On Her Own Ground

  The New York Age later reported that Lelia and the debonair Wiley had met in early 1918 in New York. But there were several other opportunities for their paths to have crossed long before that encounter. It is entirely possible that Lelia first saw him in Pine Bluff, where her Aunt Louvenia lived for at least a few years. They may also have met in Indianapolis during August 1911, when both attended the Knights of Pythias convention, as well as between 1911 and 1914, when Wiley and Ed operated Wilson Brothers Pharmacy in St. Louis and lived in the same block as one of Lelia’s dearest friends.

  What neither Madam Walker nor Lelia mentioned in their letters about their Washington visit was that Wiley had become an unspoken source of tension between mother and daughter. While Lelia was charmed by his self-confidence, Madam Walker, in her maternal protectiveness, sensed an arrogance that she suspected would wound her “baby.” Lelia, however, was so smitten with a man as accustomed to the trappings of wealth as she that she was oblivious to his inadequate attentiveness. During the next several months, Madam Walker would struggle to keep her thoughts to herself.

  Surrounded by a “shower” of birthday cards from friends and employees from across the country, Madam Walker celebrated her 51st birthday on December 23 amid the splendor of a festively decorated Villa Lewaro. That morning her former sister-in-law, Peggie Prosser, had arrived at the Irvington train station. In tow was little Frank Ransom, dressed in his new Christmas suit—“somewhat like the goods that soldiers are wearing in their overcoats”—that godmother Walker had bought for him. With Lelia in Washington—probably with Wiley—for the holiday, Madam Walker was ecstatic to have the rooms come alive with a child’s laughter and wonderment.

  The next afternoon on Christmas Eve the house began to fill with other friends. At dusk one of the final arrivals was Hallie Elvira Queen, a Spanish teacher at Dunbar High School, Washington, D.C.’s premier black public preparatory school, whose faculty included several Ivy League Ph.D. recipients, many of whom had been denied jobs in white institutions because of their race. Queen herself was a Dunbar graduate with an A.B. from Cornell and a master’s degree from Stanford University. Fluent in Spanish, French and German, she had been honored for her work as an interpreter during the war. Because she was close to Lelia’s age, Madam Walker may have looked upon her as a daughter—one with whom she found much in common because of Queen’s work as chairman of Howard University’s Red Cross chapter during the war and for the relief work she had done during the East St. Louis riots. What Madam Walker did not know was that Queen had been hired in May 1917 by the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division as an informant and translator to monitor “Negro subversion,” to “carry out surveillance activities among blacks” and to report on “‘suspicious’ activities including church meetings, conferences, streetcorner gatherings, and other such activities.” Whether Queen was on official assignment during her Christmas visit to Villa Lewaro is not reflected in her confidential MID file because her reports to the War Department appear to have ended in November 1918. But by then, she had already determined that “no German propaganda [was] carried among colored families in Lower West Side & Upper Harlem between 125th & 142nd Streets,” Madam and Lelia’s Manhattan neighborhood.

  Regardless of Queen’s intentions, the keen powers of observation that had made her a competent spy also helped her capture the mood of Madam Walker’s first Irvington Christmas. “The building and grounds, with all of their beauty, meant little to me except as ‘a fitting temple for so great a Soul,’” Queen later remembered of her initial entry into the courtyard, “for the genius and achievement of the woman were far greater than buildings of marble and wood.” Madam Walker, she wrote, was “gracious, cordial and unaffected by all the grandeur” as she introduced Queen to the other guests and joined them around the Victrola as they sang Christmas carols. Having “retired early,” Madam Walker awakened everyone at midnight to wish them “Merry Christmas.” Because Edna Lewis Thomas was away, she invited Queen to her room to help address gifts. “Well did they show the largesse of her heart!” Queen remembered. “It was significant that the most generous presents were made to people who could not return them, as the children of her chauffeur [and] her maids.” While Madam Walker had received dozens of gifts from friends and employees, she was most proud of her daughter’s presents. “With most loving care she showed bits of stationery and other gifts from Lelia, for these were indeed the most cherished of all,” wrote Queen.

  Early on Christmas morning, while some of her guests explored the grounds, Madam Walker sat snuggled before the “glowing fireplace” that Mr. Bell had prepared in the main hall. As the logs sizzled and crackled, everyone exchanged gifts until breakfast was served. “It was significant that in that beautiful state dining room, with its wonderful furnishing and rich indirect lighting and all the material good that life could expect,” that “Madam insisted upon our kneeling while she returned to God thanks for the gift of the Christ child and for all other gifts that had come to her,” Queen reverently reminisced. “The theme of her prayer was humility and awe in the presence of God.”

  Throughout the day additional dinner guests trickled in. May Howard Jackson, the sculptor, whose work had been exhibited at Washington, D.C.’s prestigious Corcoran Gallery, was accompanied by her husband, William Sherman Jackson, head of the mathematics department at Washington’s M Street School, the city’s oldest black public school. The accomplished couple was joined around the specially built Hepplewhite table by AME minister W. Sampson Brooks of Baltimore, who discussed his extensive European travels. Among the military men present were a Lieutenant Simmons, as well as a sailor from a torpedoed vessel and a wounded army officer, one of the members of the 369th who recently had received the Croix de Guerre, the French High Command’s most coveted military honor. As Madam Walker contemplated a trip to France to observe the peace talks at Versailles, she was rapt as her dinner companions recounted stories of Europe and the war. “The personnel of that . . . party,” wrote Queen, “may well be taken to show the diversity of interests shown by Madam Walker in selecting her friends.”

  After their early afternoon meal, the group explored the house as if it were a museum, moving from the music room, where they gathered to hear more carols on the Estey’s automatic player, to the library, where they sampled the “magnificent selection of books.” That evening Madam Walker’s chauffeur, Louis Tyler, drove a small group into the city for a basketball game at the Manhattan Casino, the hall at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue where Lelia and James Weldon Johnson had hosted a farewell concert for the departing 369th earlier that year. “Mme’s entrance was the signal for an ovation and she was at once requested to throw the ball from her box,” wrote Queen. After the game, Tyler escorted the two women to Lelia’s town house for the night.

  Early the next morning Tyler drove Madam Walker to Pier A at the tip of Manhattan, where she joined New York City mayor John S. Hylan’s committee to review the return of the Atlantic Fleet. At the mayor’s personal invitation, she and other members of his welcoming party boarded the police boat Patrol. Although the first severe snowstorm of the season had turned the harbor into a “twilight gloom,” the mood was festive as the police band played Christmas music beneath a twenty-foot tree fastened to the afterdeck. Among those on board observing the majestic procession of warships as they steamed through blowing snow past the Statue of Liberty were department store executive Rodman Wanamaker, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, British Columbia governor Sir Frank Barnard, New York Police Commissioner Richard Enright and several city officials. On a nearby naval yacht, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and Secretary of War Newton Baker reviewed the passing ships as they received a nineteen-gun salute. While the Marine Band played “The StarSpangled Banner”—its strains muffled by the misty fog—tens of thousands lined the shore from Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan to 173rd Street. That afternoon the sun broke through on cue, radiating brightly as 6,000 Marines
and sailors stepped in time down Fifth Avenue.

  Madam Walker greeted the new year with much anticipation and exhilaration as she reviewed Ransom’s annual report. Her 1918 earnings had jumped to $275,937.88, an increase of $100,000 over the previous year, and an amount equivalent to more than $3 million today. “Your receipts exceeded over a quarter of a million and I have no doubt but that you can easily make it a half million in 1919,” Ransom ecstatically predicted. “You should congratulate yourself on a remarkable business and when I say remarkable, I am putting it mildly.”

  Even with the wartime supply problems, her sales had more than doubled in September—her busiest month—and in December—usually one of her slowest months. And now with the war behind them, Grower tins and metal combs were back in stock. Just as she had expected, Chicago had turned into a lucrative market. “You will be surprised at the number of parlors that have been opened up since the Convention,” Ransom wrote in mid-January after visiting the city. “Some really beautiful parlors. Chicago now reminds me of New York, a Walker Parlor on every corner.” Even the conflicts with the agents over drugstore sales of Glossine had been resolved by a plan to open wholesale supply stations in several cities. And within weeks the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company would begin branching out from hair care into cosmetics, introducing a line of facial products that included cold cream, cleansing cream, witch hazel and four shades of face powder.

  Still, potential money worries persisted. Madam Walker’s 1918 expenditures—in large part due to the completion of Villa Lewaro—had ballooned to $329,016.85. “This makes an apparent deficit, which is, of course, offset by the loans, etc., all of which have been paid in full with the exception of the New York property,” summarized the meticulous Ransom. “All Indianapolis property is absolutely clear, leaving you a balance in the bank to your credit of $5,228.27,” which, both had to agree, left an uncomfortably tight margin. But after only one month into the new year, money was flowing in so quickly that Madam Walker found little reason to be pessimistic. “As for your business it is increasing in leaps and bounds, which is remarkable for January,” Ransom gleefully announced. “For instance, your receipts for Monday, just one day, were over $2000.00. Your receipts for Wednesday were over $1400.00, so you can see where you are going. If nothing out of the ordinary happens, your receipts for this year will approximate a half a million if it does not go over.” By month’s end the company had taken in $26,477.43, exceeding January 1918 by $12,000.

  To celebrate, Madam Walker visited Tiffany’s showroom at Thirty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue and treated herself to a few eye-catching treasures—a 3.38-carat solitaire diamond set in a platinum ring with “66 tiny diamonds” and a pair of matching earrings, “the pair weighing 7.28 carats.” While there, she also arranged to have three one-carat diamonds from another ring placed into a new setting. Riding up Fifth Avenue after making her purchases, she had every reason to believe that 1919 would move her closer to the millionaire status that she and Ransom both expected her to achieve.

  CHAPTER 20

  Global Visions

  Africa—with its stunningly rich natural resources, its unrealized political potential and its overwhelming educational needs—had long fascinated Madam Walker. At least as early as 1912, she had dreamed, with a missionary’s zeal, of establishing a girls’ industrial training school on the continent. “By the help of God and the cooperation of my people in this country, I am going to build a Tuskegee Institute in Africa!” she had proclaimed during her first National Negro Business League conference. Soon afterward she arranged to pay the tuition for Edmund Kaninga, one of Tuskegee’s small number of African students, whom she hoped to educate “for the purpose of founding and establishing a Negro Industrial School on the West Coast of Africa.” Then in 1914 she contributed funds to a mission school in Pondoland, South Africa, and extended support to another African student at Hannon Industrial Institute in Greenville, Alabama. When it became clear that business demands would prevent her from personally developing her ambitious school project, she offered $1,000 to any one of the three major black denominations—the Baptists, the AMEs or the AMEZs—willing to “start a little Tuskegee Institute in Africa.” And it was not only education that interested Madam Walker. Touched by a report that “seven African . . . girls were being held for ransom,” she sent $100 to Liberia for their release in care of Baptist missionary Emma Bertha Delaney, a Spelman College graduate who would later found the Suehn Industrial Mission near Monrovia.

  The roots of Madam Walker’s curiosity about Africa may well have sprung from her childhood in Madison Parish, where an organized group of black Civil War veterans—swept up in the seductive Back to Africa movement of the 1870s—frequently met to discuss emigration to Liberia. But it probably was in the sanctuary of St. Paul AME Church in St. Louis where she first heard detailed descriptions of life on the faraway continent from visiting bishops and missionaries. As a member of the Mite Missionary Society, she deposited pennies and nickels in the weekly offering basket to help pay the salaries of women missionaries in Africa. With churches in Liberia and Sierra Leone since the early nineteenth century, and in South Africa by the late 1800s, AME representatives—much to the consternation of colonial government officials—often mingled their religious messages with education and politics, militantly claiming “Africa for the Africans.” Madam Walker’s attraction to New York’s Mother AME Zion Church was motivated, at least in part, by her admiration for Alexander Walters, the church’s presiding bishop and a leading Africanist, who had been elected president of the Pan-African Association in London in 1900 and later traveled to West Africa on behalf of the church.

  In late 1918 as plans for the Paris Peace Conference solidified, Madam Walker was among a group of politically conscious African Americans already discussing the status of Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa and German Southwest Africa—the four African colonies ruled by Germany since the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, when the European powers partitioned the continent among themselves. The colonies’ future ownership loomed as a point of contention in any peace settlement. By 1900, Germany—along with Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Belgium—had wrested control of nearly 90 percent of Africa’s land in pursuit of the continent’s mineral and agricultural abundance, including its gold, diamonds, cobalt, palm oil, rubber and cocoa.

  In the November 1914 Crisis, which was mailed during the early months of the European conflict, W.E.B. Du Bois trained a racial prism on the war, denouncing it as a “wild quest for Imperial expansion,” especially by Germany, England and France, into the resource-rich territories in Africa and Asia. “Today civilized nations are fighting like mad dogs over the right to own and exploit these darker peoples,” he assailed. And although Madam Walker’s thoughts about Du Bois’s claims are not recorded, she doubtless saw, and probably read, his article, for her photograph accompanied a story about black YMCA donors in the same issue. Four years later, with Germany’s defeat imminent, Du Bois’s “Memorandum on the Future of Africa”—a document as ambitious as Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for the League of Nations—laid out a plan for an “international Africa.” Intended to encompass the almost one million square miles of land that made up the Belgian Congo, as well as the Portuguese and former German colonies, this proposed new territory was to be administered by a global commission comprised of white Europeans and Americans, as well as by representatives of what Du Bois called “the civilized Negro world”: “black Americans and other people of African descent” from all hemispheres. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, upon receiving Du Bois’s proposal, appears to have summarily dismissed it. In fact, any plan advocating sovereign “self-determination”—the right of a people to establish their own future political status—even when advanced by his own President, horrified him. “The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right of ‘self-determination,’ the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of ce
rtain races,” he wrote soon afterward regarding one of Wilson’s League of Nations principles. Certain that the phrase would “breed discontent, disorder and rebellion” among a range of disaffected peoples and become “the basis [for] impossible demands on the Peace Congress,” he asked in his confidential memorandum, “What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it?” Lansing did not even bother to mention black Americans, so unlikely were they to be able to wage any effective claims on the world stage.

  As much as Du Bois attempted to redefine the issues of the European war to include African Americans, their concerns—whether domestic or foreign—were of little consequence to Woodrow Wilson, who considered the “disposition” of Germany’s former African colonies as “not vital to the life of the world in any respect.” Nevertheless, Du Bois, Madam Walker and others had begun to press the issue of black representation in the American peace delegation. In a late-November 1918 letter to Lansing, who still had not acknowledged his African memorandum, Du Bois requested approval of passports for six “carefully selected . . . representative American Negroes”—including himself—for travel to Paris to observe the conference proceedings. Claiming that “large numbers” of “the colored people of America, and indeed of the world,” had written to him “concerning the Peace Conference,” he declared, “It would be a calamity at the time of the transformation of the world to have two hundred million . . . human beings absolutely without voice.” Already skittish about the notion that “certain races” might wish to have any voice at all in France, Lansing referred the matter to State Department Counselor Frank Polk, who recommended denying travel documents for the group. “I think your inclination not to grant passports is a wise one as racial questions of this nature ought not to be a subject to come before the Conference,” Lansing cabled from Paris in late December, as he and President Wilson awaited the opening of the talks. Determined to minimize public dissent among the ranks of the American peace commission—and acutely aware that his own League of Nations plan had little support in Congress—Wilson already had excluded Republicans from the delegation. Needing all of his energy to negotiate with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau, the Democratic President had no desire to be distracted by black Americans who were intent upon raising embarrassing questions about domestic race relations and American foreign policy in Africa.