On Her Own Ground Page 20

  Along with Alice Kelly and her chauffeur, Homer West, Madam Walker arrived in Washington, D.C., in early August 1913 to deliver a series of lectures entitled “The Negro Woman in Business” at ten area churches. By midmonth, she had become a “pronounced hit . . . speaking in all the churches and filling space in the dailies.”

  From the pulpits of the prestigious Metropolitan AME Church on M Street and the all-black First Baptist Church of Georgetown, she encouraged the “women of the race to rise above the laundry and kitchen . . . and to aspire to a place in the world of commerce and trade,” Richard W. Thompson, the president of the National Negro Press Association—and her host for the week—reported in his nationally syndicated column.

  “The girls and women of our race must not be afraid to take hold of business endeavor and, by patient industry, close economy, determined effort, and close application to business, wring success out of a number of business opportunities that lie at their very doors,” she repeated all summer. Proud to announce that she was “employing hundreds of Negro girls and women all over this country as agents, clerks and otherwise,” she told congregations and lodges, “I have made it possible for many colored women to abandon the wash-tub for more pleasant and profitable occupation.” Even her latest ads emphasized training—“by mail or by personal instruction”—and job opportunities. “Learn to grow hair and make money,” it promised. “A Diploma from Lelia College of Hair Culture is a Passport to Prosperity.”

  “Mme. Walker is essentially a businesswoman,” wrote Thompson, a Washington disciple whose work was subsidized by the Tuskegee principal. “And no matter where she goes or on whatever errand, she talks business . . . She never loses an opportunity to emphasize to her sisters the importance of their getting into the world of business . . . making themselves financially independent and setting an example for all people of thrift, industry and practical application of their mental training.”

  As guests of Thompson and his wife near the District of Columbia’s bustling U Street corridor, Madam Walker and Alice Kelly enjoyed theater and whist parties, as well as “motor parties to Baltimore, Alexandria and the suburbs.” Madam Walker, of course, loved to socialize during all of her trips, but no business opportunity ever was overlooked.

  Almost as soon as she returned to Indianapolis from the East Coast in September 1913, she began planning her first overseas trip to the Caribbean and Central America. After an October 31 farewell reception, she and her niece Anjetta Breedlove left for New York again in the custommade Cole with Otho Patton, her new chauffeur. When they arrived in Harlem, soapbox orators on Lenox Avenue undoubtedly were still talking about the ten-day National Emancipation Exposition, a fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. An unprecedented array of music and pageantry—ranging from the spectacular performance of bandleader James Reese Europe and his Clef Club to conductor Will Marion Cook’s program of classical music and traditional spirituals—had been unveiled each day at the Armory near Columbus Circle. More than 30,000 people had attended the evening athletic events and the daytime political debates, as well as the ambitious historical extravaganza written and staged by Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois, with more than 300 elaborately costumed performers.

  In New York, Madam Walker found herself with more social invitations than she could honor as she readied herself for a two-month journey to “introduce her hair preparations” to a large untapped market of women of African descent, including residents of overwhelmingly black Jamaica and Haiti, as well as Costa Rica, Cuba and the Panama Canal Zone, where as many as 40,000 West Indians now lived.

  By design, she had coordinated her trip with Mme. Anita Patti Brown, a highly regarded coloratura soprano, whose globe-trotting had already taken her to the areas Madam Walker wished to cultivate. The two may have met in Chicago at the 1912 NNBL convention soon after Brown, a European-trained prima donna, had returned from “a triumphal tour” of Jamaica and the Central American states. But it is possible that they had encountered each other at an earlier time. Born in Atlanta, Brown had grown up in Indianapolis, where she had sung in a church choir, then worked as a maid until she moved to Chicago around 1900. Presumably, she maintained ties to the city where Madam Walker had moved in 1910.

  Departing from New York on the steamer Oruba on November 8—with Brown’s entourage, instruments and costumes, as well as Madam Walker’s car, products and promotional literature—they arrived in Jamaica five days later. In Kingston, Madam Walker was greeted enthusiastically as “business men and high officials vied with one another in extending to her the hospitality of their country.” Although still a British colony, Jamaica—as James Weldon Johnson would describe it just a few years later—had “black custom house officials, black soldiers, black policemen, black street car conductors, black clerks in the big shops, black girls in the telegraph office and at the news-stand of the fashionable Myrtle Bank Hotel.” A few months later, W.E.B. Du Bois experienced “a strange sort of luxury” riding “on railways where engineers, firemen, conductors and brakemen were black.” While he was enchanted with Kingston’s Blue Mountains and Montego Bay’s turquoise waters, he also discovered that “threaded through all this curious beauty . . . is tragedy of a poverty almost incomprehensible.”

  Nevertheless, the upper class of this predominantly black society provided a rich market for her products. “She was gratified to observe that it was only necessary to mention her business to secure more orders for goods than she could possibly supply,” a reporter observed, noting that she “found more people willing to work than she could think of employing as agents.” The trip was a happy mix of business and “gaiety.” Her “chief delight,” she said, was motoring through the countryside, where pastel orchids, crimson hibiscus and violet bougainvillea alternated with sugarcane fields and banana groves. “Long moonlight sails” with her hosts helped relieve the “intense heat” of the day.

  From Kingston she and Anjetta traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with its picturesque bay, distant plum-colored mountains and boiling political turmoil. A country of stark contrasts and contradictions, its mostly mulatto elite looked down from their hilltop villas on thatched-roof peasant huts, their “outer walls . . . whitewashed or tinted blue, or pink, or yellow.” Her stay, she said, was “a grand round of pleasure” as she was entertained by “many noted people, all of whom accorded her exceptional social courtesies.” In a society that James Weldon Johnson found “on a level that for wealth and culture could not be matched by the colored people in any city in the United States,” she was greeted by the “official family.” A member of that family may have been President Michel Oreste, one of seven Haitian heads of state who were either deposed or dealt violent deaths between 1912 and 1915, when the United States sent military forces to occupy the island nation.

  Madam Walker marveled at the opulence of the upper-class homes, but was perplexed by the crude and degrading Haitian prisons, where she discovered that “men and boys are, on the slightest pretext and least provocation, beaten and very often forgotten” and allowed to starve to death. The “real ‘Chamber of Horrors,’” she said, was “the prison where the political offenders are confined” and “kept in irons and bound—hand and feet—in solitary confinement [with] no visitors but the guards.” Learning that the cells were “bare with dirt floors” and contained no beds or mattresses, she was so distressed that she loaded her car with “18 chickens, one turkey, cakes and other things, and had a regular Christmas dinner prepared,” though later she was led to believe that her gifts had never reached the prisoners.

  Even so, in the city she found the Haitian men “polite” and the Haitian women “beautiful,” just as James Weldon Johnson had observed. With “their baskets balanced on their colored-turbaned heads, the large, gold loops in their ears pendulating to their steps,” Johnson wrote, “they strode along lithe and straight, almost haughtily, carrying themselves like so many Queens of Sheba.”

  After return
ing to Kingston for Christmas, Madam Walker traveled to Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba, where she trained more Walker hair culturists and made arrangements to ship her products through local customs agents. In late January she was back in New York with Lelia and quietly exploring a permanent move to the city, in part to become more involved in the city’s political and cultural life, in part to spend more time with her daughter.

  CHAPTER 14

  New Horizons

  Madam Walker thrived on spoiling Lelia, giving her “baby” expensive presents and extravagant parties. And Lelia wanted nothing more than to please “Mother.” But Madam’s overindulgence and Lelia’s inevitable dependence placed the two women on an emotional tightrope. The single-minded determination that had served Madam Walker so well in her business dealings frequently intruded on her personal relationship with her daughter. Even as Madam showered her with pricey gifts, Lelia could not help feeling that the largesse sometimes came with strings attached. On the one hand, Madam was proud of the sacrifices she had made on her daughter’s behalf. On the other, Lelia struggled to remain in her mother’s good graces and to display the requisite amount of dutiful gratitude.

  “Fire and ice” was how one of Madam Walker’s secretaries described their relationship. “They loved each dearly and they sometimes fought fiercely.” But their estrangements were never prolonged because the glue of their past bound them in such an unusual way. No one they knew could comprehend their personal journey, a self-propelled ascent from utter destitution to bountiful luxury that few, if any, other mother-daughter pairs in America had experienced. Regardless of their periodic spats, they were more alike than different, plagued by an early sense of emotional abandonment and an attendant need to control and cling to those closest to them. On a healthier plane, they also shared a love of music, dancing and entertaining, and their generous spirits ultimately prevailed over the flare-ups that were ignited by their quick tempers.

  During April 1914 Madam Walker hosted a spring dance and recital to celebrate Lelia’s visit to Indianapolis. More than 200 guests assembled in the Pythian Hall amid palm fronds and baskets of fragrant white flowers, the ballroom festooned with gold streamers and ribbons. Even the Walker women’s attire complemented the color scheme. Lelia, whose hair was draped with a double strand of pearls, donned a white Empire gown embroidered with gold thread. Madam Walker’s diamonds sparkled above her intricately designed cream lace and white charmeuse dress. As the hostesses greeted their guests, an assistant distributed palm-sized, gold-tasseled dance programs embossed with “CJW 1914.”

  Men in cutaway coats and women in floor-length formal dresses reveled to an array of vocal numbers, violin selections and poetry recitations. Tenor Noble Sissle, an Indianapolis native who would later pen “I’m Just Wild about Harry,” performed his signature song, “I Hear You Calling Me.” Next, elocutionist Mary Ross Dorsey—dressed in diaphanous white chiffon—presented a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose humble and often humorous subjects Madam Walker especially enjoyed. Dorsey’s rendition of “The Party”—a poem about a plantation shindig—offered an ironic mirror to the elaborately decorated hall and impeccably attired guests:

  Dey had a gread big pahty down to Tom’s de othah night;

  Was I dah? You bet! I nevah in my life seen sich a sight . . .

  Evehbody dressed deir fines’—Heish yo’ mouf an’ git away,

  Ain’t seen no sich fancy dressin’ sense las’ quah’tly meetin’ day;

  Gals all dressed in silks an’ satins, not a wrinkle ner a crease,

  Eyes a’battin’, teeth a-shinin’, haih breshed back ez slick ez grease.

  The reference to hair surely made Madam Walker and the others laugh. And because Dunbar’s rhythmic poems rarely failed to stimulate a crowd, by the time the band struck its first few notes, the dancers were more than ready to “make the scene a very brilliant one.”

  The following April, Lelia returned to Indianapolis for the second annual Walker spring musicale. This time the dance hall was adorned in luscious pink tones from floor to ceiling as a local photographer captured “the richly gowned women with their courteous escorts.” Called “one of the most elaborate functions of many seasons,” the event showcased singers and musicians from Chicago as well as Columbus and Springfield, Ohio.

  During this visit, Lelia and Madam Walker shared two of their other favorite pastimes: sightseeing in Madam Walker’s Cole and shopping. At H. P. Wassons, one of Indianapolis’s first department stores, they purchased perfume, a hat, pumps, two suits, a camisole, an umbrella and towels. And no downtown excursion was complete unless Madam Walker called upon Julius Walk, the jeweler who had provided her monogrammed sterling silverware and treasured diamond earrings and necklace.

  The following week, mother and daughter motored to Ohio, visiting Xenia, Wilberforce, Dayton and Springfield, where they “were the recipients of much social attention and many business engagements.” Lelia loved riding in the touring car so much that her mother planned to surprise her at Christmas with her own automobile. Not long afterward Madam Walker informed Ransom that she had just purchased a Cadillac for Lelia. “I guess you think I am crazy,” she wrote with a mild touch of self-consciousness. “I had a chance to get just what Lelia wanted in a car that had been used a little. It was worth $2,650 and I got it for $1,381.50 and since I was going to give her one for Xmas I thought I had better snatch this one as it would save me money.” Accustomed to his boss’s unpredictable splurges, Ransom replied, “No, I don’t think you crazy, but think you very hard on your bank account. I take pleasure in the fact, that there can hardly be anything else for you to buy, ha, ha.” Characteristic of their comfortable banter—and with faith that she was now making so much money that the purchase would have little impact on her budget—Madam parried, “I assure you I am not going to buy another living thing.” But when it came to her beloved only child, even she had to admit that such a promise would be impossible to keep.

  Madam Walker’s reputation as a generous woman had caused her to be inundated with requests for money from all over the country. What she had come to call “begging letters” arrived almost every day from prisoners, swindlers and scores of people down on their luck. Just within her own family she supported her sister-in-law, Lucy Breedlove, and four nieces in Denver, as well as her elder sister, Louvenia, who had recently moved to Indianapolis. Louvenia’s son, Willie Powell, remained a disappointment despite Ransom’s successful efforts at obtaining his release from Mississippi’s Parchman Prison, where he had been serving time for manslaughter. “People know that he has been in prison and every step he makes will be watched,” she said in refusing her sister’s request to have him join her in Indianapolis. “The least thing he does will cast reflection on me.”

  Resentful, but duty-bound to care for her family members, Madam Walker had instructed Ransom to keep them on strict budgets, lest they become even more dependent upon her. “I am tired of fooling with those ungrateful Negroes,” she wrote after falling out with her niece Anjetta. Following “another sassy letter” from Louvenia, she told Ransom, “I do not care to have any more communication with her . . . It seems the more I do for my people they are harder to please and I am going to quit trying to please them.” But as with most unequal sibling relationships, she wavered, guilty that she had said “something too hard.” Just two days later she wrote Ransom about the possibility of purchasing land for Louvenia in New Jersey: “I wish that you could get in touch with someone from whom I could get a little place about one or two acres so that she and Willie could live there and raise chickens, pigs and have a garden.”

  While her decisions to help her family involved a great degree of emotional angst, she was quite disposed to assist young men and women who showed a willingness to better themselves. “Mrs. Walker is grounded in the belief that every particle of talent in the colored race should be conserved; that no promising young person should be denied by fate the opportunity to reach his ideals,” the Recorder
reported.

  She was so moved, in fact, by “the constant effort and untiring energy” of sixteen-year-old Frances Spencer that she called upon her friends in the white business community to help sponsor a Valentine’s season benefit for Indianapolis’s only black harpist. Spencer’s plight particularly touched Madam Walker because, like herself, she was a “self-made girl, having started alone in the world at nine years.” For the February 1915 concert, standing room was “at a premium” in the Pythian Hall in part because Noble Sissle was scheduled to perform along with P. L. Montani, the celebrated harpist, whose orchestra had offered to accompany his pupil, the “unusually talented” Spencer. At the end of the evening, Madam Walker presented Spencer with a $300 check for the down payment on an exquisite gold-leaf harp “in order that she might get her heart’s desire.” Madam Walker was extremely gratified by Spencer’s obvious delight, but the young woman’s request for additional aid unnerved her. “After the recital was over she came to my house and begged me to give her a home,” Madam later said. “I told her that I had been so badly deceived in girls that I did not want to take her.” Nevertheless, Spencer persisted until a wary Madam Walker allowed her to move into an extra room at 640 North West Street. “After remaining here for about two months and being treated like one of my own family and receiving a salary of $6 per week . . . she stole out everything which she had, including the harp,” Madam Walker painfully told a reporter.

  The incident had so soured her that she declared, “Now I want to say, and this is final, that I am through helping so-called people.” Her temper erupting over Spencer’s thievery, she continued, “There isn’t a day that I am not besieged by people for help . . . and, near as I could, I have tried to help, or reach them in some way. In the future all appeals will be turned down and consigned to the waste basket.” Her fit of pique proved to be temporary, but her skepticism for such personal appeals would become permanent.