Free Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan

especially, he exhibits a keen sense of himself as a quasi-comic hero, though always with the heightened consciousness of a black man who knew he stood apart from and was regarded skeptically by the surrounding community of white homesteaders.
    Marriages between white men and Indians were not uncommon in Gregory County, and a few Indians had married Buffalo Soldiers. But Micheaux never lost sight of the fact that his skin color made him a genuine rarity, a “novelty” among the predominantly white homesteaders. He met and talked with white families who had children, “in some instances twenty years of age,” Micheaux wrote later, “who had never seen a colored man. Sometimes the little tads would run from me, screaming as though they had met a lion, or some other wild beast of the forest.” Hisneighbors quickly learned the name Oscar, he wrote later, but fumbled over the pronunciation and spelling of his “odd surname.” He sometimes got deliveries that were marked, simply, “Colored Man, Dallas.”
    There was only “one other colored person” residing in Dallas, Micheaux wrote Jessie, “a barber, who was married to a white woman, and I didn’t like him.” This was the first time in his life Micheaux had lived surrounded by white people, many of them European immigrants—Germans, Swedes, Irish, Czechs, Russians, Danes, and Austrians—still conversing in their mother tongues. “Only about one [homesteader] in every eight or ten was a farmer,” Micheaux recalled. “They were of all vocations in life and all nationalities, excepting negroes, and I controlled the colored vote. This was one place where being a colored man was an honorary distinction.”
    In spite of everything, by September Micheaux had proven his mettle beyond any doubt. His persistence impressed all his neighbors. In the summer of 1905, he later estimated, he pulled a plow fourteen hundred miles to break the bulk of his claim, planting corn, oats, and flax, and fencing off vast sections of his property. He broke over 120 acres, more than most “other real farmers, who had not broken over forty acres, with good horses and their knowledge of breaking prairie.”
    He had made a home for himself, and triumphed among his peers, showing himself to be not only a hardworking farmer but in many small ways a good neighbor. He was less and less a “novelty” Negro. He had a growing circle of friends among the white settlers. “I began to be regarded in a different light,” Micheaux wrote.

CHAPTER FOUR
1906–1908 THE ONE TRUE WOMAN
    Winter came early in South Dakota, and the groundbreaking and planting halted. With extra time on his hands, Micheaux sought other work. The long distances between his homestead and others didn’t bother him; when he wasn’t riding a horse or buggy, he was a familiar figure striding across the fields, hiring himself out to neighbors. One of the many tasks Micheaux performed for the Jackson brothers was freighting coal and supplies between Bonesteel and Dallas.
    When the cold set in and the winds worsened, there was little respite. Neighbors who visited him recalled Micheaux lying in bed, his little stove burning fiercely and blankets up around his shoulders, the corner of a book peeking out.
    Micheaux got in the habit, that first year, of heading to Chicago around Thanksgiving for Christmas and the New Year, staying for as long as possible. He caught up with friends, celebrated his birthday on the second of January, and attended all the shows downtown and in the Black Belt. He was impressed by the new stock company that had taken over the Pekin Theater at the corner of Twenty-seventh and State. The Pekin Players were among the nation’s first professional black theater troupes, mounting original plays as well as Broadway hits and old standards restaged with all-black casts. Charles Moore and Lawrence Chenault were two of the