The Black Rose
Authors: Tananarive Due
Tags: #Cosmetics Industry, #African American Women Authors, #African American Women Executives, #Historical, #Walker, #Literary, #Biography & Autobiography, #C. J, #Historical Fiction, #Cultural Heritage, #Biographical Fiction, #African American Authors, #Fiction, #Businesswomen, #African American women
The Black
Rose
TANANARIVE DUE
ONE WORLD
THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP · NEW YORK
Contents
To my grandmothers
Lottie Sears Houston
and
Lucille Graham Ransaw
(1911–1992)
(A Madam C.J. Walker School of Beauty Culture graduate, 1941)
for planting the seeds
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project was a tremendous opportunity and gift, and for that I must thank the Estate of Alexander P. Haley and my agent, John Hawkins, of John Hawkins & Associates. Also, thanks to my editor, Cheryl Woodruff, for her encouragement and her role in bringing this book to life.
During the time that Alex Haley was researching the life of Madam C.J. Walker, his special research assistant was A’Lelia Perry Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter and biographer. Although she was not involved in the preparation of this manuscript, the interviews, letters, and research she provided to Alex Haley during his lifetime were invaluable.
Special thanks to the Indiana Historical Society, where the Madam C.J. Walker Collection is housed and open to the public, and the Madam Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis, which is definitely worth a visit. Thanks also to Bethel AME Church in Indianapolis and the Vicksburg and Warren County Historical Society. For small favors that meant a lot, I also thank E. Ethelbert Miller and Charles Johnson.
For teaching me to cherish my history, I thank my parents, John Due and Patricia Stephens Due. And for much-needed emotional support, as always, thanks to my sisters, Johnita Due and Lydia Due Greisz, and my dear friend Luchina Fisher. And lastly, thanks to my wonderful husband, Steven Barnes, for believing in me even during those moments when I forgot to believe in myself.
Yellow Jack
O my body’s racked wid de fever
My head rack’d wid de pain I hab… .
—SLAVE HYMN
Sometimes I feel like a motherless chile,
Far, far away from home,
A long, long way from home.
—NEGRO SPIRITUAL
OCTOBER 29, 1916
DELTA, LOUISIANA
No one had seen a car like it.
Delta was not a rich town, mostly an assemblage of weather-beaten
country stores, banks, and feed shops beneath faded, hand-painted signs. Residents sat on barrels in the shade and engaged in their cheapest town entertainment, which was watching the episodes of the day: a hitched horse trying to rear
up, the parade of cotton growers’ wagons on their way to market, or a motorcar
owner cursing in the middle of the street, working up a sweat as he cranked furiously, trying to coax the engine of his stalled Tin Lizzie back to life.
So when a long, sleek black convertible touring car glided its way into Delta
that day, driven by a somber-faced colored chauffeur in black cap and uniform,
the entire street took notice. The car seemed to stretch forever, with room for at
least seven or eight people to sit. And who was the primly dressed colored woman
in a black suit and white shirtwaist who sat in the backseat with a smile fixed on
her face, waving to people as she passed?
Before long, colored and white children, and a few older people, were chasing the car. When the car slowed and the woman inside invited a few children
to climb in beside her for a ride, excitement rippled through the town like fire
through a field of summer wheat; colored people began to pour toward the car,
clamoring for a ride themselves. Soon there was no room on the street for passing traffic, and whites could only stare at the scene with bafflement. Was this
woman the wife of a king or chief somewhere in Africa?
Virtually unnoticed, another colored woman walked through the crowd passing out yellow notices to any of the colored onlookers who would have
one: MME. C.J. WALKER HAIR PRODUCTS, the advertisement said, and
careful observers noticed right away that the likeness of the woman affixed to pictured products called Wonderful Hair Grower, Glossine, and Vegetable Shampoo matched the face of the woman inside the beautiful car. This was Madam
C.J. Walker!
“That’s her?” A barely concealed, excited whisper.
“Reckon so. That’s her face, all right. Seen it on the shampoo box!”
The car came to a stop, and the Negro woman expelled a huff of air as she
stepped down from the car, betraying her bone-weariness, but the crowd of onlookers didn’t hear it. Sarah Breedlove Walker had been traveling for months. In
the past three weeks alone, she had visited five cities and spoken to hundreds
of Southern agents and customers. Last night she’d stayed up in her boardinghouse writing letters long past midnight. On mornings like this, she awakened
with leaden arms and legs, her back aflame, restful sleep a distant memory.
Headaches seemed her daily companions, and at times her heart raced in her
chest for no good reason at all. Her doctor’s nagging words plucked at her
memory like prophecy:
You’ll work yourself to death, Madam Walker. Your blood pressure’s sky-high.
But as usual, when Sarah saw the huddled people waiting to greet her, their
faces glowing with anticipation, energy suffused her bones and flesh, lifted her
spirits, cleared her mind. Especially here, and especially today. She was home.
Sarah’s heart fluttered with a strange mixture of exhilaration and dread as
she stared at the pebbled roadway beneath her delicately laced shoes. This wide
clay street had once touched her family’s feet, long ago. The road now carried
shiny automobiles alongside the horses and buggies she remembered from childhood, but many of the same clapboard homes still stood, older but little changed.
She’d been born here nearly fifty years ago, and now she was back.
And there was so much work to be done! The folks who used threepenny
words like
ostentatious
to criticize her fur coats, diamond jewelry, and fifty-dollar shoes just didn’t understand. She wasn’t putting on airs. In fact, truth be
told, in this Louisiana sun she’d just as soon be wearing the threadbare cotton
dresses she’d worn in her days as a washerwoman, without her starched white
shirtwaist and heavy skirt to trap the heat against her skin. But she had more to
think about than her own comfort. How many Negroes in towns like Delta had
ever met one of their race who spoke, walked, and dressed as she did? How often
could someone stir their imaginations into thinking they might make a good wage
working for themselves instead of cleaning houses or sharecropping for white
folks? Who could believe that a woman, born poor like them, might grow wealthy
selling products to other Negroes?
Well, if ideas were bread, Sarah figured she could feed her whole nation.
And if the good Lord would just keep firing her words with inspiration, or let her
capture her people’s attention through the finery of her car, then, Sarah decided,
yes, sir, it was all right. The travel and the fatigue, the long years, the work and
the sacrifice … it was all worthwhile.
Only one life that soon is past. Only what’s done for God will last.
Sun or no sun, bone-tired or not, she was going on. Especially today, in
Delta. And especially now, when the Lord had guided her to more fortune than
any other woman of her race in the world.
“Lady … you got a million dollars?” a boy blurted out. “Lemme see it!”
The boy’s mother swatted him across the cheek, too hard. Sarah’s aching
back tensed when she saw anyone strike a child, and her heavy arms grew taut in
anger. All too easily, she recalled the beatings from her brother-in-law, when she
was just a child herself.
“Who you talkin’ to?” The boy’s mother shook his arm. “This ain’t just no
lady. This is
Madam
.” Sarah could hear her parents in the young woman’s
country accent and cadences, and for a moment the woman’s features blurred
into her mother’s, a long-ago dream. “ ’Scuse his manners, Madam Walker,
ma’am. I mean, if chirren ain’t got a mule’s sense!”
Sarah nodded at the woman, smiling. Not a happy smile, just bittersweet
and knowing. I’ve got my own mule, by the name of Lelia, she thought. She
knew that mother’s fear of balancing too much love with not enough discipline,
and the dangers only increased with money and status. That thought, the first
hint of self-pity, was banished as the crowd penned Sarah in, flurrying for her attention. There were even some white folks vying to shake her hand. Oh, yes.
White folks had even come to hear one of her lectures in Jackson last week,
praise the Lord, and those were some ornery, Negro-hating folks over in Mississippi! Seemed like her skin color mattered less all the time, so long as her money
was green.
“Please, Madam, you just sign me up, an’ I’ll be a good agent!”
“Madam Walker, I’m a washerwoman jus’ like you was—”
Sarah touched as many as she could, distributing handshakes and hope with
equal measure as she walked through the crowd. “That’s right,” she said, her
voice pitched to rise above the din. “I started out just like you. My sister and I
were here without a thing to call our own, in a shack not far from where we’re
standing now. The Lord showed me a way through hard work and faith, and he
can show you, too.”