because they were indeed “all-talking, singing, and dancing.” Not all members of the black press hailed such major white-studio productions as social advances, however; historian Donald Bogle has pointed out the contrast between white and black journalists' reactions. Many of the latter found fault with the stereotypes in
Hallelujah!,
especially the “spiritual-singing, crap-shooting characters.”
*
But
Hallelujah!
was handsomely produced, using the latest technology—and, indisputably, offered more black faces than usual on the screen.

Most theaters in black neighborhoods wanted to book the latest Hollywood “all-talkies.” Many that couldn't afford the changeover to sound simply went bust. According to one report, at one time there were as many as fifteen “race moving picture managers and proprietors” in Washington, D.C. By 1930, there were two.

As “talkies” boomed, race pictures shriveled, and by 1930 there were
more black theaters in Washington, D.C. than there were race picture producers in the entire country. The white Southerner Richard E. Norman; the Johnson brothers, Noble and George; Harry Gant and Ira McGowan's short-lived Los Angeles company; Robert Levy's high-minded Reol Productions; the Royal Gardens of Chicago; the Maurice Film Company; and the Colored Players Corporation of Philadelphia—all these and many others gave up the ghost, their fleeting existence all but forgotten today.

Having spurred a gold rush, race pictures left behind a ghost town. One newspaper columnist wrote that the famous race-picture pioneer Oscar Micheaux had fallen on “evil days.” And though he was no longer universally regarded as “great,” by the early 1930s Micheaux was for all intents and purposes “the only.” In a list of Christmas wishes for 1930, the
Pittsburgh Courier'
s Floyd G. Snelson Jr., published this wish for Micheaux in his column: “Some new hits for his moving pictures.”

 

Micheaux was proud of living in Harlem, and in his novels he derided certain luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance who chose to live in New York's more upscale neighborhoods. So it must have been humbling for this distinguished citizen to walk the streets of Harlem in that winter of 1930, when the newspapers were writing his obituary. One might imagine him as a figure out of one of his stories, bowing his head, holding onto his hat, trailing his long Russian coat behind him—Czar Oscar leaning into the whipping wind and snow.

For all his sociability and communication skills, however, Micheaux was a solitary, private man, who never quite fit into the Harlem Renaissance. In most ways, the Renaissance passed him by. Indeed, Micheaux only half-lived in Harlem; he was always on the run, hopping trains in and out of town, seldom intersecting with the intellectual ferment of the time.

By 1930 the Renaissance was at its zenith. Yet Micheaux and his films came in for “profound silence and neglect from his intellectual contemporaries,” as film historian Clyde Taylor has noted. Though Micheaux personally knew some of the poets, artists, and writers who dominated the cultural movement that celebrated black life in Harlem
and America—people like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston—Micheaux didn't hold membership in the same social, political, or intellectual circles.

They were middle-class, college-educated; Micheaux was low-born, a primitive. They were modernists—some of them militants—who repudiated authors like Charles W. Chesnutt and Henry Francis Downing, dismissing their novels about “passing” as quaint.
*
These Harlem literary lights enjoyed close connections with New York's best publishing houses; Micheaux was a self-published novelist, whose fiction was intended for ordinary folk. Those who registered his work at all looked down on his “execrable” English, in the estimate of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the widow of poet Laurence Dunbar, who met Micheaux in Pennsylvania in the 1920s. (Even Micheaux's film scenarios reeked of “bad English,” Dunbar-Nelson thought.)

Among Harlem's cultural leaders, Micheaux was alone in preferring motion pictures as a medium. In 1967, when Langston Hughes cowrote a book called
Black Magic
—“A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment”—film was treated almost as an aside. Micheaux himself was mentioned noncommittally, as part of a sweeping single sentence covering race cinema.

Writer Carlton Moss recalled talking about Micheaux and race pictures with Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Rudolph Fisher (author of the first black detective novel), Renaissance chronicler Arna Bontemps, and other Harlem eminences, but what he discovered was that they considered Hollywood a cultural junkyard, and race pictures just more garbage for the heap. “They saw Micheaux as an illiterate person,” recalled Moss. “And this they could not accept. Because the big thrust at that time was to prove that you were as literate as whoever the accepted figure was on the national scale.”

“Those circles,” said Moss on another occasion, “never took Micheaux efforts seriously. One prominent writer was known to be working on a play about Micheaux. He called it, ‘Let's Make Movies.' It was a
comedy
on Micheaux's filmmaking. Few who criticized him, admitted to ever having
seen
his films.”

Nor did Micheaux care to develop a circle of his own. He was, as ever, a lone wolf who slipped in and out of circles. Among his friends were a few loyalists, actors like Lawrence Chenault, William E. Fountaine, or Lorenzo Tucker. But in the dark winter of 1930—no darker, Micheaux would have said, than his loneliest time on a South Dakota homestead—he trusted one person alone: Alice B. Russell, his pillar of constancy and resolve. In films he sometimes idealized women as intelligent, beautiful, ladylike, moral exemplars. Mrs. Micheaux seemed that ideal sprung to life.

From her he drew strength and purpose. As had become his custom, Micheaux spent Christmas of 1930 and the week leading up to the New Year and his forty-seventh birthday with the Russell family, dividing the holiday season between their 48 Morningside Avenue flat in Harlem and his wife's family's house on Greenwood Avenue in Montclair, New Jersey. The ex-homesteader had dubbed the Greenwood Avenue place “The Homestead.”

 

But his death notices were premature. Micheaux had been building a lifeline to new angels, and in January 1931 he reincorporated in Albany with unlikely partners—Leo Brecher and Frank Schiffman. They took his name off the masthead, and renamed his company Fayette Pictures. Micheaux was listed as the nominal president (“titular head,” according to the publicity), with Brecher as vice-president, Schiffman as secretary.

Brecher and Schiffman, white and Jewish, were exactly the type of producers Micheaux had railed against for meddling in race pictures. But seen from another angle, they were logical saviors. Under Brecher's principal ownership, Schiffman ran the Lafayette, the New Douglas, the Roosevelt, and the Odeon theaters, the four biggest movie houses in Harlem. (For years they had been trying to buy a fifth, the Renaissance). They invested in all-black stage shows that traveled outside New York and were thinking of branching into race-picture exhibition in other East Coast cities.

In one fell swoop, Micheaux was now able to boast “new capital” for production, and prime bookings in Harlem. He would use the new capital to bankroll the first true “race talkie.” “From now on the product will be all-talking pictures,” the company's initial press release boasted, “and will be produced on a larger and more expensive scale.”
The black press gave the news big coverage. “Due to lack of funds,” according to one account, “Micheaux has heretofore played a lone hand in the making of his pictures. The difficulties of creating talking pictures were so great, however, that he was hardly able to get started.” Now he planned to make “one or two each month.”

Fayette Pictures announced lofty if familiar ambitions: Micheaux's first sound picture would have a “tryout on Broadway” before gracing Harlem theaters; the pioneer would produce “a couple of short subjects” to accompany the tryout; and the film's general distribution would be preceded by “a special road show engagement in a large number of key cities.”

As though in tacit rebuttal to Theophilus Lewis, Micheaux made sure the new company's press release pointedly mentioned two of the “Negro-conscious” Hollywood pictures the columnist had cited:
Hearts in Dixie
and
Hallelujah!
Micheaux emphasized that
his
“talkies” wouldn't indulge in nostalgia for the Old South, like the most recent Hollywood fare. Where
Hearts in Dixie
and
Hallelujah!
“had their settings in the South and dealt with the Negro in his native state,” Micheaux intended to fill a void by setting his stories among modern blacks in the big Northern cities. “Micheaux contends that since there are more than 4,000,000 Negroes in the North, he feels that a public is in position to possibly appreciate a theme dealing and laying somewhere among these 4,000,000…”

Fayette Pictures took a lease on space at the Metropolitan Studios in Fort Lee. In mid-January, Micheaux declared, he would commence photography on “the first all-black talkie” (a claim that pointedly dismissed
Hearts in Dixie
and
Hallelujah!,
which Hollywood had promoted in similar terms). His financing even afforded him time to prepare his cast. His actors had already had been “in rehearsal for some time,” one article in the black press noted. After “five weeks of intensive rehearsal,” said another, “all the dramatic artists entered the studio the day the shooting was scheduled to begin, knowing every word of their parts.”

 

Though separated by twelve years,
The Homesteader,
the first feature-length silent race picture, and
The Exile,
the first all-black talkie directed by a black man, sprang from the same source material: Micheaux's own life story. After
The Homesteader,
Micheaux had incorporated versions of his autobiography into several silent pictures, and that habit would con
tinue into the sound era.
The Exile
was Micheaux's latest reworking of his homesteading saga, divided between Chicago and South Dakota, but spiced up with underworld vice, a vamp's murder, and song and dance numbers.

Once again, the hero of the tale was the Micheaux alter ego Jean Baptiste, a young, self-righteous man who finds himself at odds with decadent Chicago. Jean Baptiste is besotted with Edith Duval, who is determined to become the “Queen of Chicago's Negro Underworld.” Edith dwells in a South Side mansion formerly owned by a wealthy meatpacker, but “deserted by his heirs who fled, frightened and terrified,” according to a title card, “by the sight of an endless stream of Negroes, brought North to supply labor demands for the war.”