SOURCE: "Oscar Micheaux: The Melting Pot on the Plains," in The Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters, Vol. 2, September, 1976, pp. 299-307.

[In the following essay, Elder examines the historical information contained in Micheaux's published works about the westward expansion of the United States.]

When the Department of the Interior opened up land on the eastern part of the Rosebud Reservation in Gregory County, South Dakota, in 1905, the most unusual homesteader to stake his claim was the young Afro-American, Oscar Micheaux, a former Pullman porter from Illinois. Micheaux's ambition and daring seem to have fascinated his German, Swedish, Irish, Assyrian, Russian, Danish, and Austrian neighbors; there can be no doubt that he was deeply involved in his own accomplishments. He told of his homesteading experience in an autobiography, The Conquest, the Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), and again in two novels, The Homesteader (1917) and The Wind From Nowhere (1941).

Micheaux's story of his life on the South Dakota Prairie is doubly significant. First, it represents an American ideal at the turn of the century—the movement west and the opening up of the country. More interesting for the student of cultural pluralism, however, is Micheaux's self-conscious emotional division between personal ambition, marked by intense frontier individualism, and his hope of being not only a racial representative but a leader of his people and a model for them. Reflective of this paradoxical self-image is the contrast he establishes between the City and the Wilderness as he develops his theme of the West. This symbolic juxtaposition also serves as the organizing principle for his discussion of race.

Like the writings of other regionalists, Micheaux's books provide a wealth of topographical, historical, and political information. He gives details about the methods of holding lotteries to settle the country (first choice of a homesite going to the holder of the first number pulled from a pile by a blindfolded child); the astonishing way new towns sprang up almost overnight on the prairie; and the way two-story buildings in the town which boomed a few months before would be sawn in half and both parts moved to the next settlement boosted by the local businessmen, who had themselves started from nothing and flourished overnight. He enlightens us on the condition of the Indians, especially the social history of families of "breeds" like the Amoureaux who were ranchers, owners of great herds of cattle and much land, and "high moguls in Little Crow society." He emphasizes the importance of the railroad in making or breaking the fortunes of the towns and farms in its path; and he skillfully describes the appearance and unusual features of the new country, frequently described as "the hollow of God's hand." Despite Micheaux's interest in local color, however, his real subject is himself. The introduction to his autobiography states: "This is a true story of a negro who was discontented and the circumstances that were the outcome of that discontent."

The West, the Wilderness, represents to him, as it does to his German and Swedish neighbors, all that is new and promising for the future. Here, he says in his book, is "unbroken prairie all about him; with its virgin soil and undeveloped resources.… Here could a young man work out his own destiny." His own growth is intrinsically linked with the growth of the country; a young man starting out with few resources, he explains, "must begin with the beginning and develop with the development of the country." The prairie is the "land of raw material, which my dreams had pictured to me as the land of real beginning.…"

Micheaux, like his fictional counterpart in The Homesteader, Jean Baptiste, was the only Black man to settle on the Rosebud after its opening; and he was one of the few settlers with sufficient foresight, frugality, ambition, determination, and industry to survive the dreadful winters on the prairie, the scarely less dreadful summers, and the plagues of prairie fires and drought. A list of his virtues would sound remarkably like Ben Franklin's, and he had the same trouble with "humility." This connection with one of America's founders, whose own Autobiography emphasizes the pleasure and possibility of rising from "poverty and obscurity … to a state of affluence and some degree of celebrity in the world," is apt, for Micheaux dedicates his own story to that Black Ben Franklin, Booker T. Washington.

Micheaux's story, despite its hopeful premise of participation in the American Dream, is one of increasing isolation. The loneliness is not only that physical solitude imposed by the darkness which steals up swiftly, imperceptibly, on the plains, or by the snow which sweeps "into huge drifts or long ridges," forming "one endless, unbroken sheet of white frost and ice," isolating individuals within their flimsy shacks, locking them within their sod houses, covering over the fences and roads man uses as marks and guides for his presence on the earth, and threatening the lone man in the wilderness with perceptual distortion as well as physical extinction. More significantly, Micheaux comes to realize his emotional and psychological isolation from his people. Late in his autobiography, he observes:

Before I had any colored people to discourage me with their ignorance of business or what is required for success, I was stimulated to effort by the example of my white neighbors and friends who were doing what I admired, building an empire; and to me that was the big idea. Their parents before them knew something of business and this knowledge was a goodly heritage. If they could not help their children with money they at least gave their moral support and visited them and encouraged them with kind words of hope and cheer. The people in a new country live mostly on hopes for the first five or ten years. My parents and grandparents had been slaves, honest, but ignorant. My father could neither read nor write, had not succeeded in a large way, and had nothing to give me as a start, not even practical knowledge.

Micheaux notes the two distinct factions in Afro-American political and social thought at that time, factions which he characterizes as Progressives and Reactionaries. Classifying himself with the former, he explains: "The Progressives, led by Booker T. Washington and with industrial education as the material idea, are good, active citizens; while the other class distinctly reactionary in every way, contend for more equal rights, privileges, and protection, which is all very logical, indeed, but they do not substantiate their demands with any concrete policies; depending largely on loud demands, and are too much given to the condemnation of the entire white race for the depredations of a few." While Micheaux agrees that the Black man has been discriminated against, his own powerful sense of self-sufficiency and individualism prevents him from identifying with a people whom he characterizes as unable to "feel the thrill of modern progress and … ignorant to public opinion." As his story progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that despite his desire to inspire and lead other Blacks into the glories of settling the plains, Micheaux actually defines himself in contrast to them.

Shortly after leaving home as a very young man, he starts his first bank account, and his view of it as opening the door for a literal and imaginative flight from his race is instructive:

The little twenty-dollar certificate of deposit opened my mind to different things entirely. I would look at it until I had day dreams. During the three months I spent in Eaton I laid the foundation of a future. Simple as it was, it led me into channels which carried me away from my race and into a life fraught with excitement; a life that gave experiences and other things I had never dreamed of. I had started a bank account of twenty dollars and I found myself wanting one of thirty, and to my surprise the desire seemed to increase. This desire fathered my plans to become a porter on a Pullman car.

After working several months on irregular runs that take him to all the major cities east of the Mississippi, he is put on a steady run to Portland, Oregon. Micheaux makes much in his books of the importance of the railroad in developing the Midwest. By the vagaries of its hitting one town and missing another, the fortunes of western entrepreneurs and prairie towns are made or lost. It is clear that the railroad serves as a "civilizing" force in his own life, as well, and those of his fictional counterparts. By working as a porter, he sees most of the country from Boston to Portland; he learns about farming and sheep-raising from the western sheepmen he encounters on return runs from Chicago; he becomes familiar with the features of the country where he is later to locate his claim. His inquisitiveness, which he shows as having been a burden to his family when he was growing up, now provides him with the basis for his acquisitiveness.

Moreover, once he moves onto the Rosebud, he sees his unique presence there as another opportunity to prove himself. Although he spent time on farms as a child, he was never very fond of or good at farm work; and his struggles to get started in South Dakota provide the few humorous passages in his autobiography:

I had left St. Louis with two hundred dollars in cash, and had drawn a draft for five hundred dollars more on the Chicago bank, where my money was on deposit, and what did I have for it? One big horse, tall as a giraffe; two little mules, one of which was a torment to me; a sod house; and an old wagon. As I faced the situation there seemed nothing to do but to fight it out, and I turned wearily to another attempt, this time with more success. Before I had started breaking I had invited criticism. Now I was getting it on all sides. I was the only colored homesteader on the reservation, and as an agriculturalist it began to look mighty bad for the colored race on the Little Crow.

He trades one bad mule for another bad mule: "I learned afterward the trader had come thirty-five miles to trade me that mule.… I soon had the enviable reputation of being a horse trader. Whenever anybody with horses to trade came to town, they were advised to go over to the sod house north of town and see the colored man. He was fond of trading horses, yes, he fairly doted on it." His white neighbors keep waiting for him to sell out "and 'beat it' back to more ease and comfort":

This is largely the opinion of most of the white people, regarding the negro, and they are not entirely wrong in their opinion. I was quite well aware that such an opinion existed, but contrary to expectations, I rather appreciated it. When I broke out one hundred and twenty acres with such an outfit as I had, as against many other real farmers who had not broken over forty acres, with good horses and their knowledge of breaking prairie, acquired in states they had come from, I began to be regarded in a different light. At first I was regarded as an object of curiosity, which changed to appreciation, and later admiration. I was not called a free-go-easy coon, but a genuine booster for Calias and the Little Crow. I never spent a lonesome day after that.

His acceptance among the white homesteaders, however, is offset by his rejection among the Blacks he knows in Chicago. "One of the greatest tasks of my life," he reports, "has been to convince a certain class of my racial acquaintances that a colored man can be anything." When more land opens up for settlement, lengthy advertising circulars are printed and distributed to lure settlers. Micheaux "gave the name of not less than one hundred persons, and sent them personally to many as well. I wrote articles and sent them to different newspapers edited by colored people, in the east and other places. I was successful in getting one colored person to come and register—my oldest brother."

As the West, the Wilderness, represents success and the future of the country to Micheaux, the City is linked irredeemably in his mind with the plight of his less ambitious brothers. The City is Chicago, the great "hog-butcher" of the plains, the home of thousands of Blacks at the turn of the century. On its South Side, he is trapped once again by the backwardness, improvidence, insecurity, ignorance, and cramped spirits he went on the road to escape. Consistent with the sexual tension central to the American slavery experience, the dichotomy between the City and the Wilderness is reinforced by the two women with whom Micheaux becomes romantically involved: Orlean, his Black wife, who is inescapably rooted in the sterile soil of Chicago's ethnic mentality, and the artistic, appreciative, hard-working, ambitious, and, unfortunately, white Agnes, whom he meets on the plains.

Micheaux's portrait of Chicago, "the Mecca for southern Negroes," is unusual, for most early Afro-American fiction writers focus upon Harlem as the goal of the turn-ofthe-century urban migration. "Always the freest city in the world for the black man," Micheaux explains, "Chicago has the most Negroes in the mail service and the civil service; more Negroes carry clubs as policemen; more can be found in all the departments of the municipal courts, county commissioners, aldermen, corporation counsels, game warden assistants, and so on down. Indeed, a Negro feels freer and more hopeful in Chicago than anywhere else in the United States." Such freedom and hope appear illusory and limited to the homesteader, however, when he compares them to the opportunities the Wilderness offers. Unfortunately, he cannot convince many others that they can do as he did. His brother-inlaw expresses the general attitude of Chicago Blacks when he states, "that colored people had been held in slavery for two hundred years and since they were free they did not want to go out into the wilderness and sit on a farm, but wanted to be where they could have freedom and convenience.…"

In an attempt to alleviate his increasing loneliness and isolation, Micheaux decides to marry. Despite his firm resolve not to, he falls in love with the daughter of a Scots homesteader. His reason for not pursuing the relationship, which is reciprocal, reveals both his dependence upon white good will and his racial loyalty. He marries a Black girl from Chicago, but because of her immaturity, her preacher father's interference, and the general attitude of her family and friends that she is throwing her life away out in the wilds, the marriage fails.

Much more interesting than the details of his actual marriage are the imaginative uses to which Micheaux puts it in The Homesteader. In the novel, the timid wife of the autobiography turns into a she-devil who attacks Micheaux in a hysterical rage, as though punishing him for attempting to move beyond the confines of his racial experience. After striking him with all her force, scratching at his eyes, and abusing him so furiously that he sinks, with "no effort to protect himself," to the floor, "she suddenly raised her foot and kicked him viciously full in the face. This seemed, then, to make her more vicious, and there-upon she started to jump upon him with her feet.…"

If Micheaux envisions himself martyred by his race for his individualism, he indulges in an amazingly violent and melodramatic way of avenging himself. Orlean, stunned finally by her realization of what her attack on Jean Baptiste means and aware, as only Micheaux was really aware, of the chaos and sterility her rejection of him guarantees, stabs her father, whom she blames for her predicament, and then kills herself.

Having dispatched the Blacks to their bloody ends, Micheaux turns his attention back to Agnes, the Scots girl. His resolution of this relationship is another example of pure wish-fulfillment. Incredibly, he secures for her a previously unsuspected Black ancestor so that his hero can follow "The Custom of the Country—and its law" and still, as in real life he was unable to do, obtain his dream-girl. In his autobiography, Micheaux admits, "I would have given half my life to have had her possess just a least bit of negro blood in her veins … ;" in his fiction, he provides her with barely that "least bit." She certainly does not share the insecurities of the rest of their race. On the contrary, she is artistic and, because of her experience as a homesteader's daughter, every bit as ambitious and determined to succeed as he. She even saves his life twice.

If Agnes is Micheaux's fantasy girl (she too has had dreams from early childhood about the faceless, dark man who would totally alter her life), The Wind From Nowhere, essentially the same story as in the earlier works, extends the racial fantasy to include representatives of those Blacks Micheaux dispatched in The Homesteader. Martin Eden and his racially-mixed Deborah go east from the prairie, where

unfortunate families of their race had been forced on relief. They selected from them the worthy and industrious ones, brought them hither and permitted each to buy and pay for out of earnings, ten acres of rich, deep plowed land. And with each purchase they supplied a cow, a horse, chickens and pigs. Each family then grew its own food. The women were able to make their pin money from eggs and chickens and milk; the men were given work in huge food product factories and manganese alloy plants that were built, where they were given a few days work each month. Twenty-five years hence, a great Negro colony will call the Rosebud Country home and be contented, prosperous, and happy.

The utopia of socialism comes, then, to replace the rugged individualism of Micheaux's early self-image and definition of America's promise. Only through a kind of benevolent paternalism can he now imagine the mass involvement of his people in the hope of the Wilderness.

The paradoxes of the personal and racial tensions in Micheaux's books render them fascinating testaments to the Black identity struggle at the beginning of the twentieth century as well as illuminations of the Afro-American experience in a section of the country seldom examined in this regard, the rural and urban Midwest. The Black pioneer's perception of his visibility among European immigrants in the Wilderness and his invisibility among his own people on Chicago's South Side results in one of our literature's most revealing views of the Black's dual role as "America's metaphor" and her scapegoat.