Letter to the Editor. (News).

To the Editor:

It was an unexpected pleasure to be reading through Afterimage and to discover Jennifer Home's extensive, thoughtful and helpful review of Oscar Micheaux and His Circle (which I co-edited with Pearl Bowser and Jane Gaines) as well as two other recent books on Micheaux (Writing Himself into History by Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence and Ron Green's Straight Lick). Authors and editors always yearn for such attentiveness (and space from journals), so I write to express my thanks. I know that the review was consciously focused on Micheaux, but I would lust remind you (and perhaps your readers) that one of our book's real strengths is its attention to Micheaux's contemporaries: Colored Players Film Corporation, Richard E. Norman, Richard Maurice as well as documentarian Zora Neale Hurston, the Lafayette Dramatic Stock Company and Black newspapers' participation in the race film phenomenon. Surely the essays on these subjects by Charlene Regester, Phyllis Klotman, Gloria Gibson Hudson and Sister Francesca Thompson m erit attention. Their contributions allow us to situate Micheaux's achievements in a broader context. Many 1920s moviegoers preferred the work of Colored Players or Norman to that of Micheaux. As aficionados of race films, we may disagree with that assessment; but as historians we must and certainly can understand it.

I would also like to set the record straight on what might seem a small point: my essay on Oscar Micheaux's Body and Soul (1925), which appears in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle, is not a simple reprint of my essay that appeared in Yale Journal of Criticism and, as you pointed out, received the Kovacs Prize. I expanded several sections and did some modest reworking based on further research. Moreover, as I came to recognize, Body and Soul was, in part, about endings. This made me think more carefully about the way I had ended my own essay, which I found less and less satisfactory and also changed. Finally, the essay in Oscar Micheaux and His Circle is productively illustrated (while the YJC article has no illustrations at all). The resulting effort is, I feel, a substantial improvement over the YJC article--which was a leap forward from something I had published earlier in the catalog Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. I wish I could have gotten it right the first time, but that rarely seems to happen. Having s truggled with this essay for so long, I was particularly appreciative of Home's remarks. In general, this "project" on Micheaux and race cinema of the silent period was one of the most exciting, pleasurable and rewarding undertakings of my adult life. I believe I am not alone in this assessment.

Charles Musser

New Haven, CT