Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 23, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“I got my start by giving myself a start.” –Madame C. J. Walker

 

In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” the speaker bemoans, “I all alone beweep my outcast state.” In contrast, rather than indulge in a pity party, Sarah Walker turned her misfortune into a fortune, and in the process, she became America’s first female, self-made millionaire.

 

Hair–comprised of lifeless follicles–has long been equated with female pulchritude. Corinthians states, “If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her; for her hair is given her for a covering.” Lady Godiva achieved immortality when she rode naked on her horse through the streets of Coventry, her modesty preserved by her flowing tresses. Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote of his lover, “Only God, my dear/ Could love you for yourself alone/And not your golden hair.” Women’s crowning glory led to Sarah’s renown and fortune.

 

A future millionaire’s story had its genesis on a plantation by the Mississippi River in Delta, Louisiana, where Robert W. Burney had owned sixty enslaved people, including Owen and Minerva Breedlove. Arriving two days before Christmas, due to grueling poverty, Sarah was the only present her parents received. Unlike her siblings, Louvenia, Owen Jr., Alexander, and James, she had been born into freedom. Nevertheless, the family was still enchained in their role as sharecroppers. They also had to contend with the white supremacist groups: the Knights of the White Camellia and the White League.

 

Owen and Minerva had likely “jumped the broom,” a ritual for the enslaved to legitimize their union. With their $100.00 from an abundant 1868 cotton harvest, they were able to marry in a Christian ceremony. Two-year-old Sarah, her baby brother Solomon, and their four older children attended.

 

When Sarah was old enough, she worked alongside her family in the fields under the suffocating Southern sun. Aware cotton translated survival, Sarah proclaimed, “Twasn’t nobody could beat me a-choppin’ cotton an’ a-pickin’ dem bolls clean.” As Mississippi was averse to providing knowledge that would enable blacks to raise their station her formal schooling spanned three months. Tragedy entered the Breedlove cabin with the death of first Minerva, and then Owen, possibly from disease born from the bayous. At age seven, Sarah lived with her sister Louvenia and her husband Jesse Powell in Vicksburg. Four years later, Jesse found her work as a caregiver for white children. When walking walked past the town’s shop windows, she looked longingly at its displays. Later, Sarah described Jesse as “cruel;” her comment stemmed from either emotional and or sexual abuse.

 

Escape arrived at age fourteen through a common-law marriage with Moses McWilliams, undertaken “in order to get a home of my own.” She was delighted at the birth of her daughter, Lelia; at age twenty, Sarah was a widow. Moses’ cause of death is unknown, though he may have been a victim of lynching.

 

In 1888, along with three-year-old Lelia, Sarah headed north to escape violence and poverty. Her destination was St. Louis where her brothers were barbers. Her first residence was the venue of stabbings, murders, and a brothel. She worked as a washerwoman for $1.50 per diem, a job she held for a decade. Because of her long shifts, Sarah had to leave Lelia at an orphan’s home a few days a week. On one occasion, reality hit home, “I was at my washtub one morning with a heavy wash before me. As I bent over the washboard, and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself: ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?” Another weight was the Breedlove family tragedies. Her brother, Alexander, died from an intestinal illness. Louvenia’s son, William, ended up in Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison convicted of manslaughter.

 

In a bid to ease her hardships and provide her daughter with a father figure, Sarah married John Davis, a decision she soon regretted. They fought over his lack of motivation, his girlfriend Susie, and his drinking. Their marriage ended when John chose his mistress over his wife.

 

During their embattled relationship, Sarah had experienced a significant amount of hair loss. The affliction was common for woman of the era, caused by infrequent washing, illness, scalp disease, lice, and poor diet. Stress from her husband might also have exasperated her condition. What increased her self-consciousness was long hair was the vogue. Women with luxuriant locks looked out from newspapers and magazine covers. Jazz singer Helen Humes’ 1923 song, “Nappy Headed Blues,” illustrated black women’s hair issues, “Bought myself some hot irons, gonna start to fryin’ hair/Straighten it or burn it, makes no difference, I don’’t care….Got to smooth these knots out, got to be an Indian queen.” Sensing a niche market, Kinkilla, Kink-No-More, and Straightime appeared. The Boston Chemical Company sponsored Ozono that claimed to “take the Kinks out of Knotty, Kinky, Harsh, Curly, Refractory, Troublesome Hair.” 

 

Often Sarah recounted the genesis of her hair elixir, “For one night I had a dream, and in that dream a big black man appeared to me and told me what to mix for my hair. Some of the remedy was from Africa, but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.” The actual origin story was not as visionary. Sarah started her career working for the black businesswoman, Annie Pope-Turbo, the proprietor of Poro School of Beauty Culture. Annie’s product had helped Sarah reclaim healthy hair. When Sarah wanted to strike out on her own, she experimented with Annie’s mixture, until she came up with her own that consisted of coconut oil, beeswax, and violet extract that she called Wonderful Hair Grower. The formula, in conjunction with the hot metal comb invented by a Frenchman in 1870, helped smooth hair that allowed black women to adopt the Gibson Girl style.

 

Armed with Porco products, Sarah Breedlove headed to Denver to try her luck. She believed that the city’s soil contained alkali-hard on hair-that would make it a receptive market. She arrived with $1.50 and a heart full of hope. No doubt she was enthralled with Denver socialite Margaret Tobin Brown, immortalized as the Titanic survivor fictionalized in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Two days before her thirty-eighth birthday, in her friend’s parlor, Reverend William Dyett officiated at the wedding ceremony of Sarah to Charles Joseph (C.J.) Walker. Deciding to open her own business, she instituted the C. J. Walker Company. Although her husband later claimed that he was the brains behind their enterprise, he had told his wife that he “could see nothing ahead but failure.” Her friends also warned her about the pitfalls of striking out on her own. She said of the naysayers, “Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton.”

 

A marketing maven, Sarah advertised in the growing number of black newspapers. Several ads focused on Before and After photos featuring Sarah’s own transformation. Her confidence came to fruition when the party line in the Walker’s rooming house rang with orders. Fifty-five years before Mary Kay Ash had trained women to work as “independent beauty consultants,” Sarah hired “Walker agents.” By doing so, her female labor force earned a share of the profits, thereby providing thousands of black women an alternative to livelihoods as farm laborers, domestics, and washerwomen.

 

As Denver had a limited black population, Sarah traversed the country selling her Wonderful Hair Grower. By 1907, the former washerwoman who had earned $300 a year was earning the same amount per month. At the time, most black women earned $20.00 a month as domestics, and white male factory workers had monthly incomes ranging from $40.00 to $60.00 per month. A lyric of “Nappy Headed Blues” reflected Sarah’s success, “Run to Madame Walker, send a fifty-dollar bill/Then send me some pomade, help a poor girl if you will.” Her Walker agents also increased; at its zenith, she had a sales staff of 20,000 in America and the Caribbean. Her directive to her female employees was one she herself followed: help those who need help. With preachers praising the Walker System of Beauty from their pulpits to encourage black aestheticism, Madam’s coffers overflowed.

 

However, while her finances flourished, her five-year marriage floundered. C. J. had been on the road promoting their company for several months, and Sarah was not miserable over his absence.  Standing in the shadow of his successful wife, C. J. might have engaged in extra-marital relations in a bid at self-affirmation. His affair with Dora Larrie proved the death knell to his marriage. Post separation, he wrote to his former wife, begging her to take him back, “I am tired of Louisville and am writing these lines with tears dripping from my eyes.” His entreaties fell on deaf ears. A further family fracture occurred when Lelia’s one-year marriage to John Robinson, a man of whom her mother had not approved, ended when he took off after an argument. The newly single mother and daughter drew strength, both personally and professional, from one another.

 

While working in Indianapolis, Sarah diversified her assets in the contingency her present business were to suffer a setback. She purchased real estate in several cities, including five lots in Indianapolis, twenty in Gary, Indiana, and individual properties in Los Angeles and New York. A reward of her success was a seven- passenger Cole touring car, a limited-edition model. Due to her metamorphosis from sharecropper to business tycoon, black leaders took note, and when they didn’t, she refused to be sidelined. A 1900s “nasty woman,” Sarah disrupted Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League Convention after he ignored the hairdresser. Indignant, she took the floor, “Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face. I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.” She received their attention. Sarah also refused to be silent when confronted with social injustice. After the Isis Theater charged blacks twenty-five cents for admission while whites paid a dime, Sarah commissioned the Walker Theater where an evening of entertainment was not sullied by racism.   

 

The Walker women’s lives s changed when they met Fairy Mae Bryant, the middle of eight children of Sarah Bryant, a widowed washerwoman. Because of Fairy Mae’s hair that cascaded to her waist, she became a model for Madame Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower. As Lelia did not have children, and as the twelve-year-old was living in poverty, Lelia offered to adopt Fairy Mae and promised Bryant that she would provide Fairy Mae education, a share in the business, and contact with her biological family. Preferring a lavishly furnished twelve-room house to her impoverished home, the child was thrilled with the idea. In 1912, the adoption took place whereby Fairy Mae Bryant became Mae Walker Robinson.

 

A peripatetic journey ended when Sarah joined Lelia in her luxurious Harlem residence, part home, part beauty salon. Vertner Tandy, a Cornell graduate, likely New York State’s first licensed black architect, built Lelia a Harlem townhouse that combined two townhouses into an elegant red-brick façade. Mother and daughter became part of Harlem’s famous influential and high-profile residents. They were a fixture in Manhattan’s theater, art, and music communities. Shopping sprees included Madame’s purchase of a Tiffany 3.8-carat solitaire diamond encircled with “66 tiny diamonds” and a pair of matching earrings.

 

After a lifetime of frenetic activity, Sarah wanted a home in a secluded and scenic spot. The woman who had been born in a cabin found her forever home in a 1916 Italianate Renaissance mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, in upstate New York, (named after writer Washington Irving) that consisted of three stories, thirty rooms, and marble staircases. The estate included a Louis XVI chamber suite, an Estey $8,000 organ, and Auguste Rodin sculptures. Decorating touches included bronze and marble statuaries candelabras, tapestries, and paintings. The showplace served as an artistic salon frequented by notables from artistic, political, and business circles. The neighborhood was none too shabby as fellow residents carried the names Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt, Tiffany, and Morgan.  Opera great, Enrico Caruso, a family friend who provided entertainment at Walker soirees, christened the estate Villa Lewaro, an acronym formed from the first two letters of Lelia Walker Robinson. Sarah used her mansion as a site for balls whose attendees included Langston Hughes and photographer James Van Der Zee.  When critics sniped that her mansion was a monument to “undue extravagance,” Sarah countered that Villa Lewaro was “a Negro institution built to show the race what a lone woman accomplished and to inspire them to do big things.”  

 

Sarah Breedlove Walker’s life is an against all odds story: the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, born in a cabin on a plantation, died a millionaire despite the tyranny of Jim Crow. What is more inspiring is she earmarked her wealth for the betterment of others. Every year, she donated $10,000 for Southern colleges and sent six students to Tuskegee Institute. Her philanthropy included founding a black Y.M.C.A., restoring Frederick Douglass’ home, and donating $5,000 t0 the N.A.A. C.P. A fierce fighter for justice, Sarah gave $5,000 to the National Conference on Lynching. Through her activism, she rubbed shoulders with Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune. In 1917, Sarah attempted to meet with President Woodrow Wilson regarding making lynching a federal crime, but he did not grant her an interview. In Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the 1963 March on Washington, he claimed that the United States had given black people a “bad check” and had defaulted on their promissory note. The F. B.I. branded him the most dangerous Negro in the nation. Forty-four years earlier, the Military Intelligence Division’s file had put Sarah Walker’s name on the list of “Negro subversives” for her involvement in the 1919 International Paris Peace Conference.

 

Villa Lewaro remained Sarah’s residence until her 1919 death brought on by a heart attack. The New York Times obituary carried the headline, “Wealthiest Negress Dead.” At her passing, her fortune ranged from $600,000 to $700,000, a sum equivalent to $9 million in contemporary currency. After Lelia died, she bequeathed the mansion to the N.A.A.C.P. In 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a 32-cent commemorative stamp of Madame Walker. Sarah was the third in the postal service’s Black Heritage series; those previously honored were the abolitionist Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson.

 

Sarah’s last words were to Dr. Ward, “I want to live to help my race.” Her true legacy is she followed the admonition of Luke, “To whom much is given, from him much will be required.”

 

 

 

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