Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (47 page)

On the face of it, this new book, his fourth since he quit making movies, was an homage to Charles W. Chesnutt and the “passing” novel
The House Behind the Cedars,
which Micheaux had always loved and admired: Chesnutt—the acclaimed, elegant writer, whose interest in the theme of “passing” was intensely personal, as it had always been with Micheaux;
The House Behind the Cedars
—a “passing” masterpiece of the sort Micheaux always wished to achieve for himself.

Micheaux's ingenuous foreword to
The Masquerade
explained that he had decided to write “an historical novel.” Then, digging through “my old file of motion picture scenarios,” he had alighted on his script for Chesnutt's story, which he had filmed once in the silent era and again with sound. He'd always felt that
The House Behind the Cedars
needed more of the “turbulent, grave and exciting” pre–Civil War context, he wrote, the kind of history that inspired his own family's migration north, and thus was an untold part of his own life story. Reworking Chesnutt's
novel, emphasizing historical personalities and events, would permit him to depict the momentous Dred Scott Decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the abolitionist John Brown, and other background leading up to the War Between the States. “I am very happy, in the meantime, for the privilege of having known Mr. Chas. W. Chesnutt, who died in 1932, and acknowledge with gratitude, the assistance provided by his book of that period,” Micheaux wrote.

Indeed, the first half of
The Masquerade,
the American history that forms a prelude to the fictional narrative, is the most interesting, with Micheaux ennobling Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists (John Brown is described as “an artist at dying”). But readers also get a hint of things to come in these early chapters, where Micheaux reprinted full pages of direct transcription from the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 and Lincoln's 1861 presidential inaugural address.

When Micheaux shifts the story to Chesnutt's “Fayetteville,”
*
the reader is introduced to the characters from
The House Behind the Cedars,
with only slight variations on the names given them by the original author. As he had in both screen versions, Micheaux dropped the chunk of flashback in the middle of the novel that described life “under the old regime,” instead leading the sequence of events with the backstory of Rena's mother. Again, as with both films, Micheaux radically altered Chesnutt's ending—the very last chapter of the book.

To the rest of what Chesnutt had written, Micheaux added tiny bits at the beginning and end of some (not all) chapters, and made interpolations (especially in the Southern vernacular), cuts, minor supplements and word changes. But otherwise—in his story sequence, characters, and virtually all of his dialogue—Micheaux replicated Chesnutt's novel exactly. Micheaux's Chapters 26 through 48 correspond directly with Chesnutt's 9 through 33. Virtually all the language is identical.

Out of four hundred pages of
The Masquerade,
Micheaux copied nearly two hundred from Chesnutt's novel, almost line for line.

As one small sample, consider Rena's eloquent letter to George Tryon, her tortured white suitor, after he finds out that she is teaching in a nearby school. When Tryon writes to ask her if they might meet and discuss “what has passed between us,” Rena sends this response:

CHESNUTT'S VERSION

GEORGE TRYON, ESQ.

Here is the version Micheaux published as his own work, with the slight variations from Chesnutt's wording marked in bold:

MICHEAUX'S VERSION

GEORGE TRYON, ESQ.

Micheaux did make one meaningful change in the story, replacing Chesnutt's tragic ending with the happy finale he had used in both film versions. In the last chapter of
The Masquerade,
Rena would recover from her debilitating illness (fatal in Chesnutt's novel), with her childhood friend Frank waiting by her bedside. Frank proposes, and after marriage, like many black people of the post-Reconstruction Era—including Micheaux—they will leave Fayetteville for “a booming and growing town called Chicago.” Frank plans to go into construction, with Rena as his bookkeeper.

Micheaux has Rena's uncomprehending white suitor, George Tryon, arrive in town just in time for Rena and Frank's wedding. A neighbor informs George, who is standing outside her house, that Rena is marrying a childhood sweetheart. He rides away, stunned, and muttering, “Childhood sweetheart…,” consoling himself with the thought that “if she was marrying a childhood sweetheart, she must have been in love before she ever met him.”

Not a terrible ending, but in the context, it hardly mattered. The first half of the book and last chapter notwithstanding,
The Masquerade
was a blatant piracy of Charles W. Chesnutt's work. After years of adapting it to his own ends, Micheaux had finally assimilated Chesnutt's masterpiece as his own.

Of all the questionable things he had done to survive and keep going, this was the worst. He had often borrowed from other produced or published works. He had frequently used material transcribed from courtrooms or newspapers. He had flirted blithely with copyright infringement. He had dodged subpoenas and shaved the law. But until
The Masquerade,
his own creativity had never been in doubt.

It was a bizarre act, one for which there is no simple excuse, or easy explanation. Unless Micheaux had been struck down by some kind of silent illness, a stroke, something that diminished his capacity. Unless he sat at his desk in a stupor while writing
The Masquerade,
laboriously copying out another author's words. Perhaps Micheaux was unaware of what he was doing, or only half-aware; strong, independent man that he'd always been, perhaps he was unwilling or unable to confess his frailty.

He seemed in fair fettle in March 1947, signing autographs at publication parties hosted by two Harlem bookshops, the National Memorial Bookstore at 2107 Seventh Avenue, and the Washington Bookstore at 2084 Seventh Avenue, and then traveling to Washington, D.C., for an NAACP luncheon feting authors. But
The Masquerade,
even in several
editions, wouldn't sell more than fifteen thousand copies, according to Micheaux's own numbers. This time the paucity of reviews was a blessing; no one noticed the rank plagiarism. Indeed, it has escaped most scholars, as the book is rare, out of print, and almost universally ignored.

“I wouldn't be quite so critical about it,” said sympathetic scholar J. Ronald Green, “given Micheaux's general naïveté and unprivileged background in intellectual matters. I would tend to look at it as a major folk artist being drawn repeatedly to a story and accomplishment that he admired, but wanted to do some work on.”

By the spring of 1947, Micheaux was telling his wife that the book business appeared to have bottomed out, and he thought he should attempt “to get back into pictures as soon as possible,” in Alice B. Russell's words.

 

As always, once decided, he took action. Once committed, he began planning his moves.

Most of his old associates were out of the race picture business. It would take forever to drum up investors. He would have to keep the budget down and pay all the upfront costs himself, drawing from his savings. He could limit expenses by shooting the entire film in Chicago, lots of exteriors, mostly with amateur actors.

There was one story no one could accuse him of stealing. For his final fling at filmmaking, Micheaux chose the subject most familiar and natural to him. His own life story had been the basis of his first novel way back in 1913, then the first motion picture he wrote, directed, and produced, and other films and books in the years since. Now he would make a movie of
The Wind from Nowhere:
his “one man's story” and its lessons for the race, his tale of struggle and conquest, of trust and innocence betrayed.

His 1943 novel had been characterized in publicity as a prospective “stage play,” so it is possible that a script already existed and all Micheaux had to do was rewrite it as a motion picture. Visitors to 40 Morningside Avenue found Micheaux nursing his weight and health, and snapping his fingers with ideas. He wasn't exactly up and dancing, but the old bustle and ebullience was back.

It was true that Micheaux would be taking a tremendous risk with this venture, using up all his “little money” on the production's operating
budget. And he wouldn't be able to go out on the road, selling the new movie like he used to. Still, he knew how to sketch and describe air castles. This was going to be his greatest film, one of epic length and unlimited box-office potential. As he had since his very first picture, Micheaux planned “a big plot and long story,” the most super of all his super-productions: “Like
Gone With the Wind,”
he kept saying. Micheaux found a New York distributor willing to stake a Broadway premiere, and after the opening, black theaters coast to coast would clamor for the picture. Maybe, finally, white audiences would show up, too.