On Her Own Ground Read online

  Because Jesse Powell viewed Sarah as a burden, he expected her to contribute to the household income. Even for girls as young as ten, and sometimes younger, there was always work tending to the needs of white children or helping with housework behind the walls of the town’s mansions. Sarah was just old enough to work as a laundress, “the province of black women exclusively,” according to historian Jacqueline Jones. The work, in fact, was so “onerous” that it was the main chore nineteenth-century white women “would hire someone else to perform whenever the slightest bit of discretionary income was available.”

  While Sarah may have felt safer in town with Alexander nearby, Vicksburg was no haven of security. After the 1874 election, a group of whites had ambushed a meeting of black men at ten o’clock in the morning. “The whites came with the 16 shooters and just shot and killed every Negro they saw,” a man who witnessed the attack later told a congressional committee. “I think they killed about a dozen or so; they killed them because they were Republicans. Nothing was ever done to them for the killing.” Again in 1876 whites shot and killed two black men in full view of the courthouse.

  The freedmen were alarmed at the continued brazenness of the assaults. They were also panic-stricken over a proposal in Louisiana’s legislature that was designed to abridge their rights in ways that closely resembled slavery. Those fears, along with their inability to turn a profit after thirteen years of sharecropping, made thousands in the Mississippi River valley ripe for flight from debt and oppression.

  In early 1879, just as black farmers were receiving the now perennial news that they owed more than they had earned, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a charismatic black Tennessean, visited several river communities touting the solution for which many had prayed. Cheap land, the right to vote and freedom from harassment awaited them in Kansas, he promised with evangelical enthusiasm. “Now is the time to go,” he declared. “Ho for Sunny Kansas,” announced fliers trumpeting Singleton Settlement’s prime location on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway. Like the railroad company circulars that had lured French, German, Norwegian, Swedish and Welsh immigrants to the unsettled West, Singleton’s pamphlets guaranteed “plenty of coal, water and wood” on “one of the finest lands for a poor man in the World.”

  Having lost faith and patience, thousands of black men, women and children spontaneously journeyed to the riverbanks laden “with their poor, battered and tattered household goods.” Within weeks they had clotted together at Vicksburg, Delta and two dozen other Louisiana and Mississippi levees from Greenville to Natchez, convinced that steamboats were en route to convey them north to Kansas-bound trains. During late February, when sixty Madison Parish residents boarded a steamer for St. Louis, eleven-year-old Sarah undoubtedly watched family friends depart. Within days, when another large group headed up the river toward Missouri, the Vicksburg Herald sarcastically reported that “the African hegira continues.”

  From the pulpit and in public places, Curtis Pollard preached deliverance and urged the emigrants on. Having seen the evil intentions of the Democrats from inside the state senate chambers, he harbored no illusions about the freedmen’s immediate future in Louisiana. Pollard actively aided two Richland Parish men who had tried to migrate against their employers’ will in mid-February. “One of them [was] cut very bad . . . [T]hey said the bulldozers had got a hold of them for wanting to go to Kansas, and had pretty nearly killed them,” he later said.

  When former Lieutenant Governor Pinchback visited the Delta levee in early March 1879, the promised exodus had drawn nearly 700 refugees to that site alone. He found “every road leading to the river filled with wagons loaded with plunder and families who seem to think anywhere is better than here.” Pollard, who had led a rally in Delta on the day of Pinchback’s visit, was forced to flee his home and abandon his family three days later when a white Madison Parish doctor threatened to kill him. “I was accused of teaching the people to immigrate to Kansas [and was told] my neck would be broke,” he later testified. Because Sarah had known Pollard all her life, word of his escape must have frightened her. More significant, however, was the departure of twenty-one-year old Alexander, who was old enough to understand the political implications of the movement. His job in a downtown store must have made him more aware than most of the dangers a young black man faced. If he missed the 1879 wave, Alexander was part of the second surge in March and April 1880, his own departure possibly triggered by the election-eve murder of Madison Parish’s black Republican Club president. In the end, nearly 20,000 black Mississippians and Louisianans joined the migration. Madison Parish, with 1,600 Exodusters, lost more than any other district.

  Like many of the migrants, Alexander never reached Kansas, settling instead in St. Louis, where the African Methodist Episcopal and black Baptist churches welcomed the refugees with housing, food and advice. His first job as a porter quickly led to another as a barber. Such rapid progress was more than enough encouragement for Owen Jr. and James to trail him up the river before the end of 1882. With all three of her older brothers gone, Sarah was fully at the mercy of Jesse Powell.

  CHAPTER 3

  Wife, Mother, Widow

  “I married at the age of fourteen in order to get a home of my own,” Sarah always said of the day she ran off with Moses McWilliams. Nothing more. Nothing less. But clearly she believed her survival was at stake. Did Moses court her with thoughtful gifts and affectionate gestures? Did their eyes first meet at a picnic, in church, at a Sunday social? Or was the marriage merely a desperate effort to escape an unbearable situation? All the details of Moses’s life—his age, birthplace, physical bearing and occupation—remain matters of conjecture.

  The union was very possibly a common-law arrangement since neither bride nor groom could have afforded to pledge the $200 Mississippi marriage bond. At any rate, no marriage license has yet been found in Madison Parish or Warren County. In later years, Sarah’s memory of the relationship would become strikingly devoid of romantic sentiment. Her intent, she consistently said, was pragmatic, her approach unhesitant.

  A photograph taken a few years afterward shows that she was a physically attractive young woman. While any clothing she owned surely was worn, even shabby, her waist had begun to contour between a full bosom and rounded hips. Her chestnut-brown body was firm from field work, her forearm muscles thickened and defined from the washboard. A heart-shaped face framed alert ebony eyes, slightly flared nostrils and purposeful lips. As with so many other black women who had long forgotten the elaborate grooming rituals of their African ancestors, her crudely braided hair was usually covered with a patterned head wrap.

  In 1885, during the spring between Sarah’s seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays, her daughter, Lelia, was born on June 6. If she and Moses lost other children before or after, she kept the painful knowledge to herself in later years. But there is no doubt that Lelia’s arrival gave Sarah’s life new meaning and made her determined to protect this sparkly eyed baby girl from the cruelty, hunger and hardship she had endured as a child. So long deprived of her own mother’s touch, Sarah had had little exposure to the overwhelming, all-consuming maternal protectiveness that Lelia stirred in her. For the rest of her life, Lelia remained the center of her affection, the source of her motivation.

  Though their lives were still difficult, the new family was in a position to benefit from the increased wages that came from two exceptionally good back-to-back cotton crops. Despite the periodic flare-ups of political violence, Vicksburg remained a magnet for blacks from rural Mississippi and northern Louisiana, spawning churches and benevolent societies, separate from and parallel to those in the white community. The Negro Masons, the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows and the Order of Colored Knights of Pythias attracted the more prominent African American men to their ranks, their wives to their auxiliaries. Moses and Sarah’s lowly social standing would have excluded them from membership, but nothing would have prevented them from viewing the groups’ colorful annual parades
and enjoying country picnics with Lelia.

  Finally, when it seemed Sarah had pieced together all the elements of the family she had lost, Moses died, probably sometime during 1888. Rather than lead her out of poverty into the promised land as his biblical namesake had done for the children of Egypt, Sarah’s Moses abandoned her in the wilderness. The circumstances of his death have long been fodder for speculation. In the absence of Sarah’s own words on the topic, the temptation to fill the void has been great. At least three different writers have fashioned plausible accounts of a violent demise. But considering her passionate commitment to the antilynching movement in later years, it is hard to imagine that Sarah—who was to become the outspoken, politically astute Madam Walker—would not have used a personal experience as poignant as a husband’s murder to punctuate the horrors of mob violence.

  Curiously, all the articles claiming his tragic end were written years after Sarah’s death. While she was alive and could either refute or confirm the accounts, no reporter who had personally interviewed her—including anti-lynching activists Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson—ever mentioned an alleged lynching. Nevertheless the story continues to resurface.

  Konrad Bercovici, a prolific social historian, created the first known version of the lynching story after an interview with Lelia in her Harlem home during the 1920s. “Her father having been killed in a riot, she is anything but passive on the subject,” he wrote in Harper’s Monthly. “Rising from her chair as she talked to me, she looked more like an African empress than the offspring of a former slave. Speaking about negroes whose relatives and parents have been killed in riots or in lynchings, her frame trembled, her lips quivered and her eyes filled with tears. She looked like an avenging nemesis.” This melodramatic episode loses credibility when Bercovici incorrectly identifies Sarah as “Mrs. Lillie C. Walker . . . a speaker and singer . . . a former slave,” as if he had jumbled his notes into a composite character of several notable black women of the era. A little exaggeration may have pleased his editors and titillated the magazine’s subscribers at a time when many white American and European writers craved the exoticism and primitivism they believed Harlemites possessed. But the hyperbole resulted in bad journalism and worse history. After reading the article, Lelia wrote to a friend, “I don’t think he has been quite truthful . . . He drew a colorful description, but not truthful.”

  Twenty years later Marjorie Stewart Joyner, a longtime Walker Company employee and loyal family friend, wove a less sensational, though probably no more accurate, story. In her version, Moses was named “Jeff” and was “reported killed in a race riot in Greenwood, Mississippi.” Yet another account, by another writer, placed the supposed uprising in Greenville, Mississippi.

  Harry B. Webber’s 1952 series about Madam Walker in the popular Pittsburgh Courier further embellished Joyner’s tale. In his made-for-Hollywood scene, a plaintive young Lelia asks, “Is Daddy coming back?” as the now-named “Johnson” gallops away on a horse “to take a new job on a big cotton plantation up near Vicksburg.” After the requisite crescendo, Webber unveiled the crushing news. “The details came slowly—a race riot in Vicksburg the night of the day her husband vanished, the deaths of Negroes in violence, their bodies thrown into the river,” Webber waxed. “It indeed had been farewell that hot morning on the levee. For one of the bodies was that of hopeful Johnson, who rode on his horse to Vicksburg seeking a new life but perished a few hours later in unsought death.”

  With no death certificate and no dependable oral history from Sarah herself, it is unlikely that anyone will ever know whether Moses McWilliams was one of the ninety-five people whose lynchings were documented in 1888. Two years earlier, on March 16, 1886, more than twenty black men had indeed been massacred in Carrollton, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood, but Sarah consistently said she “was left a widow” when she was twenty years old.

  It is certainly possible that Joyner’s Greenwood race riot and Webber’s Vicksburg incident went unreported. Mississippi historian Vernon Lane Wharton believed it “impossible to make any estimate of the number of individual Negroes lynched or murdered by whites during the period . . . When reported at all, they were generally given a line or two in very small type in the ‘Mississippi Brevities’ or ‘Miscellaneous Items’ columns of the papers.”

  The Madison Times-Democrat, in Sarah’s home parish, carried just such an item in July 1889. “There have been several lynchings in the past eighteen months, none of which have found their way into print heretofore.” Contemporaneous courthouse records provide no answers, since such murders were rarely prosecuted. In fact, in Mississippi “there seems to have been no single instance throughout the period in which a white man was hanged for killing a Negro.”

  But thousands of lynching articles did make their way into the pages of the black press as a matter of record, and even into some Southern white newspapers as a form of editorial and social intimidation. Using data from those stories and other sources, E. M. Beck’s detailed listing of nineteenth-century Mississippi lynching victims includes no men named McWilliams between 1882 and 1889, all the possible years Sarah was married to Moses. Likewise, Ralph Ginzburg’s painstakingly documented inventory of “5,000 Negroes Lynched in the United States since 1859” lists not a single McWilliams in Louisiana or Mississippi. And aside from murder, Moses could have died from any number of illnesses or accidents. Even desertion was not impossible or implausible.

  Many years later, Sarah’s memories of her husband’s death were characteristically spare and emotionally unrevealing: “I was left a widow at the age of twenty with a little girl to raise.” But at the time she must have confronted a hauntingly familiar abyss of emptiness, uncertainty and utter panic as she examined her options.

  She refused to return to the Powells’ home. And Vicksburg would never offer her more than the field, the washtub and a weekly fistful of Indian-head pennies. So just as she had fled Jesse Powell, Sarah knew she would have to flee Mississippi. With little more to encourage her than raw determination, she began plotting her trip to St. Louis. Her decision to leave was not easy, but it was not unusual. Hundreds of young, single and widowed black women left the South each year during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, seeking jobs, bolting from abusive relationships, searching for better lives. And a decade earlier, many of the most eager Exodusters had been women. Now with 200,000 unmarried working black women, most of whom lived in the South, the pool of potential migrants was large.

  During early 1889 Sarah and three-year-old Lelia headed north, maybe on a train, but probably on a New Orleans–St. Louis Anchor Line steamboat. Far from the luxury of the boat’s upper promenades, they would have been invisible, lower-deck passengers on the weeklong journey. Their three- or four-dollar fare would have bought the equivalent of steerage, a cramped space somewhere among the cargo, the smelly livestock and the deafening, vibrating engine.

  * * *

  When Sarah and Lelia reached St. Louis, the Breedlove brothers were already familiar figures in the neighborhood around St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church where their barbershop had been located for six years. Alexander, James and Solomon all lived near the family business, clustered within eight blocks of each other. Owen had left St. Louis around 1883, moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and deserting his wife, Samira.

  As self-employed barbers, they had joined a trade with a long and lucrative tradition among St. Louis blacks. Even before the Civil War, a handful of freemen, who considered themselves the “colored aristocracy” of the city, had become wealthy shaving and cutting the hair of a predominantly white clientele. Their successes were duplicated in several cities across the country.

  By 1860 one of their group claimed $20,000 worth of St. Louis real estate. A little more than a decade later James Thomas, a former riverboat barber, owned nearly two blocks of downtown property and a twelve-chair, marble, lace and chandeliered tonsorial palace in one of the city’s most exclusive hotels.
Thomas also had had the good fortune of marrying Antoinette Rutgers, the daughter of Pelagie Rutgers, a mulatto whose estate had been estimated at a half million dollars at the time of her death in 1867.

  Such accomplishments among African Americans must have stunned Alexander and his brothers when they first arrived. Black men controlled no businesses of consequence in Vicksburg. But in St. Louis many of the nearly 300 black barbers were considered the best in the city. They were also the largest group of black entrepreneurs. While most did not become wealthy, they enjoyed more independence than laborers, servants, teamsters, messengers and porters—the jobs held by most black men. Even so, the business was changing around them. In Philadelphia, where blacks had dominated the trade since 1838, they had lost their foothold by 1889. Soon afterward, the Breedlove brothers faced a similar crisis, brought on by a racist backlash against black barbers, then later made worse by King Gillette’s introduction of the easy-to-use safety razor.