On Her Own Ground

  Despite Lelia’s distractions, the Walker Company enjoyed unprecedented sales during the two years after Madam Walker’s death: $486,762 in 1919—or the equivalent of $4.8 million today—and $595,353 in 1920—equal to more than $5 million today. In 1921, however, a brief postwar depression pushed sales below the $400,000 mark, and they continued to decline steadily during the next decade. Ransom, along with a cadre of very capable national sales representatives, made valiant efforts to carry on Madam Walker’s work. By the end of 1920, the company could proudly claim to have trained 40,000 Walker agents since 1906. But without the benefit of their founder’s charisma and vision, Ransom, Lelia and the others found themselves faced with fierce competition from Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone’s Poro Company, Sarah Spencer Washington’s Apex Company, Anthony Overton’s Overton Hygienic Company and a score of other regional firms by the mid-1920s.

  The eagerness to please her mother that Lelia had displayed when she ran the Denver and Pittsburgh offices, and when she first opened the Walker Salon in New York, was now gone. Out of a sense of obligation she continued to attend the annual conventions and to make occasional trips to represent the company. She sat on several boards—including the Harlem Child Welfare League, the Music School Settlement and the women’s auxiliaries of the NAACP and National Urban League—and she contributed $25,000 to the Hampton-Tuskegee Endowment Fund, but her interests increasingly were elsewhere. In 1923, when Ransom solicited her suggestions for improving sales in the Harlem office, she had little to offer. “I do not know of anything that can be done to improve the New York sales,” she wrote. “New York is a peculiar city; anything that is a nine days wonder takes, but just let it be ten days. Nothing excites blasé New York.”

  In fact, Harlem’s corners were saturated with Walker, Apex and Poro salons. But whereas Lelia seemed willing to allow her competitors to make inroads, her mother would have been devising strategies to best them. “I feel we have exploited this field thoroughly and are getting as much right now out of this business as any concern is getting or can get,” Lelia rationalized, convinced that the Walker Company’s best days were long gone. “Everything has its day and lives its life. People are not as much interested in whether their hair grows or not, due probably to the short hair or bobbed hair style and there are numbers of similar preparations on the market that seem to grow hair as fast as ours.”

  Clearly Lelia lacked her mother’s fortitude and perseverance. Nevertheless, she had inherited her flair for the dramatic. Whereas Madam Walker had influenced the commerce and politics of her era, Lelia would help create the social and cultural aura of hers. Sometime during 1922 she initiated her own personal transformation by changing her name. A few months after returning from her overseas trip, she added an “A” and an apostrophe to “Lelia,” though exactly why she chose “A’Lelia” remains a mystery. With her new name—just as her mother had gone from “Sarah” to “Madam”—Lelia seemed to be lowering the curtain on one act of her life and lifting it on another. As if on cue, the lively, glamorous Harlem Renaissance was being ushered in by several cultural milestones, among them the debut of the all-black Broadway musical comedy Shuffle Along. A number of other notable literary events celebrating the “New Negro” and a talented generation of poets, novelists and artists were just on the horizon.

  “It was the period when the Negro was in vogue,” wrote poet Langston Hughes, one of Harlem’s brightest lights, in 1925. The movement’s “mid-wives”—Howard University’s Alain Locke, Opportunity founder and editor Charles S. Johnson and Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset—all hoped their cultural revolution of art, poetry and music would improve race relations in America in ways that six decades of post–Civil War protest, blood and politics had failed to do. But for all its high-flown cultural aspirations, the “renaissance,” for many, was as much—or more—about the opening of Harlem’s cabarets and speakeasies to downtown white revelers as it was about the creation of literature and sculpture. Harlem’s nightlife, reported Variety, “now surpasses that of Broadway itself . . . from midnight until after dawn it is a seething cauldron of Nubian mirth and hilarity.” Historian Nathan Huggins attributed the desire of a “generation of Americans to lose themselves in cabarets, rhythms, dances, and exotica” to a “postwar hangover.” F. Scott Fitzgerald simply said that “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” And A’Lelia Walker was poised to ride. “She wanted to miss nothing,” remembered a friend. “She tried to miss nothing.”

  A’Lelia was the first to admit that she possessed no particular artistic talent, but she genuinely enjoyed the company of the free-spirited writers and had already developed longtime friendships with musicians Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, as well as Flournoy Miller, one of the stars of Shuffle Along. Among this crowd, she was comfortable. As hostess to Harlem’s cultural elite, A’Lelia had finally found her niche.

  “She looked like a queen and frequently acted like a tyrant,” wrote her friend Carl Van Vechten, the novelist and former arts critic who famously interpreted Harlem for other downtown whites. “She was tall and black and extremely handsome in her African manner. She often dressed in black. When she assumed more regal habiliments, rich brocades of gold or silver, her noble head bound in a turban, she was a magnificent spectacle.” Her son-in-law, Marion Perry, remembered her as a woman with “royal instincts.” Langston Hughes called her “a gorgeous dark Amazon.” At five feet nine inches, with excellent posture and an evenly distributed 190 pounds, she was six feet tall when she dressed in her heels and turbans. “She had a superb figure, the type that artists like to draw,” wrote one reporter who knew her well. W.E.B. Du Bois’s assessment that she was “without beauty but of fine physique” may have said more about him than about her. Surely he found no agreement among Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage, Berenice Abbott, R. E. Mercer and James Latimer Allen, a few of the many well-known artists and photographers for whom she sat during the 1920s.

  A’Lelia “made no pretense of being intellectual,” Langston Hughes later recalled, but she could be a charming and generous hostess, who “could engage you in conversation on most any topic and who gave you the impression of being well-informed on all of them.” She had learned, she told the Inter-State Tattler, “the art of reading headlines, and the trick had served [her] well.” And while one observer judged her attention span to be no longer than “seven minutes,” at least one of her friends thought she was “one of the most subtly humorous women in Harlem.”

  A’Lelia’s guest lists were quite diverse. “At her ‘at homes’ Negro poets and Negro numbers bankers mingled with downtown poets and seat-on-the-stock-exchange racketeers,” Hughes remembered. Of course, her Harlem friends formed the core. Besides the young writers like Hughes, Countee Cullen and Bruce Nugent, regular visitors included Edna Lewis Thomas, Madam Walker’s former social secretary, who was now an actress, and her husband, Lloyd; actor Paul Robeson and his wife and business manager, Eslanda (when they were in town); singer and vamp Nora Holt; Pittsburgh Courier columnist and New York School Board member Bessye Bearden and her husband, Howard; painter Aaron Douglas; entertainer Florence Mills; voice teacher Caska Bonds; Inter-State Tattler managing editor and Pittsburgh Courier columnist Geraldyn Dismond (later know as Gerri Major); Mayme White, A’Lelia’s constant companion and social secretary; and McCleary Stinnett, a well-known bootlegger and A’Lelia’s favorite dance partner. From downtown, Carl Van Vechten probably introduced poet Witter Bynner, writer and salon hostess Muriel Draper and novelist Max Ewing to A’Lelia’s soirees.

  A’Lelia’s parties also had an international flavor and “were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy.” Among the European royalty and near-royalty were Princess Violette Murat of France, Osbert Sitwell and Peter Spencer Churchill of England, Prince Basil Mirski of Russia and a Rothschild or two. When A’Lelia was informed that a Scandinavian prince had not been able to maneuver the crowded hallway leading to her apar
tment, she “sent word back that she saw no way of getting His Highness in . . . nor could she herself get out through the crowd to greet him. But she offered to send refreshments downstairs to the Prince’s car,” Hughes recounted years later.

  From time to time A’Lelia hosted celebrations at Villa Lewaro, on one occasion throwing a July Fourth extravaganza complete with fireworks for Liberian President C.D.B. King, on another, a lavish Christmas dinner in Kennedy’s honor. But she did most of her entertaining at her 136th Street town house or at her much smaller pied-à-terre at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, where a large swath of rose and green taffeta draped sensuously from the living-room ceiling. There in Apartment 21, her collection of elephants—in “jade, velvet, metal, ivory and ebony”—were displayed everywhere, but especially on the built-in shelves of her custom-made mahogany studio couch. With accompaniment by the hot pianist of the moment, A’Lelia’s Thursday visitors were likely to hear Showboat star Jules Bledsoe perform his signature “Ol’ Man River” or see Al Moore and Fredi Washington teach the steps to their latest dance routine. After one of A’Lelia’s parties, writer Max Ewing described the “extremely elegant” surroundings in a letter to his mother. “You have never seen such clothes as millionaire Negroes get into,” he wrote. “They are more gorgeous than a Ziegfeld finale. They do not stop at fur coats made of merely one kind of fur. They add collars of ermine and gray fur, or black fur collars to ermine. Ropes of jewels and trailing silks of all bright colours.”

  In November 1923, A’Lelia turned her skills as an impresario to her daughter Mae’s wedding, both orchestrating the event and choosing the groom. That Mae was not particularly keen on Dr. Gordon Jackson, a Chicago surgeon who was thirteen years her senior, seemed to be a minor detail as far as A’Lelia was concerned. “I look upon this wedding as the very biggest advertisement we have ever had [except for] Villa Lewaro,” A’Lelia wrote Ransom a week and a half before the ceremony, sure that the photographers and reporters would be out in full force to cover everything from the linen shower to the magnificent reception at Villa Lewaro. “This is the swellest wedding any colored folks have ever had or will have in the world. While its purpose certainly is not for the advertising, God knows we are getting $50,000 worth of publicity. Everything has its compensation.” Although, in this case, it was at Mae’s expense.

  A’Lelia had sent out 9,000 invitations to friends and Walker agents in every state in the union, as well as to Nigeria, Liberia, England, France, Haiti and Panama. By midmorning, on November 24, despite a cold rain, thousands of people “white and colored, drawn out of curiosity,” had gathered on 134th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues in front of St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Inside the sanctuary, which was lavishly decorated with chrysanthemums, autumn leaves and palm trees, nearly two-thirds of the pews were filled a full hour before the ceremony was scheduled to begin.

  The bridesmaids—mostly members of the Debutante Club that A’Lelia had started for Mae after her graduation from Spelman Seminary in 1920—wore silver dresses covered with cream Chantilly lace and trimmed with ropes of orange blossoms. The groomsmen, in formal morning attire, included five doctors and two attorneys, among them Henry Rucker, Jr., the grandson of nineteenth-century black Georgia Congressman Jefferson Long. The mother of the bride was stunning in her elegant gold metallic gown from Paris.

  Although the bride was miserable, her breathtaking dress drew “gasps of admiration” as she moved slowly down the aisle. Luminescent sea pearls accented her train and created the frame of her headpiece, a crownlike ornament inspired by Egyptian artifacts from the recently opened King Tutankhamen tomb. In Mae’s wedding photographs—taken later that day at Villa Lewaro and the day before her twenty-fifth birthday—she was noticeably melancholy. Gordon, on the other hand, looked stern and cocksure as he stood behind her. Predictably Mae’s efforts to be the dutiful wife A’Lelia had advised her to be failed in the face of Gordon’s volatile temper. In May 1926, when she was eight months pregnant, she moved from their Chicago home into her own apartment near Michigan Avenue. By early December, three years after the $46,000 wedding she had not wanted, Mae was divorced and back in New York with her six-month-old son, Gordon Walker Jackson.

  The following August, she married attorney Marion R. Perry, Jr., who adopted young “Walker.” Their daughter, A’Lelia Mae Perry, was born on July 22, 1928.

  By early 1926 A’Lelia had begun to move as freely among her white downtown acquaintances as among her black Harlem pals. But few friends, white or black, were as close to her during the late 1920s as Carl Van Vechten. When James Arthur Kennedy, soon to be her husband, could not join her in New York for Easter 1926, she spent the holiday with Van Vechten and his Russian-born wife, Fania Marinoff, in their impressive apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street.

  Van Vechten, who had been a well-known New York music critic until he was forty, had begun writing fiction in 1922. When he trained his sights on Harlem for the subject of his fifth novel, he was no stranger to African Americans. His father had helped support the Piney Branch School for Negro Children in Mississippi and he prided himself on his “fully integrated guest lists.” But when Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven reached the bookstores in August 1926, its title alone scandalized many black New Yorkers. And while Van Vechten was careful to depict intellectually capable and socially refined black characters, he seemed, to some critics, to be overly fascinated with the racy underworld of numbers bankers and pimps, as well as the sadomasochistic sexual encounters between two of the book’s main characters.

  Du Bois, in a scathing review in the December 1926 Crisis, called it “cheap melodrama” and “a caricature” of Harlem life. But James Weldon Johnson, with whom Van Vechten had developed a close friendship, called Nigger Heaven “a fine novel” and praised him for being an early champion of black culture by writing “frequent magazine articles and by his many personal efforts in behalf of individual Negro writers and artists.”

  The character Adora Boniface was unmistakably based on A’Lelia. Although Adora was a former “music hall star” who lived on Striver’s Row and had inherited her husband’s real estate fortune, Van Vechten did not veer far from the truth in drawing her personality. “She was undeniably warm-hearted, amusing, in her outspoken way, and even beautiful, in a queenly African manner that set her apart from the other beauties of her race whose loveliness was more frequently of a Latin than an Ethiopian character.” If she was nicer to Van Vechten after the book, as he later wrote a friend, perhaps it was because she appreciated his description of her “good heart” and “ready wit.” Self-conscious about her size and her dark skin—Wiley had made it clear that he preferred light-skinned women—A’Lelia also appreciated the thoughts Van Vechten placed into the mind of Mary Love, the novel’s prim librarian. “She was beautiful, of that there could be no question, beautiful and regal,” Mary said of Adora. “Her skin was almost black; her nose broad, her lips thick . . . She was a type of pure African majesty.”

  A’Lelia may even have taken some perverse satisfaction in Van Vechten’s fictional depiction of her relationship with some members of the city’s black elite. “Frowned upon in many quarters, not actually accepted intimately in others—not accepted in any sense of the word, of course, by the old and exclusive Brooklyn set—Adora nevertheless was a figure not to be ignored,” Van Vechten, the narrator, observed. “She was too rich, too important, too influential, for that.”

  With a first printing of 16,000 copies—and thirteen subsequent printings—Nigger Heaven became the most widely read of the Harlem Renaissance–era novels. Translated into at least ten and possibly eleven languages, it made A’Lelia one of “the most discussed women” in New York and may have done as much to immortalize her role in Harlem’s 1920s as did The Dark Tower, the salon she opened in 1927.

  Although A’Lelia was never a patron in the sense of underwriting the living expenses of any of the young Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, she frequently opened her home an
d her kitchen, filling them up with her spicy spaghetti—the secret was cheese and wine—and staking them at poker games. During early 1927, at several gin-soaked brainstorming sessions, writer Bruce Nugent, painter Aaron Douglas and a few others talked with A’Lelia about creating a salon for poetry readings and art exhibits, something “completely informal . . . homey [and] comfortable” where they could bring their friends. At Nugent’s suggestion, they agreed to call it The Dark Tower, a nod to Countee Cullen’s Opportunity column of the same name. But after the project was delayed by much procrastination—and apparently even more gin—A’Lelia moved forward without the original team of “consultants.”