To some, Oscar Micheaux is one of the most significant Black artists of the twentieth century. To many others, he’s unknown. Despite his renown as a prolific auteur of early “race films” and reissues of his first novel, The Conquest (1913), his literary efforts have been slow to restitution by scholars, academic publishers, and university libraries—the reliable agents of cultural recovery. The preservation and recirculation of his novels have therefore fallen to Amazon Kindle Editions and anonymous “presses” that issue digital reproductions of public domain texts for online sale. These are typically produced through the print-on-demand (POD) model, an increasingly common method of cheap, digital publishing in which a copy of a book is not printed and bound until a customer orders one. Such is the case for Micheaux’s second novel,“The Forged Note (1915): if you want to acquire a printed copy for a non-antiquarian price, your choices are limited to a handful of POD editions on Amazon and other online stores. On one hand, it’s a feather in digital retail’s cap that these historical texts are still in circulation at all, when they could be counted as lost like so many of Micheaux’s films. Reading Micheaux in the format of an Amazon POD book, however, also foregrounds the extent to which such editions obscure and decontextualize crucial information. In the case of The Forged Note, an intentionally self-referential novel about selling books door-to-door in Black communities of the Jim Crow South, POD’s erasure of historical and publishing contexts is especially ironic, exposing the specific consequences of this erasure for Black literary history, which continues to contend with archival neglect and institutional prejudice.
The Forged Note tells the story of Sidney Wyeth, a Black bookseller who travels across the South peddling copies of a novel—not a play by Shakespeare—titled The Tempest. Sidney has a secret: he is the anonymous author who penned The Tempest. The character who first deduces this, Mildred Latham, becomes a sales agent for Sidney, falling in love with and marrying him in the process. Between Sidney and Mildred’s flirtations, the novel presents several Black citizens of Attalia, a fictionalized Atlanta, some of whom Sidney employs as agents alongside Mildred. Like much of Micheaux’s literary and cinematic output, The Forged Note contains plenty of sentimentalism, narrative digression, and bias against poor Black Americans. But through its unique bookselling plot, it narrates its own embeddedness in the social contexts of the early twentieth-century South. Following Wyeth as he enlists Black domestic workers, Pullman train porters, and ministers in the sale of his novel, The Forged Note gives readers an indirect, thinly fictionalized account of how it arrived in their hands and who participated in its circulation.
The descriptions of where and to whom Sidney hawks The Tempest challenge persistent assumptions about the social class of early twentieth-century Black readers. According to Alisha Knight, the consensus among major literary publishers in the early twentieth century was that “black people…could not afford to buy books and, as a result, books were rarely produced for or marketed to them.”[1] Consequently, much research on turn-of-the-century Black reading focuses on unbound media such as newspapers and magazines. Similarly, Elizabeth McHenry has shown that periodicals offered more affordable and more social ways of consuming literature for working-and middle-class Black Americans, since newspapers could be divided and distributed by section and easily read aloud to a large number of people with varying literacies.[2] Even so, Sidney’s most reliable customers, and the most rigorous readers in Micheaux’s novel, are not the small, educated class of Black intellectuals W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the “Talented Tenth”—they are female domestic workers, who use the privacy of back doors and kitchens to purchase copies right under their employers’ noses. Mildred, a domestic servant herself, explains that she doesn’t bother selling The Tempest to teachers because “they do not seem to take much interest in work by Negroes…but I do find the women in service, in great numbers, to be fond of reading and full of race pride.”[3] Additionally, The Forged Note suggests that even when Black workers couldn’t afford to buy books, they still often found ways to read them.[4] As Mildred observes: “[T]he massess…did not buy The Tempest, but they read it. She found it borrowed among them all.”[5]
The novel thus presents a portrait of Black life and Black readers at a moment when these reading practices were infrequently documented and very often erased. Traces of these original Black readers and of the Black neighborhoods in which Wyeth/Micheaux sold their books, as well as the small Nebraska jobbing printer that Micheaux paid to publish the novel, crop up in early editions of The Forged Note through copyright pages, illustrations, and bindings. But this literary history is utterly obscured by the 2020 POD edition. It is not that the “independent publisher” mentioned in the Amazon listing deleted any part of the narrative. Yet the story of a book and the people who read it extends beyond the narrative of the main text, and the flattened, minimal, and economic design of POD editions fails to sustain that larger story. This is especially true of Micheaux’s works, which were self-published and distributed by the author as a business venture that he also intended as a program of racial uplift. His commitment to self-publishing through his own imprint, the Western Book Supply Company, gave depth to his novels’ promotion of Black entrepreneurship and afforded him a high degree of editorial independence.[6] His writing is unabashedly opinionated, promoting a radical version of Booker T. Washington’s self-reliance philosophy that frequently veers into colorism and classism. In his first novel, The Conquest, Micheaux asserts that “there are two very distinct types of classes, among the American negroes. … [T]hose who are quick to think, practical, conservative as well as progressive, while there are those who are narrow in their sympathies and … do not realize what it takes to succeed.”[7] These prejudiced statements brought him under fire from Black newspapers, many of which were understandably reluctant to print such opinions. But the same editorial independence that allowed Micheaux to express his inegalitarian worldview also yielded poignant portrayals of early twentieth-century Black life and provocative experiments in literary form. Circumventing recently standardized copyright laws and unprecedented corporatization in US publishing, Micheaux made the most of his literary independence and wove newspaper articles, popular lyrics, and community gossip into the narration of The Forged Note.[8] The book’s promiscuous social circulation is encoded into the novel’s structure itself.
To glean this broader understanding, though, readers need to scan information located around the main text, such as the copyright and title pages, printer’s marks, and illustrations. These elements, which book historians call “paratexts,” contain traces of the novel’s initial Black readers.[9] This historical literary network is the palimpsest obscured in the new editions available on Amazon and other online marketplaces. The 2020 edition offers no information about the original publication, and almost no details about how this edition came into the world. The title page features no publisher’s information, and the novel starts immediately on the second leaf. The edition that Micheaux sold, by contrast, features sixteen pages of front matter, including illustrations by C. W. Heller and a table of contents, all of which has vanished in new copies.[10] Readers who are introduced to Micheaux through the Amazon edition would not know that he was among the first Black Americans to own a publishing imprint. Nor would they know that the first edition came bound in hardcover, another key clue about how early twentieth-century readers engaged with the book. Mildred’s explanation in the novel that Black workers purchased The Tempest out of race pride is enhanced by the knowledge that Micheaux’s books were initially fine physical artifacts that could signal distinction and erudition on the shelves of a turn of the century Black home. The novel’s brilliant, self-referential qualities are similarly lost. Its plot partially rests on the inability of Sidney Wyeth’s customers to recognize him as the author pictured on The Tempest’s jacket when he sells the book at their doors. The first edition of The Forged Note juxtaposes this running gag against a portrait of Micheaux that indeed appears on the inside cover. More than a tongue-in-cheek flourish, this metatextual joke again gestures to the social circulation of Micheaux’s novel, as Micheaux himself sold it through face-to-face appeals. The social character of The Forged Note and much Jim Crow-era Black literature, personified by the agents who sold books in their communities and by the readers who bought them, comes into clearer view only when reading the original edition or a reliable facsimile.
For Micheaux, participation in literary culture was nothing less than a gateway to racial advancement and an antidote to American anti-Blackness. Similarly, in The Forged Note, willingness to buy Wyeth’s novel and feeling “fond of reading” are supposed to index a character’s respectability. The narrator opines that these characters are the kind of Black people who “made effort toward their betterment” rather than “employ their earnings for … liquor and dice, among other frivolities.”[11] This is a troubled, elitist logic, and Micheaux’s novels and films have been labeled “‘white,’ ‘bourgeois,’ and ‘fatuous’” for their promotion of it.[12] The Forged Note, in particular, exemplifies these ideas as it explicitly bases its philosophy of race pride and social mobility on the physical object of the book. As one “respectable” book buyer in the novel says, “I am fond, very fond, of good books, and when it comes to one which my race has produced, I want it, for such are few.”[13] By “good books,” it’s likely that this character is referring not just to the quality of writing but also the quality of the material product. For Micheaux and the readers he solicited, books signified prestige, permanence, and status. This equation of book reading with respectability takes profoundly conservative shades: when the narrator and characters praise Black Southerners for buying Sidney’s book, they often simultaneously accuse those who do not buy books of obstructing their race’s advancement. The original edition of The Forged Note thus functioned at once as an object of racial unity and a promoter of intraracial class division, resonating with some Black workers while setting others apart as inferior. By contrast, the POD version of the text reverses this dialectic completely. While this cheap edition does not indicate anything about the status of who buys it and is available to anyone with ten dollars to spend, it nonetheless strips the novel of the social weight that it held for Black readers in the early twentieth century. Even as The Forged Note entertains conservative positions, it consistently foregrounds the workers and readers who are most vulnerable to erasure and enforced invisibility. Digital reproductions sever the unique connection that Micheaux fashioned between his novel’s plot and its physical format.
Curiously, the faith in the free market and by-the-bootstraps self-improvement voiced by many characters in Micheaux’s work appears to parallel some of the metadata and promotional materials accompanying the POD edition of The Forged Note in its Amazon listing. The book is described as “independently published” and digitized by an anonymous “community of volunteers”; in this respect, the POD edition might be said to revive Micheaux’s dually communal and entrepreneurial ethos for the age of digital retail.[14] However, an investigation into the origins of the Amazon edition unveils entities that are far removed from the independent, community-minded salesperson embodied by Sidney Wyeth and Mildred Latham. The sole clue to the provenance of my POD copy is a web address on the final flyleaf, which reveals that the book was printed on February 14, 2022, in La Vergne, Tennessee, most likely at a printing facility called Lightning Source. (The precise date of printing, especially juxtaposed with the May 2020 “publication” date, is one sign that it was printed on demand.) Lightning Source is owned by Ingram Content Group, itself a subsidiary of Ingram Industries, a major manufacturer and distributor of books as well as marine transportation supplies. In other words, an “independently published” copy of The Forged Note is in fact the product of a massive corporation and an American legacy fortune (the Ingram family wealth, after all, can be traced back to the nineteenth-century lumber baron Orrin Henry Ingram).
Just as POD editions highlight the contradiction of “independent” publishing’s entanglement with monopoly capitalism, they also present the paradox of being at once “accessible” and “inaccessible”. Thanks to the nearly instantaneous process of transaction, production, and delivery allowed by digital POD, The Forged Note can now be obtained by a mass, international audience, with no limit on the amount of copies that may be printed. However, this book’s design is horrific to the point of deterring even the most determined reader. Its walls of text are intimidating and unrelenting; it is difficult to imagine anyone but an academic specialist in African American literature willingly taking on the full novel in this form. The immediacy of the edition’s production and distribution results in a text constructed with no human or institutional hand, no intentional design. As Anna Kornbluh writes in her recent book Immediacy, on-demand products such as this one “evacuate mediation,” they are reduced to pure content.[15] However, unlike the easily consumed digital art that Kornbluh critiques, new editions of The Forged Note are impenetrable precisely because the text’s formal and mediated elements, deemed pricy and extraneous, have been annihilated. Micheaux’s novel is less expensive than it has ever been, yet it’s farther out of reach.
Ironically, Micheaux’s belief in markets’ ability to efficiently distribute Black literature is the same logic undergirding Amazon’s mass distribution of his novels—a mode of distribution that is contributing to keeping Micheaux’s work obscure. Even as POD damages Micheaux’s legacy, this surprising symmetry between The Forged Note’s pro-business rhetoric and the market ethos of Amazon persists. What to make of this puzzle? A generative reading of Micheaux must start with an understanding that the worldview expressed in his texts frustrates modern progressivism’s expectations of historical Black literature. This understanding only comes with the help of the social histories contained in the paratexts of earlier editions, or “mediators,” to borrow Kornbluh’s terminology.[16] With access to paratexts, readers can contextualize the noxious elements of Micheaux’s philosophy alongside his and others’ aspirations for racial uplift and social mobility, as well as shifting definitions of Blackness and policies of settler colonialism that were contemporary to his career.[17] Without this information, readers encounter Micheaux’s positions ahistorically, if they encounter them at all. The most likely consequence of POD publishing for Micheaux is the reduction of his writing to his racial identity, an index of the antiracism made possible by Amazon. However, the most antiracist position that a reader of Micheaux can take is to treat his writing with all the complexity that it presents, the radical and the repulsive, rather than to take the simple production and consumption of his work as an inherent token of progress.
Even if the people who transcribed Micheaux’s text for digital sale did so out of a commitment to Black literary history, the technologies propelling this labor are not neutral. Like many of its fellow digital reprints of literary classics, the 2020 Forged Note utilizes an uncredited stock image as the cover: an impressionistic painting of a genteel city scene, ladies walking and shopping in fine livery and white skin. A reverse image search reveals that the painting is A view of the southern Stachus Rondell, the Sonnenstraße and the old St Matthew’s Church (1916) by Charles Vetter, a German painter. Besides the close proximity of its creation to the publication year of Micheaux’s novel, this painting has nothing to do with The Forged Note or the scenes of Black Southern and Midwestern life that the latter depicts; there appears to be little reason why Vetter’s painting should serve as the cover. Although we may accurately describe this decision as automated or random, it nonetheless displaces Micheaux’s work from the society in which it is grounded. Digital POD seems to default to Western art for its stock imagery, reinforcing whiteness as the standard for mass cultural production. The effect is to obfuscate The Forged Note’s status as a document of Black America during Jim Crow. The same is true for the Lightning Source version of Micheaux’s first novel, The Conquest, and POD editions of other relatively obscure Black authors from the same period such as Sutton E. Griggs.[18]
All superficial parallels aside, then, this neoliberal form of “independent publishing” is structurally antithetical to the independent Black publishing that Micheaux developed in the early 1910s. Contrary to digital POD, Micheaux’s self-published novels make visible individuals and communities who are necessary to literary culture but typically go unacknowledged by readers, writers, and scholars. By devoting The Forged Note to the dramas of the exact people who sold his books in specific Black communities, Micheaux reveals literature to be a social product, enabled by and responding to the situations of real people. Yet, until the best institutions of literary recovery—libraries, university and small presses, and public humanities initiatives—receive proper support, readers will encounter The Forged Note, and many other otherwise “lost” historical documents, as walls of text with no context beyond a credit transaction.
Notes:
[1] Alisha Knight, “‘To Have the Benefit of Some Special Machinery’: African American Book Publishing and Bookselling, 1900–1920,” in The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Vol. 6: U.S. Popular Print Culture, ed. Christine Bold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 440.
[2] Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 12.
[3] Oscar Micheaux, The Forged Note (Independently published POD edition, 2020), 25, original emphasis.
[4] Oscar Micheaux, The Forged Note, A Romance of the Darker Races (Lincoln, NE: Western Book Supply Company, 1915), 94, https://archive.org/details/forgednoteromanc00mich/mode/2up.
[5] Micheaux, The Forged Note (2020), 75.
[6] For Micheaux’s approach to self-publishing, see Patrick McGilligan, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker (New York: Harper, 2007), 93–99.
[7] Oscar Micheaux, The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer (New York: Washington Square Press, 2003), 129-
130.
[8] Micheaux began self-publishing shortly after the Copyright Act of 1909, the US’s keystone intellectual property legislation until the Copyright Act of 1976, which remains dominant. The 1909 Act “granted copyright owners the exclusive right to reproduce a work … and defined any effort to copy or reproduce a work of art without permission from the copyright holder as an infringement.” See Anne Collins Goodyear, “Marcel Duchamp, Copyright, and the Emergence of Art as an Idea,” American Art 37, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 18. On the incorporation of literary publishing, book historian Michael Winship characterizes the US late nineteenth century by a marked decrease in the number of publishing houses and the consolidation of corporate publishers “in a few East Coast cities.” See Winship, “The Rise of a National Book Trade System in the United States,” in A History of the Book in America, Volume 4: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, eds. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 59.
[9] Book historians such as Lori Leavell have investigated how Black writers have utilized paratexts to, among other things, build networks and signal coalition with one another: “… [A]uthors and editors utilize[d] paratexts—the attendant elements of books, including prefaces and frontispieces—to purposefully generate the perceptions that they are connected in some way to another author or editor.” The paratexts of The Forged Note affiliate Micheaux with the sales agents and readers of the novel. Lori Leavell, “Recirculating Black Militancy in Word and Image: Henry Highland Garnet’s ‘Volume of Fire’,” Book History 20 (2017): 151.
[10] See Oscar Micheaux, The Forged Note (Lincoln, NE: Western Book Supply Company, 1915), https://archive.org/details/forgednoteromanc00mich/mode/2up.
[11] Micheaux, The Forged Note (2020), 66.
[12] Quoted in Charlene Regester, “The Misreading and Rereading of African American Filmmaker Oscar Micheaux: A Critical Review of Micheaux Scholarship,” Film History 7, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 426.
[13] Micheaux, The Forged Note (2020), 66.
[14] See Amazon.com, “The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races,” Amazon, accessed January 11, 2025, https://www.amazon.com/Forged-Note-Romance-Darker-Races/dp/B088BM4F1X; https://www.amazon.com/Forged-Note-Romance-Darker-Races-ebook/dp/B00AQMFT3U/ref=monarch_sidesheet_title.
[15] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2024), 217.
[16] Kornbluh, Immediacy, 40.
[17] Economic programs that divided oppressed racial minorities through settler colonialism included the Homestead Acts, which allowed both Black and white Americans to claim and cultivate a piece of private property on what had been Native American lands in the Great Plains. The Homestead Acts are central to Micheaux’s first novel, The Conquest, in which Micheaux expresses disdain for the “outlaw Indian half-breeds” who periodically raided the settlement where he lived. Micheaux’s debut novel unintentionally demonstrates the efficacy of the Homestead Acts in sewing division across oppressed racial groups and assimilating them into the capitalist economy. See Micheaux, The Conquest, 119.
[18] See Amazon.com, “The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer,” Amazon, accessed January 11, 2025, https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Story-Negro-Pioneer/dp/B088BJR91T; and Amazon.com, “The Hindered Hand: Or the Reign of the Repressionist,” Amazon, accessed January 11, 2025, https://www.amazon.com/Hindered-Hand-Reign-Repressionist/dp/1987717597.