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

another, he was always selling himself. Though he was indeed “well enough acquainted” with a number of prosperous white people, his close friends were members of his own race, and they spanned a spectrum from doctors and lawyers to fellow porters and humble workingmen, not to mention a long list of ne’er-do-wells. He was always coy about lady friends in his fiction, pretending chaste habits. Men “like to be modest,” he wrote in one book, “to appear like they have no loves. It creates sympathy.” But he pursued women in several cities, and wrote to more than one.
    â€œLove is something I had longed for more than anything else,” Micheaux wrote in The Conquest, “but my ambition to overcome the vagaries of my race by accomplishing something worthy of note, hadn’t given me much time to seek love.”
    Foremost in his mind, at Christmas 1904, was Jessie, whom he had come to think of as a possible bride. When he returned from South America, he hastened to Carbondale to visit his sister, and then called on Jessie at her home in nearby Murphysboro. He had grown “tall and rugged,” he boasted in The Conquest, but Jessie was also “much taller.” His sister and Jessie’s mother excused themselves so the two young people could sit on the settee alone.
    Micheaux told Jessie of his “big plans and the air castles I was building on the great plains of the west.” Taking her hand, he was just about todeclare his love for Jessie when “I caught myself and dared not go farther with so serious a subject when I recalled the wild, rough, and lonely place out on the plains.” First, he vowed silently, he would develop his land into a proper home for a husband and wife.
    Micheaux returned to St. Louis and his Pullman job, spending most of the winter on excursions to Florida and Massachusetts. He took repeated runs to Boston, where he explored the Roxbury community and immersed himself in sightseeing. Along with the usual landmarks, he was keen to see Trinity Church, home of the Episcopalian clergyman Phillips Brooks, whose collected sermons he had read. A man who revered education, he also paid what must have been poignant visits to the Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Smith College in Northampton, Harvard and M.I.T. in Cambridge. He joined other tourists at historical sites in downtown Boston, inspecting the Old North Church, the Paul Revere house, the U.S.S. Constitution, Faneuil Hall, “and a thousand other reminders of the early heroism, rugged courage, and farseeing greatness of Boston’s early citizens.”
    Wherever he traveled as a porter, he also kept up with vaudeville and plays and concerts. His appetite for show business had probably begun with the summer riverboat shows that passed through Metropolis when he was growing up. In Chicago his tastes broadened. He had learned to enjoy everything from classical music to spoken recitals to blackface comedy. In writing about the shows he treasured from his travels, he never mentioned that in Boston’s “white” theater district, as in the theater districts of all other American cities, he had to endure “nigger heaven” (the widely-used term for the balcony to which black ticket-holders were relegated) and other offensive protocols of segregation—perhaps because the racism was so widely taken for granted.
    In Boston, Micheaux was captivated by a performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto, with the Australian diva Nellie Melba as Gilda and the young Italian tenor Enrico Caruso as the womanizing Count. The Pullman porter’s love of music extended to the Irish tenor Chauncy Olcott (composer of “My Wild Irish Rose,” among other songs), and he made a point of seeing Terence, Olcott’s new musical set in Ireland. Micheaux also recalled attending a “gorgeous and bloodcurdling” revival of Siberia, a play that incorporated the infamous Kishinev massacre