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Who is, or are, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction novels may Oscar Micheaux be said to have adapted in his films? To such seemingly obvious questions, there are some obvious answers. It is well known that Micheaux directed two film versions of Chesnutt's tragic novel of racial passing, The House behind the Cedars (1900): the first, in 1924, is entitled House behind the Cedars and is a faithful adaption that encountered difficulties with the censors; the second is the recently rediscovered Veiled Aristocrats (1932), a remake with a happy ending. It is less well known that around the same time, Micheaux may also have arranged to purchase the rights to Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race “riot,” with a parallel plot on the struggles in an interracial family over the legitimacy of the mulatto side. It is not clear whether the transaction was ever completed or whether the Marrow film was ever made. But together the two novels may be said to map the conflicting contours of and historical changes in representations of racial passing—not only Chesnutt's but also Micheaux's. Both novelist and filmmaker chart the crossing of the classic passing plot of discovery and subsequent acknowledgment or denial of “black blood,” which shapes both Chesnutt's and Micheaux's House behind the Cedars, with narratives of legitimacy—legal, social, and professional—central to Marrow of Tradition. In the process, the novel and the film suggest how the traditional tropes of racial uplift that undergird the search for middle-class respectability, in a kind of updated passing plot, should be thought of as an available narrative form rather than a coherent ideology.
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- Selected Papers from the MLA Convention: Early American Cinema and Politics
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- Copyright © 1999 by The Modem Language Association of America
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1 I did not learn of the possibility that Micheaux and Chesnutt had discussed the rights to Marrow until I presented this talk at the MLA convention, on which occasion Siva Vaidhyanathan (History Dept., Wesleyan Univ.) told me of their possible correspondence on the matter. Their letters on the subject, housed in the Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland, OH), reveal that in 1920-21 Chesnutt was contacted about the rights to his novels by two different film companies, Micheaux Film Corporation and Reol Productions, the former interested in House, the latter in Marrow. Whether Micheaux knew of or had an interest in these other plans to film Marrow is not clear. In addition, the 1920-21 date of the correspondence, coming after Within Our Gates (1919-20), seems to refute the thesis that Gates is based on Marrow. But given the sketchy data on Micheaux, especially the difficulty of establishing credits and titles, as well as his practices of making different versions of his own films and simultaneously negotiating for and producing several films, it is possible to imagine that Marrow, as a potential future property, could have informed the making of Gates. According to the literary critic William Andrews, both film companies, Micheaux and Reol, paid $500 apiece in 1920 for the rights to revive House and Marrow, but nothing ever came of Reol's plans for Marrow. See Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP) 265n. According to the film historian Charlene Regester, the Micheaux-Chesnutt correspondence reveals Micheaux's blatant machinations in putting off his payment of $500 to Chesnutt for the rights to House, one of several cagey business strategies regularly used by Micheaux the entrepreneur. See Regester, “Oscar Micheaux the Entrepreneur: Financing The House behind the Cedars,” Journal of Film and Video 49.1-2 (1997): 17-27.
2 Micheaux's views of passing were, surprisingly, quite different from—more unequivocally critical than—Chesnutt's ambivalent sympathies. On their different biographical encounters with and representations of the possibilities of passing, see Corey Creekmur, “Telling White Lies: Oscar Micheaux and Charles W. Chesnutt,” Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, ed. Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser (Washington: Smithsonian Inst. P, forthcoming 2000).
3 For virtually everything I know about Micheaux's Gates, including my introduction to the film, I am indebted to the brilliant work of Jane Gaines. She has written on the film's “riot-lynching linkage” as well as its strange textual history in “Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama, and Oscar Micheaux,” Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993) 49-70. Gaines notes that Cripps says Gates is about the Leo Frank lynching, whereas Harry T. Sampson thinks another Micheaux film, The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), was about the Frank murder. See Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 (London: Oxford UP, 1977); Sampson, Blacks in Black and White: A Source Book on Black Films (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977).
4 Jane Gaines, “The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates: Two Tales of the American South,” Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures, ed. Richard H. King and Helen Taylor (New York: New York UP, 1996) 177.
5 See Charles W. Chesnutt, letter to Booker T. Washington, 25 Nov. 1901, in “To Be an Author”: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz III (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 169-70; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993) 427.
6 Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, 1902) 380.
7 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, 1901, introd. and notes by Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Penguin, 1993) 219.
8 On the crossing of these two scenarios, see Gaines, “Mixed-Blood Marriage in Early Race Melodrama,” Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, ed. Pearl Bowser, Gaines, and Charles Musser (Washington: Smithsonian Inst. P, forthcoming 2000).
9 Gaines, “Fire and Desire” 60. Interracial rape, Gaines says, is thus “both enacted and averted” in what she suggestively calls the “Nightmare Flashback,” a “method of containing the horrors of lynching and protecting the contemporary uplift narrative” (“The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates” 186, 185).
10 See Amy Kaplan's article in this issue.
11 Carrizal was a particularly significant battle for African Americans; the film Trooper of Troop K, made by the black producers Noble and George Johnson's Lincoln Motion Pictures, was set against the backdrop of the heroism of black troops in this battle. I am indebted to Gaines for pointing out this, and so much more, to me.
12 “Chesnutt's Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition,” World [Cleveland] 20 Oct. 1901, magazine sec.: 5; rpt. in Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 169-70.
13 See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996) 111, 114.
14 Sundquist believes that Chesnutt must have invented the names, which refer to no real persons or events he has been able to document. However, according to one of my graduate students, Robert Kuwada, igorot is a derogatory term for bushmen colloquially used in the Philippines. This possible etymology preserves and, perhaps, even extends what we might call Marrow's imperial frame of reference. Thanks to Kuwada for pointing it out to me.
15 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford UP, 1996)107.
16 The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International, 1968) 268.
17 W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920, The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 506-08.
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