On Her Own Ground

  Beyond social work, Madam Walker intended to foster political and social activism among her agents. “I shall expect to find my agents taking the lead in every locality not only in operating a successful business, but in every movement in the interest of our colored citizenship,” she said. Toward that end, the Walker delegates, “on behalf of 12,000,000 Negroes,” dispatched a telegram commending President Wilson for his “strong and vigorous” condemnation of lynching. Wilson secretary Joseph Tumulty’s reply was perfunctory, assuring them that their “patriotic sentiments are appreciated.” Regardless of the dismissive response, the Walker agents knew their concerns had been duly registered with the highest office of the land.

  Any sense of satisfaction they may have felt, however, was crushed by the horrifying Defender headline they faced on the final day of the convention. Two black women—Ethel Barrett and Ellen Brooks—had been “coated with tar and feathers” in Vicksburg, a town where Madam Walker still maintained ties. As if mocking Wilson’s words, five vigilantes also had doused Brooks—the wife of an American soldier said to be “in the trenches in France”—in oily creosote and set her aflame. Although she was described as a “hardworking woman” by former white employers, her attackers felt justified in assaulting her because she appeared to have “no visible means of support.” A woman’s employment—or lack thereof—was certainly no crime. But it had become an issue of contention in the wartime South as local law-makers perverted the federal Selective Service “work or fight” statutes that required all able-bodied men to be either gainfully employed or enlisted in the Army. Never intended to apply to women, the law in some jurisdictions had been twisted to force black women to perform the household work many had begun to abandon for factory jobs, self-employment or migration. Faced with complaints from local white housewives that there was a shortage of cooks and maids, Jackson, Mississippi, city council members passed legislation requiring all able-bodied black women—including the wives of black servicemen—to work. In Wetumpka, Alabama, in the case of Maria Parker, even a self-employed hairdresser was not exempt. Arrested because “her chosen occupation . . . did not meet the appropriate criteria of servility,” both Parker and the washerwoman she employed were charged with “vagrancy” by an overzealous town marshal who “routinely monitored black women’s labor output by counting the clothes hanging in their yards and arresting women who fell short of his quotas,” according to historian Tera Hunter.

  These attacks, charged the Defender, established a new kind of harassment “in that the spirit of [this] social unrest and disorder is determined to strike down the professional and independent men and women of our Race in the South.” Such affronts only strengthened Madam Walker’s desire to use her money and her power to “help my people” and to provide employment for them. As she closed her second annual convention, she was already preparing to open the doors of Villa Lewaro, her Westchester County mansion, for a late-August convention to discuss those very matters.

  CHAPTER 19

  Her Dream of Dreams

  Pronouncing Villa Lewaro a “wonder house” with a “degree of elegance and extravagance that a princess might envy,” The New YorkTimes declared that Madam Walker “could hardly have chosen a more attractive spot” for her home. Considering the affluence of her neighbors, the New York Herald paid her no small compliment when it designated her thirty-four-room mansion “one of the showplaces of the entire Hudson east shore.” Called “the wealthiest spot of ground in the world in proportion to its population” during the early twentieth century, Irvington-on-Hudson and Tarrytown—its neighboring village to the north—were home to some of America’s most prosperous capitalists. In the “zone of the metropolis’s millionaires” was Lyndhurst—railroad mogul Jay Gould’s Gothic Revival mansion—and Kykuit, John D. Rockefeller’s 300-acre Pocantico Hills estate. Tiffanys, Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers—some of them from the founding families of the Ardsley Casino, arguably the nation’s most exclusive country club—were sprinkled among the county’s hills and vales.

  Located less than twenty miles north of Manhattan, Villa Lewaro, with its vermilion Spanish tile roof and milky stucco façade—a blend of white sand and sparkling marble dust—was visible from North Broadway, the well-traveled Westchester County thoroughfare that linked New York City to the state capital in Albany. With Madam Walker’s approval, Vertner Tandy had situated his most ambitious architectural commission not along the river for optimum seclusion, but near the main road in “the most exclusive part of Irvington,” unabashedly heralding the presence of America’s premier black businesswoman. With imported Japanese prayer trees and flowering shrubs and perennials timed to bloom continuously from early spring until late fall, Madam Walker’s Italian gardener intended to create a setting as magnificent as that of any of the surrounding estates with their formal gardens and impeccably tended grounds.

  * * *

  In June 1916, as soon as Ransom and S. A. Singerman, Madam Walker’s New York attorney, had discreetly extricated her from any legal obligations to the Bishop Derrick property, Realtor John Nail began searching for an alternative venue. Quite knowledgeable about real estate in the metropolitan area beyond Harlem, he quickly began negotiations on the Irvington site. After some persuasion, Ransom, Madam Walker and Lelia concurred with Nail that “no better spot on earth could have been secured,” though initially Ransom questioned the need for homes in Harlem and Westchester County. “Now in reference to having two mansions,” Madam Walker informed Ransom from her office on 136th Street, “I will never be content to live in New York City. It does look like a shame after putting so much money in this place to build another.” But because she wanted “comfort” more than anything else, she “could never be satisfied living in anybody else’s home.” And 108 was more her daughter’s domain than her own. “For that reason I guess I am doomed to build the other house,” she conceded. By the end of August 1916 she had signed the deed for the property at 67 North Broadway.

  Irvington’s elite—unable to ignore the daily progress of construction as they commuted to and from the train station at the foot of Main Street—did not warm to the idea of having Madam Walker in their midst, warily viewing her as a curiosity at best, an unwelcome intruder at worst. But as the house took shape, even the most resistant snobs could not deny its tastefulness. With the local speed limit set by the Village Board at twenty miles per hour, they motored slowly past the graceful Ionic columns that now framed the semicircular, two-story portico at the main entrance. By the time Madam Walker’s interior decorators began arranging her furniture and artwork in the spring of 1918, she was too consumed with her own pleasure to care what the neighbors thought. Promising Ransom not to “overdo” herself during the move from Harlem, she admitted that “I am very anxious to get things straightened out” as she spent her first day in her “dream of dreams” on June 13.

  From the curved balcony outside her sleeping porch Madam Walker could see the New Jersey Palisades looming above the Hudson River like a fortress, reminiscent of Vicksburg’s towering bluffs. Her airy boudoir—which caught the early sun through French doors—was designed for pure indulgence with its twelve-piece Louis XVI chamber suite of ivoryenameled mahogany arrayed upon a nearly wall-to-wall hand-woven Aubusson carpet. On warm mornings her housekeeper served breakfast downstairs outside her first-floor dining room on the upper level of a two-tiered terrace. At night yachting parties were known to beam their search lights across those terraces, illuminating the crochet-like balustrades that dramatically latticed the rear of the house.

  Having spared no expense in her effort to create a breathtaking environment for herself, Lelia and Mae, Madam Walker later told a reporter, “I had a dream and that dream begot other dreams until now I am surrounded by all my dreams come true.” At her direction, the walls of the main hall were lined with handcrafted tapestries selected to complement the soft shading of the elaborately carved medallions that were set in the room’s coffered ceiling. I
n the center of that room a large oak table held a bronze Cartier sculpture of a jaguar attacking an equestrian and his rearing horse. Doorways on either side of the fireplace led to the music room, where a prized Estey organ—equipped with an automatic player mechanism—piped familiar harmonies and full symphonies to all floors of the house with the press of a button. Madam Walker’s cozy dining room—with its recessed lighting and whimsical ceiling mural of sea sprites, mermaids and demons—opened from the center of the main hall onto a panoramic view of the river. With the guidance of a consultant from Brentano’s, she had selected an impressive array of morocco-bound volumes for her paneled library. Poet Paul Laurence Dunbar—one of Madam Walker’s favorites—shared shelves with Mark Twain, Honoré de Balzac, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Two limited- edition collections stood out among all the others: a signed, hand-illustrated ten-volume set of the world’s great operas with an introduction by Giuseppe Verdi and a fourteen-volume set of the rare wood- and pigskin-bound Hinckley Bible. Outside the library a broad marble staircase led to the second-floor landing, where Auguste Rodin’s “La Vieille Courtisane” stood watch over the master bedroom and the lavishly furnished guest bedrooms.

  As proud as many African Americans were of Madam Walker’s good fortune, a grudging few accused her of “undue extravagance” and self-aggrandizement. She was quick to remind her detractors that “Villa Lewaro was not merely her home, but a Negro institution that only Negro money had bought.” She had built the house, she said, to “convince members of [my] race of the wealth of business possibilities within the race, to point to young Negroes what a lone woman accomplished and to inspire them to do big things.” Fully conscious of the symbolism Villa Lewaro evoked, she urged Ransom to deliver a clear message to newspaper reporters: “Do not fail to mention in the article for ‘Negro History’ that the Irvington home, after my death, will be left to some cause that will be beneficial to the race—a sort of monument.” Ransom more than complied in a news release marked by his usual flourishes. “This residence will be all that the heart could wish, a monument to the brain, hustle and energy of this remarkable woman, and a milestone in the history of a race’s advancement,” he wrote. “We take a pardonable pride in stating the fact that a member of our race is now the owner of a valuable estate . . . within view of the famous Palisades.” In a variation on Ransom’s theme, Freeman columnist R. W. Thompson praised Madam Walker—his occasional Washington houseguest—for providing an “object lesson to her race as to what can be accomplished by thrift, industry and intelligent investment of money.” Her abilities, he wrote with obvious pride, demonstrated that “all of the brains, executive ability and business acumen are [not] lodged in white craniums.”

  Less than a month after moving in, Madam Walker embarked on the summer tour that took her to Denver for the NACW biennial and Chicago for the Walker agents convention. But after five weeks away from Irvington, she was eager to return to the comfort and quiet of Villa Lewaro. By mid-August she was “busy as a bee” tending her backyard garden. “Every morning at six o’clock I am at work . . . pulling weeds, gathering berries, vegetables, etc. We are putting up fruit and vegetables by the wholesale,” she wrote Ransom. “Tell Nettie she should see me now—am all dressed up in woman-alls, the feminine for overalls, and I am a full-fledged ‘farmerette.’” To add to her delight, her Indianapolis housekeepers, James and Frances Bell, had arrived while she was away. “I think they are just the right folks for this place. Mrs. B. says this is a god-blessed place,” she happily wrote, addressing her maid with the respect she had craved for herself during her days as a cook and washerwoman.

  Relaxed and reinvigorated after two weeks in Irvington, Madam Walker traveled to Atlantic City on August 21 for the National Negro Business League’s nineteenth annual convention. With less than a week before her first Villa Lewaro gala, she charged Lelia with overseeing the Bells, the gardeners and the interior decorators as they fussed with final preparations. Her guest of honor, Emmett Scott—the Special Assistant to the Secretary of War for Negro Affairs—also was the NNBL’s featured speaker. Taking as his text “Winning the War,” he reviewed the accomplishments of the 1,000 black captains and lieutenants in the United States Army and the Medical Reserve Corps, the forty black chaplains and the “more than 300,000 American Negro” draftees. “Two divisions of Negro troops are now in France with eight combat regiments to be trained in various cantonments in the country,” he proudly announced to an audience eager to know the details of the latest battlefield activities of the 92nd Division and the 369th Regiment of the Provisional 93rd, now wearing French uniforms and attached to a French combat division.

  That Friday, NNBL member Vertner Tandy—a physically imposing and charming man—effusively praised his most famous client, thanking her for contributing “more to architecture for Negroes than any person or group of persons in this country.” Nodding in her direction, he peered through his round-rimmed glasses and urged his patron to step forward toward the podium so that he might address her personally. “I want to say to you, Madam Walker, in the presence of this august assembly that it has been through your unselfish loyalty to your race and to your achievements and successes that a Negro has been successful and has achieved success in architecture,” Tandy announced. Calling her “the greatest woman this country has produced,” he extolled her for sharing “with those of her race the glories that she has achieved.” Tandy, it must be said, had profited handsomely from the arrangement, building commission fees into nearly every transaction, from the purchase of the organ to the acquisition of the roof tiles.

  The NNBL audience was indeed, as the architect had suggested, “august,” unquestionably the cream of black entrepreneurship and leadership. In the hall was George White, the former North Carolina congressman who had introduced the first federal antilynching bill in the House of Representatives, then developed a black town near Cape May, New Jersey. Maggie Lena Walker, founder of the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and the first American woman bank president, sat not far from Atlanta Life Insurance Company founder Alonzo Herndon and Charles Clinton Spaulding, the general manager and soon to be president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. In addition to Madam Walker’s competitors, Annie and Aaron Malone—who had just constructed an expensive and well-equipped factory and office building in St. Louis—were her friends John Nail and Charlotte Hawkins Brown.

  Madam Walker had developed so much respect among this group of influential African Americans that when an Austin, Texas, physician was told by NNBL president James Carroll Napier that he had failed to follow protocol in his effort to introduce a resolution, she was able to successfully persuade the body to yield him the floor. Having herself faced a comparable dilemma six years earlier when Booker T. Washington refused her request to speak, she urged the group to support the doctor’s motion to commend George W. Breckenridge, a white San Antonio newspaper publisher who had pledged $100,000 to help convict lynchers in his state. “I am very much in sympathy with what the gentleman has just stated. It was unfortunate he did not bring it to the attention of the Committee on Resolutions but since it didn’t come up at that time, I do believe it can still go yet . . . and it will have the same effect,” she appealed to Napier, just as George Knox had petitioned Booker T. Washington on her behalf in 1912. Impressed by a recent New York Age article about the generous fund, Madam Walker herself had dispatched a telegram of support to Breckenridge the previous week. “I told [him] I represented 20,000 Negro businessmen and women and that I spoke the sentiments of 12,000,000 loyal black Americans,” she said, urging the NNBL to similarly display its appreciation. “I am in favor of this League sending a telegram or some kind of communication . . . I believe it will have much weight.” Without further deliberation, Napier approved the proposal.

  For the late-August Villa opening, Lelia and Edna Lewis Thomas—Madam Walker’s social secretary and Lelia’s close friend—selected engraved invi
tations with a small Walker crest fashioned from a “W” affixed to a cobaltand-lavender shield. “Mme. C. J. Walker,” read the elegantly scripted card, “requests the pleasure of your presence at an afternoon with Hon. Emmett J. Scott, Assistant Secretary of War, Sunday, August twenty-fifth from three until six at her residence, Villa Lewaro, Irvington-on-Hudson.” Fully immersed in war-related matters—and intent upon positioning Villa Lewaro as a venue for both social enjoyment and political debate—Madam Walker had instructed Lelia to add the words “Conference of interest to the race” to the RSVP line. With Scott as honoree, she could be sure of lively conversation and high attendance.

  Long past the stony condescension to which he had subjected Madam Walker during her first visit to Tuskegee, Scott apparently was pleased to accept her invitation. But when he received a preliminary guest list, he objected to some of the names. His personal secretary’s subsequent letter to Lelia hurled her into a state of panic. “I have never in my life been so disturbed. I understand that one or two of those men are antagonistic to Mr. Scott,” Lelia wrote Ransom. “I am awfully fearful about this thing wondering how mother intends to bring these different factions together after they have scrapped all of these years. How she is going to bring them together is a mystery to me.”