Article: "Try to refrain from that desire": self-control and violent passion in Oscar Micheaux's African American Western.(Critical Essay)

Jean Baptiste, the protagonist of Oscar Micheaux's novel The Homesteader (1917), first appears in the narrative struggling against a howling blizzard on the plains of frontier South Dakota. (1) Micheaux's depiction of this storm, which transforms the plains into "one endless, unbroken sheet of white frost and ice," is both a realistic winter landscape description and an allegorical representation of Baptiste's social situation--a black individual who has left behind African American communities in the East to seek economic opportunity in a predominately white western frontier settlement (38). As Baptiste observes, there were "Germans from Germany" and "Swedes from Sweden" ...