SOURCE: "Negro Fiction to World War I," in Negro Voices in American Fiction, The University of North Carolina Press, 1948, pp. 23-100.

[In the following excerpt, Gloster briefly assesses The Conquest, The Homesteader, and The Forged Note.]

Avoiding both pride and bitterness in his treatment of interracial subject matter, Oscar Micheaux writes some-what autobiographically of the experiences of an enterprising Negro in Chicago, the South Dakota farm lands, and the urban South. His first novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913), based largely on the author's own life and dedicated to Booker T. Washington, relates the experiences of Oscar Devereux in Illinois and South Dakota. In the latter state Devereux, after acquiring a homestead and becoming a prosperous farmer, falls in love with a Scottish girl but evades matrimony because of the racial barrier. Later marrying Orlean McCraline, daughter of a Negro preacher of Chicago, he finally leaves her because of frequent disagreements with her father.

In The Conquest, for the first time in American Negro fiction, a leading colored character appears in the role of a pioneer; and settlement in the Northwest is proposed as an approach to the alleviation of racial tension in the South. Admitting that the black man suffers injustice in the United States, Micheaux nevertheless asserts that this "should be no reason why the American Negro should allow obvious prejudice to prevent his taking advantage of opportunities that surround him." Recommending the Northwest as an area where the Negro might work out a successful future, the author continues:

… for years I have felt constrained to deplore the negligence of the colored race in America, in not seizing the opportunity for monopolizing more of the many million acres of rich farm lands in the great Northwest, where immigrants from the old world own many acres of rich farm lands; while the millions of blacks, only a few hundred miles away, are as oblivious to it all as the heathen of Africa are to civilization.

In didactic chapters entitled "Where the Negro Fails" and "Progressives and Reactionaries" Micheaux advances opinions concerning the shortcomings and leadership of his race. He affirms that "the greatest of all the failings" of his people, both ignorant and educated, is the lack of "that great and mighty principle which characterizes Americans, called the initiative." In amplification of this idea, he says:

Colored people are possible in every way that is akin to becoming good citizens, which has been thoroughly proven and is an existing fact. Yet they seem to lack the "guts" to get into the Northwest and "do things." In seven or eight of the great agricultural states there were not enough colored farmers to fill a township of thirty-six sections.

Another predominating inconsistency is that there is that "love of luxury." They want street cars, cement walks, and electric lights to greet them when they arrive.

In an evaluation of the two conflicting schools of Negro leadership, Micheaux expresses a preference for the racial platform of Booker T. Washington:

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.

A further examination of Micheaux's views on the Washington-DuBois controversy reveals, however, that he is not altogether in agreement with the views of the Tuskegee educator. He proposes the Northwest for Negro settlement, while Washington advised the black man to remain in the South. In addition, Micheaux is incorrect in the observation that DuBois was not a leader of the anti-Washington movement and that this movement did not gain momentum with the passing of the years.

The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915), largely autobiographical like The Conquest, is also a trail-blazing novel in its treatment of the experiences of a Negro writer in selling his own book in the urban South. Sidney Wyeth, author of a novel called The Tempest (really The Conquest), and Mildred Latham are promoting the sale of The Tempest among colored people in Southern cities. Wyeth goes to Attalia (Atlanta) and Effingham (Birmingham), while Mildred works in Memphis. At the close of the novel the couple, reunited in New Orleans, set out for South Dakota, the part of the country that Wyeth prefers and calls home.

Much of The Forged Note is direct criticism of Negro life in the urban South, "wherein people and environment are so different from the rest, that a great problem is ever at issue." Though aware of prejudice and persecution, Micheaux is chiefly concerned with the black man's own delinquencies. For example, one character in the book makes the following comment concerning the colored population of Effingham:

"These Negroes in Effingham are niggers proper. They think nothing about reading and trying to learn something; they only care for dressing up and having a good time."

A further indictment of Negroes, especially the leaders of the race, is given in an article which Wyeth contributes under the following headline to a Southern daily news-paper:

Negro Says Race Faces Dreadful Conditions, Due to Lack of Leaders. Says Selfishness Is So Much the Order That There Is No Interest Whatever Toward Uplift. Professional Negro the Worst.

A sordid picture of the criminality and profligacy of colored Memphians is painted for Mildred by a minister:

"The city has a preponderance of ignorant, polluted people among the Negroes. They flock into this town from all around, and represent the low, polluted, and depraved element of our race. They settle about the levee district, spend their earnings for the worst whiskey, give the remainder of their time to gambling and all kinds of vice, and murder is the natural consequence."

Though indicating the degeneracy of Negro life in Southern cities, Micheaux offers no panacea and fails to exhibit the optimism and enterprise which characterize The Conquest.

Except for an intensification of the theme of intermarriage and a more detailed analysis of the main character's difficulties with his Negro wife because of her father's interference, The Homesteader (1917) is quite similar to The Conquest. The novel is an account of the love of a Negro farmer of South Dakota for the daughter of a neighbor who has recently migrated from Indiana. When the lovers are brought together in a driving snowstorm, the author comments:

But what he was yet to know, and which is the great problem of our story, the girl, his dream girl, Agnes Stewart, happened to be white, while he, Jean Baptiste, The Homesteader, was a Negro.

Although strongly attracted to Agnes, Baptiste concludes that their marriage could not be consummated in the United States since

… between him and his dream girl was a chasm so deep socially that bridging was impossible. Because she was white while he was black, according to the custom of the country and its law, she could never be anything to him. (Italics by Micheaux.)

Moreover, he feels that such a union would not be for the best interests of the girl and himself:

But to marry out of the race to which he belonged, especially into the race in which she belonged, would be the most unpopular thing he could do. He had set himself in this new land to succeed; he had worked and slaved to that end. He liked his people; he wanted to help them. Examples they needed, and such he was glad he had become; but if he married now the one he loved, the example was lost; he would be condemned, he would be despised by the race that was his. Moreover, last but not least, he would perhaps, by such union bring into her life much unhappiness, and he loved her too well for that.

For these reasons, therefore, Baptiste decides to marry a woman of his own race and eventually weds Orlean McCarthy (note the similarity of the name to that of the wife of the hero in The Conquest), a Chicago minister's daughter, whom he carries to his homestead in South Dakota. The Reverend McCarthy succeeds in alienating his daughter's affections and causing her to sell property which her husband had given her. After Orlean, tormented by conscience, commits patricide and suicide, Baptiste is accused of a double murder but is later acquitted because of findings of a detective hired by Agnes. Baptiste and Agnes are brought together through the use of deus ex machina, a device frequently used in American fiction to solve the difficulties of interracial romance. Returning to South Dakota, Baptiste learns that Agnes has Negro blood and marries her without anxiety concerning American mores and law.

Though unimpressive in technique, Oscar Micheaux's novels introduce characters and settings far removed from the well-trod paths of American Negro fiction. The problem of intermarriage, the cardinal interest in The Conquest and The Homesteader, is left dangling in the former work but is solved in the latter through the hackneyed device of revealing that the supposedly white heroine is a mixed-blood. The Conquest, which attempts to defend the program of Booker T. Washington, proposes Negro migration to the Northwest as a means of improving race relations in the South. In The Forged Note the author missed an unusual opportunity to probe the life of the Southern urban Negro. With all their inadequacies, however, Micheaux's novels stand in contrast to much of the complimentary fiction produced by many Negro writers before the World War.