Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (20 page)

 

Within Our Gates
is the first Micheaux production to survive for current-day viewing, although the existing version is obviously damaged by both censorship gouges and general age and misuse. (Originally an eight-reeler, the film already had slimmed down to six reels by 1921, according to company advertisements.)

From the moment its darkly comic opening title card appears on screen (“At the opening of our drama, we find our characters in the North, where the prejudices and hatreds of the South do not exist—though this does not prevent the occasional lynching of a Negro”), the film is an astutely written, at times beautifully directed, landmark. Even in its truncated form, it holds up as a gripping, affecting work of quality.

Evelyn Preer's sweet performance centers the film. And while it is true that Micheaux's leading ladies were often subjected to harrowing ex
tremes of nature and violence, in films like
Within Our Gates
the heroines are smart and strong, and they usually pull through, proving their mettle.

Micheaux was a unique storyteller, using film methods that were as idiosyncratic and modern-minded as anything being tried in Hollywood at that time. One of his unusual techniques was repeating scenes from different subjective viewpoints to reveal the crucial missing pieces of a puzzle. Micheaux liked to fool an audience the first time, then reiterate a scene once or twice, from shifting perspectives. During the lengthy flashback of
Within Our Gates,
he achieves this very cleverly, without any of the usual winking, so the audience is thoroughly gulled by the question of who murdered the white landowner. The landowner's slaying is depicted twice: once to gain the audience's trust and muddy the waters, then a second time to bare the surprising truth.

Micheaux was a believer in dreams and premonitions, and his films have a predilection for fantastical auguries. The eeriest example in
Within Our Gates
occurs during the flashback sequence. The audience meets a black man named Efrem (E. G. Tatum)—“a debased servant” of the landowner, in the words of scholar Corey K. Creekmur—whose misinformation feeds the outrage of the lynch mob. Later in the flashback, “surrounded by an angry white mob that grows less and less appreciative of his services and servility,” as Creekmur notes, “Efrem's comic ‘glory' dissolves into a nightmare image or projection of his own lynched body, his extended tongue a grotesque parody of the laughing face of the comic darky of the minstrel tradition.” His thoughts seal his own doom. “Following Efrem's vision, the white mob chases him, clearly to realize his own grisly projection of their racist desires.”

Micheaux's films can be vastly entertaining, but from his first picture to his last, he was always a message bearer, and his “preachment” here—promoting hard work and education, condemning servility and criminal behavior and racism—comes through loud and clear. Writing his films the way he wrote his books, he tossed in facts and information to support his ideas, and the intertitles of
Within Our Gates
are peppered with statistics. He never shied away from big issues, shrewdly portraying the land peonage system that replaced slave economics in the South (a system rigged in favor of plantation owners that victimized all poor people, including whites).

While Micheaux's choice of subject matter is generally given high marks by contemporary film critics, his cinematic skills are often faintly
ridiculed. That seems absurd, considering that he plied his craft as a true “independent filmmaker,” long before that phrase became popularized. Hollywood contract directors had large staffs that assisted their every move, expert studio departments at their beck and call, and overall production budgets ranging from $350,000 to $600,000 in the 1920s (depending on the stars). Micheaux, in contrast, worked with ragtag crews and shoestring budgets, inventing as he went along. And yet, when his resources and his imagination were in alignment, he was capable of breathtaking cinematic effects, as in his films' frequently stunning climaxes.

Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence, in their invaluable study
Writing Himself into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences,
have written conclusively about the lengthy backstory that forms Act Three of
Within Our Gates,
and the linked series of crescendos, building to a climax, in which the Boston schoolteacher's family is hunted and slain, and she herself is nearly raped. The white mob in the film is sprinkled with American tintypes, including “patrons from the local ice cream parlor, a boy on a bicycle with a baseball bat, a man in a butcher's apron, a woman in a gingham dress armed with a rifle,” in Bowser and Spence's words. They congregate in an almost “festive, picnic-like atmosphere.”

The black family temporarily eludes their white stalkers by hiding in a swamp. But the family is ferreted out, and the mob is transformed into a grotesque blur, with distorted camerawork that wouldn't be out of place in an early German Expressionist film. (Micheaux didn't restrict his moviegoing to Hollywood fare; later, in one of his 1940s novels, he confessed his admiration of the German masterworks that influenced all great filmmakers.)

The violence in
Within Our Gates
is depicted with a luridness and savagery rare in the American cinema. The youngest boy in the family is fired on as he tries to flee. The boy pretends to have been struck down; then, when the mob turns its back, he jumps on a horse, managing to ride to safety. The parents are surrounded by the bloodthirsty mob.

Preer has fled to a cabin, trapped by the vengeful brother of the dead white landowner. As Preer struggles with him, Micheaux returns to her family's lynching in progress, jumping between the two nightmares. “By crosscutting the defilement of the Black woman and the lynching of the Black male for reasons that have nothing to do with crimes against white women, Micheaux demystifies pervasive racist myths,” wrote Bowser and Spence. “In this rape, it is the white man who is the sexual violator, not
the Negro; and the ‘promiscuous Black female' is not a willing participant but vigorously fights back.”

The bravura crosscutting continues, with the lynch mob stoking a wild bonfire in order to burn the bodies of their victims. From beginning to end, the flashback of
Within Our Gates
is meticulously crafted, densely packed with ideas, and furious with emotion. It is one of the most powerful sequences in Micheaux's body of work.

Not for the fainthearted. Still, if
Within Our Gates
disturbed some people, the film also found many appreciative viewers. “The picture is a quivering tongue of fire,” a black schoolteacher wrote to the
Chicago Defender,
“the burn of which will be felt in the far distant years…

“The spirit of
Within Our Gates
is the spirit of [Frederick] Douglass, Nat Turner, [William Sanders] Scarborough and [W. E. B.] DuBois rolled into one, but telling the story of the wrongs of our people better than Douglass did in his speeches, more dramatically transcendent than DuBois in his
Souls of Black Folk
…

“
The Birth of a Nation
was written by oppressors to show that the oppressed were a burden and a drawback to the nation, that they had no real grievance, but on the other hand they were as roving lions, seeking whom they might devour.
Within Our Gates
is written by the oppressed and shows in a mild way the degree and kind of his oppression. That he is an asset to the nation in all phases of national life, aspiration and development. Nothing like it since
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
”

 

One part of Micheaux's dream—making movies that might attract droves of white patrons, just as white readers had been drawn to his novels—already had begun to evaporate, right away with
The Homesteader.

There is anecdotal evidence that some white people attended race pictures in mixed neighborhoods in big Northern cities, and even in a few theaters in the Deep South. But by and large, as even the earliest advertisements for
The Homesteader
conceded, “Negro productions such as this are restricted, as it were, to Negro theaters.” Micheaux couldn't get his film into white theaters, and he couldn't get white people into black theaters.

Another part of the dream also died from the get-go. Micheaux, who had always mused about making big money, and whose screen stories more than once featured parvenu black millionaires, realized very quickly
that race pictures were not going to make him rich. A Hollywood director of that era wouldn't have earned less than $750 a week, with some salaries rising as high as $2,500 weekly. But Micheaux never made that kind of money in a week—not
any
week. Privately he always referred to his earnings as “little money,” i.e., not Big Money.

Yet he had the optimism of the pioneering homesteader he had once been: The seeds sown today would reap a bounty in the future, good weather permitting. As long as there was cash flow, Micheaux wasn't one to wring his hands. He knew how to stretch a dollar, and knew even better how to stretch credit.

Publicly, he always wore the face of the optimist. Thus it was that, early in 1920, amid mounting debt, he issued a press release for the Micheaux Book and Film Company declaring the windfall success of
The Homesteader
and
Within Our Gates
—and profits for investors. A meeting of officers would convene in Sioux City, according to the release, to map out a future agenda and offer additional stock shares at $100 each. Micheaux also announced that he would publish a journal “of finish and high aspiration” devoted to “race filmdom,” called
The Brotherhood.

Even as the ink was drying on the press release, however, newspapers were reporting that the Micheaux company was on the verge of receivership. His budgets, measly in Hollywood terms, were astronomical for race pictures. (“MOST COSTLY RACIAL FILM EVER MADE,” the advertising blared.) Revenue was slow to trickle in, and hard to separate from operating expenses. Genuine profits were a figment of Micheaux's imagination.

George P. Johnson, boasting of inside information from people in Micheaux's employ, privately told the
Pittsburgh Courier
publisher Robert L. Vann that the race-picture pioneer “has made nothing for himself, but wasted lots of money on production.”
The Homesteader
had been “produced at a loss,” Johnson informed Vann, “but not near what his last film is.
Within Our Gates
is a complete failure financially.”

Johnson wrote on the same subject to Micheaux, not without feeling. “I know and you know that you have paid dearly in cash, hard work, sacrifices, worries, to pull thru the two productions you have made,” Johnson said. “The result[s], other than accomplishing a certain prestige for Oscar Micheaux as a writer, playwright and a coming director, have not been very encouraging, especially from a personal financial standpoint.”

The worries and crises seemed constant. Having failed to lure Johnson
away from Omaha, Micheaux now decided that the only person he could trust to run business affairs in Chicago, while he was on the road, was a member of his own family. His youngest brother, Swan E. (for Emerson) Micheaux, was summoned from Great Bend, Kansas. Slender, curly-haired Swan, twenty-five years old (Oscar was thirty-six), went on the letterhead, initially, as “Secy & Treas” of the Micheaux Film Corporation (“Producers & Distributors of High Class Negro Feature Photoplays”).

One way for Micheaux to generate more revenue would be to sell his pictures overseas, where the climate for race pictures was said to be more receptive than in some parts of America. So in the winter of 1919–1920 he left for an extended stay in New York, reportedly en route to Europe, according to newspaper items, where he intended to arrange foreign placements. Whether he himself traveled to any foreign countries is unclear (Micheaux was always “on his way to France” in letters to George Johnson, though he never actually seemed to depart). But the race-picture pioneer did disappear from sight in Chicago, for months over that winter.

Not until May, after “extensive traveling,” was he spotted back in the city. During his absence Micheaux had written “a series of features,” according to published reports, including—a departure from the controversial
Within Our Gates
—several comedies. The sudden flurry of press items said that Micheaux was already at work filming his next scenario, a boxing picture, and that
The Brute
would be ready for release by July.

 

Micheaux followed sports the way he followed show business, paying special attention to those athletes who might have been champions and record-holders, if professional sports were not as ruthlessly segregated, in that era, as Hollywood. Boxing was one of his passions; indeed, there is a persistent rumor, dating from the Rosebud years, that Micheaux sometimes donned gloves and took on challengers in a makeshift ring erected outside Ernest Jackson's home in Dallas, South Dakota.

Whatever the case,
The Brute
was partly an excuse for Micheaux to stage a lavish match between two luminaries of the sport, both of whom boasted connections to the legendary Jack Johnson. One was Marty Cutler, a solid fighter and sparring partner of Johnson's—though in this film, Cutler would play the white champion, pitted, in the climax, against a
black challenger played by heavyweight idol Sam Langford, Boston's “Tar Baby.” Langford, who fought more than six hundred bouts in his twenty-two-year career (though he never won a major title), was Johnson's worst nemesis. Johnson narrowly defeated Langford in a fifteen-round decision in 1906; thereafter, Johnson rebuffed any suggestion of a rematch. Micheaux would gleefully bill Langford as “the man Jack Johnson refused to fight.”

Micheaux would put comedy as well as plenty of action in his third film, though the core drama of
The Brute
—“the most interesting part of the tale,” according to at least one critic of the time—followed the misfortunes of a naïve young woman who falls under the influence of a brutal underworld kingpin after her fiancé is lost at sea. The kingpin's specialties are abusing women and rigging prizefights.