Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan

Author:Patrick McGilligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061982156
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER TWELVE

1925–1927 STRAWS IN THE WIND

Micheaux put on a show in person, too. He’d taken to speaking and dressing theatrically. Up North in the wintertime he’d wear a long Russian coat, and talk about his audience, his films, his “territories,” as though he were running an empire. “He’d come on like Czar Nicholas,” artist Elton Fax remembered. “The dusky czar of Race filmdom,” the Chicago Defender dubbed him.

Late in 1924, “looking the picture of health and prosperity,” Czar Oscar stopped by the offices of the Chicago Defender, trying to get some news out via Tony Langston’s column. Though Langston was out of town, Micheaux regaled other reporters with his castles in the air, telling them he was “contemplating a trip to South America” and the West Indies in January. (A month or two later, he’d tell the press in another city that he was en route to Cairo and “several Russian cities” to arrange foreign bookings.) He foresaw a golden future for race pictures. “Our honored visitor was shown every courtesy at the command of the staff,” the Defender reported.

As with his earlier air castles, there is no evidence that these far-flung excursions ever materialized, though Micheaux did travel now and then to the West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica, was the last stop for showing his pictures). He was a “one-man corporation,” after all, and he knew it would be risky to leave the United States for any extended period. In fact, though his brother Swan had been running the Chicago office for several years, Micheaux had begun to suspect him of negligence or worse. And if not family, who could the race-picture pioneer trust?

But the empire was momentarily stable. The company had benefited from the success of The House Behind the Cedars, and Micheaux would maintain his blistering pace by producing three new motion pictures in 1925: The Conjure Woman, The Devil’s Disciple, and The Spider’s Web.

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