On Her Own Ground Read online

  Neither Scholtz nor Sarah left any public statements to confirm Fisher’s contention, but the story is a plausible, if now unverifiable, one. Because Sarah needed soaps and medicinal supplies to supplement the products Pope-Turnbo shipped to her, she easily would have gravitated to the Scholtz Drug Company at the bustling Sixteenth and Curtis Street intersection. Often billed as the largest pharmacy west of the Mississippi River, the company claimed to carry “the most comprehensive line of goods known to the drug trade.” Scholtz, one of the founders of the Colorado Pharmaceutical Society, had trained his druggists to give “special attention to the compounding of physicians’ prescriptions and family recipes.”

  Speculation is required to tie the threads together at this point. But if Sarah indeed worked as a cook in the rooming house where Scholtz temporarily lived, or even if she only shopped at his store, Fisher’s scenario seems entirely possible. “She was making extra money on the side selling Madam Poro’s work,” said Fisher, referring to the company name that Annie Pope-Turnbo later adopted. “He saw it one day and asked her what it was. And she told him. And he says, ‘I can analyze this for you. And you can leave out some or put in more and you can make the money yourself.’” If Scholtz had made such a suggestion, or if Sarah herself had initiated the product analysis, she was not prepared to stop selling Pope-Turnbo’s products immediately. At least for several more months she would call herself an agent for Roberts and Pope, the company name that Pope-Turnbo used during early 1906. But the seed of independence already had begun to germinate.

  While Sarah continued her work as a cook, she would later tell a reporter that “in her spare time she mixed tubfuls of a hair restorer.” As time went by, she would more frequently insert various versions of her divine intervention narrative, in one instance saying that she had dreamed of her formula “for three nights.” And perhaps she had. But she had also intentionally chosen to omit Pope-Turnbo’s role. Having saved enough money to resign her kitchen job, she later said, “I hired a little attic, which was my first laboratory,” probably at 1923 Clarkson, where she was living in late November 1905.

  With “two days a week doing washing” and five days giving hair treatments, her workload was reversed. At the same time she apparently had begun experimenting with ingredients for her own formula. “I began of course in a most modest way,” she recalled. “I made house-to-house canvasses among people of my race, and after a while I got going pretty well.” Her door-to-door solicitations were made all the easier because of the compactness of Denver’s black community. Around 1904, African Americans had begun to spread north and east of the downtown neighborhood between Fifteenth and Twentieth streets, where they had settled in the 1880s and 1890s. But their shift was less than seismic during the next decade as they migrated a block at a time toward the Five Points area that emanated from Twenty-seventh and Washington streets a mere half mile away.

  Just as Sarah had been drawn to the congregation at St. Paul in St. Louis, she joined Shorter Chapel AME Church. Like her sister-in-law Lucy she soon became a member of the Mite Missionary Society. Located only four blocks from her Clarkson Street apartment, Shorter had been founded in 1868 as Colorado’s second black church. Along with connections Sarah would soon make in the local Columbine Chapter of the Court of Calanthe, Shorter offered spiritual support and a place to get her bearings. The church’s annual Sunday-school picnic, always a highly anticipated and well-publicized event, was held at a nearby lake within a week of her arrival. As Sarah sought to promote her business, she certainly had everything to gain by attending.

  During this time she discussed her business ideas with fellow Shorter parishioner George Ross, a recent Howard University Law School graduate who was operating a small printing business while he prepared for the Colorado state bar examination. “I sold her her first batch of cards advertising Pope-Turnbo articles,” he proudly wrote years later. Sarah, who recalled using a portion of her initial $1.50 capital, confirmed the transaction. “I spent 25 cents of this to have some cards printed,” she said of the neatly lettered bristol board calling cards announcing “Mrs. Sarah McWilliams.”

  As well as his printing services, Ross also solicited advertising for The Statesman, a Denver-based publication owned by his close family friend Chester A. Franklin. Aware of Sarah’s eagerness to build her reputation, he also may have encouraged her to consider promoting her work in the paper, which claimed readership in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah and New Mexico. On December 1, for the going rate of a nickel per line, she placed a small announcement for her Clarkson Street “hairdressing parlor” in The Statesman. “Mrs. McWilliams, formerly of St. Louis, has special rates for a month to demonstrate her ability to grow hair,” her first ad notified potential clients. A decade later Sarah would develop a reputation as a major advertiser in the nation’s black newspapers. But for now she was intent upon convincing clients of the worth of her scalp treatments. As the Kansas City Star was to note: “As fast as she earned a little money, she spent it on advertising . . . spending more on printers’ ink in the beginning than she spent on bread and butter.”

  In these early months, Sarah remembered, she rarely rested, so determined was she to succeed. Customers gravitated to her because of her “splendid personality.” A charisma and conviction forged from her own difficult journey now shone through as a sincere desire to give excellent service and to assist other women.

  No correspondence between Sarah and C. J. Walker exists from this era, but Sarah’s messages about her progress clearly were persuasive enough for him to join her in Denver. By the time he arrived in late November or early December, she knew the community well. Nineteenth and Arapahoe streets formed a crossroads for the several dozen black businesses, professional offices and meeting halls that spread out to Larimer Street on the north and Champa Street on the south. Along Arapahoe the shops ranged from Charles Call’s Boot Parlor, C. A. Holly’s Drum Repair and Henry Pinn’s Ping Pong Parlor to W. J. Foster’s Tailor Shop, Richard Evans’s Mining Supplies and Frank Jones’s Carpentry Shop. Miller’s Bicycle Livery, Fountain’s Barber Shop and the Odd Fellows’ Hall clustered together on the northern end of the neighborhood. Within walking distance of their apartment the couple found eight black churches, a funeral home, two dentists and three physicians, including Dr. Justina Ford, Denver’s first black woman doctor.

  Accustomed to the fast-paced, fast-buck mind-set of Chestnut Valley, C.J.’s imagination raced with plans. He wasted no time in publicizing his presence, and with the aid of Sarah’s friend George Ross, he was listed in The Statesman’s December 8 “Denver Doings” column as one of the “newcomers to Denver.”

  With C.J.’s holiday season appearance, he and Sarah had their choice of an array of parties at nearby Manitou Hall and East Turner Hall, the two most popular sites for black fraternal group gatherings. Throughout December the J. C. Harris Orchestra performed several nights a week for Denver’s many black lodges, including the True Reformers, the Masons and the bewitchingly named Sisters of the Mysterious Ten, the women’s auxiliary to the United Brotherhood of Friendship.

  Two days before Christmas, Sarah celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday with C.J. Soon after the new year, on January 4, 1906, Reverend William Dyett, Shorter’s pastor, performed a quiet marriage ceremony for them in the parlor of Sarah’s friends Delilah and B. F. Givens. The Givenses, who lived in the 2200 block of Arapahoe, had been among the striving, working-class African Americans who, during the first decade of the 1900s, had begun to integrate Curtis Park, one of Denver’s first near-in suburbs. Created in 1871 with the advent of the city’s first horsecar trolley, the area’s detached brick homes, with their charming parapets, fish-scale shingles and oriel windows, provided just the setting that Sarah relished for her third marriage and first real wedding.

  The matrimonial trappings could not have been more perfect, except for a rather large, dangling piece of unfinished business: Sarah had neglected to sever her ties with John Davis. “There
is no divorce record here by them,” an attorney concluded after a thorough search of St. Louis legal documents several years later. And though Delilah Givens would later sign an affidavit attesting to Sarah’s nuptials, a Denver attorney swore that he was “positively unable to find any trace of a marriage license issued to either C.J. or Charles J. Walker” after combing all relevant Arapahoe County records between 1867 and 1915. Sarah and C.J. apparently gambled that this vexing oversight would have no consequence, that Davis would exact no price. And for a very long time it seemed they were right.

  Less than two weeks after Sarah had become Mrs. Charles Joseph Walker, she had a chance to try on her new name among friends at any one of several social events during Margaret Murray Washington’s three-day swing through Denver. Elected NACW vice-president-at-large during the St. Louis convention, Washington had been invited by antiragtime crusader Ida Joyce Jackson to meet with black clubwomen in Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Denver. More than five hundred guests, “white and colored . . . filled every inch of space long before Mrs. Washington put in an appearance” in Shorter Chapel’s sanctuary for her Monday night lecture. The “elaborately arranged” Tuesday afternoon reception was hosted by Mrs. Irving Williams, Delilah Givens’s next-door neighbor. Williams, the widow of one of Shorter Chapel’s earliest trustees, ran an embroidery and Battenberg lace business. News of her teas, suppers and musicales frequently merited attention in The Statesman’s society column.

  In Denver, Sarah found class lines for such soirees less rigidly drawn than in St. Louis’s black community, where some descendants of the pre–Civil War elite jealously guarded their positions. With so few blacks in Colorado, they could ill afford such attitudes. And in a town where striking it rich trumped all, personal drive and ambition, with which Sarah Walker was well endowed, more often than not determined one’s social standing.

  A month or so after their marriage ceremony, Sarah and C.J. moved to a well-kept rooming house at 2410 Champa on the southern edge of the Curtis Park area. Their landlady, Callie Fugitt, who catered “fifteen cents and up” dinners from her home every Saturday night, must have been pleased to have tenants as industrious as the Walkers.

  In March 1906, perhaps with C.J.’s help, Sarah revised her newspaper ads to reflect her changed marital status. Now calling herself “Mrs. C. J. Walker,” she notified customers of both her social engagements and business activities while on sales trips to Boulder and other nearby communities.

  While Mrs. Walker developed her hair and scalp work, C.J. was busy with his own endeavors. He and a partner named B. W. Fields opened the Industrial Real Estate Loans and Rental Company at 212 Fifteenth Street in the shadow of the state capitol, where they offered “a number of houses to rent or sell in all parts of the city,” as well as “homestead land for farming and grazing.”

  In a community eager for public events, C.J. seized economic opportunities both in real estate and in entertainment. Unlike St. Louis with its all-night music scene and constant influx of out-of-town lecturers and performers, Denver offered few cultural choices for African Americans beyond its local orchestras and small string quartets. When they attended events at the Tabor Grand Opera House, they were consigned to a segregated section.

  On May 3, when nationally renowned vaudevillians Bert Williams and George Walker filled Manitou Hall, C.J. undoubtedly leaped at the chance to work the crowd to promote his upcoming “Grand May Festival and Popularity Contest,” which was scheduled in the same hall a week later. As chairman of the True Reformers’ arrangement committee, he was determined to make a splash with his first high-profile production in Denver. Along with strategic advertising in The Statesman, his scheme was to have the affair pay for itself by raising funds through pre-event ticket and raffle sales. “The lady receiving the largest number of votes at 10 cents a vote, will be declared the most popular in Denver, and will also win a handsome gold watch,” his ad declared. In a stroke of marketing savvy, he had arranged to have the prize displayed in the window of the Boyd Parks Jewelry Company, the most prestigious jeweler in the city, known for “high class trade in high class goods.”

  The Walker husband-and-wife partnership appeared to be flourishing, with one’s individual pursuits reinforcing the other’s. Certainly any popularity-contest hopeful in need of a hairstyle for the special occasion would have been referred by C. J. Walker to the skilled hands of Mrs. Walker. And any of Mrs. Walker’s attractive clients, especially those with outgoing personalities, might have been encouraged to enter the competition. Just in time to attract the business of the contestants and their guests, Sarah Walker’s first eye-catching photograph was published in the April 20 Statesman. Below the headline “Mrs. Walker’s Offer,” her oval portrait presented her as the personification of dignity, posed with hair neatly pompadoured into soft, upswept rolls around her face. Her gaze was firm, though her eyes focused away from the camera. The corners of her mouth formed a small crescent just shy of a smile. Her high-necked dress, with its puffed sleeves and smocking, conveyed sensible neatness rather than frilly opulence.

  With both Walkers drumming up business, Pink 592, the party-line phone at 2410 Champa, hummed throughout the spring with requests for tickets and hair appointments. Even before C.J. had staged his early May Festival, he was completing arrangements for a May 30 Decoration Day train excursion to Colorado Springs for residents of Denver, Pueblo and Trinidad. “A grand old-fashioned time is expected at the Springs on that day,” promised his promotional materials. Seventy miles south of Denver, Colorado Springs had been established in 1871 by Colonel William Jackson Palmer, founder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railway, the north-south line that transported people and goods along the eastern base of the Rockies. His Antlers Hotel, built in 1883, was long considered “the only first-class hotel between Chicago and San Francisco.”

  In the May 25, 1906, Statesman on the Friday before the all-day outing, C.J. announced not once, not twice, but three times that he had secured the crowd-pleasing J. C. Harris Orchestra. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING on Decoration Day?” inquired his ad. “‘I am going to Colorado Springs on the big Decoration Day excursion over the Rio Grande,’ is the cry of all.”

  A week earlier Sarah had updated and strengthened her own announcements with an edgier, more direct message and layout. She had exchanged her previous pose—one of poise, but not force—for one with a more commanding demeanor. Now she stared openly into the camera, her hair cascading and full-bodied rather than pinned, tucked and restrained. In a second view from the back of her head, her shoulder-length mane, though slightly uneven, was healthy, bushy and abundant. “Two years ago her hair was less than a finger’s length,” the ad boasted, claiming that the growth was “the result of only two years’ treatment.”

  To say that C.J. was a mere huckster would be too simplistic, but he clearly fancied himself a showman and a promoter. It was as if the gears required for wheeling and dealing ground audibly within his head. Sarah Walker had approved of enough of his speculative ventures to marry him. And because she had grand expectations for herself, perhaps his schemes did not strike her as impractical. For now, his ambition seemed to match hers.

  Probably through their alliance with Statesman editor Chester Franklin, C.J. had managed to attract, as the Decoration Day keynote speaker, William T. Vernon, a graduate of Wilberforce College’s schools of law and divinity, and president of the AME Church’s Western University in Quindaro, Kansas. Celebrated as “a pulpiteer, platform lecturer and commencement orator,” Vernon had recently been nominated by President Theodore Roosevelt to be Register of the U.S. Treasury. Blacks took particular pride in this appointment—which had already been held by two African Americans during the Garfield and Arthur administrations—because the occupant’s signature appeared on all government bonds and U.S. currency. Vernon’s personal history would have appealed to Sarah Walker. Born around 1871 in a log cabin, he had risen to “the highest place held by the race in America.”

  C.J.’s Decorat
ion Day excursion, which drew a crowd from Colorado’s four largest communities, boosted Sarah’s business. As her own best walking advertisement for scalp treatments, she had impressed so many visitors that she began to receive invitations to demonstrate her products in the state’s smaller cities.

  In mid-May she paid to reprint a letter from Pope-Turnbo clarifying the difference between Roberts and Pope products and a competitor’s ointment that Pope-Turnbo considered inferior. The correspondence appeared in both black newspapers, The Statesman of Denver and the similarly named, Colorado Statesman, which was owned by Joseph D. D. Rivers, a Booker T. Washington disciple. “Now as to the oil that woman has,” Pope-Turnbo wrote, “it is nothing but vaseline with sulpher, quinine and ox marrow.”

  “Shops are failing every day simply from the fact that vaseline is too strong for the hair,” she warned. “And no one has my preparation.” No one in Denver, of course, except for her agent Sarah Walker, whose companion letter to the editor that week openly challenged another local hair culturist named Dora Scott. “I wish to say to my customers to not be led into buying of her and think you are buying the grower I represent, Roberts and Pope,” Sarah, writing as “Mrs. C. J. Walker,” warned. “I represent the preparation bearing the label of Roberts and Pope and it can be secured only from me.”

  But shortly after that exchange, Sarah Walker began to distance herself from Annie Pope-Turnbo. Abruptly Walker’s ads ceased. For someone who had appeared in the local papers almost weekly for six months, the silence was uncharacteristic. The hiatus seems to have signaled both turmoil with Pope-Turnbo and Sarah’s decision to market her own products under her own name. Perhaps the realization that she could thrive without Pope-Turnbo had come in Colorado Springs when so many people clamored to learn her beauty secrets. Whatever the impetus, by late July, when Sarah finally appeared again in The Statesman, she had emerged as “Madam C. J. Walker,” adopting a title long used by modistes and hairdressers. While some may have considered the use of a French form of address to be at least a bit of an affectation, “Madam” Walker hoped to signal to her clients that she and her products were of the highest quality.