The Black Rose (66 page)

Sadie decided just to stand up and speak whatever came to her mind. That was what Sarah would want, she thought. In fact, she knew that was exactly what Sarah would
do
.

Sadie’s heart thumped when she heard her name called. Lizette squeezed her hand, and Sadie began to walk to the head of the room as all of the faces watched her, wondering who she was. She wasn’t wearing any finery today; instead, she was dressed exactly as Sarah had always urged her representatives, in a white blouse and simple skirt, a uniform she was proud of.

“Afternoon, y’all,” Sadie greeted the group nervously. “My name is Sadie Jackson, and I’m nobody special. I knew Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker before she was special to anybody except her friends. We used to wash clothes together in St. Louis, right in her yard, back when she used to count her little pennies in a mason jar.” Sadie took a deep breath, fighting a stone in her throat from the sudden vivid memory of her friend’s face.

“In some ways, it hardly seems real for me to be standing here in Sarah’s big grand house with all the newspapers talking about her passing, and with all you folks come to honor her. But then I guess I just always expected it somehow. Sarah had a belief all along, you see, that she could do whatever she put a mind to. And if you knew Sarah like I did, you know she had a
strong
mind—not just smart, which she was, but ornery, too. It could be raining buckets outside, but if Sarah thought it was sunny, you couldn’t say a word to change her mind.”

At that many people in the room laughed aloud, even as they dabbed their eyes.

“Sarah liked what she liked, too. She liked that pork, one thing. No matter how much money Sarah had, she was never too proud to find some pigs’ feet. And she
loved
to work. She didn’t always love the work she was doing, I can tell you that, but she had something inside of her that made her want to do her best. And that was all she ever tried to give anybody—her best. When she gave her best, it made you want to give your best. That was all her company was supposed to stand for, to my thinking; she was giving her best, and she expected the same from all of us. She cared about how we looked to the outside world, because she saw something beautiful in us. She told me once she had a dream about a field of black roses—and I think Sarah was really just a gardener. That’s how she saw herself. She was trying to get those roses to grow.”

Sadie paused, rocking on her heels. She felt a growing sense of serenity as she spoke about her friend. “Do I think Sarah would have wanted to live a few more years? Well, I guess we all would. But even though I wasn’t here at the end, I think I know what was in Sarah’s mind. There was one day back in St. Louis, we were all sitting around the kitchen table, reading the newspaper—I think, in fact, Sarah had just put on a pot of coffee—and we came across an article about
Plessy versus Ferguson
and separate but equal, and we all talked about how there didn’t seem to be a good future ahead for Negroes. It’s the only time I ever saw Sarah look scared a day in her life. But I can tell you one thing… .”

Sadie paused, gazing at Lizette in her white hat and lovely dress, and her tall son beside her, and F.B. Ransom on the stairs with his young son on his arm, and the scores of other women who represented Sarah’s company, as well as the dignitaries who had come to honor her. Somewhere a baby was crying—and Sadie guessed it was the infant she’d seen that someone told her was named A’Lelia. So A’Lelia was here today after all, wasn’t she?

“Sarah wasn’t scared anymore,” Sadie went on. “We may still be in some dark days, but the future is right in this room, and she knew it. I think if she was standing here, she’d see all these sad faces and say, ‘Y’all just hush. There ain’t nothin’ to be cryin’ about. This room was built for dancing, not cryin’. I’ve worked hard, and my work is done. I saw my roses grow.’ ”

For years afterward, those who heard Sadie speak that day would tell her she’d looked and sounded so much like Sarah at the funeral that they had wondered in their hearts if it wasn’t possible that Madam C.J. Walker had come back to life.

Sadie never believed her friend had left at all.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Historical note: A’Lelia Walker Robinson reached home the day after her
mother’s funeral; she privately visited the Woodlawn Cemetery vault where her
mother’s casket had been kept for her. Almost immediately, A’Lelia married not
Dr. Kennedy, but Dr. Wiley Wilson. She soon divorced Dr. Wilson and married Dr. Kennedy, but they, too, divorced in a short time.

A’Lelia, who was instrumental in the construction of the historic Walker Theatre, still located in Indianapolis, became one of the most visible personalities of
the Harlem Renaissance. She was known for her literary salon, called Dark
Tower, where she entertained figures such as poets Countee Cullen and Langston
Hughes. Hughes wrote a poem for her, “To A’Lelia.” She died at the age of forty-six in 1931. There were 11,000 mourners at her funeral.

Soon after Madam C.J. Walker died, her former husband, C.J., wrote to
F.B. Ransom to ask whether or not he was listed in her will. Mr. Ransom told
C.J. he recalled hearing Madam say that she intended to include C.J. in the
will—but apparently she did not. F.B. Ransom’s parting line to C.J.: “You, I
think, will admit, however, that whatever you lost, you have no one to blame but
yourself for it.”

The Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company thrived for decades after her death, celebrating its sixtieth anniversary in 1960. F.B. Ransom was general manager until his death in 1947. Madam Walker’s adopted granddaughter,
Mae Bryant Perry, eventually served as company president, as did F.B. Ransom’s daughter, A’Lelia Emma Ransom Nelson.

I have tried to be faithful to the
spirit
of Madam C.J. Walker in this book, but
The Black Rose
is a work of fiction. Aspects of Madam’s life have been presented slightly out of sequence or fictionalized, including the creation of composite characters like Lottie Ransaw. Ultimately, no one knows how Madam devised her modification of the steel comb or created her hair formula. She consistently said in interviews and advertisements that the formula came in a dream, which might well be true. One source interviewed for this book believed that a St. Louis physician had given her the formula, and that could also be true. In fact, her secret was so well kept that I do not even know what her hair formula was, except that it probably contained sulfur.

The interviews, documents, and publications included in the boxes of research I received from the Alex Haley Estate are too numerous to mention, but they were invaluable in the writing of this book. Here are a few additional titles I discovered that were helpful:

Madam C.J. Walker,
by A’Lelia Perry Bundles;
Slave Songs of the United
States,
edited by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison;
Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915,
by Louis R. Harlan;
Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920,
by Willard B. Gatewood;
To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives
and Labors After the Civil War,
by Tera W. Hunter;
Stolen Childhood: Slave
Youth in Nineteenth-Century America,
by Wilma King;
Ain’t but a Place: An
Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis,
edited by Gerald Early;
When Harlem Was in Vogue,
by David Levering Lewis;
The Great Cyclone at St. Louis and East St. Louis, May 27, 1896,
compiled and edited by Julian Curzon;
The World Came to St. Louis: A Visit to the 1904 World’s Fair,
by Dorothy Daniels Birk;
Paths of Resistance: Tradition and Dignity in Industrializing Missouri,
by David P. Thelen;
Victorian America: Transformations in
Everyday Life, 1876–1915,
by Thomas J. Schlereth; and
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience,
edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

T
ANANARIVE
D
UE
is a former features writer and columnist for the
Miami
Herald
. She has written two highly acclaimed novels:
The Between
and
My
Soul to Keep
. Ms. Due makes her home in Longview, Washington, with her husband, novelist Steven Barnes.

A One World Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 2000 by Tananarive Due and the Estate of Alex Haley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

One World and Ballantine are registered trademarks and the One World colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/BB/

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-102064

First Edition: June 2000

Jacket design and illustration by David Stevenson and Heather Kern based on original photos © Dave Gordon/Photonica and Shinichi Honda/Photonica

eISBN: 978-0-345-44441-7

v3.0