On Her Own Ground Page 18

  Neither Madam Walker nor Lelia could claim much luck when it came to matters of the heart. By the fall of 1912 John Robinson had been gone for more than two years, though Lelia had not yet filed for divorce. Without any existing correspondence between mother and daughter during the early 1910s, there is no reliable way to discern their thoughts and feelings on the subject of men and marriage. But one thing is clear: they discussed the absence of a family heir.

  With no prospective groom in place, twenty-seven-year-old Lelia legally adopted thirteen-year-old Fairy Mae Bryant less than three weeks after her mother’s divorce had been granted. Exactly how and when Lelia and Fairy Mae met remains unknown, though Lelia likely saw her while in Indianapolis for the Knights of Pythias convention in August 1911 as well as during the Christmas holidays later that year. Family oral history suggests that Madam Walker first encountered Fairy Mae as she ran errands for Walker hair parlor employees and customers. One of the better-educated neighborhood children, she easily would have qualified for the “secure position” as a “young girl solicitor” for which Madam Walker advertised in the Recorder. Certainly Fairy Mae’s widowed mother, Sarah Etta Hammond Bryant, would have welcomed the “good commission” Madam Walker promised the youthful employees who distributed fliers and delivered Walker products. But it was Fairy Mae’s braids—long, thick ropes that reached below her waist—that had caused Madam Walker to notice her. What more perfect walking advertisement for her bestselling hair grower than a young girl with hair so healthy and abundant that it captivated strangers? What more dramatic illustration of her hair care system than the transformation of Fairy Mae’s bushy, cascading mane into soft, pliable plaits, something that Madam Walker could achieve with just a light touch of the heated metal comb she now marketed with her products?

  Fairy Mae was petite, barely five feet tall, and well mannered. Approaching graduation from the eighth grade, at a time when most Americans had considerably less formal education, she was a bright and curious student. But her family could not afford to send her to high school. With Madam Walker’s interest, however, it seemed that her hair—an inky version of Rapunzel’s locks—would provide a path from poverty.

  “Mae had beautiful hair, and that’s the thing that they wanted. Someone with nice hair,” an envious in-law remembered decades later. But Fairy Mae was not the delicately featured, light-skinned beauty favored by many members of the black elite. As a symbol of the Madam Walker Company, however, her smooth cocoa complexion was an asset, an acknowledgment that Walker products were designed for brown and black women, rather than the near-white models often featured in newspaper ads. Fairy Mae’s prominent nose, especially when viewed in profile, provided a physical reminder of the strong Native American genes that mingled with those of her African and European ancestors. Her penetrating almond eyes switched from warm to melancholy to intense. And when she smiled, the small gap between her upper front teeth appeared. Still, it was always her heavy, crinkly hair that made people stare, sometimes with admiration and sometimes with envy.

  Mae had grown up in Noblesville, Indiana, with her seven siblings. In the summers and on holidays she often visited her grandmother, Samira Thomas Hammond, a washerwoman, who in 1911 had moved into rented rooms at the rear of 636 North West Street, two doors south of Madam Walker’s factory. Samira—born in 1838 in Orange County, Indiana, and old enough to have been Madam Walker’s mother—was the matriarch of a large extended family whose members regularly traveled the twenty miles via Interurban train between Noblesville and the Indiana Avenue neighborhood. Her daughter—and Fairy Mae’s mother—Sarah Etta Hammond Bryant, was also a laundress who, like Madam Walker, had been born in 1867. Another of Samira’s daughters, Della Hammond Ashley, and Della’s husband, James Ashley, owned a small, popular Indiana Avenue cafe. “Aunt Del,” who had no children of her own, doted on Fairy Mae and other visiting nieces and nephews.

  Madam Walker had come to know Samira and Del as neighbors. And it is possible that she had met Sarah Etta, a Court of Calanthe sister, as early as March 1910, when she happened to have been in Noblesville during a revival at Sarah Etta’s church. Because Bethel AME was the center of much black social activity in the town, Madam Walker could not have missed the handsome Bryant clan, a rainbow of complexions ranging from cream to chocolate, all three daughters with flowing, hip-length hair. That spring the other parishioners would have focused more attention than usual on Sarah Etta, who was still mourning the loss of her husband, Perry Bryant.

  * * *

  While Samira Hammond was by no means part of Indianapolis’s colored elite, some of her ancestors had been among Indiana’s earliest settlers of color. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were respected enough that their family illnesses and church activities warranted the occasional mention in the “Noblesville” column of the Indianapolis Recorder. “Little Miss Farrie [sic] Bryant, who has been visiting her grandmother and aunt in Indianapolis,” the paper noted in August 1909, “returned home last Sunday evening.” Although Samira’s financial circumstances dictated a modest existence, she cherished her unusual family history. Unbeknown to most of her neighbors along North West Street, her great-grandfather, Ishmael Roberts, had been among a small group of freemen who had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. At the time of the first United States Census in 1790, Ishmael—who was born circa 1755 in Northampton County, North Carolina—and his Cherokee wife, Silvey, were among North Carolina’s 5,041 free people of color. Between 1787 and 1826, he had purchased and sold more than 900 acres of land in Robeson and Chatham counties.

  Descendants of the Roberts and Hammond families proudly claimed that their ancestors had never been slaves. But during the first three decades of the nineteenth century they had begun to lose some of their privileges because North Carolina plantation owners—fearful of slave revolts and abolitionists—had tightened laws affecting both slaves and freemen. With each successive term, “the Legislature stripped the free Negro of his personal liberties,” so that by 1835 the state’s lawmakers had clamped down on their migration into and out of the state, outlawed their freedom to preach, and rescinded their right to vote regardless of how much property they owned. In response, organized groups of free blacks fled the state, including dozens of Robertses, who had begun migrating to Indiana in the 1820s. By 1840, more than 150 people with the surname Roberts were living in nine southern and central Indiana counties.

  The Hoosier State, however, was only relatively more welcoming than North Carolina had been, having passed a law in 1831 requiring all newly arrived Negro families to register with county authorities. In 1833, after settling in Orange County, Indiana, Ishmael and Silvey’s son, Elias Roberts, and his wife, Nancy Archer Roberts, presented a certificate of freedom proving that “although persons of Couleur, [they] are free and entitled to all the rights and privileges of white persons.”

  Twenty years later, in August 1853, their daughter, Candiss, and her husband, Jordon Thomas, were compelled by Indiana law to enroll themselves and their children in the Orange County Register of Negroes and Mulattoes. Because the state legislature had adopted a provision in 1852 stating that “no negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in the State” unless already a resident, those who wished to stay were required to register. One of those children was Samira, who was described on the ledger as a “mulatto 4 ft 11 1/2 in high.” Six years later, when she turned twenty-one, she married Littleton Hammond, a Vigo County, Indiana, widower with a small son and another North Carolina transplant. Hammond’s father, Elijah, was considered a “full blood Cherokee Indian.” Sadly Littleton died in 1876, leaving Samira with eight children between infancy and fifteen years old, just as her mother, Candiss Roberts Thomas, had been widowed with eight minors.

  In 1889, Samira’s daughter Sarah Etta Hammond married Perry Bryant, one of the founders of Noblesville’s colored Masonic lodge and an active member of the local Knights of Pythias chapter. By the time the couple’s last child
was born in 1907, they had settled in the town’s Federal Hill area west of the White River. Perry, who worked as a fireman in one of the local factories, and Sarah Etta created a stable family whose close ties with Bethel AME Church made them well-regarded members of the town’s African American community.

  In late June 1909, however, the family’s equilibrium was shattered when Perry Bryant died of cerebral meningitis and heart disease. The Grand Master of the Masons presided over as elaborate a funeral as any black man in Noblesville might receive. But despite the charitable hearts and hands of his fraternal brethren, as well as those of Sarah Etta’s Eastern Star, Court of Calanthe and Bethel Needle Club sisters, Perry’s personal assets and benevolent society benefits could not begin to support seven minor children, including an eighteen-month-old toddler, eight-year-old twin boys and Fairy Mae, the youngest of three daughters.

  Having lost her own father when she was only nine years old, Sarah Etta Bryant had no illusions about the difficulties she faced. Just as her mother and grandmother had been widowed in their thirties, she now confronted the intimidating task of rearing a large brood on her own. So when Madam Walker first asked if Fairy Mae might serve as a model for Walker products, Sarah Etta welcomed the opportunity for her child. It may have been during Fairy Mae’s trip to Harlem with Madam Walker and Lelia in early 1912 that the Walkers began to consider formally adopting her. The impressionable thirteen-year-old Fairy Mae, who had never been on a vacation, was mesmerized by a lavish Cinderella world of more food, clothes, privileges and indulgences than she had ever dreamed existed. The New York journey “turned her head,” said a relative, so that when the Walker women offered to adopt her, Fairy Mae needed no convincing and “wanted to go.”

  Sarah Etta, on the other hand, was not so quickly or so easily persuaded. It was one thing to allow her child to travel and be exposed to a world she could only imagine. It was something else entirely to relinquish one’s child to another woman. Yet the Walker women offered not only to continue Mae’s education and to train her to run their business but to allow her to maintain contact with her family. Still, Sarah Etta remained torn. The unfathomable decision to surrender her child must have been made palatable only by degrees when she considered her own childhood and the fact that she, like Fairy Mae, had grown up as a fatherless child in the middle of a large group of siblings. “Mae was very special to the Bryant family, and her going to the Walkers was God-sent and deeply appreciated,” said genealogist Coy D. Robbins, Jr., whose mother had known Mae as a child. “Etta did not see it as giving up, but rather as having a way economically and socially for Mae to acquire material things and life experiences that she, as a widow, could not provide.”

  Fairy Mae understandably was seduced by the opulence of Madam Walker’s Indianapolis home with its twelve lavishly furnished rooms. For a child accustomed to living with several siblings in less than half the space, the calm and quiet of the rose-and-gold drawing room—with its brilliantly patterned Oriental rugs, gold-leaf curio cabinet and Tiffany chandelier—was like paradise. In the library, Fairy Mae could hold soft leather-bound books, run her fingers across the gleaming keys of the Chickering baby grand piano and admire the lovely oil paintings of young William Edouard Scott, the local colored artist who had studied in Paris. On a table covered with Battenberg lace, she watched Madam Walker’s guests being served dinner on Havilland china with monogrammed silverware and sparkling crystal goblets. In Pittsburgh, at Lelia’s home on Mignonette, the surroundings were much the same.

  In late October 1912 a Pittsburgh judge approved Lelia’s petition to adopt Fairy Mae Bryant with the consent of her mother, Sarah Etta Hammond Bryant, and with the understanding that her “welfare” would “be promoted by such adoption.” Significantly, the decree granted Fairy Mae “all the rights of a child and heir of the said Mrs. Lelia Walker Robinson.” It also legally changed her name from Fairy Mae Bryant to Mae Walker Robinson, though John Robinson would never have any significant involvement in her life. In fact, Lelia was not at all focused on Robinson, whom she would finally divorce nearly two years later.

  Fascinated by business opportunities in New York and California, Lelia had persuaded her mother to buy property on both coasts. By early December she and Mae were house hunting in Los Angeles, hoping to find a base for her cousin Anjetta Breedlove to establish a West Coast Walker operation. As Lelia prepared to make the down payments on houses there and in Harlem, Ransom assured her that her mother was “very much impressed with the proposition.” For his part, he praised her discerning eye and told her that she “would make an ideal real estate agent.”

  As the year ended, Madam Walker was unusually pleased with her daughter and with herself. While visiting friends in St. Louis for Christmas, she was ecstatic to learn of the Freeman’s eye-catching, full-page, holiday season layout declaring her “America’s Foremost Colored Business Woman,” and praising her wealth, her entrepreneurial acumen and her philanthropy. “The write-up in the Freeman,” Ransom wrote to her on New Year’s Day, “created quite an impression here.” Madam Walker was delighted with the positive publicity, a fitting segue to another prosperous year.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sweet Satisfaction

  Each morning’s mail brought sacks of handwritten orders for Wonderful Hair Grower to Madam Walker’s Indianapolis office. Crumpled dollar bills and crisp money orders accompanied appreciative testimonials and crudely scrawled requests for supplies of Glossine, Vegetable Shampoo, Temple Salve and Tetter Salve. In the Walker factory, neighborhood women hand-ladled the curative ointments into round tin containers, then boxed them for the shipping clerk’s daily trip to Union Station and the post office.

  In Florida, Georgia and Alabama during the spring of 1913, Madam Walker taught her beauty culture system to several dozen more agents, presenting them with diplomas and wiring their product orders to her secretaries in the North West Street office. In hamlets too small for a train depot, Madam Walker and her traveling assistants tossed packets of promotional booklets and fliers from passenger cars as locomotives crawled by to retrieve rural route mail pouches.

  “Your business is increasing here every day,” F. B. Ransom wrote from Indianapolis in one of their almost daily missives while she was on the road. Having tallied her receipts for April 1913—the third consecutive month exceeding $3,000—he marveled, “I think you are the money-making wonder of the age.” Just four months into the year, she had already taken in more than $11,000, almost as much as her entire 1912 earnings and the equivalent of nearly $200,000 in today’s dollars. “You will . . . have to keep a little mum on your annual income,” Ransom cautioned, advising her of the soon-to-be-ratified Sixteenth Amendment, which would, for the first time, impose federal tax on all personal earnings greater than $3,000. With the average American breadwinner’s annual wages amounting to less than $800, Madam Walker would soon become not only one of the few citizens subject to the levy but one of the even smaller number bound for the highest tax bracket.

  “Madam is in a fair way to be the wealthiest colored person in America. I am ambitious that she be just that,” Ransom revealed to Lelia. Subtly suggesting that Lelia curb some of her own extravagances he queried, “You will help me, won’t you?”

  Ransom quickly had learned that both mother and daughter loved to spend. And who could blame them after they had scrimped and sacrificed for so long? But while Madam Walker relied upon Ransom to manage such details as taxes and bank balances, she had not ignored the need to diversify her investments. “I am preparing myself so that when this hair business falls to the ground I will have an income and I won’t have to come down,” she said several months later as she noted the lengthening lineup of newly established hair preparations competitors. As a result, she had begun to buy real estate in several cities, including five lots in Indianapolis and twenty in Gary, Indiana, as well as the New York and Los Angeles properties that Lelia had discovered.

  At the same time Madam Walker clearly relished
the more ostentatious trappings that her good fortune afforded. In May, after her trip through the South, she treated herself to a sleek, seven-passenger Cole touring car, a limited-edition model comparable to the Cadillac. “Oh, it’s the latest thing in autos,” Ransom wrote Lelia. “So you see, you are quite an heiress.”

  Certainly Madam Walker did not discourage Lelia from indulging her own extravagant tastes in jewelry and clothes. And now that Lelia was renovating their Harlem town house and beauty salon, Madam Walker had no quarrel with her daughter’s choice of the finest art and home furnishings their money would allow. Whether she articulated it or not, Madam Walker may have been attempting to compensate for the hungry, unstable John Davis years in St. Louis. But just as important, she was happy to reward her daughter’s business instincts and her eagerness to assume responsibility for their East Coast operation. After pronouncing Lelia’s tasteful New York office letterhead “perfectly beautiful,” Ransom predicted “that daughter and mother are going to make a still more powerful business firm.”

  Ransom, however, made no secret that he thought the New York operation too costly. In fact, he rarely missed an opportunity to remind Lelia to limit her large expenditures. “I want you to join me in urging Madam . . . to bank a large portion of her money to the end that it be accumulating and drawing interest for possible rainy days,” he counseled, referring as much to Lelia as to her mother.