Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (46 page)

Micheaux's story skitters all over the map—from Atlanta to Chicago and New York, from Memphis to Nashville and Louisville, touching down aboard a luxury liner bound for Bremen and visiting Berchtesgaden in Germany, where Hitler is busy delivering a speech berating Jews and describing the lynching of Negroes as America's “national pastime.” (A Japanese ambassador, looking on, smiles in agreement.) In Germany, readers meet a brother and sister of the Negro race, though half-German and light-skinned, who are dispatched to America to aid the subversion. The sister becomes conflicted by her assignment when she falls in love with Wyeth.

The New York chapters are sprinkled with autobiographical allusions and glimpses of Wyeth/Micheaux's daily routine. Minor characters in the novel are based on the multitalented Donald Heywood, and on Irving Miller, a noted producer of black theatricals, whose wife, a dancer, had a small role in Micheaux's 1923 film
Deceit.

The most intriguing aspect of
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
is Micheaux's continuing colloquy on Jews, a fellow oppressed minority, but a group whose members had too often rubbed him wrong. In fiction and films he was an early voice in the difficult history of black and Jewish relations in America, but in the end his message was complex.

At first, Micheaux's alter ego Wyeth is bemused by the Nazis' offer and stalls his reply. Ultimately, however, Wyeth/Micheaux rejects the “hate movie” proposition, saying that he is content as an author. Besides, his attitude toward Jews has been misunderstood. At this peak of anti-Semitic tragedy in the world, Micheaux's alter ego waves an olive branch, insisting that he doesn't hate Jews.

“After all they did to spoil your business?” the unsympathetic Kermit prods.

“They didn't go into it to hurt me; to put me out of business. They went into it on the theory that they could make some money. They had a right to,” Wyeth/Micheaux replies phlegmatically.

So Kermit heads to Buenos Aires, another old Micheaux haunt, from the days when he was portering for white bigwigs on South American excursions. There Kermit tracks down the genuine article, an ex-Hollywood German émigré filmmaker, who is willing to take up the gauntlet. When the hate tract premieres in Harlem, riots break out and vandals run wild, destroying “mostly Jewish owned” businesses and merchandise.

In the meantime, the white Mrs. Wingate has become Mrs. Kermit Early. Disapproving of her black husband's corrupt brand of Americanism, she exerts her will and he quits the subversive organization. Mrs. Early then arranges for her husband to become editor and publisher of “a struggling Negro magazine,” and they drop out of the narrative. While Kermit is never treated less than skeptically, by the end of his book Micheaux has developed a grudging admiration for his purposeful white wife—the closest he ever came to condoning the early temptation he had always condemned in his fiction: intermarriage.

The story speeds to a supercharged end, à la
Dark Princess,
with the remaining pro-Nazi black Americans hatching a plot to assassinate the First Lady (i.e., Eleanor Roosevelt) and plant a bomb aboard a train.

 

Elton Fax, the young man who had endured Micheaux's memorable monologue on a train trip years before, learned around this time that the Harlem author was looking for an artist to create a dustjacket for his new novel. By now an established illustrator and artist for magazines and books, Fax made an appointment to visit Micheaux. “I was kind of thrilled again to meet him and see this man, genuinely so,” recalled Fax.

Now, the great man was massive and stooped and gruff. His winning smile had “gone with the wind.” Micheaux didn't mention whether he remembered Fax from that train ride, a decade earlier; probably not.

The illustrator was disconcerted when Micheaux offered him “$35 or something ridiculous” for his artwork. Moreover, Micheaux demanded ownership of the piece in perpetuity, whereas the accepted practice in commissioning such illustrations was to pay for one-time use only. Still, Fax admired Micheaux, and he accepted the job, crafting “a beautiful black and white drawing,” which the author paid for and accepted. Then, to the artist's astonishment (and without his permission), Micheaux embellished Fax's drawing with “abominable” colors intended to evoke his glory years as a race-picture pioneer, “…the same yellows, the same blues, the same reds that went into those old lobby cards” for his many films, according to Fax. “That was his [Micheaux's] bag,” said Fax. “That is what he knew.”

But Micheaux knew his audience, and the “colorized” Elton Fax cover helped make
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
a windfall success. The “mouth by mouth advertising,” as Micheaux liked to put it, made up for the paucity
of reviews. Inside of a few years, with orders generated by mail, or by the author himself brandishing copies on the road, the second Micheaux novel since his return to fiction had sold a remarkable 55,000 copies: “the biggest single success” of his literary career, according to the
New York Amsterdam News.

That was almost twice the profits of
The Wind from Nowhere.
Micheaux had learned a lot since his early self-publishing days, and now he was supplementing his company income by distributing other titles besides his own. Among them were substantial works, including
New World A'Coming: Inside Black America
by Roi Ottley, a former
Amsterdam News
staffer, whose investigative report on the condition of blacks in America incorporated research he had supervised as an editor of New York's Federal Writer's Project. Another work the Book Supply Company made available to stores and mail-order buyers was
Strange Fruit
by Lillian (Eugenia) Smith, a controversial first novel by a white Southerner about an interracial romance, a murder, and a lynching.

Between working on his novels, and traveling and selling his own books and those written by others, the World War II years elapsed swiftly and not unpleasantly for Micheaux. “His friends think he's all through because he has suspended making pictures,” Micheaux wrote of Sidney Wyeth in
The Case of Mrs. Wingate,
“but he is doing far better, for himself, in the present business than he ever did in making pictures.”

 

Micheaux dedicated his next novel, his sixth, “To Mary J.”—Mary J. Russell, his wife's unselfish, hardworking mother—“Whose faith and confidence in the writer has always been a source of inspiration.”

The Micheauxes stayed close to their Montclair “Homestead” while living an increasingly quiet, insular life in Harlem. People who visited their Harlem flat recall the furnishings as simple and unassuming, though Elton Fax said that Micheaux “didn't live like a pauper by any means.” He continued to dress well and dine to satisfaction, and he still had a chauffeur on call, but the couple had few of the material trappings of affluence.

Actor Lorenzo Tucker, faithful to the mentor who had launched him into race pictures as “The Colored Valentino,” often dropped by to say hello, finding his once-energetic employer now staid and stolid with age. Micheaux was afflicted by arthritis and hypertension. “Instead of calling
him Mr. Micheaux in later years,” Tucker remembered, “I called him Doc, and I called my stepfather the same thing—so he was like a father to me.”

He was “Dad” to his spouse of twenty years, Alice B. Russell. She tried to superintend his health, coaxing Micheaux into taking the occasional break from his routine. They enjoyed day trips to Long Island or to the Catskills, longer trips to the Adirondacks, driven by their chauffeur while the couple nestled in the backseat.

By early 1945, “Dad” had put the finishing touches on his third novel of the World War II years:
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield.
The title echoed that of the successful
Mrs. Wingate,
and so did the novel's byzantine construction. But the new book was a puzzle-work, whose pieces—some clearly left over from Micheaux films—didn't fit together with the same fluidity as
The Case of Mrs. Wingate.

For the story's centerpiece, Micheaux concocted a central romance between a mysterious Memphis woman and a lovelorn private eye (“New York's ace Negro detective”), who is chasing a dangerous criminal cross-country. He threw in an illegal abortion and undertaking scandal in Memphis, an upstate New York rape case, a Harlem murder with Leo Frank echoes.

For the last time, Micheaux brought back his shadow self, Sidney Wyeth, who was still brooding about Jews and blacks. He included some winking autobiographical touches. Micheaux even has his characters praise Wyeth/Micheaux's own films and books repeatedly (“A corking good story!”)—a joke that wears thin, but must have entertained his longtime readers.

But Micheaux had begun to fester. Creeping age and jealousy colored his onetime optimism and outlook on racial issues. In
The Forged Note,
Micheaux had included a fleeting portrait of Memphis's Beale Street, a quarter “entirely occupied by Negroes,” but not a terrible place despite its juke-joint ways. In
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield
it's full of “bums and whores and hustlers.” Whatever its drawbacks, Chicago had always been a city of hope; now, in both
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
and
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield,
the Black Belt where Micheaux once lived seemed a hotbed of Nazis, Communists, and criminals.

The shifting of emphasis from Leo Frank's Jewishness to his sexuality was indicative of another trend in Micheaux's work. He had always treated sex and nudity adventurously in his films, but never so crudely as in his World War II novels. When the ace race detective in
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield
gazes at the title character, “at her rounded breasts which seemed to extend straight out and hang down,” he has to wonder
if she is wearing a girdle; he stares as “her teaties rose and fell as she breathed.” In the novel's potboiling climax, when the black killer known as Scarface catches his lover in bed with a rich white man, he says his first impulse is “to tell you to go to the bathroom and wash your dirty——” Then this phrase appears: “(word used censored by the author).”

The book's attacks on fellow black authors “Frank Knight” (i.e., Richard Wright) and “Ora Thurston” (i.e., Zora Neale Hurston)—who figure into the story because both had Memphis backgrounds—were gratuitous, mean-spirited.

“The best known and the most read of Negro writers,” according to Micheaux, Knight/Wright wrote “very interesting” books, but he was nevertheless a hypocrite. First, he was once a Communist; second, he was married to a Jewish woman (“most Jews at heart are Communists”); and third, he lived downtown, eschewing black Harlem. Sidney Wyeth, on the other hand, “is married to a girl of our race,” Micheaux wrote of himself. “They live in Harlem and go around among Negroes and are seen walking and riding up and down the streets of Harlem.”

Thurston/Hurston had social advantages that Wyeth/Micheaux never had; after all, her father had been a public figure (a preacher and elected mayor). And none of her books “ever got out of the first edition, which means that they did not sell well.” Her main accomplishment, he wrote, has been “getting money to live on from white people.”

Gone with the wind was Micheaux's ability to write about himself with genuine good humor, as he had in
The Conquest.
Now he wore bitterness on his sleeve. In a foreword to
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield,
Micheaux claimed that
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
had been ignored by the press because he treated “race-mixing” differently from other writers; where most novelists saw to it that such intermingling ended tragically, he had dared suggest a workable marriage between a millionaire white woman and her “colored lover.” “Being plain and frank about it, such stories are against the ‘pattern' as designed for Negroes and writers pretty well understand that ‘thou shalt not' write such books,” he wrote.

“Eighty-five per cent of the daily newspapers and magazines that received copies [of
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
] for review ignored the book and made no mention of even having received it,” Micheaux griped. “A few gave fine reviews and praised the book highly.”

Elton Fax was asked to contribute another dustjacket illustration for
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield,
and with a sinking feeling he went to meet
with Micheaux. They argued about his fee; later they argued about one of Fax's sketches before Micheaux would approve it. Fax was embarrassed to hear Micheaux, with his genteel wife standing nearby, exhorting him to sex up the drawing, to lower the female figure's cleavage. “Look here,” Micheaux demanded, “show some titties!”

Fax did his best to compromise, but that “cured me of dealing with Micheaux,” he reflected years later. Growingly isolated, the race-picture pioneer had become “a super exploiter,” Fax thought, “a supreme egotist.”

Micheaux picked up a little money and publicity with a condensed serialized version of his novel in the April 1946
The Negro.
But despite Elton Fax's artwork, sales of the peculiar, grumpy, sensationalistic
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield
slumped far below
The Case of Mrs. Wingate
and
The Wind from Nowhere.

 

Micheaux's World War II novels inevitably sold through their early printings, and then orders declined. The effort to reprint and continue promoting the books was too much for Micheaux, a “one-man corporation” with growing health concerns.

And whatever was happening inside Micheaux deepened, worsened.

After
The Story of Dorothy Stanfield,
he would write only one more novel:
The Masquerade,
published in early 1947.