“We dedicate this tower to the aesthetes,” announced the engraved invitations that began arriving in mid-October 1927. “That cultural group of young Negro writers, sculptors, painters, music artists, composers and their friends. A quiet place of particular charm. A rendezvous where they may feel at home.”
But instead of a place of reverie and reflection, the opening-night reception was like all of A’Lelia’s other parties: crowded, bustling and well stocked with food, champagne and gin. Nugent, ever the tieless bohemian, almost was not admitted because of his casual dress. At any rate, he found the prices on the menu much too high for the struggling artists A’Lelia had initially intended to benefit. The “hall was a seething picture of well-dressed people,” Nugent later wrote. “Colored faces were at a premium, the place filled to overflowing with whites from downtown who had come up expecting that this was a new and hot night club.”
At one end of the room—which stretched across the back of A’Lelia’s 136th Street town house—stood a customized bookcase. Designed by Paul Frankl in the shape of a skyscraper, it was filled with first-edition copies of books by Hughes, Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer and many of the other new Harlem writers. On the right side of the room Hughes’s prize-winning poem “The Weary Blues” was carefully lettered on a buff-and-gold wall, its rhythmic words celebrating the black folk idiom:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Directly across from Hughes’s blues was Countee Cullen’s more formal sonnet “From the Dark Tower,” which heralded the emerging voices of black writers.
We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap.
Dark rose tables and chairs matched the wood of the piano and complemented rose-hued curtains and wine-colored candlesticks. A sky-blue Victrola was available whenever no live music was being played. A red graphic of The Dark Tower bookcase appeared atop all menus and stationery.
What had been conceived originally as a casual setting was now an upscale tearoom. But if A’Lelia hoped to make a profit from the enterprise, she soon was disappointed. Her friends were not accustomed to paying for her hospitality and the young artists couldn’t afford the prices. Within a year the original Dark Tower was officially closed. “Having no talent or gift, but a love and keen appreciation for art, The Dark Tower was my contribution,” A’Lelia announced on an engraved card that she mailed in October 1928. She blamed the “members” for not making use of the facility, but she had failed to mention that at least part of the reason the effort had lost money was that her hostess, Sari Price Patton, had embezzled some of the daily receipts. After November 1, A’Lelia continued to rent The Dark Tower for private parties, luncheons, teas, card parties, meetings and receptions.
In August 1928, during the twelfth annual Walker agents convention, A’Lelia and Ransom welcomed the delegates to the dedication ceremonies of the spectacular $350,000 headquarters and factory of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis. “It is the culmination of the dream of the late Madam C. J. Walker, who in her life planned for this very event . . . as [she] desired to give to the race the most modern plant for the manufacture of toilet preparations,” wrote the Amsterdam News after the groundbreaking the previous year. “Like Villa Lewaro . . . it will contain the best that money can buy.”
The building was indeed one of the most magnificent any African American company had ever built, but it could not have opened at a worse time. The next autumn, on October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed, sending the entire country into an economic tailspin. By then end-of-the-year company revenues had dipped to $213,327 and A’Lelia had been forced to rent the 136th Street town house to the New York City Health Department for a pediatric clinic. In 1930, when President Herbert Hoover asked Congress for $100 million to fund a public works program, soup kitchens had become a common sight and annual Walker Company revenues had fallen below $200,000 for the first time since 1917. By the end of that year, more than 1,300 banks had closed and 26,355 businesses had failed.
That fall the trustees of the Walker estate were so financially strapped that they arranged to auction Villa Lewaro’s contents. On Thanksgiving weekend 1930, cars lined both sides of North Broadway in Irvington for a quarter of a mile in either direction. The more disrespectful buyers drove their cars through the front gate and parked on the grass.
Throughout the house cardboard tags hung from Madam Walker’s treasures. Thousands of bargain hunters—some of them the very people who had sneered as they passed the house—trampled through her “dream of dreams,” picking off the items she had so lovingly selected. “What am I bid for this beautiful Chickering concert grand piano?” said auctioneer Benjamin Wise of the gold-trimmed piano, as music played softly on the Estey organ at the other end of the music room. And so it went for three days on every floor of the house. Arthur Lawrence, the president of the Westchester County Parks Commission, bought one of the Aubusson tapestries from the drawing room for $1,150. Madam Walker’s ten-piece Hepplewhite dining-room suite went for $1,100. The contents of the library—including the $15,000 ten-volume opera set by James Buel—sold for close to $1,800. In the end, the auctioneer estimated that he had received about twenty cents on the dollar. “Sale of Villa Lewaro Nets $58,500 in 3 Days as Millionaires Bid,” read the Pittsburgh Courier headline.
Three weeks later A’Lelia and Ransom sent their annual Christmas telegram to all Walker Company employees. “Worry won’t help matters. We must be cheerful as possible under existing conditions,” A’Lelia wrote, though she was feeling anything but optimistic. “Worthwhile is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong.”
Ransom’s holiday message, however, minced no words. “Dear Coworker. True there seems to be nothing to be particularly joyous about this Yuletide but when you know you have done your best you can at least enter the festivities with a clear conscience. Any number of you no doubt are thinking if the founder Madam C. J. Walker had lived things would have been different,” he continued, anticipating their concerns. “If so you are wrong. No one could have foreseen the financial crisis that has gripped not only America but the world.” He had only to look to Detroit—and to much larger corporations—to prove his point. The Ford Motor Company, which had employed 128,000 workers before the Crash, would be down to 37,000 by the following summer.
In 1931, Ransom’s job only became more difficult as annual sales fell to just over $130,000. More than ever, he was pressuring A’Lelia to find a buyer for Villa Lewaro. At one point she even turned to Carl Van Vechten for help. “I have been holding on to this place through sentiment (my mother), but I’ve arrived at the conclusion it is foolish of me to maintain such a large and expensive home with no family ties.” She was willing, she told him, to sell the house to him for $150,000, forty thousand dollars less than its assessed value. “There isn’t a person I’d rather have Villa Lewaro than you,” she closed. Van Vechten replied as gently as he could to his distressed friend, “But, dear A’Lelia, what would I do with a house? I am always away all summer. And where do you think I’d get all that money? A’Lelia behave!”
With Villa Lewaro’s annual upkeep at $8,000, the fairy castle had become a white elephant, hungry for heating oil, maintenance and property taxes. Because the Indianapolis building produced revenue, Ransom concluded that the factory’s mortgage should take priority over the maintenance of a house that was rarely used.
With Villa Lewaro on the market and 108 rented out, A’Lelia had still managed to hold on to her Lincoln, her baby grand piano, her sterling silver and enough trappings to keep herself comfortable. But she had pawned much of her jewelry and there were signs that she was depressed. Although she knew her blood pressure was hovering near the 200 mark, she refused to restrict her d
iet.
In March 1931, after five years of a long-distance marriage, she and Kennedy divorced. During the doctor’s four and a half years in Tuskegee, A’Lelia had managed to visit only a few times. And demands of the veterans hospital prevented him from traveling to New York with any frequency. Kennedy filed for desertion, but they had both agreed several months earlier that a divorce was the best solution. “There was no place in A’Lelia’s life for crickets, sandflies and firebugs, husband or no husband,” a friend observed. “She could enjoy the country for a day, a week, perhaps a month, but not beyond that.”
“In love and in marriage she was unsuccessful as was but natural,” Carl Van Vechten wrote years later. “She was too spoiled, too selfish, too used to having her own way to make any kind of compromise.”
In a letter dated August 12, 1931, Ransom delivered yet another blow: “We are merely taking in money enough to take care of the payroll, notwithstanding the fact that the payroll has been greatly reduced. We are able to do nothing about our outstanding bills,” he wrote. “I am letting the factory people off every other week . . . I just want you to know how things are going.” It is unclear whether A’Lelia ever received the letter, for three days later she and her close companion, Mayme White, drove to Long Branch, New Jersey, for their friend Mae Fain’s weekend-long birthday party. On Sunday, after a day at the ocean and an indulgent dinner of lobster, champagne and chocolate cake, A’Lelia awakened with a headache so severe she could not see. At 5:03 the next morning she was pronounced dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was only forty-six years old.
A’Lelia “knocked herself out, because she wanted to be knocked out,” her son-in-law, Marion Perry, said years later. With Walker Company sales at a trickle and no end to her personal financial woes, she saw nothing but poverty ahead.
Just as A’Lelia’s parties had been grand, so was her funeral. More than 11,000 people filed past her casket at Howell’s Funeral Home the following Friday. The mourners were “mostly women . . . young women, already stooped with the drudgery of work . . . old women, muttering indistinctly of the days when they knew ‘Madam’ . . . well-dressed women to whom the living woman’s career had been a challenge,” reported the Philadelphia Tribune. In the open casket, A’Lelia wore a gown of gold lace and tulle over lavender satin with a pale green velvet sash draped around her body. Her feet were covered in apple-green satin slippers. Around her neck were her cherished Chinese amber prayer beads. On her third finger was the silverand-amber ring Mayme had given her. Three orchids, a gift from Bessye Bearden, had been placed in her hands. Above her head a spray of two dozen orchids decorated the inside of the casket.
By early Saturday morning nearly 1,000 people had gathered outside the mortuary for the invitation-only funeral. “But, just as for her parties, a great many more invitations had been issued than the small but exclusive Seventh Avenue funeral parlor could provide for,” Langston Hughes remembered. For a few moments before the white-maned Reverend A. Clayton Powell, Sr., opened the service with the Ninetieth and Twenty-third psalms, he stood “motionless in the dim light” behind A’Lelia’s silver casket. From the front row, Mae, Marion, Mayme and F. B. Ransom watched quietly. Among the dozens of Walker agents and longtime family friends who sat nearby were Jessie Robinson, Alice Burnette, Lucille Randolph and Edna Thomas. Even Wiley Wilson made an appearance, though Kennedy did not. The Van Vechtens and Countee Cullen were out of town.
Appropriately the service was filled with music performed by A’Lelia’s friends. The Bon Bons, a female quartet, opened with “I Ain’t Got Long to Stay, for My Lord Calls Me by the Thunder,” then later sang “Steal Away to Jesus.” Paul Bass, the tenor, who often had entertained at 80 Edgecombe, offered “I’ll See You Again,” A’Lelia’s favorite melody from Noël Coward’s 1929 play, Bitter Sweet.
Mary McLeod Bethune, speaking “in that great deep voice of hers,” delivered the eulogy. “She recalled the poor mother of A’Lelia Walker in old clothes, who had labored to bring the gift of beauty to Negro womanhood, and had taught them the care of their skin and their hair, and had built up a great business and a great fortune to the pride and glory of the Negro race—and then had given it all to her daughter, A’Lelia,” Hughes remembered. As friends and family sifted through the meaning of Mrs. Bethune’s words, Inter-State Tattler columnist and music critic Edward Perry read “To A’Lelia,” a poem that Langston Hughes had written two days after A’Lelia’s death.
So all who love laughter,
And joy and light,
Let your prayers be as roses
For this queen of the night.
As Perry took his seat, several Walker agents lined up to place flowers on the closed casket.
At Woodlawn Cemetery, Mae, Marion, Mayme, Mrs. Bethune and a small group gathered around the flower-filled space that had been dug beside Madam Walker’s grave. From above, Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the world’s first black licensed pilot, dropped two bouquets of gladiolas and dahlias from a small plane. “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem,” Hughes later wrote. “The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”
In most of the obituaries, A’Lelia was inevitably compared with her mother. Almost always, she came up wanting. The New York News & Harlem Home Journal was harsh: “The happy, hapless life of A’Lelia Walker was a tragedy.” Calling her “generous and free-handed to a fault,” the best that Du Bois could manage was to say that “her memory, with all the things that mar it, is not altogether unlovely, and her life surely not quite in vain.” But her closest friends, who understood her struggles and her disappointments, were more charitable. “A’Lelia’s wealth had packed too many thrills into her life . . . It got to the point where her existence virtually depended upon a succession of swift and colorful events, like in a kaleidoscope,” wrote the Inter-State Tattler’s Edgar Rouzeau. And in fact she once had told her son-in-law, Marion Perry, “I had everything I wanted in life. I just didn’t have it long enough.” But it may have been Carl Van Vechten who remembered her most enthusiastically. “You should have known A’Lelia Walker,” he declared in a letter to author Chester Himes twenty-five years after her death. “Nothing in this age is quite as good as THAT. Her satellites were shocked and offended by her appearance in Nigger Heaven, but she was nicer to me after that, even than before. I miss her . . . What a woman!”
Epilogue
Today the Walker women’s legacy is alive in two National Historic Landmarks: Villa Lewaro, their Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, mansion, and the Madam Walker Theatre Center in Indianapolis, Indiana. Home to the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company from 1927 until 1979, the Center now includes a small Walker museum room, sponsors a vibrant schedule of theater and musical performances, operates a cultural arts education program for Indianapolis youth and hosts the annual Madam Walker Spirit Awards for Entrepreneurs. Villa Lewaro, a private residence, was briefly opened to the public during the fall of 1998 when it was featured as a designer show house to benefit the United Negro College Fund. Although Madam Walker’s will stipulated that the home was to be donated to the NAACP upon A’Lelia Walker’s death, by mutual agreement—because of the high Depression-era taxes and upkeep—it was sold in 1932 to the Companions of the Forest, a women’s benevolent organization that had no black members. In 1993 Villa Lewaro was purchased by Harold Doley, an African American investment banker, and his wife, Helena.
The original Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company was sold by the Walker estate trustees in 1986. Today Madam Walker’s role as a pioneer of the multibillion-dollar hair care and cosmetics industry is best exemplified by the successful member companies of the Chicago-based American Health and Beauty Aids Institute, who recently welcomed her into their hall of fame. In 1998 Madam Walker was honored as the twenty-first subject of the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage Series commemorative stamps. Madam Walker’s papers and letters are archived at the Indiana Histor
ical Society in Indianapolis.
Endnotes
ABBREVIATIONS
ARCHIVES, LIBRARIES AND COLLECTIONS
BTW/LOC—Booker T. Washington Papers/Library of Congress (Washington, DC)
CHS—Colorado Historical Society
CPL/VGHC—Chicago Public Library/Vivian G. Harsh Collection
CTS/MHS—Charles Turner Scrapbooks/Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis)
DPLWHD—Denver Public Library Western History Division
FWP/SCRBC—Federal Writers Program/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York)
GSC/CU—Gumby Scrapbook Collection/Columbia University
IHS—Indiana Historical Society (Indianapolis)
LLCU—Low Library at Columbia University (New York)
LOC—Library of Congress (Washington, DC)
LPEC/MHS—Louisiana Purchase Exposition Collection/Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis)
MCML—Madison County, Mississippi, Library (Canton, MS)
MHS—Missouri Historical Society (St. Louis)
MPCH—Madison Parish, Louisiana, Court House (Tallulah, LA)
MSRC—Moorland Spingarn Research Center (Howard University, Washington, DC)
MSRC/YMCA—Moorland Spingarn Research Center/YMCA, Jesse Moorland Papers (Howard University)
MWC/IHS—Madam Walker Collection/Indiana Historical Society
MWFC/APB—Madam Walker Family Collection/A’Lelia Bundles (Alexandria, VA)
NARS—National Archives and Records Administration (Washington, DC)
OCHM—Old Court House Museum (Vicksburg, MS)
RACNP/LOC—Records of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace
RNACWC—Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs
On Her Own Ground Page 39