Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only (9 page)

Afterward, he despised himself for his confusion, his weakness, his vanity, his stupidity. A mixed-race romance was impossible. He could never marry a white woman. It wouldn't be fair to her, or their children.

“I would have given half my life to have had her possess just a least bit of negro blood in her veins,” Micheaux wrote in
The Conquest,
“but since she did not and could not help it any more than I could help being a negro, I tried to forget it.”

Out of despondency emerged fresh resolve. When Micheaux decided that he would never marry a white woman, he also decided it was time to buckle down and find a wife “among my own.” The week before Christmas, he straightened out his business affairs and left for Chicago.

After spending time with friends and relatives there, he took off for New York, where he sought out the hot clubs and popular shows. He befriended a recent graduate of an agricultural college, one of the sons of Junius Groves, the “Negro Potato King” of Kansas, who at the height of his success owned five hundred acres of potatoes, a business big enough that he had a special Union Pacific track running to his property. Micheaux confided his yearning for a wife, and Groves's son recommended his sister, who lived on the family farm in Kansas. Micheaux started writing to her.

From South Dakota, he had been writing more frequently to Daisy Hinshaw, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the “most prosperous colored” family in Carbondale, whom Micheaux knew from Metropolis days. While in New York he sent her a telegram, offering to pay Daisy a visit. Daisy wrote back, asking Micheaux to bring her a nice new purse from New York as a token of his affection. “I did not like such boldness,” he recalled. “I should have preferred a little more modesty.” Grudgingly, Micheaux stopped at a Fifth Avenue shop and spent six dollars on a large seal handbag.

Arriving in Carbondale, he found himself the “Man of the Hour” as word flew around that Daisy Hinshaw had a suitor who had brought her
an expensive gift all the way from New York. The gossips predicted marriage. “The only objector to this plan,” wrote Micheaux, “was myself.” Spending time alone with Daisy, he found her pleasant enough but dull, and “a little odd in appearance,” small, bony, with gray “cattish” eyes.

Half out of boredom, he decided to visit relatives in the mining town where he once had worked, but while he was waiting at the train station he heard the “colored caller” announce a train to Murphysboro. With a pang he remembered Jessie; impulsively, Micheaux boarded the train and showed up at her house. When he rang the doorbell, Jessie herself opened the door. “She had changed quite a bit” since he had last seen her, “and now with long skirts and the eyes looked so tired and dreamlike. She was quite fascinating, this I took in at a glance.”

A moment later they were kissing. The next hours were “the most carefree time of my life,” he recalled, spent catching up with each other and pouring out their “pent-up feelings.” Jessie's father, the mail carrier, had fallen on hard times; he had suffered an injury and lost his job. Jessie too was struggling; she was teaching at a country school but sewing to make ends meet. Micheaux felt badly for Jessie, “so weak and forlorn in her distress.”

The midnight train took him back to Carbondale, and the next morning he was brought up short by a pouting Daisy, who suspected Micheaux of lingering in the arms of another woman. Arranging him on a sofa in her house, she made a grand entrance in a black silk dress with her face powdered and her hair done up, announcing that she was ready to make arrangements for moving to South Dakota. “One advantage of a dark skin,” Micheaux wrote later, “is that one does not show his inner feeling as noticeably as those of the lighter shade, and I do not know whether Miss Hinshaw noticed the look of embarrassment that overspread my countenance.”

Fortunately, they were interrupted by an unexpected visitor, and Micheaux was able to avoid making any false promises to Daisy. The next day he guiltily kissed her good-bye at the train station, knowing he would never see her again. She had grown “sad in appearance,” Micheaux wrote, “and looked so lonely I felt sorry for her.”

He stopped off in Murphysboro and took Jessie for a long walk. By now it was mid-January, and they talked it over and agreed to get married in October, when Jessie could come to South Dakota and register for a Tripp County relinquishment.

Micheaux returned to South Dakota via St. Louis and Great Bend,
visiting with his family and members of the local ex-slave community in Kansas, many of whom operated thriving farms. While there, he boasted about his engagement. “Shooting jackrabbits by day and boosting Dakota to Jayhawkers half the night,” he recalled in
The Conquest,
he wrote to Jessie “sometime during each twenty-four hours, and for a time received a letter as often.” He talked up the glories of the Rosebud: Micheaux was eager to expand his holdings with Tripp County relinquishments, but he knew he could file only once under his own name, because of the residency requirements. If he had partners, he could find ways to double his land and loans.

Two of his younger sisters, Olive and Ethel, were both graduating from high school in June, and they told Oscar that they'd be willing to farm relinquished claims in South Dakota, but they didn't have the money to pay the registration and startup costs. Micheaux agreed to mortgage his land and loan them the expenses.

 

But his hopes that Jessie was the One True Woman were all too swiftly dashed.

Back in South Dakota for the winter, Micheaux continued to write her regularly. He grew “a bit uneasy” when weeks went by without any reply. Then Jessie finally wrote back with devastating news: She had heard through the grapevine that Micheaux was engaged to Daisy Hinshaw of Carbondale, and “as Daisy would be the heir to the money and property of her parents, she felt sure my marriage to Miss Hinshaw would be more agreeable.” The grapevine was wrong, but it was too late for him to disabuse Jessie; for on April 1, she explained, she had impulsively married an older man, a cook who was better suited to her humble circumstances.

Micheaux would have been paralyzed with the blues if he hadn't been so preoccupied by spring chores on his two farms. Even so, he felt “jilted” and nursed his hurt for months.

The summer of 1909 was the peak of the land craze. Lot prices soared, as people competed for Tripp County relinquishments. The hotels in Gregory and Dallas filled up with lucky number-holders, novice settlers, and the usual surfeit of speculators and adventure-seekers. The roads were filled with automobiles, and many places now had telephone service.

The harvest looked to be another prosperous one, and Micheaux had become as land-crazy as everybody else. He scouted for possible relin
quishments far west of Dallas, in western Tripp County. Once again, the county's prospective municipalities were vying for the chance to become the next railhead, the latest prairie boom town. Ernest Jackson drove around in his Packard, offering staggering prices for swaths of unsettled land over twenty miles west of Dallas.

The town of Colome, closer to Dallas and already the bustling county seat of Tripp, tried to ignore Jackson's machinations. The enterprising Jackson called a community meeting in Colome and announced sale prices for lots in a new town he was building farther west, which the first citizens—banking on the Jacksons' sway with the railroad surveyors—were already calling “Winner.” As signs of confidence in its future, the town of Colome laid cement sidewalks along its streets and built a modern schoolhouse with a gymnasium. For his part, Jackson then threw a festive auction in Winner, replete with bartenders and gamblers, selling a record $84,000 in lots in two days. When the good citizens of Colome still refused to budge, Jackson bought the town's most important buildings, cut them in half, and used huge power tractors to move them eleven miles west to Winner.

When the time came for Micheaux to choose his Tripp County relinquishments, he oriented himself around the new center of operations for the Jackson brothers, scouting forfeited claims as far as fifteen miles northwest of Winner. He raced around in a borrowed car before pinpointing three properties. The necessary loans would come from the Jacksons' bank in Winner.

As it happened, Micheaux's sister Ethel wasn't due to turn twenty-one—the legal age for filing—by October, when the land opened up. So instead Olive would be joined on the South Dakota homesteading adventure by the family's maternal grandmother, Louisa Gough. Though the former slave was in her mid-seventies, his grandmother “always possessed a roving spirit,” in Micheaux's words, and she “wanted to come.”

Micheaux mortgaged his 320 acres for $7,600, and paid in the neighborhood of $6,400 for three relinquishments: two for his sister and grandmother, and one for his wife-to-be—the One True Woman, the Mrs. Micheaux he hadn't yet found.

 

Still, he kept trying. In early September, Micheaux compiled a list of eligible candidates and hurriedly wrote letters to the top three, suggesting
they meet to discuss a proposition he had in mind. One of the women was “a maid on the Twentieth Century Limited, running between New York and Chicago.” Another was the daughter of Kansas's Negro Potato King. The third was a schoolteacher in Chicago's Black Belt.

“He was somewhat ashamed of himself when he addressed three letters when perhaps he should have been addressing but one,” Micheaux wrote of his alter ego Jean Baptiste in
The Homesteader
(the first sequel to
The Conquest
). “It was not fair to either of the three, he guiltily felt; but business was business with him.”

In retrospect—and with cause to regret his actions—Micheaux said that his first choice really should have been the Negro Potato Princess, whom he had never met, but whose letters to him were always so “logical” and “agreeable.” But he had waited too long before organizing his trip, and didn't dispatch his urgent missives until just before he left. He tarried at the Omaha train station, waiting for a telegram from the Potato Princess. But none came, so he crossed her off his list and continued on his way to Chicago.

He arrived in late September, hoping to hear from the train maid; instead he received a telegram informing him that his second nominee had suffered a “severe attack of neuralgia” and was under a doctor's care in New York. Thus the list dwindled to one name: Orlean McCracken, a twenty-five-year-old graduate of South Division High School in Chicago and Wilberforce University in Ohio. Micheaux had met Orlean the previous winter in Murphysboro, where she was then teaching school. He had seen her again, on trips to Chicago. He had been writing her intermittently, sending her articles and books; in her responses she had warmed to his tales of homesteading.

Micheaux might have preferred “a farmer's daughter,” he reflected later, but “I had lived in the city and thought if I married a city girl I would understand her, anyway. I could not claim to be in love with this girl, nor with anyone else, but had always had a feeling that if a man and woman met and found each other pleasant and entertaining, there was no need of a long courtship.”

On the positive side, Orlean was “a kind, simple, and sympathetic person; in fact agreeable in every way.” Micheaux had found her pretty (dark-complexioned, “although not black,” with “heavy, black and attractive” hair and “coal-black” eyes), and brainy: a college graduate, Orlean was probably “the most intelligent of the three” on his list.

In Chicago, he phoned the McCracken residence. The family lived in a large stone-front house on Vernon Avenue, a fashionable area of the Black Belt referred to as “East of State,” where black professionals lived alongside the scattering of white homeowners who hadn't yet abandoned the neighborhood. The black professionals constituted “a sort of local aristocracy,” in Micheaux's faintly scornful words, “not distinguished so much by wealth as by the airs and conventionality of its members, who did not go to public dances on State Street and drink ‘can' beer.” Vernon was “much unlike the south end of Dearborn Street and Armour Avenue where none but colored people live.” He made an appointment to see Orlean the next afternoon, which was a Saturday.

It wasn't until Micheaux rang the doorbell and was greeted by Orlean's mother that he recognized Mrs. McCracken and made an unsettling connection: Orlean's father was one of the presiding Elders of the A.M.E. Church who roamed the southern Illinois circuit—in fact, the very same Reverend McCracken who had visited his Metropolis home for Sunday supper and upbraided Oscar when he was a boy, causing a ruckus in his family.

When Micheaux arrived, Orlean's father was at a convention hundreds of miles away. So Micheaux and Orlean went out for dinner and a long walk in Jackson Park, talking easily. She commiserated with him over what had happened in his relationship with Jessie from Murphysboro, a tale she knew through mutual acquaintances as well as their correspondence. The walk climaxed with Micheaux's earnest proposal that Orlean come to South Dakota, file on the relinquishment he'd earmarked for her, and become his bride. Orlean was receptive to the idea, and told Micheaux to come back the next morning and explain things to her mother.

Micheaux did just that, and Mrs. McCracken proved amenable, though she was nervous about making any momentous decision without her husband. Orlean had a younger sister, already married, who hovered about disapprovingly, and impressed Micheaux as jealous and mean-spirited. All three women spoke of Reverend McCracken with awe, as though he were a wise potentate.

They all attended Sunday services and sat through Bible lessons afterward. That evening, Micheaux took Orlean to see a popular revue headed by blackface comic Lew Dockstader and featuring the well-known vaudevillian Neil O'Brien and a rising young entertainer named Al Jolson.
Blackface shows, generally with white men smearing their faces with cork to sing, dance, and tell jokes in “Negro dialect,” were a nineteenth-century show business phenomenon; this was one of the last major shows touring nationally. But there were also black masters of minstrelsy like Bert Williams, and the most sophisticated blackface humor cut both ways, satirizing the fatuousness of racial stereotypes and empathizing with the plight of African-Americans. “Simply condemning it all as an entertainment that pandered to White racism does not begin to account for its complexities, its confusion, its neuroses,” as John Strausbaugh observes in his thought-provoking
Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imagination in American Popular Culture.