"Try to refrain from that desire": self-control and violent passion in Oscar Micheaux's African American Western

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Michael K. Johnson

Jean Baptiste, the protagonist of Oscar Micheaux's novel The Homesteader (1917), first appears in the narrative struggling against a howling blizzard on the plains of frontier South Dakota. (1) Micheaux's depiction of this storm, which transforms the plains into "one endless, unbroken sheet of white frost and ice," is both a realistic winter landscape description and an allegorical representation of Baptiste's social situation--a black individual who has left behind African American communities in the East to seek economic opportunity in a predominately white western frontier settlement (38). As Baptiste observes, there were "Germans from Germany" and "Swedes from Sweden" as well as Danes, Norwegians, "Poles, and Finns and Lithuanians and Russians," all homesteading in the area surrounding Gregory, South Dakota, "but of his race he was the only one" (64). This opening sequence of a solitary heroic black man advancing "resolutely forward" through snow, sometimes "directly against" the "fine grainy missiles that cut the face," effectively condenses into a single naturalistic image much of the action that follows as Baptiste struggles to succeed in an America dominated by white people (21).

This image may also figure Oscar Micheaux's own situation as a black writer working with the Western, a genre associated with white writers. The Western, the story of life on the American frontier, with its "imperial plot of valorizing white men" (Ammons 216), seems a particularly alien genre for the African American writer. How then does Oscar Micheaux negotiate the difficult task he has set for himself-to tell a story of specifically African American experience through a genre associated with advancing an ideology of white superiority and imperialism? (2)

On the one hand, Micheaux writes a Western that is perfectly in keeping with the ideology of the genre. In West of Everything (1992), Jane Tompkins points out that in the Western, the "West functions as a symbol of freedom, and of the opportunity for conquest" (4). (3) The Homesteader is just such a story of conquest, of transforming wild and savage land into civilized productive farmland. "Jean Baptiste had come West," Micheaux writes, "and staked his lot and future there, doing his part toward the building of that little empire out there in the hollow of God's hand" (107). In American myth, the West is the place of transformation and self-making, or, as Micheaux renders it, "the place for young manhood," where with "indefatigable will," a "firm determination," and a "great desire to make good," the unknown man who "had no heritage" except for his "French name" could find a level playing field "of virgin soil and undeveloped resources" and the opportunity to "work out his own destiny" and build his own little empire (Micheaux 24). (4) As in many white-authored frontier adventures, Jean Baptiste's story also justifies and celebrates the conquest and redistribution of Native American lands and territories--for such activities are necessary precursors to the building of empire and the bringing of civilization to a "savage" land. In The Homesteader, Micheaux neither condemns nor critiques the dominant culture myth of manifest destiny but rather claims a share of the spoils for the enterprising black man.

On the other hand, however, The Homesteader carefully revises the Western as Micheaux filters elements of the genre through his own experience as an African American, through his understanding and response to hegemonic cultural beliefs of his day, through his reading of African American literature generally, and through his specific knowledge of the writing and philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Micheaux dedicated his first book to Washington; the thinly-veiled autobiography entitled The Conquest provides a blueprint for The Homesteader. As Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence note, Micheaux believed in "Booker T. Washington's ideal of pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps," and he believed along with Washington that the majority of African Americans "needed models, heroes, to mold public opinion and for the elevation of public sentiment" (19-21). One such hero is Jean Baptiste, whose comments on racial uplift reveal that he shares his creator's beliefs: "If I could actually succeed, it would mean so much to the credit of a multitude of others.--Others who need the example" (109). (5) Micheaux's admiration for Washington and his belief in the goal of racial uplift inform and guide his revision of the Western.

The Homesteader is divided into four "epochs." Epoch one follows one year in Baptiste's life, from winter through spring planting to the fall harvest in which Baptiste reaps a successful crop and declares his love for Agnes Stewart, the (presumedly) white woman who saves him from freezing to death in the novel's opening sequence. Epoch two begins with Baptiste's decision to "sacrifice" his love for Agnes in the name of race loyalty. "Examples they needed," ruminates Baptiste, "and such he was glad he had become; but if he married now the one he loved, the example was lost" (147). Already in possession of 320 acres, Baptiste purchases still more land to expand his holdings: "If he or any other man of the black race could acquire one thousand acres of such land it would stand out with more credit to the Negro race than all the protestations of a world of agitators in so far as the individual was concerned" (132). In order to reach that number, he needs an African American fiancee on whose behalf he can make a claim. The story of Baptiste's courtship of and troubled marriage to Orlean McCarthy follows. This epoch ends with the death at birth of their first child, a coinciding drought that threatens to destroy Baptiste economically, and with Orlean's returning to Chicago with her father (Rev. Newton Justine McCarthy) as Baptiste helplessly watches. (6)