On Her Own Ground Read online

  “There is among the slave population throughout the states far too much information for their own happiness and subordination,” the nearby Richmond Compiler editorialized. “Without rigid regulations and strict subordination, there is no safety.”

  As late as 1860, Delta was an unincorporated village with only ten households of fewer than sixty whites as well as hundreds of slaves who were scattered over a few thousand acres. By then the Burneys, who had prospered splendidly during the previous decade, had every reason to believe their good fortune would continue. The Breedloves, who had never known freedom, had no reason to believe their luck would ever change. But by the end of the war in April 1865, nothing about their parallel worlds remained a certainty. A year later Robert Burney was dead of a stroke, perhaps overwhelmed by the daunting struggle to regain his land and his lost wealth. That November, Mary Fredonia, still nursing an infant, succumbed to cholera. Their six young daughters would spend decades untangling legal disputes over their father’s property.

  For Owen, Minerva and their growing family, freedom constructed new hurdles. The scant 1866 cotton harvest was followed by an even more disastrous yield in 1867, when Madison Parish was decimated first by the worst flood in its history, then by army worms that left the cotton fields “blackened like fire had swept over them.” By winter, thousands of Louisiana farm families, stunned at their meager earnings, were starving and homeless, “having no place to go and no clothing but rags.” With the Burney family in too much disarray to monitor their balance books, at least the Breedloves had their shack. Like thousands of other indigent black families, they may have placed some faith in the intangible hope of full citizenship for themselves and education for their children that had come with the overthrow of the Confederacy.

  During the rainy spring before Sarah Breedlove’s birth, Congress had overridden President Andrew Johnson’s veto and adopted the Reconstruction Act, dividing the postwar South into five military districts and enfranchising more than 700,000 black men—most of them newly freed slaves—throughout the eleven states of the former Confederacy. This Radical Reconstruction would last until 1877, when the Democrats orchestrated the demise of the last Southern Republican government and claimed “redemption” for all they had lost. But in August 1867 almost two-thirds of Louisiana’s 127,639 registered voters were black, and still hopeful that their first efforts at participatory democracy would deliver the dignity and political rights they craved. With emancipation, Madison Parish’s overwhelmingly black workforce also had become an overwhelmingly black electorate.

  Owen, now thirty-nine, was eligible to cast the first vote of his life in an election calling for a Louisiana constitutional convention to rewrite state laws. In late September, when the votes were tallied, exactly half the delegates were black and half were white. Only two were not Republicans. When the conferees met in New Orleans in late November, a month before Sarah’s birth, the New Orleans Times derisively labeled their assembly the “Congo Convention.” President Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, delivered a similar indictment, accusing Radical Republicans of trying to “Africanize . . . half of our country” and calling blacks “utterly so ignorant of public affairs that their voting can consist in nothing more than carrying a ballot to the place where they are directed to deposit it.”

  While most of the new voters were, in fact, illiterate, most of the black delegates had as much or more education than their white counterparts, and in some instances more than President Johnson, a tailor who had taught himself to read. Some were former slaves; most were freeborn. Among the large property owners, a few had owned slaves. At least one, Fortune Riard of Lafayette, had been educated in France, where he served as a naval officer.

  During the final weeks of Minerva’s pregnancy Curtis Pollard—the Breedloves’ family minister and a newly elected delegate to the constitutional convention—talked optimistically of guaranteed suffrage for black adult males and statewide public education for the newly freed slaves. On December 31, eight days after Sarah’s birth, Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, another black delegate who later would serve as acting lieutenant governor of the state, introduced civil rights legislation outlawing segregation on trains, on ferries and in public places.

  The Democrats were outraged, holding fast to a platform advocating “a government of white people” in which there could, “in no event nor under any circumstance, be any equality between the whites and other races.” Without the votes required to ensure this outcome, the party faithful struck back with terror and intimidation. During the next several months, the vigilante Knights of the White Camellia, who had organized in southern Louisiana in May 1867, began to gather members and sympathizers from other parts of the state. For a while, at least, Madison’s black population was not subjected to the more flagrant violence, in large part due to its numbers, as well as to the presence of federal troops in nearby Vicksburg. But any sense of personal safety would prove to be illusory and temporary.

  CHAPTER 2

  Motherless Child

  Night riders and vigilantes bloodied Louisiana’s back roads during the score-settling campaign of 1868. Still an infant, Sarah was sheltered from knowing about the year’s one thousand politically motivated murders, many of them sanctioned by the Democratic leadership in its efforts to vanquish Republican rule and cower black elected officials. But soon enough she would understand the fearful midnight whispers of her elders and the courageous tales of those who escaped the wrath and the rope of the Knights of the White Camellia. Later in life, she would crusade against such outrages with both her wealth and her passion.

  Throughout the late 1860s, Owen and Minerva did their best to protect their children from the turmoil around them. White conservatives and Confederate sympathizers made no secret of their resentment at being governed not only by a racially mixed, Republican dominated legislature but by Governor Henry C. Warmouth, a corrupt carpetbagger, and Lieutenant Governor Oscar James Dunn, a man of ethical reputation whose primary flaw in their eyes was his African ancestry. He was “as black as the ace of spades, but a grander man from principles never trod God’s earth,” said Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, his successor as lieutenant governor.

  The Democratic offensive to regain power was so exacting and pervasive that by November most of the parishes that had supported Republican candidates in the April gubernatorial election had flip-flopped to the Democratic column as a result of ballot tampering and a petrified, stay-at-home electorate. Once again, however, Madison Parish’s proximity to the Freedmen’s Bureau regional headquarters in Vicksburg had spared it the more blatant bullying that prevailed elsewhere in the state. Consequently, Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant received 90 percent of its votes, his widest margin anywhere in the state, over Democrat Horatio Seymour, a man whose platform declared “This Is a White Man’s Government.”

  No doubt Curtis Pollard, the Breedloves’ minister and a Louisiana state senator, had played some role in keeping the night riders at bay. Often called bulldozers, these self-appointed vigilantes earned their name for plowing down defenseless blacks. Twenty years Owen’s senior, Pollard was a man Owen could admire, because of his success as a farmer and grocer, as well as for his outspoken advocacy of the freedmen’s interests. That summer The Daily Picayune called this former slave “a black man, uncompromisingly so; and a Republican equally uncompromising.” During his first year in the state senate, and two years before the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Pollard had championed Louisiana legislation that protected farm laborers from employers who threatened to fire them for supporting Republican candidates.

  Fortunately for the Breedloves, the abundant 1868 cotton harvest ushered in the first of the two most productive growing cycles since before the war. Owen’s skills as a blacksmith also made him a likely candidate for extra work rebuilding the railroad that ran through the Burney property. Its tracks destroyed during the war, the North Louisiana and Texas Railroad Company decided that year to construct its
eastern terminus at Delta.

  The crop of 1869 was called “so unmanageably large” that laborers, for once, had some bargaining power for their wages. The penny a pound the Breedloves and others earned probably meant sufficient food for their families and brought such “improvements in dress and appearance” that an official in the nearby Freedmen’s Bureau headquarters took note. The family’s relative prosperity may have provided the catalyst and the confidence for Owen and Minerva to pledge the $100 marriage bond that allowed them to wed on December 16, 1869, legalizing the union they had formed nearly twenty years earlier during slavery. Senator Pollard conducted the modest ceremony, which included the almost two-year-old Sarah, her two-month-old baby brother Solomon, and the four other Breedlove children, whose ages now ranged from seven to fifteen.

  Years later Sarah’s childhood friend Celeste Hawkins remembered her as an “ordinary person, an open-faced good gal” with no remarkable traits to predict her future achievements. “We played together an’ cotch craw-fish in de bayous,” she told an interviewer who attempted to capture her dialect. “We went to fish-frys an’ picnics; we sot side by side in the ol’ Pollard Church on a Sunday.” They also worked alongside their parents in the fields, the suffocating Louisiana heat blasting against their chests. Using a nickname that Sarah had long ago discarded, Hawkins recalled a glimmer of the competitive woman she was to become. “Twasn’t nobody could beat me an’ ‘Winnie’ a-choppin’ cotton an’ a-pickin’ dem bolls clean,” she proudly said.

  Hawkins also remembered their look-alike hairstyles. As with many black girls, their hair, said Hawkins, was “twisted and wropped with strings” in an ancient African grooming custom guaranteed to make them wince in the process. After their mothers had pulled the strands and sections tautly at the roots, their temples and scalps smarted for days.

  Their world was insular, circumscribed by the peonage of their parents. During 1874, when Sarah was old enough to enter first grade, public schools in Louisiana—where they had existed at all—were shuttered when the state legislature declined to fund them. By then the Freedmen’s Bureau had disbanded its education division. Throughout the region, “the hostility to schools for the Negro,” noted one traveler, “is . . . often very bitter and dangerous.” In some parts of the state, schools were torched, teachers harassed, even killed. The freed men and women fervently sought education for their children and themselves. Just as during slavery, planters feared a literate workforce, especially one that could choose to keep its children in class during harvesttime or learn enough to challenge the political and economic status quo.

  Sarah later told a reporter that she had had only three months of formal education, its quality undoubtedly inferior. If the Pollard Church helped her learn her ABCs and other rudimentary literacy lessons in Sunday school, she was more fortunate than most children in her parish. At least she was surrounded by the stimulation of commerce, especially around the time of her third birthday, when the trains returned to Madison Parish. Arriving every morning at eleven o’clock not far from her family’s cabin, the whistling locomotive roused the village into a busy hive. Certainly the passengers—whether in finery or rags—would have stirred a young girl’s imagination as she watched them embark upon journeys far beyond the dusty roads of Delta.

  Without warning, whatever carefree moments Sarah enjoyed as a child ceased with the death of her mother, Minerva, probably in 1873. Within a year, perhaps less, her father remarried. By late 1875, he, too, was dead.

  Decades later, after Sarah had become the well-known entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, she reminded audiences that she had had to fend for herself since childhood. “I had little or no opportunity when I started out in life, having been left an orphan and being without mother or father since I was seven years of age,” she often recounted in stoic acknowledgment of her loss.

  Publicly, at least, she did not elaborate with details, dates or causes of death. The particulars remain unknown but the possibilities are many. Disease stalked the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Valley, often in the form of epidemics poised to activate at deadly, unpredictable intervals. Cholera, once in motion, lurked in drinking water contaminated by open privies and raw sewage. In the absence of a death certificate, there is no way to know how Minerva died, but she was vulnerable to the 1873 cholera epidemic that claimed thirty-four Madison Parish victims. Without vaccines or medical treatment, pneumonia, smallpox, measles, typhoid, tuberculosis and a half dozen other highly infectious diseases went unchecked. Less likely as a cause of the Breedloves’ deaths was yellow fever, a disease usually more fatal to whites than blacks because of its West African origins and the immunity many blacks carried as a result.

  If Sarah witnessed her mother’s and father’s final breaths, she left no clue about the bewildering heartache a young child experiences at the loss of a parent. But the painful aftermath shaped her attitudes for the rest of her life. Dependent upon her older and now married sister, Louvenia Breedlove Powell, she was forced to live in the household of her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Years later she would describe him as “cruel,” suggesting, but never fully revealing, the extent of his threats, taunts and abuses.

  Rather than be destroyed, Sarah learned to turn her vulnerability into resolve and resilience. Her determination to escape was her most reliable asset.

  If Sarah was personally at risk, her entire community’s safety was subject to the statewide political turmoil that had only grown more intense since the murders of 1868. The gains blacks had realized during the early days of Reconstruction were being snatched systematically from them throughout the early 1870s. By the spring of 1874, Louisiana had become “an armed camp.” Determined to oust the Republicans, many conservatives—including a number of former Confederate military officers—established the White League, heir to the Knights of the White Camellia. Emboldened by the Democratic Congress in Washington, the League frequently carried out its assaults in broad daylight, vowing that “there will be no security, no peace and no prosperity for Louisiana . . . until the superiority of the Caucasian over the African in all affairs pertaining to government, is acknowledged and established.”

  With the country’s economy teetering from the lingering effects of the Panic of 1873, and the House of Representatives no longer under Republican control, President Grant and his party had few resources and even less will to devote to black enfranchisement or civil rights. In 1876, with both parties claiming victory for local races in Louisiana and for the presidency in Washington, the contested outcome placed the Republicans in a tenuous position. In order to seat Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the national party struck the Bargain of 1877, a compromise that secured a sufficient number of Democratic electoral college votes to install Hayes in the White House in exchange for his agreement to end federal intervention in the South. In short order, Senator Pollard and most of the state’s black representatives were stripped of their posts in Baton Rouge. With the removal of federal troops from Louisiana in April 1877, Radical Reconstruction collapsed resoundingly.

  The next year, during statewide elections, the violence that had long bombarded Madison Parish’s neighbors edged ever closer to its borders. If any members of Sarah’s immediate family were beaten or threatened, she did not discuss it as an adult. But there were many opportunities for her to witness the results of such intimidation in her parish, whether in the form of whip marks and bruises on the living or on corpses as they were retrieved from nearby bayous.

  Three weeks before the 1878 election, a black Republican candidate for Congress escaped a band of “bulldozers” less than forty miles from Delta in Waterproof, Louisiana. After hiding overnight in a moss-covered hollow log, the politician dressed as a woman to gain passage on a New Orleans–bound riverboat. The story was so well publicized in the Northern press and so widely told among local blacks for its defiant conclusion that Sarah and her friends almost surely heard it. By December, close to seventy-five people had been murdered in neighboring
Tensas and Concordia parishes. The remaining black state representative from Madison, William Murrell, later recalled seeing a man with a companion, “hanging in the swamp . . . with a brandnew grass rope around him.”

  “This of course excited the colored people in my parish at the time,” Representative Murrell later testified before a congressional committee. “They proved to be good prophets. They said it was only the question of another election, and they would reach Madison, too.”

  That terror—and the economic disaster brought on by yet another bad cotton year and one of the worst yellow fever epidemics in the nation’s history—pushed Sarah and her sister and brother-in-law off the farm and across the river to Vicksburg. In mid-November 1878, the Hinds County Gazette predicted that as many as four thousand of the area’s black laborers would be “homeless, breadless and in rags in January next.” With no cotton to pick, there would be no work.

  Jesse and Louvenia, like many others, were forced to look for jobs in Vicksburg. Both illiterate, their prospects were limited, and Jesse’s violent temper in all likelihood only added to their problems. For Sarah, however, the move meant more opportunities to see Alexander, her eldest brother, with whom she had remained close. Already living in Vicksburg for at least a year, he worked as a porter at C. L. Chambers Grocery on busy Washington Street and lived on Crawford Street near the crowded waterfront, where rents were cheapest.

  Despite Sarah’s wretched surroundings, a magazine reporter who interviewed her in her richly furnished Harlem town house years later wrote that “as a child she craved for the beautiful. She had an inordinate desire to move among the things of culture and refinement.” Such longings would not have been unusual for a curious adolescent who frequently walked past the manicured gardens of Vicksburg’s grand antebellum homes. Near the grocery where Alexander worked, shopwindows displayed bolts of taffeta and dotted swiss, pastel hats and supple leather shoes. Waistcoated dandies on steamboat layovers always drew attention as they strolled to Vicksburg’s saloons. Even in Delta, Sarah had been inside the well-furnished home of Lillie Burney Felt, one of the six daughters who had returned to the Burney plantation in the late 1860s. Around 1875, with the help of her new husband, Lillie had carefully re-created part of the floor plan and façade of the home her parents had lost during the war. It seems certain that luxury was not an alien concept to young Sarah. It seems equally certain that she had no reason to expect she would ever possess it.