That Christmas, as had become her holiday season custom for the last six years, Madam Walker distributed dozens of food baskets to the neighborhood’s needy families. And in her final gesture of generosity to the community, she sponsored a benefit to raise funds to pay off the mortgage of the Alpha Home, a black retirement residence that had been founded for pensionless former slaves. Her featured guest was Matilda Dunbar, the mother of the late poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who “gloriously” recited his “Negro Soldiers.” The young baritone Louis Depp, who had performed at one of Lelia’s spring parties, had returned from Springfield, Ohio. Only the talented Noble Sissle, who recently had paired up with a promising ragtime pianist named Eubie Blake, was missing from Madam’s lineup of favorites. Madam Walker fittingly capped the evening with one of the largest contributions the home had ever received.
“The citizens of Indianapolis, without regard to race, are one in their expressions of regret at the loss of Madam C. J. Walker as a resident of the city of Indianapolis,” read the front-page Freeman article soon after she had departed. Her business enterprise, wrote reporter William Lewis, “is not only a credit to her and her race, but a monument to Negro thrift and industry throughout America.” He proclaimed the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company “the largest of its kind in this country.” Further, he said, “what is not generally known [is that] this company enjoys a large and growing white and foreign trade.”
It was not her role as an entrepreneur that would be most missed, wrote Lewis, “but as the big-hearted race loving woman that she is.” Her gifts, he believed, had been “so freely and so largely” given that the community had come to take them for granted. “When the needy poor and institutions are no longer cheered, inspired and helped by her timely assistance, then and not until then will we fully appreciate what she was to Indianapolis.”
CHAPTER 15
Black Metropolis
It is just impossible for me to describe it to you,” Madam Walker wrote Ransom of Lelia’s spectacularly renovated Harlem town house. The first-floor hair salon, tastefully decorated in muted grays with royal blue velvet and white marble accents, “beats anything I have seen anywhere even in the best hair parlors of the whites,” she gushed. “The decorators said that of all the work they had done here in that line there is nothing equal to it, not even on Fifth Avenue.” And that apparently included the posh midtown salons of Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, the city’s premier skin care specialists who competed aggressively for New York’s elite white clientele.
Just after New Year’s Day 1916, and a few weeks before Madam Walker’s permanent move to New York, Lelia celebrated the remodeling of the Walker Hair Parlor and Lelia College with a festive open house. To the rousing tunes of James Reese Europe’s Tempo Club Ensemble—a favorite of East Coast high society from Saratoga to Newport—hundreds of guests glided along a deep-pile blue runner into Lelia’s elegant lobby, past porcelain manicure tables, pristine operators’ booths and sparkling display cases of Walker products, then through beaded curtains into her Japanese-themed tearoom. Even in the winter’s chill, the backyard gazebo lured visitors into the garden.
Like her mother, Lelia loved staging social extravaganzas and providing her guests with delicious food, appealing entertainment, inspired decorations and, above all, interesting people from the worlds of music, theater, art, politics and business. And like her mother, she had a knack for engineering the events to create publicity for her business.
On this particular occasion, the Indianapolis World stringer lauded the stylish hostess—a “most affable and courteous woman” whose personality “permeates the atmosphere”—and anointed her “the presiding genius” of this “exquisite beauty palace.” So often overshadowed by Madam Walker’s prodigious accomplishments, Lelia relished the recognition. Even her mother had credited her with the idea of establishing a Walker presence in Harlem. The salon—with its refined ambience—would be her most enduring contribution to the expanding Walker enterprise.
“Now, Mr. Ransom, in regards to this house, you will agree with Lelia when she said that it would be a monument for us both,” wrote the proud mother in late February 1916. And although they had initially planned to manufacture products in the basement, Madam Walker decided against marring the tranquil atmosphere. “Lelia and Mae are rejoicing over the fact that they will not have to make any more [hair] preparations,” she told Ransom. “And I agree with you that this house is too fine to have a factory connected with it.”
After having been irritated with Lelia for months over the excessive costs of the renovation, Madam Walker now had nothing but praise. “It was a surprise and I haven’t a word to say against it,” she said. Adept as Madam Walker could be at handling confrontation in her business affairs, she dreaded direct conflict with her daughter. Lelia, likewise, shrank from arguments with her mother. Still, they had their battles. Caught in the middle, Ransom frequently was required to serve as the go-between, buffering their impulsive tempers and diplomatically dispatching the criticisms and complaints that neither woman wanted to deliver to the other.
The clashes had begun only a few months into the first phase of the remodeling project at 108 West 136th Street as Lelia quickly ran through the $7,000 budget Madam had allotted. Fearing her mother’s exasperation, she asked Ransom to convey the news of the contractor’s cost overruns. “Am writing you to do a friendly turn for me. Am dodging behind you to keep the bullets from hitting me,” she wrote, enclosing the “final” bill of $15,000, a sum which, she admitted, did “not include wall coverings or any of the hundred and one things that are taken in building.”
Lelia anticipated Ransom’s reprimand, but the closeness in their ages—Ransom was only three years her senior—made him a less intimidating judge. “Now I know, Mr. Ransom, Mother has been wonderful to me. She has been so good until I know it seems a rank imposition, and, so it is, for me to say money to her again. That is why I am getting behind you,” she said both with diffidence and with a near-desperate hope that her mother would approve of her efforts. “You can trust me when I say the home is wonderful and if she was here she would back me in everything I am doing. There isn’t one penny being wasted.”
To soften the request, Lelia proposed a “loan from Mother in a businesslike way,” rather than an outright gift for the additional funds. “I am willing to give Mother the same interest her bank gives her, even double. I’ll pay it, my word of honor as a woman, Mr. Ransom,” she breathlessly bargained, pleading with him to intercede on her behalf. “Whatever you do, don’t let her get sore at me and ball me out, for I certainly am one nervous child.” So nervous, in fact, that she invoked the image of a recent high-seas rescue: “I realize I have certainly imposed some task on you, but you’ll have to be to me what the Carpathia was to the Titanic.”
To reassure Ransom, and ultimately her mother, she reminded him that she would more than make up for her costly renovations with expanded product sales, more Lelia College students and new customers. “My income now is $1,000 a month in poor seasons and in the summer time I know it will be $2,000 to $3,000 per month since I’ll be able to take care of the increase in my trade.” Like her mother, Lelia had nurtured a satisfied clientele, collecting testimonial letters that commended her work in New York and Pittsburgh. “Since you treated my hair, it has grown thicker and longer in 7 months than it has grown for 7 years,” a happy customer from nearby Ninety-ninth Street wrote. Every six weeks Lelia and Mae instructed a class of twenty Walker hair culturists—many of them from other states, who then returned to their homes and trained others.
By January 1916, Lelia’s monthly revenues indeed had reached the $2,000 mark. “The business has picked up wonderfully since she opened,” Madam Walker told Ransom, vindicating Lelia’s insistence on having an opulent setting for their New York operation. And although Lelia feared her mother’s disapproval, her anxiety was as much self-imposed as real since her requests were almost always granted. “Lelia wants $3,0
00,” Madam Walker had advised Ransom during the summer of 1915 as Lelia completed the purchase of 110, the building next door to 108 West 136th Street. “Am sending her a check today.” Two months later, Madam Walker again instructed Ransom to honor Lelia’s request for an additional $4,000. “Will you kindly go to the bank and see . . . if there is sufficient amount to cover the same? If not, you make arrangement so that they will honor my check.”
At Lelia’s direction, architect Vertner Tandy—a graduate of Tuskegee and Cornell and one of the first black licensed architects in New York State—combined 108 and 110 into a single stately building with a bowed red-brick-and-limestone Georgian façade. Scalloped pale gray chiffon curtains framed the stylized Venetian windows that spanned the street-level front wall. On the right, French doors opened onto the hair salon with its patterned metal ceiling and buffed parquet floor. To the left at 108, marble Doric columns guarded the entrance to the upstairs living quarters. On the third floor, Madam Walker’s bedroom—with its intricately carved fireplace and English wall tapestries—was furnished in heavy mahogany. Down the hall Lelia’s ivory Louis XVI suite was trimmed in gold, her dresser and mantel filled with framed photographs and statuettes, her floor scattered with hand-woven Persian rugs.
The women’s love of music was evident on every level of the four-story house. In the bedroom hallway they shared a Victrola. A player organ reached from floor to ceiling in the main hall. But it was in the drawing room where music took center stage, whether from recordings on the gold Victrola, from the talents of professional musicians on the new gold-leaf-trimmed Aeolian grand piano or from Mae’s hands as she practiced on the gold harp that had been retrieved from Frances Spencer.
As Madam Walker settled easily into her daughter’s luxurious home, few outward traces of her earlier life remained. Some observed that her mannerisms, her grasp of public affairs and her cultural interests all meshed comfortably with her newly acquired status. Frances Garside, the first white reporter to pen an extensive profile of Madam Walker, noted in the Literary Digest that as she entered the drawing room in an “expensive pink-flowered lavender dressing-gown on a week-day morning,” she carried herself “gracefully on high French heels . . . with a lack of self-consciousness few of us know when we get on our Sunday clothes.”
Almost from the moment Lelia moved to New York in 1913, she had longed for her mother to join her, and with each trip to the city, Madam Walker became more and more receptive. In October 1914 an intimate Sunday evening dinner party that Lelia hosted in her honor may have sealed Madam Walker’s decision to relocate. Amid decorations of orange and crimson autumn leaves and golden chrysanthemums, a few of Harlem’s most influential residents dined upstairs at 108 while extolling the community’s investment opportunities and rising real estate values. Among the guests seated beneath Lelia’s dazzling crystal chandelier were New York Age publisher Fred Moore, Realtor Philip A. Payton, Jr., and composer and conductor James Reese Europe, all men whose accomplishments Madam Walker admired.
With his 125-member Clef Club Orchestra, the classically trained Europe had caused a cultural sensation in May 1912 when he introduced African American music and musicians to a racially mixed Carnegie Hall audience. As bandleader and music director for Vernon and Irene Castle—the celebrated husband-and-wife dance team—Europe had provided the rhythmic tunes that helped them popularize the turkey trot and the foxtrot among white American audiences during the 1910s. A dark-skinned man with a “statuesquely powerful build,” Europe moved easily on the yachts and in the ballrooms of the Wanamakers, Goulds and Vanderbilts, who frequently booked his musicians for their private parties. With his recently formed Tempo Club Ensemble now headquartered in a row house at 119 West 136th Street, he and the Walkers had become neighbors.
Another guest, Philip Payton, was called “the Father of Colored Harlem” for his role in opening the area’s housing to African Americans a decade earlier. While working as a janitor in a white-owned realty firm, the college-educated Payton had witnessed the profits to be made from lucrative real estate deals. To cash in on a surge of property speculation, Payton founded a small firm in 1900 when fewer than 5,000 of Manhattan’s 36,000 black residents lived in Harlem. Four years later, under a new name—the Afro-American Realty Company—he began a concerted drive to rent apartments to blacks who were moving to Harlem from lower-Manhattan neighborhoods as well as from the American South and the Caribbean.
His biggest break surfaced, he often said, when a personal dispute between two white landlords on 134th Street caused the more creatively spiteful one to turn over an apartment house to Payton to “fill with colored tenants” in order that he might “get even.” As a result, scores of the remaining white tenants fled, forcing other landlords in the neighborhood to hire Payton to fill their emptying buildings. It was a story that Fred Moore, another of the dinner guests—and an early officer and investor in the Afro-American Realty Company—knew well. Despite Payton’s prescient coup, he had been forced to close his firm in 1908 after a series of legal and financial difficulties. Nevertheless, in 1914 he remained an astute investor and observer of the market.
Until the early 1870s Harlem had been a distant, rural village of mostly poor farmers on the northern end of Manhattan Island. The estates of its few wealthy residents were sparsely dispersed, isolated from the hustle and bustle of Wall Street and the gentility of the Astor, Carnegie and Vanderbilt mansions that later would stand like jeweled sentinels along Fifth Avenue. But by the end of that decade—when the launching of the city’s first elevated train cut commuting time from lower Manhattan to the “el” station at 129th Street to less than half an hour—Harlem became the city’s first suburb, a kind of “rural retreat of the aristocratic New Yorker.”
Optimistic contractors and architects—including the acclaimed Stanford White—built block upon block of opulent brownstones and luxury apartment buildings. By the 1890s Harlem Monthly Magazine proclaimed the district “distinctly devoted to the mansions of the wealthy [and] the homes of the well-to-do.” As the nineteenth century ended, subway construction sparked such feverish speculation that when the Interborough Rapid Transit line reached Lenox Avenue and 145th Street in 1904, risk-taking investors had transformed nearly all of Harlem’s former farmland into residences. With this second wave, Irish and Jewish families joined the upper-class British and German residents who had begun arriving two decades earlier.
When the overheated real estate market finally collapsed in 1904 and 1905, West Harlem was saturated with vacant apartments. A shrewd Philip Payton capitalized on the situation, allegedly charging blacks higher rents than whites had paid, but also offering those middle-class blacks who could afford to leave the slums and tenements of the Tenderloin and San Juan Hill districts the first truly decent housing many of them had known. And while greater Harlem would remain predominantly white for many more years, the trickle of black migration began to turn into a torrent during the coming decade.
In 1908, around the time Madam Walker arrived in Pittsburgh, Payton was forced to close the Afro-American Realty Company. Two of his employees, John E. Nail and Henry Parker, filled the breach, combining their youthful ambition with Nail’s considerable family connections. Nail’s late father, John B. “Jack” Nail, had been a political boss who had owned a hotel and two popular taverns in the 400 block of Sixth Avenue in the Tenderloin district at the turn of the twentieth century. His investments in Harlem property and other real estate had made him one of the wealthiest black men in New York.
In 1911 when blacks were scattered between 128th Street on the south and 145th Street on the north between Fifth and Seventh avenues, the younger Nail joined with Reverend Hutchens C. Bishop—pastor of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church’s prosperous, all-Negro congregation—to engineer black New York’s first million-dollar real estate transaction. The package—composed of land for a Vertner Tandy–designed church and rectory at 214 West 134th Street, as well as a row of ten apartment buildings along
the north side of 135th Street between Lenox and Seventh that sold for $640,000—became the symbolic beachhead of an unstoppable black presence in Harlem.
The backlash from white Harlem residents—still very much in the majority—was swift. John G. Taylor, president of the Harlem Property Owners’ Protective Association, called upon his members to “fight the common enemy.” His solution for the new arrivals—regardless of their incomes or aspirations—was to “drive them out and send them to the slums where they belong.” Just before St. Philip’s 1911 purchase, a group of white homeowners on 136th Street had vowed to “neither sell nor rent to colored people.” Taylor insisted that “no matter what happens, the residents on the south side of 136th Street will stick absolutely . . . by erecting a 24-foot fence in the back yards of the houses.” Two years later, when Lelia persuaded Madam Walker to buy 108 West 136th Street in the block behind St. Philip’s buildings—and on that very same “south side of 136th Street”—no wall had been constructed and the owner was eager to sell. By October 1914, when Madam Walker dined with Payton, Europe and Moore, an estimated 50,000 blacks were living in Harlem.
Not long after their enjoyable meal, Madam Walker and the three men were joined by black Shakespearean actor Richard B. Harrison on an excursion to a nearby investment property. Convinced that “all she had to do was lay eyes on Bishop’s Court”—the Flushing, Long Island, home of William B. Derrick, a recently deceased, and much revered, AME bishop—the men arranged a tour of the estate with his widow, Clara Derrick. “Naturally enough the New York folk felt that after New York came the end of the world,” the Freeman jealously reported. Almost immediately Madam Walker made a deposit on the property.
Enchanted by the four-story, twenty-room house with its spiral staircase, frescoed ceilings, magnificent trees and customized Italian marble fireplace, Madam Walker admitted that she had been taken as much with its connection to the late bishop as with its actual market value, especially after she learned that the lovely mansion was surrounded by one of Flushing’s poorest neighborhoods. Ransom could not help agreeing with Madam Walker that because of the bishop’s status among African Americans, her association with his home—regardless of its location—would provide what she called “a big ad” for her and her business. But before Madam Walker could move into the house, Flushing’s local governing board destroyed whatever fiscal value it had left by rezoning the district surrounding the estate from a residential to a business area. “The house is worth nothing . . . and the property as it stands altogether is worth no more than $17,000,” S. A. Singerman, an attorney she had retained to handle her New York legal affairs, informed Ransom. “[It] is only good for the erection of cheap tenements.” By late May—after black newspapers across the country had made much of the purchase—Madam Walker was seeking a discreet and graceful exit from the deal.
On Her Own Ground Page 22