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If we tell the truth, what most of us know about Madame CJ Walker could fit
inside a thimble. We know she did her thing roughly ninety years ago. We think she
invented the straightening comb. We flaunt her as the first Black female millionaire, but
with a degree of disdain because of the way she made her money. We know she built a
mansion up the Hudson River, and that she held property in Harlem, where her daughter
A’Lelia put the roar in the Roaring Twenties. Some of this is true, some is not, and
A’Lelia Bundles, Madame C. J. Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, has spent more
than twenty years working to set the record straight. The result, On Her Own Ground, is a
meticulously researched and scrupulously written history of one of America’s greatest
entrepreneurs.
Before she could embrace it, Bundles had to
reconcile her own ambivalence over Madam Walker’s legacy. Coming of age during the
Afro’s heyday, Bundles developed a sense of shame over Madam’s association with
the hot comb. Without the aid of her own research, Bundles writes in On Her Own Ground,
“how was I to know that while Madam Walker was alive the Walker Company never sold
skin bleaches and the words ‘hair straightener’ never appeared in her ads?”
When she began to delve earnestly into Madam’s history, Bundles exposed a host of
falsehoods about her famous foremother.
Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana, in 1867, Madam Walker was an orphan by age 7.
She married at 14 and, at 17, gave birth to her only child, A’Lelia. Her husband died
three years later. Solely responsible for her daughter, she worked as a washerwoman until
her mid-thirties, when, seeking relief from the baldness and scalp disease that plagued
her and many other Black women, she developed the formula for a scalp treatment. It would
make her rich (she later claimed its ingredients came to her in a dream).
Bundles fleshes out a racial climate in which light skin and straight hair were tickets to
success and, for those who weren’t so endowed, White manufacturers marketed products
for “improvement.” These caustic products used racist, derogatory ads promising
to rid Blacks of “the curse” of kinky hair or dark skin. Madam Walker became
successful largely because she, along with the handful of other Black product
manufacturers like Annie Pope-Turnbo (who gave Madam Walker her start in the hair
industry, later, her bitter rival), marketed safe products using respectful advertising.
Madam came to employ upwards of ten thousand Black women as sales agents, and at least
three times that many became trained as Walker “hair culturists.” Of all her
successes, she was proudest of this. “I feel that I have done something for the
race,” she said, “by making it possible for so many colored women and girls to
make money without working hard.” In an era when most Black women had two grueling
employment prospects, field worker or house worker, Madam Walker provided an unprecedented
opportunity for self-employment and financial freedom.
Though hair straightening was highly controversial, Madam Walker modified the hot comb to
accommodate Black hair. She included it as part of her standardized system, along with
hair washing, her grower, and styling. She did not invent the instrument; it had been
available in the U.S. as early as the mid-1800s. When she came to be known as “that
woman who straightens hair,” she lashed out. “I never claimed to straighten
hair,” she said, “I grow hair.”
And growing hair made her one of the most successful women in history. Madam C. J. Walker
died in 1919, never having actually reached millionaire status (she fell a few hundred
thousand dollars short). But, as Bundles illustrates, she must be remembered for her
unflinching faith in God, her philanthropy, and her tireless work as an anti-lynching
campaigner, as much as for her portfolio. M
May 2001
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