HER
DREAM OF DREAMS,
THE RISE AND TRIUMPH OF
MADAM C.J. WALKER
By Beverly Lowry
Alfred A. Knopf
442 pages.
Of
all the great American stories of re-invention and rags-to-riches,
none is more unlikely than that of Madam C.J. Walker. Born Sarah
Breedlove, to freed slaves sharecropping a dismal patch land in
Louisiana just after the Civil War, she would be orphaned at seven,
receive no formal education, and spend the first thirty-seven
years of her life eking out a living as a washerwoman and domestic.
Yet before she was forty she ran her own “hair culture”
business; by forty-five she was a philanthropist and an intimate
of Booker T. Washington, the most renowned black American of her
day; and by the time of her death in 1919, at the age of 51, she
was an outspoken race advocate and probably the richest black
woman in American history to that point; the owner of a thriving,
international corporation, a fleet of luxury cars, an elegant
Harlem townhouse, and a spectacular Westchester estate that sat
nearly in J.D. Rockefeller’s backyard. Her daughter, A’Lelia
Walker, would use her inheritance to establish herself as a patroness
of the arts and the freewheeling “Joy Goddess” of
the Harlem Renaissance.
It
is a remarkable story—and one complicated by the fact that
Madam Walker’s “hair culture” or “hair
growing” process really meant hair straightening, a practice
that strikes at the very heart of the African American identity.
Lurking always, just beneath the surface of her astonishing rise,
is the question of how much it depended upon exploiting the self-hatred
of other black women.
For
these and more practical reasons, this is not an easy story to
tell. Official America in the nineteenth century had little interest
in tracing the progress of an black orphan girl, and much of Walker’s
history remains obscure, shrouded by lost or shoddy records, dubious
reminiscences, and Madam’s own penchant for myth-making.
She moved swiftly and almost ceaselessly through this life, shedding
names, husbands, business associates, and family members, usually
as her formidable business instincts moved her. Even the inspiration
for her hair growth formula changed to suit each new audience
and ad campaign. Sometimes she had developed it herself, through
years of experimentation; other times it came to her through a
vision of a large black man or even, at the height of her mythologizing,
through God Himself, as a way of helping and uplifting the race.
These
are among the obstacles that Beverly Lowry faced in writing Her
Dream of Dreams, The Rise and Triumph of Madam C.J. Walker,
and Ms. Lowry, the author of six novels and a memoir, brings both
considerable strengths and weaknesses of her own to the task.
Foremost
among her strengths are an immense energy and a powerful and dramatic
writing style. Lowry has done prodigious research, and she paints
a vivid and engrossing picture of the world Madam Walker emerged
from, and triumphed over. The Mississippi Delta after the Civil
War was a region of almost unbelievable hardship and wretchedness,
regularly scourged by floods, disease, and human malevolence.
Above all, Lowry never allows us to forget the terror that most
African American were forced to live under, from the organized
massacres and Klan murders that hastened the end of Reconstruction,
to the dozens of lynchings that took place year in and year out,
decade after decade.
It
was a system of oppression so smothering that it seems hard to
believe anyone could get out from under it. But Lowry fills the
reader with an almost palpable sense of excitement as she follows
the young Sarah to Vicksburg, then St. Louis. Working for subsistence
wages at the immensely difficult, backbreaking trade of washerwoman;
living in abysmal slums; married by the age of fourteen, a mother
at seventeen, but still always restless, always looking to move
on; never willing to accept the stunted existence she was supposed
to be relegated to by birth. “I got my start by giving myself
a start,” she liked to say in later years.
In
fact, it looked for a long time as if her aspirations would not
be enough. Then one day opportunity arrived in the person of Annie
Turnbo, another determined young black woman, in St. Louis to
sell her hair-growing treatment at the world’s fair. Sarah
became one of her agents, and left domestic service behind forever.
Within a year she was off to Denver, reportedly with $1.50 in
capital and a new man in tow, Mr. C.J. Walker, who had
useful ties to black newspapers and advertising services.
Lowry
does a superb job of describing Sarah’s new world, as well.
Turnbo was on the cutting edge of a revolution in sales, spurred
on by the birth of the mail-order industry and mass production.
Operating under Richard Sears’s credo, “Have the goods,
then advertise,” salesmen—and saleswomen like Sarah—were
now selling a whole lifestyle. Demonstrations of Turnbo’s
hair formula were designed to be house parties, anticipating Tupperware,
and Amway.
And they had the goods that black women wanted. Anyone who has
read The Autobiography of Malcolm X or seen the Spike
Lee movie can appreciate how awful home “conking”
could be; black women a century ago were putting similar things
in their hair, including cayenne pepper, quinine and ox marrow,
straight lye and sulphur, even meat drippings—preparations
that would often cause it to fall out in clumps, and permanently
damage their scalps.
Sarah
listened, and learned the new techniques. She left Denver after
less than two years later—in business for herself now, armed
with her own hair-growing formula. She had, it quickly became
apparent, an almost uncanny flair for advertising, as well as
a knack for hiring capable and useful people as her sales agents
and assistants, and the boldness and eye for the main chance of
a natural born entrepreneur. On the rise at last, she would literally
never stop; doubling or tripling her income every year; traveling
almost frantically around the country, building a factory and
corporate headquarters in Indianapolis, building her dream house.
Striving at all times to be heard, to command respect; whether
that meant winning the blessings of the reluctant Washington for
her enterprises, or having her say in the nascent black nationalist
and civil rights movements.
It
is at the moment of Walker’s triumph that, unexpectedly,
Lowry’s narrative falters. Favored for once with an abundance
of details about her subject’s life, she becomes mired in
them, overwhelming us with descriptions of every major railroad
station that Walker passed through, or the proceedings of every
black business convention she attended.
Left
hanging are other, more pressing questions. Lowry suggests, for
instance, that the Walker hair formula was probably Turnbo’s,
analyzed and reproduced by an obliging Denver druggist. If this
is true, how did she get a patent, and what does this tell us
about Walker’s character? The ingredients included “precipitated
sulfur…along with thick petrolatum, beeswax, copper sulfate…a
perfume made from violet extract to hide the sulfur smell…carbolic
acid and coconut oil” —and while this may have been
better than what black women were putting in their hair before,
what did it do to them over the long run? How does Walker register
in the black consciousness today, as a powerful, self-made black
woman whose rise was predicated in part upon making other black
women look more white?
Lowry
doesn’t really address these issues—though near the
end, as Madam Walker finally lies still in her new mansion, struck
down by kidney disease, she devotes most of a chapter to listing
almost every item in the grand house, from Walker’s gilded
pipe organ right down to her ice box and the “dumbwaiter
[which] still works.” It was the house, after all, that
Sarah described as “her dream of dreams”—yet
Lowry barely mentions an even more impressive edifice, the factory
and office building that Walker built in Indianapolis to churn
out her beauty products. It must have been unprecedented: a modern
American factory, built by a black woman, with a black woman manager
and an all-black staff. We would like to know how many people
Madam Walker employed, what working conditions were like for the
employees of the former washerwoman, or at least what finally
became of the business. But this, Lowry informs us, “is
in the future, and has nothing to do with Madame.” Oh?
At
the other extreme, when the facts are not readily available, Lowry
has the habit of imposing her own, breezy suppositions on the
work. “…the living soul is wily, and the heart eludes
discovery. And we will never know it all,” she asserts early
on. True enough, but this still does not give a biographer license
to make things up, and reasonable speculation is different from
outright guesswork.
Thus, from her study of the woman that Madam Walker would become,
as well as what “I have learned, lived, and come to believe…”
Lowry assures us that little Sarah Breedlove’s mother, lying
on her deathbed, “would necessarily pass on hard- won information
to her children,” which would include—in order—“Learn
to read…Never mind business that’s not yours…Stay
out of white people’s way…” But how can
we possibly assume such a thing, no matter what the life experiences
of Ms. Lowry, a novelist and university instructor living in another
century? When her marriage to Mr. Walker is winding down, Ms.
Lowry assures us that “in all likelihood they no longer
carry on casual conversations.” Really? Or could it be that
two people in a dissolving marriage are capable only
of casual conversations? At other moments, Lowry writes about
Madam Walker’s rocky relationship with A’Lelia as
if she were the girl’s mother: “I tend to
think, also, that Lelia’s behavior is getting out of hand
and that she’s starting to party more vigorously and spend
more time pursuing an inappropriate night life, her interest in
the business waning.”
These
sorts of interjections are so pervasive that they seriously detract
from Lowry’s whole endeavor. Madam Walker’s life is
too rich, and Ms. Lowry is too good a writer, not to make much
of Her Dream of Dreams a good read—but in the end
Madam escapes back into the myth she created for herself.
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel Paradise Alley, about
the Civil War draft riots in New York City.
© Copyright The Chicago Tribune
