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This portrait of Oscar Micheaux was published in his first book "The Conquest"
in 1913. In his first book, Oscar did not hide his strong opinions about his family, friends, and the world around him.
Oscar Micheaux on....
his family's attitude toward him in childhood
" ...I was called the lazy member of the family; a shirker who complained that it
was too cold to work to work in the winter, and too warm in the summer....my father complained of my poor service in the field and in disgust I was sent off
to do the marketing----which pleased me, for it was not only easy, but gave me a chance to meet and talk with many people." (p.12,14)
on his mother
"My mother was a shouting Methodist and many times we children would slip quietly out of the church when she began to get happy." ( p.16)
on his oldest brother, W.O.
...I resolved that some day I would rise head and shoulders above that foolish, four-flushing brother of mine in real and material success." (p.26)
on being the only black homesteader on the South Dakota Rosebud Indian
Reservation.
"The fact that I was a stranger in a strange land, inhabitated wholly by people
not my own race, did not tend to cheer my gloomy spirits. p. 77....I met and talked
with families who had children, in some instances twenty years of age, who had never seen a colored man. Sometimes the little tads would run from me screaming as though they had met a lion or some wild beast of the forest." (p. 127)
on his disastrous trade of one mule for another...
"The mule I traded was only lazy, while the one I had received in the trade was not only lazy, but "ornery" and full of tricks that she took a fiedish delight in exercising on me...I am almost postive that she used to wink at me impudently from her vantage point. (p.84)
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