On Her Own Ground Read online

  “What should I do about these things?” I asked, knowing that I would not have her much longer. “Should I include this part? And what about that?”

  Mustering just enough energy to leave no doubt about her wishes, she leaned forward, looked into my eyes and said, without hesitation, “Tell the truth, baby. It’s all right to tell the truth.”

  Her words were a powerful final gift and a charge that I have tried to honor.

  During the two decades after my mother’s death, I worked as a network television producer for ABC News and NBC News, traipsing from coast to coast telling other people’s stories, all the while yearning to resurrect my own family saga. Each year I managed to spend at least part of my weekends, vacations and holidays excavating the details of the Walker women’s lives, learning that for every fabrication others had created, there was a more profound and interesting reality. Occasionally I found myself at the end of cold trails, but more often I was blessed with serendipitous little miracles that revealed a person or document or place, exactly the clue I needed for the next step of my search. Fortunately, Madam Walker, A’Lelia Walker and my mother had known so many people that the usual six degrees of separation were reduced to two or three. One phone call, maybe two, almost always opened the door that I needed. Few people refused to help.

  An innovator and visionary, Madam sped through the final decade of her life too busy to reflect and ruminate. Where others of her generation had penned memoirs and autobiographies, she left only the flimsiest clues about her early life. Fortunately for me she understood the power of the press, and had actively cultivated relationships with black newspaper reporters who chronicled her activities on a weekly basis. As well, hundreds of her personal letters and business records, faithfully preserved by her secretary, Violet Reynolds—and now archived at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis—provided my original road map to her travels between 1913 and 1919.

  The same sense of adventure and anticipation that had led me to the dresser in my grandmother’s room accompanied me through the libraries, archives, courthouses and historical societies of more than a dozen United States cities between 1975 and 2000. In the St. Louis Public Library, as I scrolled through thousands of feet of microfilm, I discovered three brothers Madam Walker had never mentioned in her official company biography. In Savannah, Georgia, I felt an unspoken healing as I hugged R. Burney Long, whose family still owned the land where Madam Walker was born and where her parents had been slaves. Through the years I followed Madam Walker’s path from Delta, Louisiana, to Vicksburg to St. Louis, from Denver to Pittsburgh to Indianapolis, then to Harlem and Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

  During the summer of 1982—with the last of the Walker friends and employees still alive—I was welcomed into the parlors and living rooms of a fascinating array of men and women in their eighties and nineties, all eager to entrust me with the legacy we shared. In New York, Gerri Major, long known as Jet’s “Society World” columnist, spun stories of A’Lelia’s weekend soirees and afternoon poker parties. Confined to her bed with vertigo, Major was still glamorous in a white satin lounging jacket as she described typesetting the Inter-State Tattler, the tabloid she had edited under the name Geraldyn Dismond during the 1920s and 1930s. Blues singer Alberta Hunter, who was then performing at the Cookery in Greenwich Village, described her visits to Villa Lewaro and told me that A’Lelia had a “beautiful singing voice.” Over a mimosa-filled brunch across the Hudson River in Hoboken, writer and artist Bruce Nugent recalled the crowded October 1927 opening of The Dark Tower as well as spaghetti dinners in A’Lelia’s hideaway on Edgecombe Avenue. In Chicago, Marjorie Stewart Joyner, the former principal of the national chain of Walker Beauty Schools, sparkled as she recounted her first meeting with Madam Walker in 1916.

  For my grandfather’s ninetieth birthday, I traveled to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, his childhood home, to which he had returned in the early 1960s. On the second day of my visit, I asked him about a large steamer trunk that I remembered from his Indianapolis apartment. “Try the closet in the front bedroom,” he suggested. And there it was, behind a stack of newspapers and boxes. After I dragged it into the living room, where he was sitting, we unsuccessfully tried every key in the house. Finally we called a locksmith, who in no time was there popping the lock. To my delighted astonishment, the treasures of my childhood—the ostrich fan, the King Tut charms, the opera glasses—all appeared magically before me. For the rest of the day Pa Pa and I explored. In one drawer we found the license for A’Lelia’s second marriage with a spray of baby’s breath still pressed into the folds. Beneath that document was Madam’s last letter to A’Lelia, written just nine days before she died. Folded in another compartment was Mae’s hand-embroidered wedding dress from her 1923 marriage to Dr. Gordon Jackson. Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, Pa Pa—still seated in his straight-backed chair—was ready with an explanation for each item I retrieved. Too excited to eat, too charged to sleep, we continued past midnight. As soon as Pa Pa’s head fell to his chest, he was awake again, mesmerizing me with family stories until the sun peeked through the window blinds.

  Six years earlier, my mother had granted me permission to present the Walker women’s lives as I found them. On this hot July night, Pa Pa passed the baton of family griot.

  Certainly whatever teenage reservations I may have had about Madam Walker are long gone. My original childhood curiosity has remained my most reliable guide. And now that I am the same age as Madam Walker when she experienced her greatest achievements, I fully understand why many consider her an American icon. It is a privilege to tell her story.

  A’Lelia Bundles

  Alexandria, Virginia

  A word about A’Lelia Walker: During the early 1920s Lelia Walker changed her name to A’Lelia Walker. Because her mother had originally named her Lelia and because that was the name she used during the years of Madam Walker’s life, she is called Lelia throughout the remainder of this text, except in the afterword.

  For ease of reading, research source citations have been placed at the end of the book.

  CHAPTER 1

  Freedom Baby

  Into a time of destitution and aspiration, of mayhem and promise, Sarah Breedlove was born two days before Christmas 1867. It was a Yuletide that offered her parents, Owen and Minerva, no other gifts. Their sloped-roof cypress cabin possessed as its primary source of warmth and light an open-hearth fireplace. No official document recorded Sarah’s birth. No newspaper notice heralded her arrival. No lacy gown enveloped her tiny cocoa body.

  To the world beyond her family’s rented plot of ground in Delta, Louisiana, Sarah was just another black baby destined for drudgery and ignorance. But to her parents, she surely must have symbolized hope. Unlike her slave-born siblings—Louvenia, Owen, Jr., Alexander and James—Sarah had been born free just a few days shy of the Emancipation Proclamation’s fifth anniversary. Still, her parents’ lives were unlikely to change anytime soon. For the Breedloves, even hope had its limits.

  Tethered to this space for more than two decades—first as slaves, then as free people—they knew what to expect from its seasonal patterns. Spring rains almost always split the levees, transforming land to sea until the floods receded from their grassless yard to reveal a soppy stew, flush with annual deposits of soil from the northern banks of the Mississippi River. Summer dry spells sucked the moist dirt until it turned to dust. Steamy autumns filled creamy-white cotton fields with swarms of sweating ebony backs, blistered feet and bloody, cracked cuticles. On a predictable cycle, wind, water and heat, then flies, mosquitoes and gnats, streamed through the slits and gaps of their rickety home.

  Beyond the nearby levee, the syrupy mile-wide river formed a liquid highway, bringing news and commerce like blood transfusions from New Orleans and Natchez to the south, St. Louis and Memphis to the north. Three miles upstream and a half-hour ferry ride away in Vicksburg, black stevedores unloaded farm tools and timepieces, china and chifforobes from steamboa
ts, then stacked their decks with honeycombs of cotton bales just hauled in from Jackson and Clinton and Yazoo City.

  During the Civil War the river had also become an avenue of invasion, so central to the Confederacy’s east-west supply trains and north-south riverboats that President Abraham Lincoln declared it the “key” to winning the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, whose family plantation was located barely thirty river miles south of the city at Davis Bend, was equally aware of its strategic position. From atop Vicksburg’s two-hundred-foot red-clay bluffs, Confederate cannons glowered at Union gunboats and controlled this patch of the Mississippi Valley, frustrating the federal navy for more than two years until the Confederates’ decisive July 4, 1863, surrender.

  Having been reduced to eating mule meat and living in caves during a forty-seven-day bombardment and siege, Vicksburg residents, and their Louisiana neighbors on the western side of the river, found their mauling hard to forget or forgive. As General Ulysses S. Grant’s blue-uniformed columns streamed triumphantly toward Vicksburg’s stalwart courthouse, thousands of freedmen cheered. But for many generations after the troops had left, the former slaves and their descendants would suffer from the federal army’s vindictive pillaging and the retaliation inflicted upon them by their former masters.

  Life and living arrangements were so scrambled after the war that Owen and Minerva, both born around 1828, may have been squatters on the plantation where they had lived as Robert W. Burney’s slaves since at least 1847. Their African family origins, as well as their faces and voices, are lost to time, silenced by their illiteracy. Because the importation of slaves had been illegal since January 1, 1808—though the law was flouted for years—it is likely that they were born in the United States. Whether Burney purchased them from an auction block in Vicksburg, New Orleans or Mobile—places he frequented—probably will never be known.

  Before the war, Owen and Minerva’s labor had helped make their owner a wealthy man. In 1860, a banner year for cotton in Louisiana, Burney’s “real property”—including his land and his sixty slaves—was valued at $125,000, his personal property at $15,000. Such holdings secured his place in the top 10 percent of slave-owning Southern planters, and put him among the 30 percent who owned more than 1,000 acres.

  But now, with the South defeated, the Burney fields were “growing up with weeds,” their house and farm buildings—like those of most of their neighbors—destroyed as they fled with their slaves during the first campaign against Vicksburg in 1862. Hoping never to see Union soldiers again, they had found themselves in a rented home in Morton, Mississippi, and squarely in the path of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s destructive 1864 march across that state, a prelude to his more famous 1865 swath through Georgia.

  By the spring of 1865, when the Burneys, and probably the Breedloves, returned to the peninsula where their plantation sat, the Union commanders at Vicksburg had confiscated the land for a refugee camp filled with several thousand newly freed men, women and children. “The scenes were appalling,” wrote one Freedmen’s Bureau official. “The refugees were crowded together, sickly, disheartened, dying on the streets, not a family of them all either well sheltered, clad, or fed.”

  The Burney farm had also become a burial ground pocked with mass graves for hundreds of the 3,200 Union soldiers who had died of dysentery, typhoid and malaria as they kept watch over Vicksburg during the scorching summer of 1862 and the soggy winter of 1863. The troops, along with 1,200 slaves confiscated from nearby plantations, had followed a Union general’s order to excavate a canal—a kind of jugular slash through the base of the peninsula’s long neck—intended to circumvent the impenetrable hills of Vicksburg.

  By late 1867, as the Breedloves awaited Sarah’s birth, all that remained of a once grand plantation were “one or two little houses or shanties near the river” and a large ditch marking the failed bypass.

  Robert W. Burney was only twenty-two years old in August 1842 when he arrived with his oxen and farm implements on 167 acres of rented land in Madison Parish, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg. By the following February, when he purchased the land for a mere $1.25 an acre, he already had a small group of slaves at work preparing 65 acres for corn and cotton.

  His personal good fortune was the result of a nationwide economic crisis that had financially strapped the previous owners. For a young man as ambitious as Burney, the uncultivated soil of the Louisiana frontier held more lucrative promise than the depleted farmland of the more heavily populated eastern United States. Overextended land speculators, ruined in the Panic of 1837, were forced to sell to men like Burney, who, unsaddled by debt, could dictate advantageous deals for modest amounts of cash. A native of Maury County, Tennessee—home of President James Knox Polk—Burney became the recipient of some of the country’s most fertile farmland, its alluvial soil so suited for long-staple cotton that it would soon become one of Louisiana’s wealthiest parishes.

  In April 1846 he nearly doubled his holdings with the $300 cash purchase of 160 acres just three and a half miles south of Vicksburg, one of the busiest cotton-trading ports between St. Louis and New Orleans. This time his land abutted the water, providing direct access to passing steamboats. It was situated on a mile-and-a half-wide peninsula that jutted northeastward toward Vicksburg like a finger poised to make a point, and its picturesque panoramas earned it the name Grand View. What Burney did not plant with cotton and vegetables in this dark, fertile turf remained a virgin forest of moss-draped oak, elm and cypress. Eventually a railroad designed to link trade on the Mississippi River with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would pierce the center of his cotton fields.

  With prime property and favorable future prospects, Burney’s relative affluence made him a most eligible bachelor. In October 1846, he chose for his bride Mary Fredonia Williamson, the educated seventeen-year-old daughter of the late Russell McCord Williamson, a wealthy Mississippi landowner and delegate to the second Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1832. Williamson, who like Burney had grown up in Maury County, had been a childhood friend of the Polk boys, their families so close that one of the Williamson slaves had assisted in the funeral of the President’s father.

  Williamson also had ties to another President, Andrew Jackson, under whom he had fought as a teenager in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. In 1834, during the first year of his second term, Jackson appointed Williamson surveyor general of all public lands south of Tennessee amid the feverish Mississippi land rush for the confiscated ancestral territory of the Choctaws and Chickasaws. At least a second-generation slave owner, Williamson had no reason or incentive to quarrel with the views of President Jackson, one of the South’s largest slaveholders, on the topic of chattel labor. “Ownership,” Jackson’s biographer Robert Remini wrote, “was as American to these Jacksonians as capitalism, nationalism, or democracy.” What property Williamson possessed, he passed on to his offspring. To Mary Fredonia he bequeathed at least a dozen slaves, nearly doubling her husband’s holdings of human assets.

  Independent of his wife’s inheritance, Burney had prospered well enough to attract the attention of Oliver O. Woodman, a Vicksburg investor who owned several businesses, including a pharmacy and a bookstore. In 1848, the two men agreed to combine their “negroes, Oxen, Corn, Farming Utensils, horses, etc. . . . into a copartnership.” Among the slaves Burney brought to the deal were nineteen-year-old Owen, valued at $700, and nineteen-year-old Minerva, valued at $600. At the time of the January 1, 1848, inventory, Minerva was not yet Owen’s wife and neither of them had any children.

  In exchange for co-ownership of 524 additional acres, which Woodman had purchased next to Burney’s existing property, Burney agreed to manage the plantation, the goal being “to clear up and cultivate the land as fast as the timber is taken off.” The partnership found a ready market for the timber’s by-products, especially the cordwood needed by the ravenous wood-burning boilers of the steamboats and packet boats that lumbered all day
and night around the corkscrew twists of the Mississippi and Louisiana shorelines.

  All the profits from the enterprise were to “be invested in negroes” who were to be “kept on the place during the copartnership.” In a relatively more humane gesture than that expected of other, more ruthless slave owners, Burney and Woodman agreed that, “should there be any negro women with children, which are joint property, at the expiration of the copartnership, either party getting them are to take them at valuation, as children under ten years old should not be separated from the mother.” For that, at least, the Breedloves could be grateful.

  Whether Minerva, who was a year older than Mary Fredonia, worked primarily in the fields or in the house eludes historians. But with a growing family, eventually numbering six daughters, the mistress of the house surely needed Minerva’s help. Despite having her own children, who were roughly the same age, Minerva was expected to come to Mary Fredonia’s aid whenever she was called.

  By 1850, seven years after Burney’s arrival in Madison Parish, his property was valued at $10,000, a reflection of the increasing wealth of the nation’s 350,000 slaveholding families. As the slave population burgeoned, especially in Madison Parish, where blacks would come to eclipse whites nine to one, planters grew more paranoid, advocating hard-nosed control over their human property. The prospect of a literate slave population was so frightening to some that an 1830 state law had forbidden “teaching them to read and write on pain of imprisonment for one to twelve months.”