On Her Own Ground Read online

  If Sarah and C.J. ventured to McGee’s exhibits, they saw that he had stratified the world’s nationalities into re-created village “laboratories” where nearly 2,000 mostly people of color had been imported like curios from their native countries. The Japanese were considered the most highly evolved Asians, elevated not only by their exquisite art and architecture but by their recent victories in the Russo-Japanese War. Beneath them McGee placed groups of Patagonians from Argentina, Pygmies and Zulus from Africa and Native Americans from the Western U.S. territories. But the anthropologists’ most ambitious undertaking was a United States government-sponsored forty-seven-acre reservation of more than a thousand Filipinos, ranging from Manila-based paramilitary troops to tribes that Fair planners described as Babogo “savages” and “monkey-like” Negritos. Tourists who visited the Filipino reservation were left with a skewed view both of the Philippines and of world civilization, and with a clear sense that “white and strong,” in McGee’s words, were “synonymous.” It was the same message Sarah had heard all her life.

  By the time the National Association of Colored Women—a group of the most prominent black women in the country—arrived at Sarah’s church for its fourth biennial convention in mid-July, the stage was set for a highly charged showdown over the Fair and the “race question.” Although Exposition president David R. Francis, a former Missouri governor and U.S. Secretary of the Interior, had issued a “general directive that discrimination had to cease,” the planned August 1 Negro Day was in jeopardy. Just a few days earlier, members of the 8th Illinois Regiment of Chicago had rejected an invitation to march at the Fair when they learned that white Georgia troops had objected to their presence among other American military men. Now the 200 NACW delegates also were debating whether to cancel their own daylong excursion to the fairgrounds.

  Assembled in St. Paul’s sanctuary for their opening ceremony, the handsomely dressed women enjoyed a recital of classical and religious music performed by the L’Ouverture Elementary School children’s chorus and the St. Paul and Central Baptist Church choirs. “Future success commensurate with that of the past is ours, if we hew to the line in teaching our sons and daughters to love virtue,” NACW president Silone Yates of Kansas City advised the members in her convention charge. Yates and the others saw themselves as “progressive colored women,” whose motto—“Lifting As We Climb”—served as a promise to their “neglected and unprogressive sisters,” especially those in need of “uplifting influences of freedom and education.”

  For Sarah and the other members of St. Paul, these well-educated, well-traveled visitors—representing 15,000 women from thirty-one states—created a vision of black elite propriety. The St. Louis delegation, whose members belonged to the community’s church circles, benevolent societies, literary clubs and the colored Women’s Christian Temperance Union chapter, included many women Sarah had come to know at St. Paul. Among them were Lavinia Carter, an early board member of the St. Louis Colored Orphans’ Home, and St. Louis Federation president Maria Harrison, Sarah’s former neighbor and president of the orphans’ home.

  With the field of social work still in its infancy, these women had already founded orphanages and retirement homes for aging freedmen and freedwomen, opened kindergartens and tuberculosis recovery camps, and crusaded against alcoholism and prostitution. Fifteen years earlier Sarah and Lelia had been beneficiaries of their early initiatives. And while the women may have pointed during the conference to Sarah’s accomplishments with some sense of pride, most of them were not yet ready to bring a former washerwoman into their inner social circle. Eventually, however, she would become one of their most valued members.

  In 1896, six years after the founding of the white General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the NACW held its first meeting, consolidating two smaller national black women’s organizations. The impetus to launch the group had arisen in part because of the GFWC’s refusal to grant their membership request, in part as a response to a slanderous insult regarding the morality of black women.

  After Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the pioneering journalist and antilynching advocate, blasted America’s tolerance for lynching during a well-received speaking tour in Great Britain, James W. Jacks, president of the Missouri Press Association, fired off a letter to an officer of the newly formed British antilynching society. “The Negroes in this country [are] wholly devoid of morality,” he indicted. “The women [are] prostitutes and all [are] natural thieves and liars.” Unable to tolerate the affront, black Bostonian and suffragette Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin sent out the call that assembled the National Federation of Afro-American Women, the predecessor to the NACW.

  With protest so much a part of the association’s short history, many of the St. Louis conventioneers vowed to voice their objections when they learned that Hallie Quinn Brown, a world-renowned elocutionist and NACW member in excellent standing, had been denied an opportunity to apply for a job on the fairgrounds. Led by a “vehement” Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, the women passed a resolution “to withdraw the decision to hold a session at the World’s Fair grounds.” Although the local committee opposed the boycott, Margaret Washington charged the exposition directors with discrimination “against Colored women in the matter of securing employment on the grounds and against the race in general.”

  The Missourians were sorely disappointed because they had planned a festive day, including a motorcade along the boulevards of the Ivory City with hopes of making a conspicuous and symbolic statement. Their planned spectacle of several hundred well-dressed and dignified Negro women, they believed, would counter the Pike’s portrayal of the world’s people of color as primitive and savage. Instead, the group canceled its outing and reconvened at St. Paul to continue the assembly’s more substantive business proceedings.

  Lynching, a topic that would concern Sarah in the years to come, was high on their agenda. Troubled by the escalation of racially motivated murders since the Civil War—nearly 700 blacks had been killed by whites in the South just in the decade leading to the World’s Fair—the women approved a resolution condemning mob violence. “We the representatives of Negro womanhood do heartily deplore and condemn this barbarous taking of human life,” they asserted, aware of the irony that their race had been labeled “barbaric” by the Fair organizers. Mindful that many of them would soon be returning home on filthy, poorly ventilated Jim Crow train cars, they also urged a boycott of segregated transportation systems in “Southern cities, states and towns that discriminated against blacks.”

  Two other contentious issues—more cultural and moral than legal—had surfaced during the convention. Ida Joyce Jackson, president of the Colorado State Federation, urged the delegates to support her condemnation of ragtime music. With equal fervor, Cornelia Bowen, founder of Alabama’s Mt. Meigs School, denounced “hair-wrapping” because she considered the practice imitative of whites. Jackson, a classically trained musician, viewed the increasingly popular “rag time, coon songs, and cake walks as disgraceful, vulgar and destructive of good taste and self respect [for] all Colored people, who indulged in or tolerated them.” In language reminiscent of the late-twentieth-century furor over gangster rap, temperance activist and future NACW president Lucy Thurman bemoaned the fact “that the musical taste and talent of the race is being destroyed by this so-called ‘music.’”

  This collision of art and ethnicity, of cultural expression and morals, created tension among African Americans, especially across class lines. Sarah’s thoughts on the debate are not known, though years later she enjoyed ragtime and jazz, unlike Du Bois, who considered ragtime and cakewalk dances “the chief amusements of ‘fourth and third grade Negroes.’” Yet Du Bois sensitively articulated the “double-consciousness” and “sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others” that were reflected in ragtime and accounted for much of the emotional and psychological conflict African Americans experienced. “One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Neg
ro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

  The dichotomy he described was never more apt than in the conundrum of Negro hair, a subject about which Sarah had given a great deal of thought. And just as race, morality and music had collided at the NACW convention, so too did racial identity, class and hair.

  Cornelia Bowen, a former slave and member of Tuskegee’s first graduating class in 1885, told her NACW sisters about Mt. Meigs’s Anti-Hair-Wrapping Clubs, whose members had vowed “not to wrap their hair in an effort to straighten it.” A Booker T. Washington protégée, Bowen likely was aware of her mentor’s disdain for such practices. “It is foolish to try [to] make hair straight,” she scolded, “when God saw fit to make it kinky.”

  Baptist organizer and NACW member Nannie Helen Burroughs agreed wholeheartedly with Bowen. “What every woman who bleaches and straightens out needs, is not her appearance changed, but her mind changed,” she wrote in “Not Color but Character,” a Voice of the Negro article published that very month. “If Negro women would use half the time they spend on trying to get white, to get better, the race would move forward apace,” she admonished. Burroughs had a point. And such strong emotions confronted Sarah as she continued her work as a sales agent for Annie Pope-Turnbo. But her customers’ happiness, once their hair began to grow, was all the proof she needed that she was performing a useful service. She was convinced that she was helping her clients feel more attractive and confident.

  Just as Sarah’s scalp treatment skills had boosted both her income and her personal vision of herself, the World’s Fair activities around her painted unexplored vistas. In the most American of impulses, she sensed opportunity and the chance to reinvent herself. Not yet divorced from John Davis, but living with C. J. Walker, she had grown increasingly anxious about remaining in St. Louis. In plotting her next move, she chose Denver, where her sister-in-law, Lucy Breedlove Crockett, still lived with her four daughters. Three states and nearly a thousand miles west of St. Louis, the Colorado capital was a place where Sarah believed she could make an unfettered start. And with twenty-year-old Lelia not yet willing to relocate, her nieces—Anjetta, Thirsapen, Mattie and Gladis—would provide a ready-made workforce.

  On Wednesday, July 19, 1905, with the temperature passing ninety degrees, Sarah boarded a hot, sooty westbound train, her bag filled with Pope-Turnbo’s Wonderful Hair Grower, her mind racing with anticipation.

  CHAPTER 7

  Westward

  As the Burlington Railroad locomotive steamed across Missouri’s flattened plains, then skirted north along the Missouri River through Kansas’s eastern edge, Sarah and the other passengers could feel the sticky July heat give way to cooler breezes outside their opened windows. In Nebraska spring rains had turned prairie grass as green as pea pods. Tassel-crowned, emerald cornstalks, a few inches shorter than usual, stood at attention, alternating with fields lined with harvested shocks of wheat. Just north of the Nebraska-Kansas border—past Table Rock, Endicott, Red Cloud and McCook—silos and farmhouses spiked the horizon and stray cows grazed within spitting distance of the tracks. With each passing mile, the limitations of Sarah’s past vanished, and the possibilities of her future materialized.

  Why C.J. had stayed behind is unclear. Perhaps one ticket was all they could afford. Perhaps this trip had been planned more as a trial run than a permanent relocation. Perhaps C.J. had not sufficiently shared Sarah’s vision and she had elected to go ahead despite his reservations.

  When she reached Denver the next day on July 20, 1905, temperatures lingered in the pleasant mid-seventies, an agreeable relief from the stifling mid-nineties of her final week in St. Louis. Outside Union Depot, the eastern edge of the snowcapped Rocky Mountains resembled a napping Gulliver sprawled lazily along the skyline. No World’s Fair tourist brochures or moving pictures could have prepared Sarah for the vastness of the view. Always having lived in the embrace of Mississippi River humidity, she was unaccustomed to the West’s crisp, dry air. Despite its acrid ore smelters, Denver’s sun-sprayed skies were pristine compared with St. Louis’s sun-blocking murkiness.

  An isolated outpost until 1859, when gold was discovered along Cherry Creek, Denver had capitalized on its location at the foothills of the regal Rockies to mold itself into a railway hub and tourist destination. Blessed with access to Colorado’s mining communities, the city had shared in the $850 million bounty yielded by the state’s silver, lead, copper, tin, coal and gold deposits since the Civil War. The local Chamber of Commerce touted it as “the healthiest city in the United States,” a haven for convalescing tuberculosis patients, and the gateway to the spas of Colorado Springs, its more sophisticated resort neighbor to the south. With the aid of irrigation, the area’s farms served up apples, melons, strawberries, peaches and grain for local consumption and regional distribution.

  Denver’s unspoiled vistas facilitated escape and fostered recovery from troubled lives and cumbersome identities. In a place where fortunes literally waited to be unearthed in the next creek bed, discarding failed marriages and adopting fresh personas seemed entirely acceptable.

  Migrants like Sarah from crowded urban areas marveled at the wide boulevards and absence of tenements. In 1900 Colorado’s entire population of nearly 540,000 were less than the 575,000 souls jammed into St. Louis’s city limits. Denver was home to a quarter of all Coloradans, close to 134,000 people, mostly of Irish, German and English descent, with a smattering of Italians, Chinese, Native Americans and Hispanics. In contrast to St. Louis’s more than 35,000 African Americans, fewer than 4,000 Denverites were black, about half of them women.

  Anheuser, Mallinckrodt and Danforth—names that symbolized wealth in St. Louis—were replaced in Denver by Tabor, Guggenheim, Cheesman and Witter, men who had made their fortunes in mining, smelting, real estate and finance. The state had its own notable black frontier legends, including adventurer Barney Ford, whose once elegant Inter-Ocean Hotel had been called “the best appointed hotel west of St. Louis” when it opened in 1873. There was also “Aunt” Clara Brown, a former slave and laundress who had padded her shirt-washing prices to meet the inflated boom-time incomes of gold prospectors, then used her nest egg to bring family and friends to Colorado after the Civil War. Jeremiah Lee, one of the black miners who followed gold fever to the peaks of the Rockies, had built a mansion in downtown Central City, Colorado, with part of the $100,000 he and his partners had extracted from their stake in an 1880 mine.

  Throughout Denver, there were stories to fuel Sarah’s own fantasies of prosperity, tales of women like Baby Doe Tabor and Margaret Tobin Brown who spent and behaved as they pleased, redefining upper-crust Denver with the spoils of their husbands’ mining wealth. Horace Tabor, who had made his $5 million fortune in the Leadville silver bonanza, lavished upon Baby Doe, his second wife, a $7,000 wedding dress and a $75,000 diamond necklace. Before they lost everything in the 1893 silver crash, she had fulfilled her civic duty by donating office space to the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association in her husband’s impressive Tabor Grand Opera House.

  Margaret Brown, another woman whose husband cashed in on Leadville’s mother lode, became an outspoken globe-trotter, best known as the Titanic survivor fictionalized in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. But she was also a philanthropist, popular among Denver’s black Catholics for including them in her 1906 Carnival of Nations, a festival to raise money for a new cathedral. Known for her dramatic hats and Paris ball gowns, Brown was just as comfortable with silver miners as she was with British royalty. Because her activities were well covered in Denver newspapers and because she lived on fashionable Capitol Hill just four blocks from Lucy Breedlove’s modest home, Sarah certainly had many opportunities to learn about this independent, flamboyant woman. Both women had little formal education and both had been born in 1867 in shacks near the Mississippi River, though Brown had spent her childhood farther north in Hannibal, Missouri.

  Like Brown, Tabor and Barney Ford, Sara
h had set out for Denver with every intention of finding her own fortune. Although she had arrived with only “$1.50 in my pocket,” Sarah later said of her plan to sell hair care products, “I was convinced it would be a success.” Because she had heard that Denver’s soil contained “alkali that was bad for hair,” she believed a receptive market awaited her. In fact, the alkali-laden earth, whose salt content also affected agricultural output, leached nutrients from the hair, though probably not to the extent that Sarah had been led to believe. For the many black women whose curly hair structure inhibited the distribution of moisture, it was the low humidity as much as anything else that caused their hair to feel brittle in the mountain climate.

  When Sarah first arrived in Denver, she probably roomed with Lucy. But she quickly found a job, in part to help with her sister-in-law’s daughters—fifteen-year-old Anjetta, twelve-year-old Thirsapen, seven-year-old Mattie and four-year-old Gladis. “I got a job as a cook in a boarding house at $30 a month,” she said. And although she gave no details about her employer or location, there is an intriguing oral history that provides possible clues about her early months in Colorado. Zenobia Fisher, whose mother had befriended Sarah, claimed that Sarah “was working for Scholtz . . . a wholesale druggist.” Although by late 1905 Edmund L. Scholtz had moved into a home at 1351 Grant on Denver’s “Millionaire’s Row,” at least for a short time in 1905 he was listed as a “roomer” at 1201 Humboldt along elite Cheesman Park.