Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Read Free

African-Americans; the Great Educator became a family role model.
    Even in middle age, Oscar “could quote profusely from [Booker T.] Washington,” recalled Carlton Moss, who acted in two Micheaux productions in the early 1930s. “One of his favorites,” Moss remembered, was a brief recitation on civil rights, its words part Washington and part Micheaux: “It is true, very true indeed, that the Afro-American does not receive all he is entitled to under the Constitution. Volumes could be filled with the many injustices he has to suffer and which are not right before God and man. Yet, when it is considered that other races in othercountries are persecuted even more than the black man in parts of the United States, there should be no reason why the Afro-American should allow obvious prejudice to prevent his taking advantage of opportunities around him.”
    One Washington maxim Micheaux liked to quote: “It is at the bottom of life we should begin and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”
    Bell Michaux was a deeply religious woman, baptized a Christian and then “united” at age twelve with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, an offshoot of Methodism launched by black Americans in 1787. Bell became a “shouting Methodist,” in Micheaux’s words: When she began to “get happy” at services, her children knew it was time to steal outdoors. Throughout her life she was active in charity and church affairs. Much of the family’s social activity, in Illinois and later Kansas, revolved around church events; especially when they lived in the country, the Michauxes hosted Elders and schoolteachers to Sunday supper.
    There is some evidence Oscar Micheaux himself was a deeply religious man. Micheaux was persistently autobiographical in his work, and in his second novel, The Forged Note, he describes his alter ego Sidney Wyeth as “a hopeless believer.” But he seems not to have maintained a commitment to any particular church, and in his books and films he presented a complex, skeptical attitude toward organized religion, and especially toward preachers, with their “assuming and authoritative airs.”
    This attitude may have had its roots in an incident in Metropolis, when he was a boy of about five. One Sunday after services, a group of Elders wearing Prince Albert coats and clerical vests came in wagons to visit the Michaux farm, accompanied by one of the family’s favorite Sunday schoolteachers. The older brothers went hunting for rabbit and quail to supply the special occasion, and when dinner was served the Elders seemed to devour everything in sight. Afraid he was going to be left out of the feast, little Oscar crawled into the lap of his favorite teacher and began gobbling his share. Suddenly, he found himself staring into the “angry eyes” of a tall, stout minister, whose flirtation with the teacher had been interrupted by his actions. The minister upbraided the boy for his bad manners. The boy defended himself, but Bell Michaux uncharacteristically thrashed Oscar, and afterward Oscar’s father quarreled with his wife over the incident.
    This story may be apocryphal, but Michaux relates it convincingly in his third autobiographical novel The Homesteader, even giving theteacher and the A.M.E. Elder characters transparent pseudonyms (as he often would in his fiction). In real life, the Elder was Rev. Newton J. McCracken; thirty years later, in a reworking of The Homesteader called The Wind from Nowhere, Micheaux would suggest that McCracken even had presided over his baptism.
    Later, the same Rev. McCracken would reappear, disastrously, in Micheaux’s life.
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    Metropolis, the hub of Massac County, was on the Illinois-Kentucky border, just north of Paducah, Kentucky, across the Ohio River. It was a river town straight out of Mark Twain, dominated by the vast, snaking Ohio,