“Going down a rabbit hole.” People use this phrase to mean many different things. For anyone whose writing requires research, it usually means following clues until enough dots are connected to create a credible scene.
And when writing nonfiction, it really is important not to make assumptions, because, as they say “truth is more interesting than fiction.” Or as Mark Twain wrote: “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
Alice Down the Rabbit Hole from fc00.deviantart.net
The “rabbit hole” phrase comes from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” when Alice spies the White Rabbit checking his pocket watch. Curious and intrigued, she follows behind “just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge. In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”
She just HAD to know more. Her curiosity compelled her to follow. And, like Alice, one never knows exactly how one is going to “get out again.” But plunge ahead one must. Irrationally. Illogically. And with the faith that the answer one is seeking is somewhere in that tunnel.
This is the same searing, flaming curiosity that hit me a few days ago. That has kept me up past 2 a.m. for more than a few nights as I work on Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, the first major biography of my great-grandmother.
SS Paris departs New York’s Pier 57 in lower Manhattan
I really thought I had everything I needed to finish the chapter about A’Lelia Walker’s trip to Europe and Africa…and then I realized just what a fascinating cast of characters were on board the ship with her and whom she would see in the first class dining room and lounge during her five day voyage from Pier 57 in New York to Le Havre.
Among the passengers is the independent, iconoclastic daughter of one America’s wealthiest men; the spoiled, ne’er-do-well grandson of another billionaire; a celebrated Italian opera singer returning to La Scala; the sister of one of America’s most powerful politicians, who like many young women of her era married a titled European; the editor of one of America’s most important papers and the Prime Minister of France.
Anne Morgan, daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, traveled on the SS Paris in November 1921
To my surprise there are mutual friendships, interests and serendipitous coincidences that link A’Lelia Walker to almost all of these people.
What was it like to be the only black woman in first class on the most luxurious ocean liner of the day? How was she treated? With whom did she interact? How did she spend her days and her evenings? She surely did not go unnoticed. One French newspaper reporter said some wondered, as she strolled along the deck for her afternoon walk, if she were a princess. “Her life is a mystery, others say, as they examine her and her dazzling diamonds and pearls,” he wrote.
And now having gone down the rabbit hole, I have what I need. I wish I had diaries and journals, but I don’t. But I have what I need.
A’Lelia Walker traveled to Europe, Africa and the Middle East from November 1921 to April 1922 (Photo: Madam Walker Family Archives)
So imagine, if you will, A’Lelia Walker standing at the top of the stairwell of the great hall in the photo below, looking down at her fellow first class passengers and contemplating with whom she wishes to spend her evening. Will she play bridge? Will she speak with the opera singer about her love of music? Will she find a common thread with the other women on board who volunteered with the Red Cross during the war?
Oh, I am soooo very eager to tell you all I know!!
The Great Hall for first class passengers on the SS Paris. Imagining A’Lelia Walker on the landing surveying the room and contemplating how she would spend her evening.
Langston Hughes called A’Lelia Walker “the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s.”
Many thanks to Quintard Taylor and BlackPast.org for inviting me to write an essay about A’Lelia Walker for Black History Month 2014. Here is the essay as it appears on the website. And please do visit this wonderful, information website for hundreds of articles that make Black History Month last all year long. Click HERE to go the A’Lelia Walker essay, which is posted below:
In the following account based on her forthcoming book on A’Lelia Walker titled The Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, A’Lelia Bundles provides a glimpse into the life of her famous great-grandmother whose own powerful story is often overshadowed by accounts of her mother, cosmetics entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker. I first began to learn about my great-grandmother and namesake, A’Lelia Walker, when I was three or four years old. On visits with my mother to my grandfather’s apartment, I always slipped away to explore a chest of drawers filled with her jewelry, clothes, photographs and opera glasses. Later I discovered that the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been played by famous musicians who visited her Harlem home. The first edition copies of Countee Cullen’s Color and Jean Toomer’s Caneon our bookshelves had come from her personal library.
To the wider world, she was a cosmetics industry executive and patron of the arts. Born Lelia McWilliams on June 6, 1885 in Delta, Louisiana, she was the only child of future hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist Madam C.J. Walker (Sarah Breedlove), and Moses McWilliams, a sharecropper. As an adult, she changed her name to A’Lelia.
In 1888, while still a toddler, she moved with her widowed mother from Vicksburg, Mississippi to St. Louis, Missouri,
St. Louis
where three of her maternal uncles operated a barber shop. At nearby St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church, women parishioners reached out, caring for A’Lelia in the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home while Sarah worked during the week as a washerwoman. As a choir member, Sarah was exposed for the first time to educated, urban, middle class African American women, many of whom were members of the National Association of Colored Women. Motivated by these interactions, she began to aspire to a better life for herself and her daughter. Sarah’s marriage to an abusive alcoholic named John Davis during A’Lelia’s adolescence created instability and frequently disrupted her school attendance.
In 1901, when A’Lelia was 16, her mother left Davis. She then sent A’Lelia to Knoxville College in Tennessee, where she remained for less than a year.A’Lelia Walker’s love of music and theatre, which later would inform her philanthropy, was established long before she attended college. During the late 1890s, she and her mother had lived across the alley from Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Café, the St. Louis piano hall where ragtime composer Scott Joplin often performed.
During the late 1890s, A’Lelia Walker and her mother, who then was still a washerwoman, lived across the alley behind this building which housed Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Cafe.
Her elementary school principals included black Oberlin College graduates who exposed A’Lelia and the other children to opera, German lieder, marches and spirituals. St. Paul’s organist was a classically-trained tenor who appeared in black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s opera Hiawatha at the 1893 Chicago World’s Exposition. Among her childhood friends were Porgy and Bess cast member Georgette Harvey and musicians Sam Patterson, Joe Jordan, and Louis Chauvin.In 1906, 21-year-old A’Lelia joined her mother and new stepfather, Charles Joseph Walker, in Denver, Colorado, where they recently had founded the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, a hair care products firm that soon would become one of America’s most successful women-owned and black-owned companies.
To identify herself with her mother’s increasingly successful business, A’Lelia began using the Walker surname, though she never was legally adopted by Charles Walker. In Denver and then in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as her mother traveled, she oversaw the mail order operation and manufacture of the Walker line of products. In 1909 she married hotel employee John Robinson whom she had met in Pittsburgh, but the union ended after three years.
Madam Walker opened Lelia College, her first beauty school on Wylie Avenue in 1908. (This photo from agatetype.com was shot in 1912.)
When Madam Walker moved her headquarters to Indianapolis, Indiana in 1910, A’Lelia remained in Pittsburgh to manage the company’s east coast operations. During this time, she adopted 13-year-old Fairy Mae Bryant, whose widowed biological mother had allowed her to travel with the Walkers as an assistant and model. Her hip-length braids were featured in Walker ads for their Wonderful Hair Grower, a product that healed dandruff and scalp disease. She became known as Mae Walker, later graduated from Spelman Seminary (now Spelman College) and was a Walker Company executive for more than 25 years.
In 1913 A’Lelia Walker convinced her mother to establish a Harlem office just as African Americans were moving into that uptown Manhattan neighborhood. Like her mother, she became involved in philanthropic activities, heading fundraising campaigns for several charitable causes, including an ambulance for black soldiers during World War I and a building for the Utopia Neighborhood Club’s Child Welfare and Recreation Center, which later served as the New York headquarters for the 1963 March on Washington. With Lucille Randolph—a Walker-trained beautician and wife of publisher and activist A. Philip Randolph—she founded the Harlem Debutantes Club as a vehicle to involve her daughter, Mae, and other young women from the community in social service activities.
Walker townhouse at 108-110 W. 136th Street. Today the space is occupied by the Countee Cullen branch of the NY Public Library.
Both Walker women cultivated relationships with black publishers and advertised extensively in The Messenger, The Crisis, the New York Age, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender and dozens of other newspapers.In 1916 when Madam Walker moved from Indianapolis to Harlem, she joined A’Lelia at 108-110 West 136th Street in a townhouse, office and beauty salon near Lenox (now Malcolm X) Avenue designed for them by architect and Alpha Phi Alpha founder Vertner Tandy. Two years later she moved into another Tandy-designed home, a 34-room mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, 18 miles north of Harlem. Legendary tenor Enrico Caruso suggested the name Villa Lewaro in honor of A’Lelia (A’Lelia Walker Robinson). Madam Walker’s presence in the New York office resulted in conflict, however, as she sometimes usurped her daughter’s authority in business decisions involving their local sales agents. A long-time employee described their relationship in this way: “Fire and ice. They loved each other dearly and they sometimes fought fiercely.”
On May 25, 1919, while A’Lelia and Mae were en route home from a business trip to Panama, Madam Walker died, leaving A’Lelia as the 34-year-old company president and heiress of an estate and homes valued at a million dollars.
A’Lelia Walker was in Colon, Panama when her mother died on May 25, 1919.
Devastated by her mother’s death, she immediately married Dr. Wiley Merlio Wilson, a Howard University-trained physician and pharmacist, whom she had met several years earlier when he and his brother ran businesses in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and St. Louis. As a wedding gift, she purchased a building for his medical clinic, Wilson Sanitarium, at 138th and Seventh Avenue in one of the Strivers Row blocks. They divorced in 1924. Two years later, she married Dr. James Arthur Kennedy, a decorated World War I captain, who later became the assistant director at Tuskegee’s Veteran’s Hospital.
With her sizeable fortune backed by the Walker hair care products empire, A’Lelia Walker became a patron of the newly emerging Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She hosted some of the most memorable parties of that decade, lending a glamorous, glitzy aura to the social scene above 110th Street.
The invitation A’Lelia Walker sent to hundreds of friends when she converted a floor of her 136th Street townhouse into a cultural salon called The Dark Tower in October 1927. (Madam Walker Family Archives)
At the Dark Tower—a converted floor of her 136th Street townhouse named for Cullen’s Opportunity column and poem—and at her 80 Edgecombe Avenue pied-á-terre, she welcomed Harlem and Greenwich Village writers, artists, actors, and musicians at a time when blacks and whites seldom socialized on equal terms.
Also, during an era when few women traveled alone, A’Lelia Walker visited Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean and Central and South America. On a transatlantic voyage on the luxury liner Paris in late 1921, she occupied the first class cabin next to French Prime Minister Aristide Briand. In 1922 she witnessed the coronation of Pope Pius XI in Rome, Italy and became the first American to meet Empress Zewditu I in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
A’Lelia Walker visited Ethiopian Empress Zewditu in March 1922.
As a patron of the arts, she supported J. Rosamond Johnson’s Harlem Music School Settlement which offered classical music training for black students. Musicians James Reese Europe, Ford Dabney, Joseph Douglass, Harry T. Burleigh, Turner Layton, and Alberta Hunter performed at her dinners and parties. She also opened her home to theatrical rehearsals, movie shoots and art exhibitions. Among the photographers whose careers she promoted were R. E. Mercer and James Allen. At various times, actress Edna Lewis Thomas, author Eric Walrond, and singer Taylor Gordon lived rent-free at her Harlem house.
The best known black socialite of her time, A’Lelia Walker was such a rarity that Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes called her “the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s” and noted that her parties “were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy.” In April 1929, composer Max Ewing wrote, “Wherever else one is invited or expected, one must cancel all other plans if invited to A’Lelia’s! She is the Great Black Empress, She Who Must Be Obeyed!”
A’Lelia Walker served as inspiration for many photographers, artists and novelists. (Photo: Madam Walker Family Archives)
A’Lelia Walker personified the spirit and flamboyance of the Harlem Renaissance. Her always stylish appearance, which mixed regal, statuesque African beauty with haute couture, inspired poets, novelists, and painters. “She had a superb figure, the type that artists like to draw,” said a reporter who knew her well. Among those for whom she posed were photographer Berenice Abbott and sculptors Richmond Barthé and Augusta Savage. With admiration, close friend Langston Hughes called her a “gorgeous dark Amazon,” a phrase fraught with powerful meaning in an era when light-skinned African Americans often were perceived as more beautiful by many blacks and most whites. Literary critic Carl Van Vechten and Renaissance authors Zora Neale Hurston, George Schuyler, and Wallace Thurman created characters inspired by her.
As the first internationally visible black American heiress with celebrity status, she displayed an impresario’s gift for staging elaborate extravaganzas that made headlines, filled society gossip columns, and scandalized the more straitlaced social arbiters and race leaders of her mother’s generation. Her most memorable affairs included her daughter Mae’s lavish 1923 nuptials to Dr. Gordon Jackson, son of Niagara Movement treasurer George Jackson, and a fireworks-filled 1921 Fourth of July celebration at Villa Lewaro for C.D.B. King, the President of Liberia.
Like other entrepreneurs and art patrons of the era, A’Lelia Walker basked in the euphoria of the Jazz Age and like many of her contemporaries she personally felt the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression. During this period as Walker Company sales plunged, her long-troublesome hypertension worsened. In 1931 she divorced Dr. James Arthur Kennedy.
Like many children of self-made figures, she struggled to define herself outside the sphere of her mother’s influence, expectations and legacy. On August 17, 1931, after an enjoyable day celebrating a friend’s birthday at the beach in Long Branch, New Jersey, A’Lelia Walker died from a cerebral hemorrhage.
A’Lelia Walker died in a private cottage near the beach in Long Branch, NJ in August 1931. (This photo from historiclong branch.org was taken in July 1930.)
A few days later, several thousand New Yorkers crowded the streets outside the Harlem funeral parlor where her body lay in repose. As her casket was lowered into the crypt next to her famous mother at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, aviator Hubert Julian, known as “The Black Eagle,” flew over the site releasing dahlias and gladiolas. Of her death, Langston Hughes wrote “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem…The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”
Sources:
A large collection of A’Lelia Walker’s letters, photographs, financial records, clothes and personal effects are in the author’s Madam Walker/A’Lelia Walker Family Archives in Washington, DC. Several dozen additional personal letters and other Walker Company materials are in the Madam C. J. Walker Collection at the Indiana Historical Society. Details of Walker’s life, especially prior to 1920, are included in On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner 2001) by A’Lelia Bundles, whoseThe Joy Goddess of Harlem: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, is forthcoming from Scribner in 2015. Articles and photographs also appear at https://aleliabundles.com/ and http://www.madamcjwalker.com/. Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea (1940) and Carl Van Vechten’s unpublished New Yorker profile in “Keep A-Inchin’ Along”: Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten about Black Art and Letters, ed. Bruce Kellner, provide useful accounts of her later life.
Niagara Movement treasurer George Jackson is not in this photo but was present for the inaugural meeting on July 11, 1905.
Today, July 11, on this anniversary of the Niagara Movement’s inaugural meeting at Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada across the border from Buffalo, New York, I’m reminded of how discovering a distant connection to that monumental event truly made an historical moment come alive for me.
My grandmother Mae’s November 1923 wedding was Harlem’s social event of the year. Lavish. Extravagant. Beautiful. Entirely over the top. The only problem: the bride didn’t want to marry the groom. The groom wasn’t particularly excited either.
Mae Walker marries Dr. Gordon Jackson in November 1923 (Photo: A’Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives)
What looked like a Cinderella fantasy and was reported as breathlessly as any People magazine cover story, turned out to be more nightmare than match made in heaven. A’Lelia Walker–daughter of millionaire entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker--had decided that she knew best for her adopted daughter and only legal heir. In her grand scheme–not unlike the marriages staged by mothers of some wealthy young American women who were paired with castle-rich and cash poor European aristocracy–she selected the scion of another prominent black family.
Mae Walker with her bridesmaids at Villa Lewaro (Credit: A’Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives/aleliabundles.com)
The man A’Lelia chose, I can only surmise as a way to consolidate family wealth, was Chicago physician Dr. Gordon Henry Jackson. At some point while doing research for On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner 2001), I realized that Gordon’s father, George H. Jackson, was the same George Jackson who had been treasurer of W. E. B. DuBois’s Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the NAACP.
As I began work on Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, the biography I’m currently writing, I needed and wanted to learn more about Gordon’s family. I’d been poking around for years, but thanks to Anne Moore, a librarian at UMass Amherst, I was introduced to an incredible trove of information about the Niagara Movement in the DuBois Library at UMass.
George Jackson’s signature appears just below the word “Grove” on this menu from the July 1905 Niagara Movement dinner (Credit: DuBois Library at UMass Amherst)
To say I was thrilled when she sent a copy of the restaurant menu from that first Niagara Movement meeting on July 11, 1905 with George H. Jackson’s signature and address, is an understatement. Among the documents, now on line and accessible to all, are receipts signed by Jackson and meeting minutes that confirm his unanimous re-election as treasurer during the August 1906 Niagara Movement meeting at Harper’s Ferry. (Digital Niagara Movement and NAACP documents are also available at the Library of Congress.)
George Jackson’s signature on a 1906 Niagara Movement receipt (Credit: DuBois Library UMass Amherst Special Collections)
I eventually learned that Jackson was an attorney and Ohio state legislator. After years of living in Cincinnati and profiting from smart real estate investments, he moved his family to Chicago, where he continued to purchase valuable property and be involved in political affairs.
Mae and Gordon’s marriage really was doomed from the start. Not long after their child (and my uncle), Walker Gordon Jackson, was born in June 1926, Mae moved back to New York to work in the Walker School of Beauty Culture, dividng her time between the Walker’s Harlem townhouse and the mansion in Irvington-on-Hudson. In September 1928 she eloped with my grandfather, Marion Perry, an attorney who was studying finance that summer at Columbia University. My mother, A’Lelia Mae Perry, was born the following July.
Coincidentally, my grandfather was born on this very same day 121 years ago!
My grandfather, Marion R. Perry, married my grandmother Mae in 1927. His birthday was July 11, 1892 (Credit: A’Lelia Bundles/Madam Walker Family Archives)
I can’t say theirs was a particularly happy marriage either, but their lives fascinate me and have provided a window through which to see other significant historic events and connect in a way I might not otherwise be able to do.
HOW MADAM WALKER DEVELOPED HER PRODUCTS AND SALES FORCE
After selling her line of products from door to door and turning a room of her Denver home into her first salon in 1906, Madam C. J. Walker began visiting the black communities in Colorado’s small mining towns. Soon she realized her market was limited because of the state’s small black population.
She and her husband, Charles Joseph Walker, began to travel through the Southern, Eastern and Midwestern United States. After a year and a half they settled in Pittsburgh where she opened her first beauty school, Lelia College, which she named after her daughter Lelia McWilliams Robinson (who later was to become known as A’Lelia Walker).
Madam Walker is surrounded by some of her top Ohio sales agents (Madam Walker Family Archives www.madamcjwalker.com)
They continued traveling and training sales agents. In 1910 she moved to Indianapolis where she built her first factory. By this time she already had trained hundreds of women in the Madam Walker System of Beauty Culture.
In 1913 after extensive travel throughout the United States, she visited Cuba, Panama, Jamaica, Costa Rica and Haiti to expand her business internationally.
In 1917–the year before Mary Kay was born–she hosted her first national convention of Walker sales agents. Like Mary Kay, she gave prizes to the women who had sold the most products and brought in the most new agents. But she also gave prizes to the women who had contributed the most to charity. Then she took her leadership a step farther by encouraging the women to be politically active. At the end of the convention they sent a telegram to President Woodrow Wilson urging him to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime.
By the time Madam Walker died in May 1919, she claimed that she and her teaching faculty had trained more than 20,000 Walker agents.
Her original five products–Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, Tetter Salve, Temple Salve, Vegetable Shampoo and Glossine–addressed specific needs. At a time when most American homes lacked indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity, hygiene practices were very different from today. Baths were a weekly rather than daily ritual because of the time and effort it took to pump water from an outdoor well, heat it on a wood stove, etc. Hairwashing happened infrequently: perhaps once a month for many and sometimes only once or twice during the winter. As a result, many women developed severe scalp disease, which resulted in hair loss.
Madam Walker encouraged women to wash their hair more often and to apply the ointments, which contained sulphur, an ingredient that long had been used by physicians and pharmacists to heal skin ailments like dandruff and psoriasis.
Over time Madam Walker began to realize that selling hair products was a means to a more important end. While her vegetable shampoo and ointments effectively healed scalp disease, it’s also true that her system of beauty culture gave her customers more control over the care of their hair. Soon she saw that there was more to what she was doing than selling hair products. She realized that she could empower women and helped them become economically independent at a time when racism and sexism consigned most black women to working as maids, cooks, sharecroppers and washerwomen like she had been for much of her life.
“I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself!” Madam Walker told an audience in 1913. “I am endeavoring to provide jobs for hundreds of women of my race!”
Her mission was about so much more than her Wonderful Hair Grower! Her mission had become to “grow” women’s minds and opportunities.
A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer, holds a 100 year old portrait of Walker from her Madam Walker Family Archives
I love Black History Month because I learn something new every day!
The truth is, I’m already immersed in black history every month, week and day of the year, but in February it feels as if I have lots of company. It seems that whereever I turn, there are websites, blogs, television networks, radio programs and lectures all celebrating the fascinating people I love to study.
Langston Hughes called A’Lelia Walker “the joy goddess of Harlem’s 1920s”
Writing books about my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, and her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, has given me an opportunity to learn not just about them, but about the eras in which they lived and the people they knew. Whether it’s Ida B. Wells and W. E. B. Du Bois or Langston Hughes and Florence Mills, they crossed paths with some of the most interesting and influential black women and men of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Through their lives, I’ve been able to tell a more inclusive account of American history than the version I learned in school. From Madam Walker’s birth in 1867 as America was emerging from the Civil War through World War I and the Harlem Renaissance to A’Lelia Walker’s death in 1931 during the Great Depression, I’ve been fortunate to view America through a lens that gives women and African Americans their rightful place in the nation’s story.
Mayor Ballard unveils a Legacy Award Pillar. Looking on are Lance Bundles, Judith Ransom Lewis and A'Lelia Bundles (Credit: Robert Scheer/IndyStar.com)
Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles, presented remarks on behalf of the families. “As I pondered the lives of these great Hoosiers,” she told the audience, “I couldn’t help but imagine them all seated together at a magnificent banquet. What would Madam Walker–a pioneer of the modern hair care and cosmetics industries–have to say to Eli Lilly–a pioneer of the modern pharmaceutical industry–about building a business?”
A'Lelia Bundles speaks on behalf of the Legacy Award families (Photo: Robert Scheer/IndyStar.com)
Among the descendants and family friends who attended were Robert Montgomery, son of jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery; Ted and and Anita Sewall, representing the May Wright Sewall family; Lance Bundles, great-great-grandson of Madam Walker; and Judith Ransom-Lewis and Robert Ransom, grandchildren of Walker Company attorney F. B. Ransom.
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