Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Read Online Free PDF Page A

coldest night I had ever experienced,” he stepped off the “fast mail” express in the city of his dreams, a place that might as well have been Oz, for all its surreal qualities. Imagine a young country bumpkin of the late nineteenth century, a farm hick acquainted only with backwater towns, passing through a portal into a world of tomorrow. Chicago was “new and strange,” Micheaux recalled, and that must have been an understatement.
    Trolley lines ran from downtown into the countryside. Horse-drawn vehicles shared the roads with street cars, bicycles, and the occasional chauffeur-driven automobile. The bridges were stone, the sidewalks cement. There was a lake as big as an ocean, vast public parks teeming with activity, an expanse of high-rises (at twenty-one stories, Chicago’s Masonic Temple was the world’s tallest building), and a public library that flowed around a block. At night the city was afire with lighted windows and corner lamps and electric signs. The streets were loud with music and laughter pouring out of the theaters and saloons. Most astonishing of all were the people thronging the streets—more black people than Micheaux had ever imagined. Although the population of the city was 98 percent white, roughly thirty thousand of Chicago’s inhabitants were black.
    Ninety percent of Chicago’s black citizens lived in the Black Belt, the South Side neighborhood that was Micheaux’s ultimate destination, though at that time plenty of white people—up to 40 percent—also dwelled there with little friction. The area ran from Twelfth to Thirty-first streets, bounded by Lake Michigan on the east and Wentworth Avenue on the west. Black physicians, attorneys, and professionals lived in splendid brick homes, while most ordinary folk dwelled in wood houses. Thenewcomer wandered the streets for a long time, gawking at the sights before arriving in the residential area where his brother lived.
    State Street between Twenty-sixth and Thirty-ninth was fast becoming “the centerpiece of black life in Chicago,” as Chicago historian Robin F. Bachin has written. This stretch, soon to be dubbed “the Stroll,” was jammed with sports venues, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, dance halls, and taverns, which catered to a mainly black clientele, though they weren’t always owned by black people.
    The Stroll was where the black and tans met and congregated, promenading day and night. “Excitement from noon to noon,” wrote Langston Hughes in his autobiographical novel The Big Sea, describing the thrill of experiencing the Stroll for the first time in 1918. “Midnight was like day.”
    Oscar’s brother lived in a rooming house at 3021 Armour Avenue, two blocks west of the Stroll, not far from the Union Stock Yards. William wasn’t home to greet his brother, but his landlady welcomed the young man, who had just turned eighteen, and Oscar eagerly confided in her his dreams of striking it rich in the big city. When William came home and the landlady recounted their conversation, he scolded Oscar, telling him to keep his mouth shut so people wouldn’t realize he was so “green.” William wrote their parents in Kansas, describing his little brother as “a big, awkward, ignorant kid, unsophisticated in the ways of the world,” according to Micheaux. Though Oscar tried to laugh off William’s jibes, being painted as a rube in a letter that would be read by his entire family made him feel “heartsick and discouraged,” and for the first time in his life he suffered an extended attack of “the blues.”
    William, who was six years older than Oscar, regarded himself as a man of the world. Oscar, on the other hand, viewed his brother as a poseur who had taken on city airs. William had been gainfully employed as a waiter on a railroad dining car, but “in a fit of independence—which had always been