Free Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan Page B

over Burke, but the Gregory town fathers, “with the flush of victory and the sensation of empire builders,” in Micheaux’s words, scorned their overtures. The Jacksons, seething, continued to plot.
    Micheaux was royally entertained by everything that was going on, making mental if not actual scribbled notes that would prove useful in crafting his first novel, The Conquest.
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    The summer of 1906 was another thoroughly wet one, wonderful for the crops. Micheaux managed to break the rest of the ground he intended to plow, planting wheat along with more corn and flax.
    His horse sense was improving: He bought better horses, and added machinery. He spent $3,000 on another relinquishment, north of Gregory and closer to the Missouri River, increasing his holdings to 320 acres. He divided his time between the two Gregory County farms, breaking the ground of the second homestead.
    Though he felt bereft of romance, he was also wary of crossing unspoken lines with any of the local ladies—some of them potentially eligible, many of them friendly with him, but all of them white. Though not everyone who spoke this way meant to offend him, Micheaux now and then heard himself referred to by the ugly word “nigger,” which was common parlance among the white settlers.
    One neighbor woman to his southeast tried to make him feel at ease, sometimes inviting Micheaux inside to sit down and eat supper with the family. “He’d say, ‘Nope,’ he wouldn’t do it,” remembered Dick Siler, another neighbor. “‘I’ll have some dessert,’ he’d say. And what he liked for dessert was homemade bread and milk. He’d have half a loaf of bread and drink a half gallon of milk, and that’d be his dessert. He’d always have that, but you had to bring it outdoors, he wouldn’t come in the house.”
    At times Micheaux was a mixer, known for attending the harvest barn dances hosted by local Bohemian families. He enjoyed the food and music, but shied away from the white women who tried to pull him into dancing. (He bared his thoughts on such missed chances via the lead character in The Wind from Nowhere : “He wasn’t dancing with any white girl, for everybody to be looking at them.”) He mingled more with the children, amusing them by singing, according to colloquial accounts, the schottishe “Any Rags,” popularized at the turn of the century by ragtime artist Arthur Collins. If he danced at all, it was with the children, and then everyone was delighted—the women envious—because Micheaux was a free-spirited dancer.
    Micheaux tried to picture Jessie living with him on his claim, but couldn’t quite conjure her there; nor could he shake his feelings of jealousy. He was writing at intervals to another young woman living in Carbondale named “Daisy Hinshaw” (at least that is the name he lends her in The Conquest ), whom he had known back in Metropolis, where she used to come to visit her cousins. She was older than Jessie, “not very good-looking but had spent years in school and in many ways was unlike the average colored girl,” in his words.
    He also developed a long-distance relationship with an attractive “St. Louis octoroon,” a trained nurse who wrote him engaging letters. But three of his best horses died that fall, he was distracted by hard work, and he let the St. Louis correspondence lapse. When the wet summer turned into an early, frigid winter, Micheaux almost froze in “my little old soddy.” The temperature could drop to twenty-five below zero, with thewind screaming and howling. The snow piled into huge sculpted drifts and long ridges that formed “one endless, unbroken sheet of white frost and ice.” Inside seemed as cold as outside. “Sod houses are warm as long as the mice, rats, and gophers do not bore them full of holes, but as they had made a good job tunneling mine, I was