Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only Read Online Free PDF

characteristic of him—had quit, and now in midwinter was out of a job.” Indeed, William was flat broke, “but with a lot of fine clothes and a diamond or two,” Micheaux recalled. “Most folks from the country don’t value good clothes and diamonds in the way city folks do,” he observed ruefully.
    On his first Sunday in Chicago, Oscar thought the two brothers might go to church together. But William got flashily dressed up for the occasion—“wearing his five dollar hat, fifteen dollar made-to-measureshoes, forty-five dollar coat and vest, eleven dollar trousers, fifty dollar tweed overcoat and his diamonds”—and then headed off without so much as a backward glance at his brother. Oscar trailed behind, sitting alone in an opposite pew and feeling snubbed.
    The Armour Avenue landlady, who was embroiled in some kind of romance with William, carried William on his back rent. But Oscar was obliged to pay six dollars a month as his share, so he urgently sought employment at the nearby stockyards (“Mecca for the down-and-out”). The $1.50–a-day work was decent but intermittent, and he drifted elsewhere. “I soon found the mere getting of jobs to be quite easy,” Micheaux wrote later in The Conquest. “It was getting a desirable one that gave me trouble.”
    After “trying first one job, then another,” Oscar headed for the steel mills of Joliet. A few weeks of heavy toil later—wrecking and carrying around broken iron, and digging in a canal “with a lot of jabbering foreigners,” under a foreman who was a “renowned imbecile”—Oscar heard that the nearby coal chutes were paying better, and he quit the steel industry, too.
    In charge of the coal chutes was a big black man who hired Oscar to extract coal from a box car, then crack and heave it into a chute; the job paid $1.50 per twenty-five tons. The trouble was, Oscar could only manage sixteen to eighteen tons a day, and his daily earnings peaked at one dollar. When the contractor took him out for a drink, trying to encourage him by telling him he’d be heaving thirty tons in no time, “I cut him off by telling him that I’d resign before I became so proficient.”
    Resign he did, returning to Chicago to a less sympathetic landlady, and a brother increasingly indifferent to his troubles. Oscar signed with a hiring agency, which promptly did nothing on his behalf, swindling him out of his agency fee of three hard-earned dollars. He tried the newspapers, standing outside when the papers came off the press, grabbing one, scanning the ads, choosing a prospect, then running like crazy to the stipulated address. One way or another, the jobs were always filled before he got there. “The only difference I found between the newspapers and the employment agencies was that I didn’t have to pay three dollars for the experience,” he wrote.
    One day, while talking to “a small, Indian-looking Negro,” he heard of an opening for a shoeshine man in a barbershop in the supposed boom town of “Eaton” (probably Wheaton), west of Chicago. Oscar filled hisgrip and “beat it,” arriving in the town on a cold, bleak day in early May. On the town’s main street he found a dingy two-chair barbershop, which had just been taken over by a new proprietor with a German-speaking assistant. “They seemed to need company,” Micheaux recalled. He got the position, which paid no wages but all the fees and tips he could wangle from his shoeshine customers—and an upstairs room where he could bed down. “Shining shoes is not usually considered an advanced or technical occupation requiring skill,” Micheaux explained later. “However, if properly conducted it can be the making of a good solicitor.”
    Solicitation was half the challenge: “Eaton” was in rural Illinois, where the rustic class put little stock in the