The Lone Black Pioneer: Oscar Micheaux Boxed Set. Micheaux Oscar

disagreeable, and if anyone in the family had to do without anything it was never the sister. She was quarrelsome and much disliked while Orlean was the opposite and would cheerfully deprive herself of anything necessary. Her mother, Mrs. Ewis went on to tell me, was a "devil, spiteful and mean and as helpless as a baby." I believed a part of this but not all. I had listened to Mrs. McCraline, and while I felt she was somewhat on the helpless order, I did not believe she was mean, nor a "devil." Meanness and deviltry are usually discernible in the eyes and I had seen none of it in the eyes of either Mrs. McCraline or Orlean, but I did not like Ethel, and from what little Miss Ankin told me about the Reverend I was inclined to believe that he was likely to be the "devil," and Mrs. Ewis' information regarding Mrs. McCraline was probably inspired by jealousy.

      I remembered that back in M—pls the preachers' wives were timid creatures, submissive to any order or condition their "elder" husbands put upon them, submitting too much in order to keep peace, never raising a row over the gossip that came to their ears from malicious "sisters" and church workers. As long as I could remember the colored ministers were accused of many ugly things concerning them and the "sisters," mostly women who worked in the church, but I had forgotten it until I now began hearing the gossip concerning Rev. McCraline.

      Orlean, her father and her brother-in-law had begun buying a home on Vernon avenue for which they were to pay four thousand, five hundred dollars. Of this amount three hundred dollars had been paid, one hundred by each of them. It was a nice little place, with eight rooms and with a stone front. Ethel had not paid anything, using her money in preparation for her wedding, which had taken place in September. Claves and her father had spent two hundred on it, which seemed very foolish, and were pinched to the last cent when it was done.

      Claves had borrowed five dollars from his brother when they went on the wedding trip, to pay for a taxi to the depot. The wedding tour and honeymoon lasted two weeks and was spent in Racine, Wisconsin, sixty miles north of Chicago. They had just returned when I went to Chicago. When I first called, Mrs. Claves did not come down but when we returned to the house she condescended to come down and shake hands. She put on enough airs to have been a king's daughter.

      With the three hundred dollars already paid on the home, they figured they should be able to pay for it in seven years in monthly installments of thirty-five dollars, paying the interest upon the principal at the same time, excepting two thousand which was in a first mortgage and drew five per cent and payable semi-annually. The house was in a quiet neighborhood much unlike the south end of Dearborn street and Armour avenue where none but colored people live.

      The better class of Chicago's colored population was making a strenuous effort to get away from the rougher set, as well as to get out of the black belt which is centered around Armour, Dearborn, State and Thirty-first. Here the saloons, barbershops, restaurants and vaudeville shows are run by colored people, also the clubs and dance houses. East from State street to the lake, which is referred to by the colored people of the city as "east of State," there is another and altogether different class. Here for a long while colored people could hardly rent or buy a place, then as the white population drifted farther south, to Greenwood avenue, Hyde Park, Kenwood and other parts now fashionable districts, some of the avenues including Wabash, Rhodes, Calumet, Vernon and Indiana began renting to colored people and a few began buying.

      Chicago is the Mecca for southern negroes. The better class continued to desert Dearborn and Armour and paid exorbitant rent for flats east of State street. Some lost what they had made on Armour avenue where rent was sometimes less than one-half what was charged five blocks east, and had to move back to Armour. As more colored people moved toward the lake more white people moved farther south, rent began falling and real estate dealers began offering former homes of rich families first for rent then for sale, and many others began buying as Rev. McCraline had done, making a small cash payment, and in this way otherwise unsalable property was disposed of at from five to ten per cent more than it would have brought at a cash sale.

      The place they were buying could have been purchased for three thousand, eight hundred dollars or four thousand dollars in cash. After moving east of State street, these people formed into little sets which represented the more elite, and later developed into a sort of local aristocracy, which was not distinguished so much by wealth as by the airs and conventionality of its members, who did not go to public dances on State street and drink "can" beer. Here for a time they were secure from the vulgar intrusion of the noisy "loud-mouths," as they called them, of State street. The last time I was in Chicago State street, the "dead line," had been crossed and a part of Wabash avenue is almost as noisy and vulgar as Dearborn. Beer cans, rough clubs and dudes were becoming as familiar sights as on Armour, and a large part of that part of the east side is so filled up with colored people that it is only a question of time until it will be a part of the black belt.

      Orlean's brother-in-law had come to Chicago several years previous from a stumpy farm in the backwoods of Tennessee. He was the son of a jack-legged preacher and was very ignorant, but had been going with the girl he married some six years and she had trained him out of much of it and when he finally figured in the two hundred dollar wedding referred to, he felt himself admitted into society and highly exalted. He thought the Reverend a great man, Mrs. Ewis had told me, referring to him as a Simian-headed negro who tried to walk and act like the Reverend. The McCralines, especially Ethel, referred to themselves as the "best people." I thought they were. They were not wicked, and I also guessed that Ethel felt very "aristocratic," and I wondered whether I would like the Reverend. He seemed to be regarded as a sort of monarch judging from the way he was spoken of by the family, but I had a "hunch" that he and I were not going to fall in love with each other. Still I hoped not to be the one to start any unpleasantness and would at least wait until I met him before forming an opinion. I received a letter from him when he returned from the conference. He did not write a very brilliant letter but was very reasonable, and tried to appear a little serious when he referred to my having his daughter come to South Dakota and file on land. He concluded by saying he thought it a good thing for colored people to go west and take land.

      I received another letter from Orlean about the same time telling me how her father had scolded her about going to the theatre with me the Sunday night I had taken her, and pretended, as he had to me, to be very serious about the claim matter, but she wrote like this: "I know papa, and I could see he was just pleased over it all that he just strutted around like a rooster." She wanted to know when I was going to send the ring, but as I had not thought about it I do not recall what answer I made her, but do remember that my trip to get her and Mrs. Ewis and send them home again, including my own expenses, amounted to one hundred sixty dollars, besides the cost of the land, and having had to pay my sister's and grandmother's way also and get them started on their homesteads had taken all of the seven thousand, six hundred dollars I had borrowed on my land; that I was snow-bound with my corn in the field and my wheat still unthreshed. I began to write long letters trying to reason this out with her. She was willing to listen to reason but seemed so unhappy without the ring, and I imagined as I read her letters that I could see tears. She said when a girl is engaged she feels lost without a ring, "and, too," here she seemed to emphasize her words, "everybody expects it." I was sure she was telling the truth, for with girls "east of State street," and west as well, the most important thing in an engagement is the ring, sometimes being more important than the man himself.

      When I lived in Chicago and since I had been living in Dakota and going to Chicago once a year, I knew that Loftis Brothers had more mortgages on the moral future and jobs of the young society men, for the diamonds worn by their sweethearts or wives, than would appear comforting to the credit man. It made no difference what kind of a job a man might have, as all the way from a boot-black or a janitor to head waiters and post-office clerks were included, and their women folks wore some size of a diamond. I asked myself what I was to do. I could not hope to begin changing customs, so I bought a forty dollar diamond set in a small eighteen-karat ring which "just fit," as she wrote later in the sweetest kind of a letter.

      I had written I was sorry that I could not be there to put it on (such a story!). I had never thought of diamond rings or going after my wife after spending so much on preliminaries. What I had pictured was what I had seen, while running to the Pacific coast, girls going west to marry their pioneer sweethearts, who sent them the money or a ticket. They had gone, lots of them,