The next day, to the household’s delight, she was sufficiently alert to listen to Edna and Lou read Lelia’s most recent letters. Buoyed by a particular piece of news she had longed to hear, Madam Walker rallied long enough to dictate her response. “My Darling Baby,” her letter began. “You made me very happy to know that at last you have decided to marry Kennedy. Altho I have never let you know this—it has been my wish ever since I met Wiley in Wash. I never thought he would make you happy, but I do believe Kennedy will.” Racing ahead breathlessly, Madam Walker had already begun to orchestrate her daughter’s engagement announcement and wedding ceremony.
My wish is for you to have a quiet wedding out here and leave shortly afterward for France. You may get your chateau and I will follow. Then I will take my contemplated trip around the world. Let Kennedy study abroad for a year. I will make France my headquarters. I never want you to leave me to go this far again . . . Nettie and the girls join me in love to you and Mae and I send my love, kisses and kisses and kisses.
Your devoted,
Mother
It was as if Lelia’s news had temporarily suspended reality, allowing Madam Walker to forget her illness and its inevitable consequences. With her daughter’s “future happiness . . . uppermost” in her mind, Madam Walker summoned Kennedy from his home in Chicago. When he reached her bedside she assured him he had her approval. “I want you to marry Lelia. Make her happy,” Kennedy remembered her saying years later.
At the same time, Madam Walker hesitated to ask Lelia to return, reluctant to interfere with her efforts to establish her own footing. “If I must go I want to see my daughter, Lelia, but if the crisis passes I would not like to disturb her pleasure,” she had said before leaving St. Louis. Other members of the household, however, had already wired Lelia of her mother’s fragile state.
Three days later, on Monday, May 19, just before Madam Walker lost consciousness, Dr. Ward heard her say, “I want to live to help my race.” That same day, Lelia cabled from Colón, Panama, that she had booked herself and Mae on the next ship. But with international maritime travel in the Southern Hemisphere subject more to freight requirements than passengers’ needs, Lelia was at the mercy of unpredictable schedules. The specific reasons for her delayed departure are unknown, but it was to be nearly a week before she and Mae would leave Central America.
That Thursday a cold, gloomy rain only deepened the sad reality that a semiconscious Madam Walker could no longer speak or see. Near midnight on Saturday, when she slipped into an irreversible coma, Dr. Ward warned that “she could not last longer than Sunday.” Throughout the night, Drs. Kennedy and Ward, along with Madam Walker’s nurses and the other women of the household—Nettie, Edna, Lou, Peggie Prosser and three of her nieces—took turns monitoring her from around the four-poster bed. Then, on Sunday morning, May 25, shortly after the grandfather clock at the other end of the upstairs hallway chimed seven times, Dr. Ward broke the silence with the announcement all had feared. “It is over,” he said quietly. In the end, Madam Walker’s kidneys, long ravaged by the nephritis first diagnosed in 1916, had failed.
Now finally en route to New York, Lelia and Mae received word of Madam Walker’s death in midocean. Still several hundred miles from New Orleans, the ship’s officers radioed ahead to reserve a Pullman for their trip to New York.
Stunned black New Yorkers learned the details from dozens of Harlem and Tenderloin pulpits during hastily prepared memorial services. At Villa Lewaro, Edna and Lou began logging and organizing hundreds of resolutions, condolence letters and telegrams. By Sunday afternoon Ransom was fielding interviews with newspaper reporters and planning the funeral. Assuming that Lelia would arrive no later than midweek, he scheduled the services for Friday. But Wednesday, then Thursday came and went with no word from Lelia.
Early Friday morning the Irvington chief of police stationed himself on Broadway to direct the first of the thousand mourners as their slowly moving cars and buses stretched through the village. Inside Villa Lewaro, members of the Women’s Motor Corps ushered early arrivals into the music room, where Madam Walker—dressed in a shroud of white satin with a spray of orchids at her breast—lay in a bronze casket. As Edna played “Communion in G” on the Estey, bereaved Walker agents from all over the country joined a Who’s Who of black America in a solemn procession around the bier.
Just before eleven o’clock, family and close friends assembled in the second-floor hall. With Mother AME Zion pastor James W. Brown leading the way, they descended the marble stairwell, then walked through the front hall and into the music room behind the impressive lineup of pallbearers. First came composer J. Rosamond Johnson, then New York Age publisher Fred Moore, followed by architect Vertner W. Tandy, Realtor John Nail, Harlem YMCA secretary Thomas E. Taylor and finally Buffalo Realtor and city clerk William Talbert, whose wife, Mary, was in France on behalf of the Red Cross. The honorary pallbearers, carefully selected by Ransom to reflect the broad spectrum of Madam Walker’s interests and political alliances—as well as his own ambitions—included Baptists and AMEs, Bookerites and NAACPers, entertainers and attorneys, journalists and physicians. There was Robert Russa Moton of Tuskegee, James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP, Emmett Scott of the War Department, James C. Napier of the National Negro Business League, Eugene Kinckle Jones of the National Urban League, George Knox of the Freeman, A. E. Manning of the Indianapolis World and comedian Bert Williams. Tragically absent was James Reese Europe, Madam Walker’s friend and Harlem neighbor, who had been fatally stabbed by a deranged band member just three weeks earlier.
With the nieces—Anjetta, Mattie and Gladis—as well as the Ransoms, Alice Kelly, Jessie Robinson and Peggie Prosser seated near the open casket, the service began without Lelia and Mae. “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,” intoned Reverend William H. Brooks of St. Mark’s Methodist Episcopal Church, commencing an emotional recitation of Madam Walker’s favorite psalm. Then, following a brief prayer by Reverend Brown, the lustrous baritone of Harry T. Burleigh—the man whose rendering of Negro spirituals had influenced Czech composer Antonin Dvorák—encompassed the room with “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” After Reverend A. Clayton Powell, Sr.’s obituary of Madam Walker, J. Rosamond Johnson’s own fitting composition, “Since You Went Away,” was so heartfelt that he “made all those present feel even more their loss,” reported the Chicago Defender. At Madam Walker’s request, Reverend W. Sampson Brooks of Baltimore’s Bethel AME based his eulogy on the Twenty-third Psalm. The superbly eloquent minister recalled his last conversation with Madam Walker—perhaps during her visit to his home in November 1918—when they had read together from the Book of Revelation with its captivating descriptions of Heaven’s golden altars and pearl-studded gates, or during Christmas Day dinner at Villa Lewaro. At the time, he remembered, “she had had a premonition of an early death.”
Before the final prayer, a telegram from Lelia arrived with the news that she would reach Irvington that afternoon. But at two-thirty, as the hearse rounded Villa Lewaro’s semicircular driveway en route to Woodlawn Cemetery, there was still no sign of Lelia and Mae. When their train finally pulled into Manhattan’s Grand Central Station the next afternoon, Kennedy was there to comfort them. Profoundly distraught, Lelia put off until Monday a visit to the cemetery vault to view her mother’s remains. Then on Tuesday, June 3, surrounded by a small group of intimates at one of Woodlawn’s most peaceful sites, Lelia buried her mother in a private graveside ceremony, her final loving gesture a blanket of fragrant roses arrayed upon the casket.
Madam Walker’s death was news all over the world, from Paris’s Le Figaro and La Liberté to the Chicago Defender, from the New York Herald to the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch. A widely published Associated Press article called her “the wealthiest negro woman in the United States, if not the entire world . . . credited with having amassed a fortune of more than $1,000,000 through the sale of a ‘hair restorer.’” The New York Times, in an edited version of the same wire story, ma
naged to transform the words into a singular insult: “Mrs. C. J. Walker, known as New York’s wealthiest negress, having accumulated a fortune from the sale of so-called anti-kink hair tonic and from real estate investments, died yesterday.” In contrast, the St. Louis Republic’s editorial—“A Negro Woman’s Success”—applauded her, as did the New York Post: “The Negro race . . . gave itself a full stamp of Americanism by producing in ‘Madam’ Walker a woman who built up a great fortune.”
Her highest praise, however, came from the black press in whose pages she had frequently appeared. “She owed her success not alone to the merit of her commodity. It was far more due to her ability as an organizer, her faith as well as talent, in advertising,” wrote The A.M.E. Church Review. “Her largest legacy is the inspiring example she has left to ambitious souls to undertake the achievement of large affairs,” wrote one observer. “The career of this self-made woman should be an incentive and an inspiration to all members of the race,” said the New York Age, commending her for employing her “financial success” to “help the race on its upward stride.”
Others focused on her pioneering efforts in the modern hair care industry. “It is given to few persons to transform a people in a generation. Yet this was done by the late Madam Walker,” wrote Du Bois, crediting her with improving the hygiene practices of thousands of women who otherwise would have neglected their hair. Her use of the metal hot comb—“the least important or necessary” part of her method, he said—was widely misunderstood and ridiculed. The accusation that black women were straightening their hair “in order to imitate white folk,” he continued, led her to modify her method to affect a more natural-looking texture, while still retaining the “essential” cleaning and brushing. “It is not too much to say that this revolutionized the personal habits and appearance of millions of human beings,” Du Bois concluded, with praise for her philanthropic generosity. Nevertheless, through the next several decades Madam Walker’s name became synonymous with hair straightening. Derisively dubbed the “de-kink queen,” she had maintained until the end that she was a hair culturist, not a hair straightener. “She never claimed or advertised that she could straighten hair,” Ransom told the New York Sun in an effort to correct the record soon after her death. “That statement is all a mistake. She asserted merely that she could grow hair on any head where the roots were not dead.”
In their final assessments, several reporters focused on her contributions to the advancement of women’s rights. “She was the herald of a new social order in which women will be independent and the oldest form of property will vanish forever,” wrote journalist George Schuyler several years later, adding that Madam Walker “had given dignified employment to thousands of women who would otherwise have had to make their living in domestic service.”
Many newspapers called her a millionaire, though in truth the value of her estate—her homes, factory, office, salons, apartment buildings, real estate, furnishings, cars, diamonds and furs—at the time of her death was probably closer to $600,000* with a large tax liability and $100,000 in outstanding bequests. But the speculation persisted, fueled by headlines and spurred by African Americans’ yearning for a heroine whose financial success could rival any American rags-to-riches saga. Perhaps the primary purveyor of the million-dollar myth was Ransom himself: “Madam Walker’s fortune of $1,000,000 or more was built up from the wide sale of a hair restorer strictly,” he reportedly told one New York newspaper soon after her death. Accurately quoted or not, the claim attributed to him provided a welcome antidote to the perception of inferiority. Her career, the Chicago Defender proclaimed, was “a message to the world that the Negro can reach the American standard [and] that it is possible for a member of the Negro Race to overcome the handicaps of centuries in a single generation.” Noting the dearth of “Negro . . . oil kings, movie magnates and magnificent stock exchange gamblers,” the New York Post wrote: “Mrs. Walker demonstrated that [Negroes] may rise to the most distinctive heights of American achievement. Men who do nothing but sneer at what Coleridge-Taylor composed, Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote or Booker T. Washington built will be all respect when the Negroes have their full quota of millionaires.”
*$600,000 in 1919 is equivalent to approximately $6 million today.
It certainly had been Madam Walker’s dream to become a millionaire, and a goal she and Ransom had envisioned for several years. Just months before her death, she told a reporter that she hoped to give “a million dollars to help my Race fight for its rights.” Had she lived another decade she undoubtedly would have fulfilled her wish.
Ultimately, however, it was not the final figure in the ledger books that defined the measure of Madam Walker’s life, but the promise she bequeathed to future generations that they might realize even greater successes and dream ever more elaborate dreams. The fact that several generations of African Americans have believed that she was a millionaire made such a goal seem possible.
In an affectionate parting remembrance, her friend Mary McLeod Bethune called her “the clearest demonstration I know of Negro woman’s ability recorded in history. She has gone, but her work still lives and shall live as an inspiration to not only her race but to the world.”
A’Lelia Walker: An Afterword
On June 6, 1919, just three days after she buried her mother, Lelia turned thirty-four years old. That same day, she also married Wiley Wilson.
Despondent at her loss and overwhelmed by the responsibilities now thrust upon her as president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, Lelia was desperate for an emotional anchor. James Arthur Kennedy, the man she had promised her mother she would marry, was separated but not yet divorced from his first wife. Unwilling to wait even a few months, Lelia impulsively turned to Wiley. It was a decision she would soon regret.
Meanwhile in Indianapolis, F. B. Ransom was earnestly reassuring customers, vendors and creditors of the company’s stability. At the same time he also was discovering that his boasts about the value of Madam Walker’s estate had been wildly optimistic. In mid-June, when Lelia and Wiley stopped briefly in Indianapolis—en route to a two-month honeymoon in California and Hawaii—Ransom informed Lelia of the distressing financial news. That week they also learned that John Davis, Madam Walker’s second husband—from whom she had not been legally divorced—was making claims against the estate, as were a few estranged family members who had not been included in the will. Lelia, who wanted no part of the confusion, headed west with Wiley, abdicating her responsibilities to Ransom in a way that her mother never would have done.
It always had been difficult enough for Lelia to measure up to her mother’s private expectations, but now the comparisons were being discussed in public. Lelia, nearly everyone said, was neither the businesswoman nor the leader that Madam Walker had been.
Nevertheless, when Lelia returned to Harlem, she made every effort to focus on Lelia College and her New York and Pennsylvania sales agents. But her marriage was already faltering and she was preoccupied with personal matters. That fall, hoping to regain Wiley’s affection, she handed him the deed to a handsome four-story Seventh Avenue building for his new medical clinic. Instead of thanking her, he flaunted an affair with an old girlfriend, both humiliating her in public and daring her to protest. Just as Madam Walker had predicted, Wiley had broken her heart. By the fall of 1921, they were separated.
That November, Lelia Walker Wilson sailed alone for a five-month trip to Europe, Africa and the Middle East, turning heads as she strolled the decks of the Paris in her plumed hats and expensive jewels. Weary of the gossip in Harlem, she had decided to spend time abroad freeing herself from thoughts of Wiley. Still struggling with her mother’s death, as well as her own role in the Walker enterprise, she also confided to a friend that she hoped to “find” herself.
Lelia’s arrival in Paris was greeted with an “excellent write-up in the French papers.” In fact, La Liberté’s coverage had been quite favorable. But a week later L’Intransigeant call
ed her a “négresse” in a short article by a reporter who had been on board the Paris covering French Premier Aristide Briand’s trip from America. “I am utterly surprised that a French paper would print an article, so unkindly phrased, concerning a person . . . that happens to be a black American,” she wrote to the paper’s editor from her suite at the Carlton Hotel on the Champs-Elysées. “From what the black soldiers of America told on their return after the war, I had expected more kindness from a French press.”
The incident did little to dampen Lelia’s pleasure throughout the holiday season as she shopped at Cartier and celebrated the new year in Paris, then traveled to Monaco, Nice and the South of France during January. In London she caused a sensation at Covent Garden as she was escorted to her box. “Her appearance,” a friend later wrote, “was so spectacular that the singers were put completely out of countenance.” In Rome, Lelia attended the coronation of Pope Pius XI, then sailed to the Middle East for a tour of Palestine. In Cairo she rode among the pyramids on camelback. Then, after steaming down the Suez Canal, she traveled the length of the Red Sea, disembarking at Djibouti for an overland sojourn to Ethiopia. In Addis Ababa, she became the first American to meet Empress Waizeru Zauditu, the daughter of Menelik II, the emperor who had distinguished himself among African leaders by defeating the invading Italian army in 1896.
For one of the few times since her mother’s death, Lelia was having fun. She was also allowing herself to fall in love again, rekindling her relationship with Kennedy through a series of affectionate letters. Within days of reaching Paris, she had cabled her “Artie” of her safe arrival. In reply, he urged her to “have every pleasure that can be offered,” just as he had done while in France during the final days of the war. “I think of the whole of Europe in terms of you,” he wrote, with hopes that her “entire tour may be like . . . a beautiful long road strewn with fragrant crimson flowers, the end of which terminates within the circumference of my arms.” By the time Lelia returned to New York in April 1922, they had decided to marry. Finally, after both their divorces were final, they had a quiet wedding ceremony in F. B. and Nettie Ransom’s living room in Indianapolis on May 1, 1926. Lelia joined Kennedy in Chicago for a few months before returning to New York with the agreement that they would live in both cities. But one financial setback after another, and the day-to-day obligations of his medical practice, prevented Kennedy from traveling to New York as often as he had promised. Determined not to borrow money from Lelia, and not to take advantage of her in the way Wiley had, Kennedy accepted Dr. Joseph Ward’s offer to become second-in-command at Tuskegee’s new black veterans hospital, where Ward had been named chief medical officer. Lelia had been willing to commute between New York and Chicago. Tuskegee, however, would prove to be another matter entirely.
On Her Own Ground Page 37