Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Read Free Page B

school, but so did seven who were “colored,” including the oldest Michaux child, Ida.
    By the time Oscar entered school a few years later, the situation had improved slightly. Although the scope and curricula of the white and “colored” schools was still unequal, the local superintendent of public education boasted of narrowing the gap with good equipment and a supply of “the choicest and most attractive books” for the library. (Metropoliswould maintain separate schools for white and “colored” children into the 1950s.)
    Apart from general history, mathematics, and science courses, the “colored school” emphasized reading, writing, and the arts. Students were taught to practice dictation and write form letters and searching essays. They were expected to read certain literary works before promotion. They discussed art, poetry, and music “as agencies of communication between the soul and external things,” according to the superintendent’s report.
    All this was grist for a boy who would grow into an insatiable reader and tireless writer. Yet his later reflections on his education suggest that Micheaux was just as deeply affected by its shortcomings. He described his Metropolis schooling as “inadequate in many respects.” In his books he criticized his teachers (who were paid much less than white teachers and were often recent graduates of the “colored school”) as “inefficient,” and bemoaned the distance between his home and the school on the west side of town.
    Though he exalted teachers in his books and films, they often disappointed him in real life. Teaching was his first wife’s profession, and that was an ill-fated marriage; when he traveled from city to city to sell his novels, he found that local teachers didn’t always rush to purchase copies.
    Micheaux insisted he always received “good grades” in his Metropolis school days, but felt unappreciated by those who tutored him. “About the only thing for which I was given credit was in learning readily,” Micheaux recollected, “but was continually critiqued for talking too much and being too inquisitive.”
    By now his father owned some eighty acres and was considered “fairly well-to-do, that is for a colored man,” but the Michauxes were merely land-rich and felt constantly beset by upkeep and debt. With springtime came rougher toil and a different set of learning experiences, though Oscar’s three older brothers assumed the brunt of the farm chores. Oscar, the fifth-born, was considered the family shirker, always complaining “that it was too cold to work in the winter, and too warm in the summer,” as he himself conceded. The Michauxes made ends meet by selling fruit, vegetables, and eggs, and soon—out of “disgust” at his “poor service in the field”—Calvin Michaux reassigned his young teenage son to take the family’s goods to the local meat and garden market, a huge open-air building in the center of Metropolis.
    At the market, Oscar bloomed. He discovered his métier: a born talker, he was a natural salesman. “I met and became acquainted with people quite readily,” Micheaux recalled. He soon developed little tricks, giving “each and every prospective customer” a singular greeting, or suggestion, “which usually brought a smile and a nod of appreciation as well as a purchase.” He noticed “how many people enjoy being flattered, and how pleased even the prosperous men’s wives would seem if bowed to with a pleasant, ‘Good Morning!’”
    When one older brother complained that Oscar had it easy at the market, Calvin let the brother try his hand at salesmanship. But the brother found himself tongue-tied with customers; he was no match for Oscar’s garrulous personality. One of Oscar’s surprising talents was approaching well-dressed white