On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker

by A'Lelia Bundles

Overview

Soon to be a Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer, On Her Own Ground is the first full-scale biography of “one of the great success stories of American history” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), Madam C.J. Walker—the legendary African American entrepreneur and philanthropist—by her great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles.

The daughter of formerly enslaved parents, Sarah Breedlove—who would become known as Madam C. J. Walker—was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty. She spent the better part of the next two decades laboring as a washerwoman for $1.50 a week. Then—with the discovery of a revolutionary hair care formula for black women—everything changed. By her death in 1919, Walker managed to overcome astonishing odds: building a storied beauty empire from the ground up, amassing wealth unprecedented among black women, and devoting her life to philanthropy and social activism. Along the way, she formed friendships with great early-twentieth-century political figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743431729
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	01/01/2002
Series:	Lisa Drew Books (Paperback)
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	139,185
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

A’Lelia Bundles is the author of New York Times Notable Book and bestseller On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. A former ABC News Washington, DC, deputy bureau chief and an Emmy Award–winning producer, she participated in residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell while writing Joy Goddess. Visit her website at ALeliaBundles.com or on Instagram at @ALeliaBundles.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

Madam C. J. Walker's story has always deserved an expansive loom on which to weave the threads of her legendary life with the broad themes and major events of American history. As my great-great-grandmother's biographer — and as a journalist who loves a well-told story — I consider it to be my good fortune both that she was born in 1867 on the plantation where General Ulysses S. Grant staged the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg and that one of her brothers joined other former slaves in the 1879 mass exodus to the North from Louisiana and Mississippi. I could not have fabricated a more perfect scenario than her confrontation with Booker T. Washington at his 1912 National Negro Business League convention or her 1916 arrival in Harlem on the eve of America's entry into World War I. I could not have invented her 1917 visit to the White House to protest lynching or her decision to build a mansion near the Westchester County estates of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould. Certainly when I learned that she had been considered a "Negro subversive" in 1918 and had been put under surveillance by a black War Department spy, I was convinced that reality indeed was more interesting than most fiction.

It has surely been a bonus for me that Madam Walker knew so many of the other African American luminaries of her time because the work of their biographers has provided invaluable guidance. From the correspondence, papers and books of antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, educators Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People executive secretary James Weldon Johnson, Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois, labor leader A. Philip Randolph and others, I have been able to resurrect long-forgotten relationships.

As a pioneer of the modern cosmetics industry and the founder of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, Madam Walker created marketing schemes, training opportunities and distribution strategies as innovative as those of any entrepreneur of her time. As an early advocate of women's economic independence, she provided lucrative incomes for thousands of African American women who otherwise would have been consigned to jobs as farm laborers, washerwomen and maids. As a philanthropist, she reconfigured the philosophy of charitable giving in the black community with her unprecedented contributions to the YMCA and the NAACP. As a political activist, she dreamed of organizing her sales agents to use their economic clout to protest lynching and racial injustice. As much as any woman of the twentieth century, Madam Walker paved the way for the profound social changes that altered women's place in American society.

My personal journey to write On Her Own Ground, the first comprehensive biography of my great-great-grandmother really began before I could read. The Walker women — Madam, her daughter A'Lelia Walker and my grandmother Mae Walker — were already beckoning me at an early age, sometimes whispering, sometimes clamoring with the message that I must tell their story. In a faint childhood memory, their spirits envelop me in filtered gray light beneath a tall window inside my grandfather's apartment. On a nearby dresser, just beyond my reach, I can see their sepia faces inside hand-carved frames.

Even as a little girl I sensed that these grandmothers belonged not only to me but to the world and to those who would claim them for their own dreams and fantasies. Black history books had long recited the outlines of Madam Walker's classic American rags-to-riches rise from uneducated washerwoman to international entrepreneur and social activist, from daughter of slaves to hair care industry pioneer and philanthropist. Poet Langston Hughes crowned A'Lelia Walker the "joy-goddess of Harlem's 1920s." The Negro press fancied Mae — A'Lelia's adopted daughter and only legal heir — a tan Cinderella. By the time I discovered the Walker women's public mythology, they had already begun to draw me into the world of their private truths.

My grandfather, Marion Rowland Perry, Jr., first met Mae during the summer of 1927 at Villa Lewaro, Madam Walker's lavish Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, mansion. A handsome young attorney and World War I army officer, he was quite proud of a lineage that included college-educated parents. Mae was a recent divorcée and the future Walker heiress, whose thick, waist-length hair had helped sell thousands of tins of Madam C. J. Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower. That weekend, A'Lelia Walker invited Marion to the Cotton Club with her friends — and without Mae — to take the measure of the man she considered a potential son-in-law. She discreetly slipped him a hundred-dollar bill to gauge his comfort with paying large tabs. Apparently he passed her test, for a few weeks later, on August 27, he and Mae drove to Port Chester, New York, in his green Pierce-Arrow to be married by a justice of the peace. The following July, my mother, A'Lelia Mae Perry, was born.

In 1955, when my mother, my father, S. Henry Bundles, and I moved to Indianapolis, I was three years old and Mae had been dead for nearly a decade. For a few weeks while we waited to move into our house, I slept in a bedroom of my grandfather's apartment surrounded by Mae's personal treasures. I remember that, in the months afterward, whenever "Pa Pa" opened his front door to greet us, the gluey aroma of roast lamb, Lucky Strikes and old-man musk coated my nostrils. In the entryway, as my mother knelt to adjust my hair bow and smooth my three long braids, my eyes always fixed upon a tall, moss-green Chinese lacquer secretary. Letters, keys, stamps and paper clips tumbled from its tiny gold-trimmed drawers and secret cubbyholes. A serene Ming Dynasty maiden stood guard on the door of its locked upper cabinet. Even before I learned it had belonged to Madam and the first A'Lelia, I was tempted by its mysteries.

Beyond the foyer, the apartment rambled down a long, hushed hall. At one end, Pa Pa's sleeping alcove opened onto a sitting room crammed with the Walker women's belongings — A'Lelia's first editions of Jean Toomer's Cane and Countee Cullen's Color, Mae's gold harp and Madam's crystal Tiffany vases. At the other end, toward the rear of the apartment, two shadowy bedrooms — one of them Mae's — and a rarely used dining room led to a bright, white-tiled kitchen where a dented porcelain pot always simmered with soup bones and stock, and where Pa Pa held court at his knife-scarred oak table.

While Pa Pa and my mother talked, I escaped into Mae's room, drawn time and again by a mauve moiré silk vanity. Even now I can feel a quiet enchantment as I recall grasping cool ivory mah-jongg tiles and miniature enameled King Tut mummy charms. I remember a fluffy ostrich fan in one drawer and mother-of-pearl opera glasses in another. The more I stirred Mae's belongings, the more the scent of her Shalimar dusting powder emerged, masking the familiar grandfather mustiness that clung to all the other rooms. Each piece of clothing, each photograph, each bejeweled mirror and monogrammed napkin became a genie's lamp waiting to be rubbed.

Three blocks from Pa Pa's apartment, my mother worked as vice president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the hair care products firm her great-grandmother had founded in 1906. Often when we arrived at the block-long flatiron building in Momma's 1955 black Mercury, Whitfield, the janitor, would be waving at us from beneath the marquee of the Walker Theatre. His official job title notwithstanding, I still think of him as the ambassador of the Walker Building, full of news about the boiler, the freight elevator and whoever had just gone into the Walker Beauty Shop. Opened in 1927, the brick-and-terra-cotta structure housed an elaborately decorated, African-themed theater that offered first-run movies and live jazz. Generations of the city's African Americans had danced under the rotating mirrored globe in the upstairs Casino ballroom, met for Sunday afternoon dinner in the Coffee Pot or walked past the third-floor law offices of attorneys Mercer Mance and Rufus Kuykendall on their way to see Dr. Lewis or Dr. Cox.

For me, riding the elevator was always an adventure. Once inside, I fixated on Mary Martin's shiny, finger-waved tresses and cherry-rouged cheeks as she snapped shut the accordion brass gate with one fluid flick of her wrist, then lifted us four floors toward my mother's office. Another glissade of Mary's manicured hands and the door clanked open. The percussive clickety-clack of my mother's spike heels led me across a cayenne-flecked terrazzo lobby. With each step the sweet fragrance of bergamot and Glossine from the factory downstairs made me wish for candy. First we passed Marie Overstreet (the bookkeeper, who would have been a CPA had she been born sixty years later), then Mary Pendegraph (the tall, dignified beauty who speedily processed hundreds of orders each week), then Edith Shanklin (the efficient Addressograph operator who always had a gossip morsel for my mother). In Momma's office, I must have imagined myself a businesswoman as I played with her hand-cranked adding machine and manual typewriter, sure that my random keystrokes had meaning. No visit was complete without a trip to the second floor, where Myrtis Griffin and Russell White, the ladies of the factory, still mixed some of the Walker ointments by hand in large vats.

At home, there were more reminders of my famous grandmothers. In our living room, I learned to read music on A'Lelia Walker's Chickering baby grand. We ate Thanksgiving turkey on Madam's hand-painted Limoges china and ladled Christmas eggnog — made with A'Lelia's secret recipe — from her sterling silver punch bowl.

Our all-black suburb was filled with doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, musicians and attorneys, many with connections to the Walker Company or the Walker Building. Our next-door neighbor was the son of F. E. DeFrantz, a former trustee of Madam Walker's estate and longtime secretary of Indianapolis's black YMCA. The son of Freeman B. Ransom, Madam Walker's attorney and general manager, lived two doors away on Grandview Drive. Ransom's granddaughter, Judy, was one of my closest childhood friends. On the next corner was the daughter of Robert Lee Brokenburr, the lawyer who had filed the papers of incorporation for the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in 1911. Farther up Grandview was Violet Davis Reynolds, the secretary who had joined the Walker Company in 1915 when she was seventeen years old. A few blocks from her was Mrs. Pendegraph, who would retire as corporate treasurer — and the last employee — when the original Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company closed its doors in the mid-1980s.

Surrounded as I was by so many accomplished people, it would be several years before I fully understood my extraordinary family heritage. Fortunately my mother had taken great care, I now realize, to keep the legacy of the Walker women in manageable perspective so that I could discover its power in my own time, on my own terms. While she had been expected to assume her role as a fourth-generation executive at the Walker Company — and had studied chemistry at Howard University in preparation to do so — she wanted me, her only daughter, to be free to follow my own interests in journalism. But she had also given me the name A'Lelia because she wanted me to value the connection and to respect its origins. Neither of us could have predicted that my love of words and my passion for history would eventually return me to the inheritance I had seemed to be abandoning.

For many years I was more attracted to A'Lelia Walker's story than to Madam's. My heart raced each time I saw "our" name on the pages of the dusty books that were stashed in our attic. I was thrilled to discover that our birthdays were so close: hers on June 6 and mine on June 7. But most important, the original A'Lelia intrigued me because she provided a link to the Harlem Renaissance. For a teenager who loved to read — but who had always gone to predominantly white schools where little black literature was assigned — knowing that she had hosted Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen at The Dark Tower, her celebrated Harlem salon, affirmed my dreams of becoming a writer.

While I was embracing A'Lelia, however, I was growing ambivalent about Madam. A'Lelia represented the fun, flamboyance and glamour of the Roaring Twenties. Madam, on the other hand, was associated with more serious matters: business, philanthropy and the politics of hair. And, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, hair was as much a battleground as Vietnam. Whether it was hippies with ponytails or brothers and sisters with Afros, the scalps of baby boomers had become the symbolic stage on which to express racial pride, political militancy and personal liberation. Because many people believed that Madam Walker's products were designed primarily to straighten hair, she became an easy target for accusations and complicated emotions in an era when black pride was measured by the length of one's "natural." The woman who had been among the pioneers of the modern cosmetics industry — and who had fostered self-esteem, glamour and power among several generations of African American women — temporarily fell out of favor.

During those years, I was hungry for information about the history of black Americans, reading every book and article I could find, earnestly taking the messages to heart. When E. Franklin Frazier, the venerable Howard University sociologist, accused Madam Walker of running advertisements that "tell how the Negro can rid himself of his black or dark complexion, or how he can straighten his hair," I flushed with embarrassment. Without my own research, how was I to know that while Madam Walker was alive the Walker Company never sold skin bleaches and the words "hair straightener" never appeared in her ads? It would be years before I would learn that her Walker System was intended to treat the scalp disease that was so rampant in the early 1900s, when many women washed their hair only once a month. "Right here let me correct the erroneous impression held by some that I claim to straighten hair," she told a reporter in 1918 after she had been called the "de-kink queen" by a white newspaper. "I deplore such an impression because I have always held myself out as a hair culturist. I grow hair."

Equally persistent was the widely circulated and incorrect belief that Madam Walker had invented the straightening comb. In fact, this metal hair care implement probably had been sold at least as early as the 1870s, when Parisian Marcel Grateau created his famous Marcel Wave, and was advertised in Bloomingdale's and Sears's catalogues during the 1880s and 1890s, presumably for the thousands of white women who also had kinky hair. Years later I would learn that the claim probably originated in 1922 — three years after Madam Walker's death — when the Walker Company purchased the rights to a patent from the widow of a man who had manufactured combs for Madam Walker.

Certainly in 1970 most people who recognized Madam Walker's name associated her with the hot comb. And so did I, even as I sat in the Walker Beauty School watching the cosmetology students transform my chemically straightened flip into an Angela Davis-sized Afro. During college I remained self-conscious about my connection to Madam Walker until one winter afternoon when I discovered W.E.B. Du Bois's laudatory obituary of her in the August 1919 issue of The Crisis. From deep in the stacks of Harvard's Widener Library, Du Bois, whom I considered my intellectual hero, had armed me with a strong retort. Madam Walker, he wrote, did not intend "to imitate white folk." Whereas Frazier had criticized her "conspicuous consumption" in The Black Bourgeoisie, Du Bois praised her philanthropy and credited her with "revolutionizing the personal habits and appearance of millions of human beings" by educating them about hygiene and grooming. Even to this day, the complex issues surrounding African American women and beauty continue to be debated.

A few days before my mother died in January 1976, I sat in the middle of her hospital bed and talked about the research I was doing on the women in our family. The previous fall, when Phyl Garland, my adviser at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, learned that I was related to Madam Walker, she gently refused to let me even consider another topic for my master's paper. Of course, I had long ago memorized the legend and its litany: Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, in 1867, Madam Walker was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, a mother at seventeen, widowed at twenty. While working as a washerwoman, she began to go bald. Miraculously, she claimed, the formula for the scalp treatment that had restored her hair was revealed to her in a dream. When she died at fifty-one in 1919, she was one of America's wealthiest self-made businesswomen. That was the story that everyone — or at least most African American women born before 1950 — knew. But now that I was mining new biographical territory, I had begun to discover flaws and occasional lapses of truth mixed in with the victories and accomplishments. There were difficult divorces as well as business successes, legal feuds as well as large charitable contributions. Just when I needed my mother the most to help me make sense of what I was learning, she was too weary from months of chemotherapy to focus on memories.

"What should I do about these things?" I asked, knowing that I would not have her much longer. "Should I include this part? And what about that?"

Mustering just enough energy to leave no doubt about her wishes, she leaned forward, looked into my eyes and said, without hesitation, "Tell the truth, baby. It's all right to tell the truth."

Her words were a powerful final gift and a charge that I have tried to honor.

During the two decades after my mother's death, I worked as a network television producer for ABC News and NBC News, traipsing from coast to coast telling other people's stories, all the while yearning to resurrect my own family saga. Each year I managed to spend at least part of my weekends, vacations and holidays excavating the details of the Walker women's lives, learning that for every fabrication others had created, there was a more profound and interesting reality. Occasionally I found myself at the end of cold trails, but more often I was blessed with serendipitous little miracles that revealed a person or document or place, exactly the clue I needed for the next step of my search. Fortunately, Madam Walker, A'Lelia Walker and my mother had known so many people that the usual six degrees of separation were reduced to two or three. One phone call, maybe two, almost always opened the door that I needed. Few people refused to help.

An innovator and visionary, Madam sped through the final decade of her life too busy to reflect and ruminate. Where others of her generation had penned memoirs and autobiographies, she left only the flimsiest clues about her early life. Fortunately for me she understood the power of the press, and had actively cultivated relationships with black newspaper reporters who chronicled her activities on a weekly basis. As well, hundreds of her personal letters and business records, faithfully preserved by her secretary, Violet Reynolds — and now archived at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis — provided my original road map to her travels between 1913 and 1919.

The same sense of adventure and anticipation that had led me to the dresser in my grandmother's room accompanied me through the libraries, archives, courthouses and historical societies of more than a dozen United States cities between 1975 and 2000. In the St. Louis Public Library, as I scrolled through thousands of feet of microfilm, I discovered three brothers Madam Walker had never mentioned in her official company biography. In Savannah, Georgia, I felt an unspoken healing as I hugged R. Burney Long, whose family still owned the land where Madam Walker was born and where her parents had been slaves. Through the years I followed Madam Walker's path from Delta, Louisiana, to Vicksburg to St. Louis, from Denver to Pittsburgh to Indianapolis, then to Harlem and Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

During the summer of 1982 — with the last of the Walker friends and employees still alive — I was welcomed into the parlors and living rooms of a fascinating array of men and women in their eighties and nineties, all eager to entrust me with the legacy we shared. In New York, Gerri Major, long known as Jet's "Society World" columnist, spun stories of A'Lelia's weekend soirees and afternoon poker parties. Confined to her bed with vertigo, Major was still glamorous in a white satin lounging jacket as she described typesetting the Inter-State Tattler, the tabloid she had edited under the name Geraldyn Dismond during the 1920s and 1930s. Blues singer Alberta Hunter, who was then performing at the Cookery in Greenwich Village, described her visits to Villa Lewaro and told me that A'Lelia had a "beautiful singing voice." Over a mimosa-filled brunch across the Hudson River in Hoboken, writer and artist Bruce Nugent recalled the crowded October 1927 opening of The Dark Tower as well as spaghetti dinners in A'Lelia's hideaway on Edgecombe Avenue. In Chicago, Marjorie Stewart Joyner, the former principal of the national chain of Walker Beauty Schools, sparkled as she recounted her first meeting with Madam Walker in 1916.

For my grandfather's ninetieth birthday, I traveled to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, his childhood home, to which he had returned in the early 1960s. On the second day of my visit, I asked him about a large steamer trunk that I remembered from his Indianapolis apartment. "Try the closet in the front bedroom," he suggested. And there it was, behind a stack of newspapers and boxes. After I dragged it into the living room, where he was sitting, we unsuccessfully tried every key in the house. Finally we called a locksmith, who in no time was there popping the lock. To my delighted astonishment, the treasures of my childhood — the ostrich fan, the King Tut charms, the opera glasses — all appeared magically before me. For the rest of the day Pa Pa and I explored. In one drawer we found the license for A'Lelia's second marriage with a spray of baby's breath still pressed into the folds. Beneath that document was Madam's last letter to A'Lelia, written just nine days before she died. Folded in another compartment was Mae's hand-embroidered wedding dress from her 1923 marriage to Dr. Gordon Jackson. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Pa Pa — still seated in his straight-backed chair — was ready with an explanation for each item I retrieved. Too excited to eat, too charged to sleep, we continued past midnight. As soon as Pa Pa's head fell to his chest, he was awake again, mesmerizing me with family stories until the sun peeked through the window blinds.

Six years earlier, my mother had granted me permission to present the Walker women's lives as I found them. On this hot July night, Pa Pa passed the baton of family griot.

Certainly whatever teenage reservations I may have had about Madam Walker are long gone. My original childhood curiosity has remained my most reliable guide. And now that I am the same age as Madam Walker when she experienced her greatest achievements, I fully understand why many consider her an American icon. It is a privilege to tell her story.

A'Lelia Bundles
Alexandria, Virginia
www.madamcjwalker.com

A word about A'Lelia Walker: During the early 1920s Lelia Walker changed her name to A'Lelia Walker. Because her mother had originally named her Lelia and because that was the name she used during the years of Madam Walker's life, she is called Lelia throughout the remainder of this text, except in the afterword.

For ease of reading, research source citations have been placed at the end of the book.

Copyright © 2001 by A'Lelia Bundles

Table of Contents

Contents

Biological Ancestors of Fairy Mae Bryant

Descendants of Owen Breedlove, Sr.

Prologue

1. Freedom Baby
2. Motherless Child
3. Wife, Mother, Widow
4. St. Louis Woman
5. Answered Prayers
6. World's Fair
7. Westward
8. On the Road
9. Bold Moves
10. "The Salvation of Your Boys and Girls"
11. "I Promoted Myself..."
12. Breaking Ties, Making Ties
13. Sweet Satisfaction
14. New Horizons
15. Black Metropolis
16. Southern Tour
17. "We Should Protest"
18. War Abroad, War at Home
19. Her Dream of Dreams
20. Global Visions
21. "I Want to Live to Help My Race"
    

A'Lelia Walker: An Afterword

Epilogue

Endnotes

Selected Bibliography

Permissions

Acknowledgments

Index

Reading Group Guide

1) Very few documented details survive from Madam Walker's childhood as Sarah Breedlove. From her own words, we know that she was born in 1867 on the plantation where her parents had been slaves, that she was orphaned at 7, married at 14, a mother at 17 and a widow at 20. What events and people from her early life influenced her and planted the seeds for her later success? Because On Her Own Ground is a nonfiction book, the author cannot fictionalize details she does not know or fabricate conversations which never occurred. How does she compensate for the lack of documentation?
2) Madam Walker's daughter, Lelia (later known as A'Lelia Walker), provided much of her early motivation to improve her life. As Lelia grew older their relationship was complicated. In fact Madam Walker's secretary once said the relationship was "like fire and ice. They loved each other dearly and they sometimes fought fiercely." Yet, they were so enmeshed and emotionally connected that they were never fully estranged. The themes of loss and abandonment run through the lives of both women. Sarah's parents died before she really could know them. Lelia never really knew her father. Was Sarah overly protective? Did she spoil Lelia? How do you think John Davis's behavior affected their relationship? Why might it be that Lelia didn't seem to have the same level of ambition and drive as her mother?
3) What was the influence of the women of the AME Church, the NACW and the Court of Calanthe on Sarah? How did she use some of the networking skills she learned from these groups to organize her own sales agents and beauty culturists?
4) Many people focus on Madam Walker's role as a pioneer in the hair care industry. Her entrepreneurial contributions were important, but she seemed to have a vision for women that included economic independence and political action. Are there themes and initiatives that she raised at the 1917 and 1918 Walker agents convention and in other speeches that are relevant today?
5) Madam Walker wanted Booker T. Washington's endorsement though he was not receptive at first. Why did he shun her? How did she win him over? What do you think she felt when he resisted her efforts to speak at his 1912 National Negro Business League conference?
6) Madam Walker was one of the wealthiest self-made businesswomen of her era, but what made her truly great and unique was her philanthropy and political activism. Are there examples of women or African American entrepreneurs today who exhibit the same social consciousness? Why might such an approach be important?
7) What are some examples of Madam Walker's philanthropy?
8) Madam Walker tried to hide the existence of her second marriage to John Davis. Why do you think she did that? Why do you think she had so much difficulty in her marriages?
9) For many years many people believed the myth that Madam Walker invented the hot comb and that her primary objective was to straighten black women's hair. Now that you know this information is incorrect, what particular hygiene issue was she trying to address? Also, she was very aware of the controversy about whether black women should straighten their hair or maintain a more natural look. She once said, "Let me correct the erroneous impression that I claim to straighten hair. I deplore such impression because I have always held myself out as a hair culturist. I grow hair. I have absolute faith in my mission. I want the great masses of my people to take a greater pride in their appearance and to give their hair proper attention. I dare say that in the next ten years it will be a rare thing to see a kinky head of hair and it will not be straight either." What do you think she meant in the final sentence?
10) If your city is included in the book — either as a place where Madam Walker lived or visited — discuss what the community may have been like a century ago as African Americans and women tried to develop businesses and political organizations. Are there current reminders in your community of that history?
11) What were A'Lelia Walker's contributions to the Walker Company and to the Harlem Renaissance?
12) What is the current impact of Madam Walker's life? Does she still serve as an inspirational figure for women and people of color? What is her larger legacy to the business community?

Interviews

Exclusive Author Essay
My Search for Madam C. J. Walker

At the turn of the last century, my great-great-grandmother -- like thousands of African-American women -- spent much of her time scrubbing, ironing, and folding other peoples' clothes for $1.50 a day. By the time she died in 1919, she had transformed herself from Sarah Breedlove, uneducated daughter of slaves, into Madam C. J. Walker, trailblazing entrepreneur, whose army of "beauty culturists" marketed her hair care products throughout the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean.

That unlikely trajectory has long fascinated writers and historians. But through the years, most of the articles and books that have mentioned her only added to a tangle of recycled myths and apocryphal tales. The more I read of these accounts, the more determined I became to set the record straight. Armed with a passion to reclaim my family's past -- and fortified with the knowledge gained from reading a trove of Madam Walker's personal letters -- I promised to give this remarkable woman the recognition she had long deserved.

Upon reflection, my personal journey to write on Her Own Ground really began before I could read, when I discovered a mauve moiré vanity filled with the belongings of three generations of Walker women. As Shalimar dusting powder swirled into my nostrils, each slim, silk-lined drawer offered treasure after seductive treasure: a pair of luminescent mother-of-pearl opera glasses and a fluffy ostrich fan here, a stack of sepia-toned photographs and ivory mah-jongg tiles there.

At the time I was mesmerized, but too young to fully comprehend what I was seeing. With each passing year, however, as we sliced our Thanksgiving turkey on Madam Walker's gold-trimmed china and ladled creamy Christmas eggnog from her solid silver punch bowl, slivers of her story eased into my memory. At some point -- though I can't remember exactly when -- I began to fashion the available facts into a manageable scenario: Born Sara Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, in 1867, she was orphaned at 7, married at 14, a widow at 20. While toiling as a St. Louis washerwoman during the 1890s, she began to go bald. Miraculously, she claimed, the formula for the ointment that was to heal her scalp and restore her hair had been revealed to her in a dream.

In 1906, after marrying her third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, she changed her name to "Madam" and founded the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. Along the way, she became a political power broker, moving easily among the likes of such early-20th-century giants as Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois, antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, educator Booker T. Washington, American Bar Association president Moorfield Storey, and opera tenor Enrico Caruso. An early advocate of women's economic independence, she also helped reconfigure philanthropy in the black community with her unprecedented contributions to the YMCA and the NAACP. By the time she died in 1919, many people believed her to be a millionaire.

What began for me 45 years ago as a childhood curiosity eventually evolved into a lifelong odyssey that I have happily followed into the libraries, historical societies, and courthouses of more than a dozen U.S. cities. In tiny Delta, Louisiana, I squatted on a levee a few yards from Madam's birthplace and let the syrupy ripples of the Mississippi River transport me back to antebellum times. In Indianapolis, I sipped spiced tea in an antique-filled living room as Madam's longtime secretary affectionately described their early-morning office rituals and afternoon excursions to the silent-movie theater. As I walked along 135th Street in Harlem, I regretted that her elegant town house had been razed to make room for the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library, but I had no trouble conjuring a vision of her as she stepped gracefully from her chauffeur-driven Cole touring car.

While savoring the sunset from the terrace at Villa Luwaro, her mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, I understood while she had called the home her "dream of dreams." Behind its sparkling cream stucco walls, each room and corridor shimmered with the spirits of visitors and pilgrims past: black nationalist Marcus Garvey, poet Langston Hughes, blues singer Alberta Hunter, and scores of Walker School of Beauty Culture graduates. Although the original furnishings were long gone, it was easy to visualize the hand-woven silk Tabriz carpets and elaborate Aubusson tapestries that had accented the floors and walls of the reception hall.

The sensations I had felt as a child as I touched ny great-grandmother's belongings, and the revelations I had experienced during my visits to the haunts of her early life, helped to deepen my understanding of her. But it was the personal correspondence, business records, newspaper articles, and government documents that transformed my feelings and impressions into reliable and verifiable history.

Late one night in January 1995, while winter rain slashed the windows of the Madison Parish Courthouse, clerk Phyllis Scurria kindly climbed to the top of a ceiling-high ladder to retrieve ledger books from the 1850s and 1860s that provided descriptions of Madam Walker's birthplace. At the Missouri Historical Society, I squinted at fading newspaper articles in a 100-year-old scrapbook with hopes of learning enough details to re-create the ambience and aromas of the churches, saloons, and tenements of Sarah Breedlove's ragtime-era neighborhood. At the St. Louis Public Library, I scrolled through thousands of feet of microfilm until I discovered the addresses of four Breedlove brothers who had established themselves as barbers long before their sister ever envisioned her beauty culture empire. Each visit to the Indiana Historical Society -- where I examined everything from annual Walker Company audits to handwritten requests for Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower -- left me both drained and exhilarated.

With each document and each letter, I reminded myself that the woman who had plowed down the obstacles of poverty, race, and gender to become one of the wealthiest businesswomen of the early 20th century deserved my best effort. No only because she was my great-grandmother, but because she embodied the hopes and aspirations of a generation of African Americans who were still battling the lingering legacy of slavery. And because, even today, the lessons of her life have the power to inspire anyone who has ever dreamed a dream of prosperity. (A'Lelia Bundles)

A'Lelia Bundles is a career journalist, in both print and network television. She works in Washington, D.C.

Introduction

1) Very few documented details survive from Madam Walker's childhood as Sarah Breedlove. From her own words, we know that she was born in 1867 on the plantation where her parents had been slaves, that she was orphaned at 7, married at 14, a mother at 17 and a widow at 20. What events and people from her early life influenced her and planted the seeds for her later success? Because On Her Own Ground is a nonfiction book, the author cannot fictionalize details she does not know or fabricate conversations which never occurred. How does she compensate for the lack of documentation?

2) Madam Walker's daughter, Lelia (later known as A'Lelia Walker), provided much of her early motivation to improve her life. As Lelia grew older their relationship was complicated. In fact Madam Walker's secretary once said the relationship was "like fire and ice. They loved each other dearly and they sometimes fought fiercely." Yet, they were so enmeshed and emotionally connected that they were never fully estranged. The themes of loss and abandonment run through the lives of both women. Sarah's parents died before she really could know them. Lelia never really knew her father. Was Sarah overly protective? Did she spoil Lelia? How do you think John Davis's behavior affected their relationship? Why might it be that Lelia didn't seem to have the same level of ambition and drive as her mother?

3) What was the influence of the women of the AME Church, the NACW and the Court of Calanthe on Sarah? How did she use some of the networking skills she learned from these groups to organize her own sales agents and beauty culturists?

4) Many people focus on Madam Walker's role as a pioneer in the hair careindustry. Her entrepreneurial contributions were important, but she seemed to have a vision for women that included economic independence and political action. Are there themes and initiatives that she raised at the 1917 and 1918 Walker agents convention and in other speeches that are relevant today?

5) Madam Walker wanted Booker T. Washington's endorsement though he was not receptive at first. Why did he shun her? How did she win him over? What do you think she felt when he resisted her efforts to speak at his 1912 National Negro Business League conference?

6) Madam Walker was one of the wealthiest self-made businesswomen of her era, but what made her truly great and unique was her philanthropy and political activism. Are there examples of women or African American entrepreneurs today who exhibit the same social consciousness? Why might such an approach be important?

7) What are some examples of Madam Walker's philanthropy?

8) Madam Walker tried to hide the existence of her second marriage to John Davis. Why do you think she did that? Why do you think she had so much difficulty in her marriages?

9) For many years many people believed the myth that Madam Walker invented the hot comb and that her primary objective was to straighten black women's hair. Now that you know this information is incorrect, what particular hygiene issue was she trying to address? Also, she was very aware of the controversy about whether black women should straighten their hair or maintain a more natural look. She once said, "Let me correct the erroneous impression that I claim to straighten hair. I deplore such impression because I have always held myself out as a hair culturist. I grow hair. I have absolute faith in my mission. I want the great masses of my people to take a greater pride in their appearance and to give their hair proper attention. I dare say that in the next ten years it will be a rare thing to see a kinky head of hair and it will not be straight either." What do you think she meant in the final sentence?

10) If your city is included in the book -- either as a place where Madam Walker lived or visited -- discuss what the community may have been like a century ago as African Americans and women tried to develop businesses and political organizations. Are there current reminders in your community of that history?

11) What were A'Lelia Walker's contributions to the Walker Company and to the Harlem Renaissance?

12) What is the current impact of Madam Walker's life? Does she still serve as an inspirational figure for women and people of color? What is her larger legacy to the business community?

Editorial Reviews

USA Today On Her Own Ground is a fascinating book about a fascinating woman....A wonderful story of an entrepreneur, but also a story about a dedicated African-American woman who was committed to giving her time and money to her community.

Chicago Tribune It is like finding out the secret sources of your past to read On Her Own Ground, a graceful biography by Walker's great-great-granddaughter....Bundles tells the tale with obvious affection and impressive scholarship....Under Bundles' deft handling, Walker's fable comes up fresh and inspirational. However we dress our hair, because of her, we daughters stand taller on our own ground.

The Philadelphia Inquirer The life of Madam C.J. Walker is one of the great success stories of American history. The wonder of it is that On Her Own Ground is the first full-blown biography of an amazing woman.

The New York Times Well-paced and well-written...as much social history as biography, filled with the detail and texture of culture and politics.

Chicago Sun-Times More than a history lesson in her rise to fame, On Her Own Ground offers inspiration to women — regardless of race — on how to succeed against all odds.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Bundles always knew, on some level, that this story was hers to tell. And she tells it with a controlled passion and an integrity that would have made Madam Walker proud.

Ishmael Reed Madam Walker is the key to understanding her generation. She had to battle the society that consigned her to doing its laundry...yet she triumphed to become one of the most fabulous African-American figures of the twentieth century.

From the Publisher

Oprah Winfrey is renowned for her media savvy, marketing sense, philanthropic efforts, and accumulated wealth (and the power that accompanies it). She's earned her rep, of course, and her path to stardom and influence couldn't have been easy. Imagine, then, how difficult it must have been a century ago for Madam C. J. Walker, America's first female African-American millionaire. The daughter of slaves, married and divorced by the age of 20, Madam Walker spent nearly two decades as a lowly scrubwoman before concocting (or, as she claimed, being presented in a dream) the formula for a much needed hair care product for African-American women. After making her hair care business a resounding success, Walker devoted much of her time and resources to social causes and philanthropy.

In On Her Own Ground, A'lelia Bundles, Walker's great-great-grandaughter and a woman of no small accomplishment herself (she's spent many years as a television news producer for NBC and ABC), offers an affectionate but unblinking portrait of Madam Walker. (Bundles' mother urged her daughter from her deathbed not to worry about promoting a particular image of their famous forebear, to simply tell the truth.) Bundles also explores the complicated relationship between Madam Walker and her only slightly less renowned daughter (and the author's namesake), A'Lelia Walker, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and the elder Walker's interactions with such other seminal African-American figures as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.

bn.com

The challenge of reconstructing a life of both personal and historical significance poses no apparent constraints for Bundles. She has mastered the tensions organic to such a process of recovery, analysis and truth-telling. As a result, On Her Own Ground is not an honorific narrative but rather a life convincingly told with the biographer's unwavering commitment to accuracy.
— Washington Post

Rudolph P. Byrd

Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of America's first black woman millionaire, evinces great affection for her famous relative, even if she doesn't overcome a major hurdle: Madam Walker kept her intimate life so private that there's not much to say about it. In the first chapters, Bundles uses a lot of awkward "possibly"s and "perhaps"s as she speculates about her subject's motivations and feelings. Once into the swing of Madam Walker's career, however, Bundles sidesteps the problem by turning social historian, leaving questions of love and sex aside. Walker's trajectory from uneducated washerwoman to hair-care industry magnate becomes the organizing element for a larger mosaic of black life in America, from Reconstruction through the founding of the NAACP in 1909. There's solid business history here, too, as Madam Walker figures out how to make her kitchen industry into a national empire by franchising it. Walker's philanthropy and social consciousness (working for the antilynching and the African anticolonial movements, for example) made her an important powerbroker in the black community. With fascinating details on benevolent and fraternal organizations, urban churches, black colleges, political movements and government surveillance of those involved in them, Bundles takes readers on an engrossing tour of a neglected corner of American history. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

TV journalist Bundles (ABC News) delivers the first comprehensive adult biography of Madame C.J. Walker, her great-great-grandmother, who was born Sarah Breedlove on a Louisiana plantation in 1867 and whose name subsequently became synonymous with hair straightening and black wealth. The author dispels the myth that Walker invented the hair-straightening comb and made her money from hair-straightening products for black women, a highly political issue in Walker's time as well as our own. Bundles instead focuses on Walker's impressive philanthropy, her business savvy, and the personal and political motivations that propelled her from washerwoman to cosmetics industry pioneer and legendary African American businesswoman. Walker employed thousands of black women nationwide, zealously donated to organizations that served the black community, and was actively involved in anti-lynching and racial equality campaigns. The book is a solidly researched and well-written historical account of a rags-to-riches experience that exemplifies the American dream. Recommended for all African American history collections. Sherri L. Barnes, Univ. of California Lib., Santa Barbara Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Rags-to-riches story of the daughter of freed slaves who became an entrepreneur and used the fortune she amassed to help her people. Bundles, the great-great-granddaughter of Walker, has produced a well-researched, full-length biography of her energetic and enterprising ancestor that also reveals much about the social, cultural, and political history of African-Americans in the early years of the 20th century. Born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867, she became an agent for a hair-products manufacturer in 1903 and, after her (third) marriage in 1906, began marketing Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower in Denver, Colorado. The author documents how Walker developed an extensive network of female agents and expanded her markets through personal contacts with religious and fraternal organizations, creating a national demand for her products in less than two years. Having achieved some prominence as a philanthropist (she made a generous donation to the Indianapolis YMCA in 1911), she launched a long and ultimately successful campaign to win the endorsement of Booker T. Washington and his National Negro Business League. The growth of Madam Walker's business is all the more remarkable when seen against a background of segregation, lynchings, race riots, and a white mind-set that assumed its own superiority. As her wealth grew, Walker formed ties with numerous activist groups—the NAACP, the National Equal Rights League, the International League of Darker Peoples—and she organized her own agents into the Madam C.J. Walker Benevolent Association, urging them to work toward improving their communities. While her sphere was the black business world andpoliticalestablishment,Walker's daughter Lelia (who later renamed herself A'Lelia) found her niche in the cultural and social milieu of the Harlem Renaissance, and Bundles gives a brief glimpse of the splash she made there. A fascinating portrait of an astonishing woman.

Kirkus Reviews