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Join our mailing list!    First Name        Last Name        School        Email            ©2007    StudentAffairs.com    All Rights Reserved	"This is a modern age": Oscar Micheaux in Cyberspace Brian Cremins University of Connecticut Student Affairs Online: Fall 2002 • Vol. 3, No. 4 For the last year I have been researching and writing my doctoral dissertation on pioneer African American filmmaker and novelist Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951). His name may not be familiar to you, unless you have seen his 1925 silent film Body and Soul, which featured the big screen debut of actor/singer/social activist Paul Robeson, or read one of his seven novels, only two of which are currently in print. Only in the last twenty or so years has Micheaux's name become more familiar in popular and academic circles. Not only did he self-publish and market his books, but he also raised the capital to write, direct, produce, and distribute his early silent films. By the time of his death in 1951, he had made over forty films, only a handful of which have survived. Given Micheaux's fiercely independent spirit and his commitment to what we would now call "D.I.Y." or "Do-It-Yourself" principles--in addition to his work as a writer and filmmaker, he also spent time as a Pullman car porter and a homesteader in South Dakota, an experience which served as the basis for several of his books and films--I often speculate what Micheaux would do if he lived today, in the age of the Internet. If he were alive today, would he be offering his books and previews of his films on the Oscar Micheaux Western Book Supply Company Official Homepage? These speculations began to take on a life of their own only a couple of weeks ago when I received a first-edition copy of Micheaux's 1913 novel, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer, with an autograph on the title pages by the man himself. How I ended up with a copy of a book printed almost ninety years ago by the Woodruff Press of Lincoln, Nebraska is a story which illustrates how much smaller the world has become--and how our horizons have expanded--since the advent of the digital age. As a Ph.D. candidate in the English department here at the University of Connecticut, my interest lies in Micheaux's seven novels, which range from semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a homesteader--The Conquest (1913), The Homesteader (1917; also the basis of his first feature film in 1919), and The Wind from Nowhere (1944)--to his later "sensational" detective novels, The Case of Mrs. Wingate (1945) and The Story of Dorothy Stanfield (1946). I have done most of my research by searching through primary sources and documents including Micheaux's correspondence with other African American writers and filmmakers, newspaper and magazine articles from the black press of the early twentieth century, and the books and magazines which Micheaux alludes to in his work (he loved reading the popular magazine writers of his day, including muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and short story writers like Maude Radford Warren). When I first began my research, I doubted the Internet would be of great use to me, but, after a few desultory Google searches, I came across a number of helpful websites, including Duke University's Oscar Micheaux Society site (http://www.duke.edu/web/film/Micheaux/) and the Oscar Micheaux Homepage (www.micheaux.org), which has a wealth of information collected from a number of different sources, including Martin Keenan's research into Micheaux's family history and details on the annual Oscar Micheaux Film Festival in Gregory, South Dakota. This summer, after contacting Richard Papousek and Alis Veren, the organizers of the Micheaux Festival, I found myself on a plane to Sioux City, Iowa, where I picked up a rental car and began my four-hour drive to Gregory, the small town where you'll find the site of Micheaux's original homestead. The information superhighway had led me from my desk and my trusty iMac to the Missouri River and Highway 18, which unfolded before me like a long, flat black ribbon as the Bobby Fuller Four kept me company on the radio. While in town for the conference, where I conducted a number of interviews and collected folk tales about Micheaux and his relationship to his fellow (white) homesteaders, I made a number of new friends and found my head spinning from all of the information and ideas from other Micheaux scholars, writers, filmmakers, and people from Gregory and the surrounding towns. I also stumbled across what would become my copy of The Conquest, with the following inscription: To my friend G.F. Kares in memory of days wherein the scene of this story lay, with sincere wishes, Oscar Micheaux Winner, S.D. May 9th, 1913. Dr. Arnold Wold, a retired schoolteacher and superintendent who now lives in Winner, South Dakota, had found the book at a flea market and offered it to me for sale. I jumped at the chance, and tried to imagine what Micheaux would have thought if he had known that this book would eventually make its way across the country to Storrs, Connecticut, where I found it waiting for me in a sturdy cardboard box in the graduate student mailroom. Given his affinity for the popular culture of his day--books, magazines, movies, and radio--I believe Micheaux must have been shaking his head in approval as I opened the package. He might also have been slapping his forehead and saying, Now if only I'd had access to a personal computer and some webdesign software--that would have saved me the time and energy of selling my novels door to door! Just to think of the possibilities...! As undergraduates made their way quickly from one class to the next, and my fellow grad students talked about their exams and term papers and class presentations, I closed the door of my office (which is not easy to do when you share it with six other doctoral candidates) and cradled the book in my hands. I was afraid that if I exposed the old book and its powder-blue cover (which proclaimed itself to be The Conquest...By a Negro Pioneer), it might turn to dust, or disappear in a flash of blinding light. But, no, the book was still there, a presence on my desk, and I began to think about the consistency of American popular culture, and our uncanny ability to use technology to build bridges between the past and the present. Almost one hundred years ago, Micheaux, struggling after the collapse of his first marriage and his failure as a homesteader, transformed himself into a writer, and taught himself how to compose a novel and, just as significantly, how to distribute it to his readers. One of his most remarkable qualities was his ability to adapt to the different media which were available to him: first the printed page, and later the silver screen. On the dust jacket to his second novel, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races (1915), a copy of which I received through the kind assistance of Lee Barry, who, like film historian Pearl Bowser, first began researching Micheaux's life in the 1960s, Micheaux, always the savvy salesman, includes a short reflection called "The Reader's Duty," which says, Truth spreads by testimony. There is a sort of high compulsion, which lofty spirits recognize, to bear witness to the truth wherever found. That is how the best books get their circulation. A reader who has dug treasure from a book spreads the news of his discovery to others whom he desires to enrich, If this book has pleased or helped you, will you not tell about it to the most appreciative person you know? As someone being trained as a literary critic and historian, I have often found myself resisting modern technology, including the Internet. After all, most of the work I do asks that, for the moment, at least, I close my eyes on this world and transport myself into the past as I read articles from McClure's Magazine circa 1903 or The Chicago Defender from 1910. In The Conquest, however, Micheaux's narrator Oscar Devereaux writes, "This is a modern age," and I keep reminding myself of that passage as I explore his books and, as he suggests in The Forged Note, pass them from one friend to the next. As I drove home from my office last week and listened to the new album by the Washington, D.C. post-punk band The Dismemberment Plan, I was still anxious--how did this signed book, this token of the past, end up here? And did it really belong to this new modern age of the twenty-first century? Well, of course it does, I thought I heard someone say over the din of my car stereo. And somewhere I imagine Micheaux, or someone very much like him, is teaching himself (or herself) how to tell a story and then how to "publish" it in cyberspace, complete with hypertextual links, three-dimensional illustrations, and an electronic soundtrack, and in another hundred years a historian will stumble across this self-published electronic text via an old link on what used to be called the Internet, and wonder what it's doing there, and who created it, and this cycle will repeat itself.   Printer Friendly Version