On Her Own Ground Page 26

  Still shaken when she reached Memphis the next night, she was relieved to be met by her friend Bishop William T. Vernon, the former U.S. Treasury official whom she had met in Denver a decade earlier. “I arrived here sick Wednesday night and Dr. Vernon had a [doctor] for me right away. [H]e patched me up so I could give my lecture last night. I am feeling some[what] better to-day.” But the physician was so concerned about a spike in her blood pressure that he insisted she cancel all remaining Tennessee commitments and “take not less than six weeks rest.” Heeding his advice, she told Ransom, “I think instead of coming home I will go to Hot Springs where I can really get rest and quietude.” Panicked at Madam Walker’s fragile physical state, Louise inserted her own personal note before sealing the envelope: “Mme. really frightened me last night, Mr. Ransom. She was so very ill. I am so glad she has been persuaded to take this much needed rest.”

  Despite her fatigue, she labored through a second speech that Friday evening at Vernon’s Avery Chapel AME. “I was so ill that I feared I couldn’t make it, but made up my mind I would and did,” wrote a determined Madam Walker. The next day Louise typed an alarming note beneath the message Madam Walker had dictated: “To-day the doctor told me she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown . . . You keep telling her after she gets to Hot Springs to remain there for six weeks.” And although Madam Walker had vowed “to give my mind a real rest,” she was too driven to curtail her activities. Even with the recent addition to her traveling staff of Alice Burnette—a highly capable former Jackson, Mississippi, school-teacher—she fretted, “I don’t know if they will be able to get along without me or not.”

  Two days later, Madam Walker checked into the Pythian Hotel and Bath House, the well-appointed two-year-old Hot Springs, Arkansas, hospital and spa owned by the black Knights of Pythias. Nestled among the densely wooded Ouachita Hills and Diamond Lakes of western Arkansas, the town drew patients and tourists eager to “take the waters” from its healing thermal springs, as well as gamblers and gangsters lured by its blackjack tables and racetrack. Like its white counterparts at the eight elegant European-style bathhouses along Central Avenue, the seventy-room, three-story Pythian on Malvern Avenue promised to administer care and cures for every ailment from rheumatism and gout, to arthritis and ulcers.

  The “nervousness” that the Memphis doctor had noticed was brought on by overexertion from Madam Walker’s ambitious and wearying recruitment trip, as well as the trauma and adrenaline rush of the train mishap. But she was also suffering from hypertension and the early but not yet diagnosed stages of kidney disease. Consistent with conventional medical practices of the time, Dr. Vernon’s physician had prescribed a visit to Hot Springs in the belief that the heated baths would temporarily lower her blood pressure by dilating her blood vessels and eliminating toxins from her system. And although the baths had no lasting effect on her condition, she benefited from the pampering she received and the relaxing atmosphere. “I promise you I am going to let all business alone and look strictly after my health except little things which I am going to write to you about now. Ha. Ha,” she joked with Ransom. Unable to extricate herself completely from her work, she continued to devise business schemes. “In reference to the salaries. While I fully appreciate what you say . . . I have decided long ago that I will not allow my help to dictate to me as to how I shall run my business, and how much I shall pay this or that one.” Recalling a debate she had had with a former bookkeeper, she reminded Ransom of her philosophy toward rewarding “brain work” and manual labor. “I take the stand that laborious work such as [is] done in my factory is worth more than the office work. You would find many persons who have been trained for office [work] and could fill any one of their places much eas[ier] than you could Miss Kelly’s, for everybody is looking for an easy job.”

  From her Pythian suite, she was also outlining plans to install her hair culture course in several black schools with vocational curricula, among them Pensacola’s Normal Industrial and Agricultural College, Jacksonville’s Florida Baptist Academy and Marshall, Texas’s Wiley University. In exchange for $100 to furnish a training facility with running water, a basin and worktables, she proposed placing a Walker agent on the faculty. After the schools had paid for the teacher’s course at Lelia College in New York and purchased a full line of products, Madam Walker suggested that the fee for “treatments be divided equally between the school and the agent.”

  Without hesitation, her friend Mary McLeod Bethune embraced the proposal for her Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls. “For the past four years my girls and myself have been using your Wonderful Hair Grower . . . and would be very glad to place it in our school as a course of study,” she wrote. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, whose fourteen-year-old Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, was one of the state’s only accredited black high schools, was interested as well. “I shall be glad to talk this matter over with you when I pass through N.Y. next week. I am sure that some of the requirements could not be met out here in the country, as there is no running water etc. I do think that some arrangements could be made, however,” she wrote, always with an eye to raising extra funds to operate her struggling institution.

  After an all too short visit from her friend and factory forelady Alice Kelly—“Alice is so dear and jovial that I think her visit with me did me as much good as the baths”—Madam Walker moved to the home of her local physician, Dr. James Webb Curtis, and his wife, Alice, for the Christmas holidays. Soon afterward, a local reporter learned of her recent purchase of four and a half acres in exclusive Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, twenty miles north of Manhattan in America’s wealthiest residential community. Having abandoned her plans to occupy Bishop Derrick’s former home, Madam Walker had already begun to review Vertner Tandy’s specifications for a mansion to be built not far from John D. Rockefeller’s Hudson River estate. “Negro Woman Gets in Society Addition,” read the Hot Springs headline. “Will Build Herself $100,000 Home Next to America’s Oil King—Hair Grower on Negro’s Heads and Oil Magnate Will Be Neighbors If Plan Goes Through as Arranged.” Blueprints awaited her in New York.

  For the new year, Madam Walker looked forward to a special treat. Lelia’s doctor, she informed Ransom, had “ordered her to Hot Springs. She will be here the first of January.” What Ransom also knew was that mother and daughter had another dispute to resolve. In November, just prior to Madam Walker’s close encounter with the train, she had proposed that Lelia forward all New York mail-order business to Indianapolis. With 700 agents in New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New Jersey—and the volume of sales that number represented—Lelia immediately panicked about how the lost revenue would affect her ability to meet her Harlem town house mortgage. Mother “may as well take [the house] now as to tell me to send the orders to Indianapolis to be filled, because as the people realize the preparation is coming from Indianapolis they will send directly there instead of sending to me.” Her business, she complained, was slower in the winter than during the bumper summer months, fluctuating between $50 and $350 a week from season to season. And certainly while the weather legitimately affected her sales—because heat and humidity rendered the clients’ hair more unmanageable than usual—Lelia lacked the hustle and hunger of her mother to make up the shortfall.

  “I know mother is the best hearted person on earth,” she replied to Ransom’s consoling letter after her mother had threatened to transfer the mailorder operation. “All the same my feelings should be considered. Mother reminds me of the story of the cow who gives the good pail of milk and then kicks it over. If I am to be confronted with this house or threatened with the loss of it every time it pleases mother I cannot enjoy it and would rather not have it,” Lelia ranted.

  “Mother is just like an impulsive baby. I am no Breedlove. I am a McWilliams and that impulsiveness does not run in my blood,” she grumbled. But of course both women could be equally impulsive. “Mother rules with an iron hand and forces her opinion u
pon me regardless of what I may think.”

  Because Lelia relied so heavily upon her mother, she had unwittingly relinquished much of her own autonomy. “I do not want to be dependent upon anyone,” she confided to Ransom, who once again found himself thrust into the role of mediator. “Mother is willing to do anything for me, but I want to have enough independence to settle my own bills. Whenever I am entirely dependent upon mother as you say there will certainly be a clash.”

  In her frustration, Lelia proposed a solution that she thought would decrease the chance for conflict. “If mother and I should have any controversy I would far rather move away to some little Western town, Oakland, California, for instance, open a Hair Parlor there and buy my preparations from mother and have peace of mind and freedom,” Lelia declared. “Contentment in a two room flat beats being pulled by the nape of my neck, whether it be sister, brother, husband or mother.”

  During their visit together, Lelia calmed down. With her mother on the road so much of the time, their communication—often conveyed through Ransom—was sporadic, disjointed and garbled. Madam Walker was so absorbed in her business that she overcompensated by spoiling Lelia with material substitutes, alternately tightening and loosening the purse strings. Inevitably, Ransom was caught in the cross fire. “You misunderstood me concerning Lelia, Mr. Ransom,” she wrote in the midst of the mail-order flap. “I don’t expect to have her give an account of the money she spends when I am giving it to her to do with as she wills. I shall let her keep her agents until I return.” But access to her mother’s bank account did not prevent Lelia from feeling isolated and abandoned. “With all of this big house and a nice income and above all a wonderful mother, I am so alone in the world,” Lelia whined in a moment of depression and self-pity some months later.

  But as mother and daughter said good-bye in Hot Springs, they had patched up their differences and agreed on Lelia’s proposal to add southern Florida and Cuba to her territory. Eight weeks later, during March 1917, Lelia was in Havana, reveling in her newfound freedom. Cuba “is the most picturesque place on earth, I do believe,” she wrote Ransom of her “wonderful trip.” When she returned to Harlem later that month, she discovered two pieces of good news: sales were up and her mother had come to her rescue once again. “Mother is a brick to pay off that mortgage is all that I can say,” she wrote of her loan on 108 and 110. She was overjoyed that her increased revenues would now allow her to do something nice for her mother in return. “If my business keeps up at this rate, I will be able to pay mother back in about one year and a half,” she boasted proudly in a letter to Ransom. “You were right not to say anything to mother about what I was making, because when she comes home I want to surprise her. I want to be able to hand her a nice little sum.” But within weeks Lelia felt her mother’s interfering hand once again. “I am so afraid of having an argument, and I do not want mother to think I am obstinate, but Mr. Ransom, you realize my work is a separate business and it is very hard to work it as mother would have me do without messing everything up. Please try to make mother see it in the right light,” she pleaded. “I am so afraid of ‘getting in wrong’ with mother.”

  After her recuperation in Hot Springs, Madam Walker resumed her Southern tour, blanketing several towns in Arkansas; New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Bogalusa in Louisiana; and Temple, Austin, San Marcos, Seguin, San Antonio, Houston, Beaumont and Orange in Texas, all during the first quarter of 1917. In April and May she returned to Tennessee, Kentucky and Indiana, then struck out for North Carolina and South Carolina before returning to New York in early June. “At the rate you are now going, we have now but five years before you will be rated as a millionaire, and I feel that every energy ought to be bent in that direction,” Ransom wrote as she continued her dizzying crusade.

  The more Madam Walker flourished, the more adversarial her rift with Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone grew. Not content simply to push her own products, Malone had begun to criticize Madam Walker’s use of the metal hot comb, contending that the Poro System’s disc-shaped hair pullers and pressing irons were the superior method for drying and straightening hair. In one Poro brochure, Malone had gone so far as to write, “Straightening Combs are not sold. Pressing Irons give best results.” Despite her intention to discredit Madam Walker’s system, Malone had inadvertently admitted that some of her customers were requesting the metal comb that Madam Walker believed left her customers’ hair with a fuller, more natural and less flattened look.

  Malone, whose company was growing as rapidly as Madam Walker’s, deeply resented her rival’s rise. In contrast, Madam Walker went out of her way, in public at least, to downplay their conflicts. When asked by a reporter about “the ill feeling” that had developed, Madam Walker declared that she wished “the banishment of the unpleasant feeling, that the past be forgotten whatever it held and that friendship should exist” between them. “We are succeeding and that should be sufficient,” Madam Walker told the St. Louis Argus, Malone’s hometown newspaper, after their squabbles had erupted in public during May when both women coincidentally appeared at Reverend Charles Parrish’s church in Louisville and Madam Walker’s Bethel AME in Indianapolis. “That the two women were not on the best terms was seen at the Indianapolis meeting,” noted reporter William Lewis. Although Madam Walker offered to have her bookkeeper “preside at the piano” to assist Malone’s program at Bethel, Malone dismissed her offer. To the audience Madam’s gesture in her home church appeared gracious—“an olive branch of peace,” said one observer—providing her with a public relations coup. Whether Madam Walker was truly as magnanimous as Lewis portrayed her, she was savvy enough to know that the snub had made Malone appear petty and unreasonable. “Mrs. Malone was very ugly and showed her hand, which killed her influence in Indianapolis forever and a day,” Madam Walker later told Alice Burnette, her traveling agent.

  Malone’s bitterness was compounded by her private difficulties with Aaron Malone, the husband whose mental abuse would eventually lead to a costly divorce. Madam Walker, of course, had had her own troubles with men. But C. J. Walker—embarrassing and annoying as he had become—was her ex-husband, jettisoned before he could do serious damage to her company or her psyche. Aaron Malone, on the other hand, had begun to publicly humiliate his wife and interfere with her financial interests. Those who knew her well could see that it was exacting a personal toll.

  For now, Madam Walker—who had been away from Harlem for most of the past year—had more important matters before her. She was eager to consult with Tandy about the contractor for her Westchester County home and to meet with Realtor John Nail to inspect the luxury Central Park West apartments he had purchased in Manhattan as an investment on her behalf. As well, she was anxious about the wartime restrictions that had been imposed on businesses like hers now that President Wilson had signed the resolution committing American troops to the battlefields of Europe. The summer of 1917 would also bring unexpected conflict on the domestic front—a deadly race riot that she and other African Americans had long feared.

  CHAPTER 17

  “We Should Protest”

  Just as Madam Walker was returning to Harlem in mid-June 1917, Reverend Hutchens Bishop opened the doors of his elegant St. Philip’s Church for a decidedly inelegant purpose: a mass meeting to decry “the frequency of lynching” in America. Even as tens of thousands of African Americans were enlisting in the Army “to do their bit to make the world safe for democracy” in the war against Germany, they were still subject to Jim Crow laws and vigilantism. Responding to what they called “the recent horror”—the murder of Eli Persons, who had been burned alive a month earlier in Memphis—the assembly vowed to stage a public protest so impressive that it would signal the “new spirit of the new Negro.”

  Less than two weeks later, on July 2, a race riot, far worse than the 1908 Springfield rampage, erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, a polluted “industrial slum” still reeling from yearlong labor strikes and lockouts. Directly across the Mississippi
River from St. Louis, where Madam Walker had lived for sixteen years, East St. Louis was a town whose streets and houses she knew well, a community in which she counted both friends and former laundry customers. The headline in the next morning’s New York Times—hawked from street corners all over Manhattan—was ominous: “Race Rioters Fire East St. Louis and Shoot or Hang Many Negroes; Dead Estimated at from 20 to 75—Many Bodies in the Ruins.” Because Madam Walker was so familiar with the area, she had no trouble imagining the horrible scene: smoldering buildings and the sickly sweet stench of incinerated flesh clinging to the smoky air. By the time the state militia restored order that night, the Illinois State’s Attorney estimated the death toll at 250. And although that number turned out to have been wildly inflated, those initial reports fueled conspiracy theories that the attacks were part of a grand design to scare blacks away from Northern cities. In the end few could agree on the number of dead, but at least thirty-nine blacks and eight whites lay in the morgue after what one historian has called the “first American pogrom.”

  The seeds for calamity had been germinating for months. Home to the sprawling Swift and Armour meatpacking plants, as well as the Aluminum Ore Company, this southern Illinois river community had become snagged in a fight between union organizers and resistant plant managers just as wartime demand for their products swelled. Long a haven for graft and vice—with only sixty-three police officers to monitor a population of 75,000—East St. Louis’s dives, pool halls and gambling dens operated unscathed. Because factory owners had manipulated zoning laws to avoid paying municipal taxes on their multimillion-dollar enterprises, the town had few sources of revenue other than licensing fees from its 376 saloons.