On Her Own Ground Read online

  That month, armed with a supply of Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, she “spent two successful weeks in Pueblo,” a town 112 miles south of Denver, where she had “many good things to say of the hearty support given her by the ladies of Pueblo.” No sooner had she returned to Denver than she was off again to answer “an urgent appeal from Trinidad” to conduct her scalp treatment course. Noting that she had trained forty-five eager students in ten days, The Statesman’s Trinidad reporter announced in his weekly dispatch that “Mrs. C. J. Walker . . . was very successful in her business” while there. Those completing her course could “secure a letter of instruction teaching them how to grow their own hair.” Mrs. Walker offered her classes “at a very reasonable price,” she said, “so that the very poorest may be benefited, and that those who have already been benefited will not suffer in my absence.” While in Trinidad she was entertained at a card party and “one of the prettiest receptions” the small black community had ever arranged. Her hostesses clearly delighted in the pampering and grooming she offered. As well, they welcomed her moneymaking message.

  From Trinidad she traveled north on the D&RG Railway for a brief stopover in Colorado Springs, but she cut short her planned week’s visit in order to greet Lelia, who was scheduled to arrive in Denver on August 23. To aid Sarah’s plan to broaden her market beyond Colorado’s sparsely populated borders, Lelia had taken a hair-growing course in St. Louis in order to prepare herself to “take charge of her mother’s business.” Like her mother, she may well have first learned her skills from Pope-Turnbo.

  As Madam Walker made arrangements to move Lelia into a house and office a few blocks away at 2317 Lawrence, the women could barely complete their packing as anxious customers streamed into their modest salon from early morning until late at night. “After locating in her new quarters,” an ad announced, Madam Walker “will positively receive no customers after 4:30 p.m. Business hours will be from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.”

  During her final two weeks in the city, Madam Walker took advantage of every chance to introduce Lelia. Statuesque, gregarious and beautifully dressed—in no small part due to her mother’s indulgence—Lelia always made a lasting impression.

  With Lelia now “in charge of the business,” Madam Walker and C.J. “began to travel and work up a mail order business,” leaving on September 15, 1906, “to place their goods on the market through the southern and eastern states.” By the time of their departure, Madam Walker had dissociated herself entirely from Annie Pope-Turnbo, who had become angry enough to denounce her publicly. “The proof of the value of our work is that we are being imitated and largely by persons whose own hair we have actually grown,” Pope-Turnbo accused in a letter to The Statesman. “They have very frequently mentioned us when trying to sell their goods (saying that ‘theirs is the same’ or ‘just as good’) . . . BEWARE OF IMITATIONS.”

  Now that Madam Walker had her own formula, the rivalry that would poison the two women’s relationship had commenced. In reply to Pope-Turnbo’s accusations about Madam Walker, eight satisfied Pueblo customers asserted that Madam Walker had “never claimed her preparation was the same or as good as yours; but she does claim her preparation is the best on the market.” As long as they could secure Madam Walker’s goods, they vowed that it was their intention never to use Pope-Turnbo’s products. “Until Mme. Walker came here we never heard of any hair grower . . . You are in St. Louis, and as far as you were concerned, we could have been bald-headed until now, so we consider your efforts purely spite work and see by your letter of a few months ago to the ladies of the West, how highly you recommended her.” Sarah undoubtedly appreciated the endorsement, but she was more than capable of engaging Pope-Turnbo herself. “Mme. Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower has proven beyond question to be the most wonderful hair preparation yet discovered,” her latest ad trumpeted. “It is soothing to the scalp and brings quicker results than any other.”

  Years later, in what surely was a fit of wishful revisionism, C. J. Walker would claim credit for advising his wife to develop her own line. “It is somewhat trying to me when I look back to the beginning of the first establishment of this business, and the hard struggles that the Mme. & I had in those days,” he lamented. “I alone am responsible for the successful beginning of this business. Otherwise the Mme. would have taken the road for the Poro people.” In fact, it was C.J. who “could see nothing ahead but failure” as they embarked upon their southern sales trip. “She was discouraged by her husband and many patrons who said she would not be able to make her expenses from one town to another,” her authorized company biography later asserted. “However she was determined and inspired to do so.”

  Lelia, not nearly as thick-skinned as her mother, had been left with a hornet’s nest of controversy over the Pope-Turnbo matter. Initially, however, she approached her work with enthusiasm, giving scalp treatments and pressing her customers’ hair with the heated metal irons she had learned to use in St. Louis. In the evenings she cooked and stirred the product by hand, then packaged the “pressing oil, soap and hair grower” for shipments to her mother and to the mail-order customers who sent their dimes and quarters and dollars to Denver.

  Right away her local ads were revised to display a cleaner, less cluttered layout with bolder fonts. “If you want long and beautiful hair . . . If you want your hair to stop falling at once, if you want your hair to look natural and fluffy, if you want your scalp cured of all diseases go to Mme. Walker’s Parlors, 2317 Lawrence St., Mrs. Lelia McWilliams, Successor.”

  By the following May, however, Pope-Turnbo had dispatched a replacement agent to a parlor at 2118 Arapahoe, just two blocks from Lelia’s office. “LADIES ATTENTION: Mrs. M. A. Holley, who has spent some time in St. Louis perfecting herself in the scalp and hair treatment of Mrs. A. M. Pope, has come. She is now prepared to do the same work as is done in the originator’s parlors. She is the sole agent for the famed preparation, ‘Poro.’”

  That same week, The Statesman carried the following announcement: “Madam C. J. Walker and Miss McWilliams, her successor, wish to announce to their customers, old and new, that they have decided to open up business elsewhere and close up their business in Denver.” While the rift with Pope-Turnbo had been uncomfortable for Lelia, ultimately the Walkers’ decision to leave Denver had more to do with Colorado’s tiny black population and the limited potential for financial growth. Madam Walker’s travels had quickly convinced her that her most lucrative future markets existed in the heavily black South and the expanding cities of the North. She had also discovered that she was a natural teacher, a leader with a gift for drawing crowds and persuading skeptics. The key to her success would not be just her “secret” formula, but her deep understanding that women wanted to be attractive, as well as her fervent conviction that they needed to be financially independent. Her determination and decisiveness soon would create unimaginable opportunities for herself and for her agents.

  CHAPTER 8

  On the Road

  Within only a few months of leaving Denver, Madam Walker could boast of an income greater than all but the most highly paid American corporate executives. During 1907, her first full year on the road, she took in $3,652, nearly triple her total 1906 earnings. Clearly she had defied her friends’ predictions that she would fail to cover her traveling expenses.

  For a woman whose wages had rarely reached $300 a year, this two-year accumulation may have amounted to as much money as she had made during her entire lifetime. In an era when most working black women made only $8 to $20 per month as domestic servants, and white male factory workers had monthly incomes of $40 to $60, Madam Walker’s business was averaging upward of $300 each month, a more than respectable sum by any measure.

  C.J., initially quite skeptical about his wife’s plans to build a national business, had begun to understand her vision. His attitude had been changed in no small part because he had created his own moneymaking venture. Inspired by the popularity of Madam Walker’s produ
cts, he now offered a pair of dollar-a-bottle remedies: Walker’s Sore Wash, “for sores of any description,” and Walker’s Sure Cure Blood and Rheumatic Cure, which he claimed would cleanse “impure” blood and end “eczema, tetter and falling hair.” But unlike his wife’s scalp ointments, his product formulas sounded suspiciously similar to the alcohol-laden concoctions the 1906 Food and Drugs Act had intended to ban.

  For eighteen months the Walkers traveled throughout the southern United States, systematically canvassing the region where 90 percent of the nation’s African Americans still lived in 1907. Throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, they followed what had become an effective routine: contact the Baptist or AME church or both, find the best rooming house they could afford, introduce themselves to the officers of the local black fraternal organizations, arrange a demonstration at a church or a lodge, hold classes to train agents, take orders for Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, move on to the next place.

  From Muskogee, El Reno and Okmulgee, Oklahoma, they sped on to Tyler, Houston, then Galveston, Texas, leaving behind dozens of satisfied customers. A few months after their trip to Dallas, Madam Walker received a letter from Julia Coldwell, a woman who, thanks to Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, no longer needed the hairpieces—the “false braid or bangs”—she had become accustomed to wearing. “My hair was the talk of the town,” she gushed. “All the people who know me are just wild about my hair . . . I have to take it down to let them see and feel it for themselves. I tell you I am quite an advertisement here for your goods.”

  In Helena, Arkansas, a preacher’s wife who had learned the Walker Hair Culture Method in order to supplement her family income now had a long list of happy clients. “Do you remember the old bald-headed lady whom you treated while you were here, whom they all laughed at and said she should know better than to bring that head to anybody?” Mrs. O. L. Moody asked Madam Walker about a customer she had continued to treat. After missing a few weekly sessions during the fall harvest season, the woman had returned with gleeful news. “When she uncovered her head I liked to have dropped. I was utterly surprised to find her head entirely covered with hair, and she is tickled to death and said you were a God-send to humanity.”

  Without a doubt, Madam Walker had tapped a rich reservoir of desire with her scalp cure. The letters, as well as the steady mail-order requests, reflected a strong yearning for the personal care and attention she and her newly trained agents provided. With queries from places as far afield as California, Utah, Montana, Maryland and Kansas, she had succeeded in developing a national demand for her products in less than two years.

  For at least part of 1906 and early 1907, after closing her Denver office, the mail-order operation may have been coordinated from Louisville by Walker agent Agnes “Peggie” Prosser, who was also C.J.’s sister. While Lelia probably accompanied her mother and C.J. for at least a part of this period, exact details of their peripatetic itinerary remain unknown.

  After visits to New York and Pennsylvania during the summer of 1907, the Walkers realized that their business was expanding too quickly to handle their mail-order sales from the road. Because Pittsburgh’s sixteen rail lines offered convenient and accessible shipping arrangements, they chose the western Pennsylvania town as their temporary headquarters, arriving sometime between August 1907 and March 1908.

  Pittsburgh was so covered with the soot that rose geyserlike from its factory smokestacks that nineteenth-century author Charles Dickens had once described its skies as “Hell with the lid off.” Rich in natural resources from nearby coalfields and iron-ore mines, the hilly city had grown from an early-eighteenth-century wilderness village into one of America’s most profitable early-twentieth-century industrial centers. Home to glass foundries and iron-processing factories, it was the country’s unquestionable leader in the production of structural, crucible and Bessemer steel.

  Strategically located where the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers formed the headwaters of the Ohio River–Mississippi River system, Pittsburgh’s nine shipping lines transported nearly eleven million tons of freight to and from docks along its riverbanks during 1900. In the triangular wedge of land where the British Fort Pitt had once dominated the merging point of the city’s three rivers, a cavernous business district now stood with a score of banks and investment houses, dozens of government and corporate offices and the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange. By 1906 the area’s narrow streets were so crowded that a British visitor complained that “the congestion is greater than in New York, Philadelphia or Boston and is only surpassed by London.”

  As a depot on the Underground Railroad, Pittsburgh had attracted African Americans long before the Civil War. Between 1900 and 1910 the city’s black community grew from 20,355 to 25,623. And although its black population ranked fifth among Northern cities, African Americans made up less than 5 percent of the city’s total. At the time of the 1910 Census, New York was first, with 91,709 blacks, having bumped Baltimore to second since the turn of the century. Philadelphia, with 84,459, was positioned third, and Chicago, with 44,103 black inhabitants, placed fourth.

  During the autumn of 1907, close to the time of Madam Walker’s arrival, the outlook for Pittsburgh’s steel industry had been highly optimistic. But by late October the city was suffering the effects of a national banking crisis. Foreshadowed by a record stock market decline in March, the collapse of copper prices in October plunged Pittsburgh into the nexus of the Panic of 1907. New York’s Knickerbocker Bank, rumored to have been heavily invested in the metal, was stripped of all its reserves in just two days as thousands of customers squeezed into its imposing lobby demanding their deposits. Because Pittsburgh’s steel industry and banks were so intertwined with powerful New York banking interests, the city and its industries were especially vulnerable. “Hardly another city in the country was hit as hard or stunned as long by the panic as was Pittsburgh,” wrote two observers at the time. “From every type and class of labor came the report of a year with only half, or three-fourths, or even one-third of the time employed. The overwork in 1907 was out-of-work in 1908.” By April 1908 there were breadlines in some sections of town. Short-lived though this depression was, it was significant enough to have led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Board as a means to stabilize U.S. financial markets. Nevertheless, it seemed not to have prevented Madam Walker from expanding her business.

  In the midst of the economic crisis, she opened a “well-equipped” hair parlor at 2518 Wylie Avenue, a bumpy cobblestone street that stretched steeply above the financial district. In the Hill District, as in St. Louis’s Market Street area, the façades of the brick row houses were flush with the sidewalks, leaving barely a breath between street life and home life. Once a favored residential area for German and Irish physicians, attorneys and bank presidents in the late 1880s because of its proximity to their downtown offices, the district had begun to change during the 1890s as recently immigrated Poles and Italians, as well as other blue-collar workers, moved into the older, mostly brick homes. Between 1890 and 1900 the area’s black population quadrupled from just under 700 to more than 3,000. During the next decade Hill District residents became less affluent and more ethnically diverse. Blacks, who would come to comprise a quarter of the area’s 46,000 people, remained too scattered to create a concentrated enclave, sharing blocks on either side of Wylie Avenue with Russian Jews, Hungarians, Italians, Syrians and the handful of German and Irish families who remained. Unlike in Denver and St. Louis, where black businesses formed a distinguishable commercial section, their enterprises were sprinkled not only in the Hill District and other neighborhoods farther to the east in Pittsburgh, but also in the town of Allegheny, a smaller community on the north side of the Allegheny River.

  Given the era, however, there were an impressive number of black professionals, including five lawyers and twenty-two physicians. In addition to a “manufactory of hair-growing preparations”—no doubt Madam
Walker’s—a 1908 neighborhood survey listed an insurance company with twenty-eight agents and an asphalt-paving contractor who regularly employed more than a hundred men. But with no weekly black newspaper, Madam Walker and the others lacked a forum in which to advertise their products and services. Perhaps in 1909, when C. J. Walker listed himself as an “editor” in the Pittsburgh City Directory, he had hopes of filling that void.

  While the Walker Hair Parlor was located in the Hill District to attract the largest number of customers, Madam Walker, like many prominent blacks, lived in Pittsburgh’s East End, a relatively more affluent, predominantly white section removed from the “speak easies, cocaine joints, and disorderly houses” that dotted the rough alleys off Wylie Avenue. From her home at 139 Highland, she also treated customers.

  Buoyed by her successful travels, Madam Walker immediately set about gathering endorsements from the city’s black leadership, working the community just as diligently as she had worked a row of cotton. Employing her church connections and the national network of the Court of Calanthe, she sought influential preachers and fraternal officers, tapping into the web of social clubs and organizations, including many of the twenty-five chapters of the Pennsylvania State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.