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

regular polishing of their footwear. Oscar had to hover outside the barbershop, snatching at passersby and launching quickly into his spiel. “If I could argue them into stopping, if only for a moment, I could nearly always succeed in getting them into the chair,” Micheaux recalled.
    Business was paltry, however, so he found another sideline in which he had some experience: Early in the day he would go out and find spot farm jobs, pitching hay or shocking oats for area farmers, then head to the barbershop to shine shoes by late afternoon. But the local farm youth outworked him—“Whew!”—and as the summer wore on he pined for company. So he began writing letters to Jessie, the pretty, thoughtful girl he had met in Carbondale.
    Staying in “Eaton,” Oscar accumulated enough savings to open his initial bank account. The sight of his “twenty-dollar certificate of deposit,” he later reflected, opened his eyes to new horizons. Soon Oscar was dreaming of saving enough money to invest in land, or a business. It was during his time in “Eaton,” Micheaux wrote later, that he laid “the foundation of a future” for himself, with both his first savings and his first stirrings of ambition.
    Now he set a fresh goal for himself: to obtain a more decent, better-paying niche as a porter on one of the Pullman Company’s “magnificent sleepers”—a job that would offer him “an opportunity to see the country and make money at the same time,” in his words. And so Oscar returned to Chicago, temporarily busying himself with lawn-mowing, window-washing, and odd jobs while haunting the different Pullman offices.
    â€œI was finally rewarded by being given a run on a parlor car by a road that reached many summer resorts in southern Wisconsin,” Micheaux wrote. He headed out on weekends, returning on Monday mornings, buthe had a hard time making much money on such minor routes—or getting the Pullman bosses, who were besieged by black men seeking porter jobs, to pay any attention to him.
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    The Pullman Palace Car Company was headquartered in Chicago. Its founder, George Pullman, pioneered the plush sleeper cars with folding upper berths that were used by the higher-paying passengers on trains. Pullman cars were available on Midwestern lines by 1865 (one carried the body of the assassinated President Lincoln from Chicago to Springfield); before long they became common in most overnight routes throughout the United States. Pullman retained ownership of the cars, leasing service to railroad lines, which switched the cars from train to train on long runs so that passengers could stay on their reserved sleepers for the entire trip. The Pullman company swiftly branched into luxury lounge, club, and dining cars.
    The first-class services offered on a Pullman car were integral to the glamour and mystique of train travel, and those services were provided by black men with direct or family ties to slavery, a background the company unofficially thought vital to the psychology of the job. Dressed in spotless uniforms of jacket and necktie, the porters were expected to meet a customer’s every demand, or indignity, with an obliging smile. Besides stocking linens and amenities and preparing berths and cars for each run, porters brushed clothes, cleaned the cuspidors and lavatories, and shined shoes (by now a Micheaux specialty). They slept in the “smokers,” the men’s toilets.
    Pullman porters were paid $25 to $40 weekly, depending on length of service. But porters were expected to furnish, out of their own earnings, the polish and rags used for shining shoes. They paid for their company-assigned uniforms and regular laundering, as well as any food they bought on the train. These and other requirements, which slashed their salaries in half, forced the porters to survive largely on tips.
    In 1894, a bitter, national porter strike marked the first