Sarah turned on her electric bedside lamp and reflected on everything she had done and still had left to do. Her business, it seemed, was charmed; every time Sarah thought the explosive growth might bury them all, good and competent workers came to her to help carry the weight. There were so many good women—Lottie, Sadie, Indianapolis forelady Alice Kelly, secretary Violet Davis Reynolds, bookkeepers Marie Overstreet and Mary Flint—and they had become a close team. Like any team, they had their quarrels, but all of them worked hard for Walker Manufacturing Co. And where would she be without Mr. Ransom and his family? Despite the formality of their address, since he always called her Madam and she never used his Christian name even though they had long become good friends, she knew they loved each other as well as any family members. Many days, in fact, Mr. Ransom’s family felt better suited to her than her own; Frankie, her godson, seemed more like a grandchild. And Mr. Ransom’s wife, Nettie, was more a sister than Lou could ever hope to be.
Together they had all created something that felt more and more like destiny. Walker Manufacturing Co. had a life all its own. That life was waiting for her in the little towns she visited, when people gathered so eagerly to see her and hear her speak. That life was pulsing in home beauty salons, where so many women were supporting their whole families because of her guidance, her inspiration. Oh, there were frustrations and occasional disputes with her agents—and some mean-hearted person had even begun circulating rumors that she’d made her fortune as the madam of a sporting house in Pittsburgh, such an outrageous lie that Sarah had cried when she first heard some people close to her actually believed it—but at the root of it all, the life was always there. She knew there were people now who looked at her with an admiration much like she’d felt for Booker T. Washington. And although she didn’t believe she deserved as much credit as he did, she’d grown to understand that people were desperate to have someone to believe in because that belief alone could stir up all the hard work and innovation inside them.
So Sarah had tried to do her part. And she’d had her fun along the way, too. In New York she didn’t seem to carry any of the stigmas that had followed her in Denver, Pittsburgh, and Indianapolis; at her beautiful town house on 136th Street, Sarah was considered among Harlem’s elite, and her dinner invitations were eagerly accepted. Sarah knew there was no black leader she could not reach if she wanted to; her days of desperately trying to get the attention of the likes of Booker T. Washington were over. Her money had bought her access anywhere she wanted.
And look at her now! Here she was at a resort frequented mostly by wealthy whites, living in luxury accommodations so generously provided to her by the Negro organization Knights of Pythias, which kept a bathhouse for its members. She, Lottie, and Lelia all had their own rooms, with fresh sheets, towels, gourmet meals, and the intoxicating hot mineral waters of the resort at their disposal.
But the price!
At that, Sarah sighed deeply, and she could feel weariness weighing down her bones even now, after a long night’s sleep. A kindly doctor in Mississippi had warned her before she came to Hot Springs that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and she didn’t doubt it. Even after all the soaking she could stand, sometimes she felt her breakdown was only biding its time. She barely recognized herself when she caught her reflection in her bathroom mirror; she seemed to have aged years in only a short time, and her tailored clothes sometimes struck her as so odd and different from the clothes she’d worn all the earlier years of her life, as if she’d borrowed them from someone else. Half the time she still expected to see herself wearing a rag on her head. She felt as if she were dreaming, and she was so easily confused now. She’d just complained to Lelia that she hadn’t received an expected letter from Mr. Ransom, but Lelia had patiently pointed out that she’d read a letter from him just the day before! What was wrong with her?
Sarah had felt tired before, but nothing to rival what she felt now. She sometimes felt so bored in this sedate place that she wanted to scream, but at the same time she was usually too weary to ask Lottie to dictate any letters for her. The minute details of her business that usually fueled her imagination now seemed to be clogging it, choking it. She was hungry for news from the outside—it seemed it would be only a matter of time before the U.S. would join the war in Europe—but any news she read always left her feeling low and empty. The world was marching on outside without her, and she was too tired to walk, much less march.
And each day felt like every other, with dreams of the train almost every night.
Later that day, sharing a hot bath with Lelia amidst clouds of steam in a private area of the resort, Sarah shared her thoughts with her daughter. “I just don’t know, child… .” Sarah sighed. “Your mama’s a mess.”
Lelia had taken to wealth like a duck to water. With her head wrapped tightly in a towel, she leaned against the tiles with the utter serenity of a woman who had been frequenting spas her entire life. “We told you about all this running around, didn’t we, Mama?” Lelia said. “My doctor says I need to get more rest too, but I know how to sit still more than you ever did.”
“Well, I’ll tell you the truth, Lela… . Some days I feel like I ain’t done a damn thing.”
Alone with her daughter, far from the watchful eyes and ears of Lottie and the expectations of the crowds she spoke to, Sarah felt at ease lapsing into her less practiced ways of speaking, softening her enunciations, no longer monitoring herself for poor grammar. In her mind now, it was almost as if Madam C.J. Walker was someone wholly separate from Sarah Breedlove. She loved both sides of herself, but lately she was grateful she could be Sarah for a while. Madam C.J. Walker carried a weight on her shoulders that was harder for Sarah to bear.
Sarah admired the palm plants lining the baths in their colorful ceramic pots, creating the tropical feel she’d enjoyed so much while she was traveling in the Caribbean. Now there was a place that knew how to slow down and relax, Sarah thought. As hard as she’d been working during those months overseas, a part of her had still felt like she was on a glorious vacation. Those incredible beaches … and the pure ocean water, like liquid sky …
“You still having bad dreams, Mama?” Lelia asked her suddenly.
“I just look at those dreams as messages, Lela,” Sarah said. “Now that I think on it, I’m glad about what happened in Clarksdale. Helped wake me up. I won’t be here forever.”
All of the doctors were wrong about her, she decided. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe Dr. Ward and her other physician friends when they told her she would die if she didn’t keep her blood pressure down. She could feel differences in her body already: she urinated more often, but her stream was sometimes only a dribble and had an unusual foamy quality; she battled headaches and awful sore throats; and then there was this strange, new brand of fatigue, which was the scariest part of all. No, she believed them, all right. Perhaps she just didn’t believe she could help it, with so much left to be done.
Lelia had dark spots under her eyes, too, Sarah noticed, probably from the strain of trying to combine her business life and social life in New York. More social than business, according to Nettie and others who visited. Lelia liked entertaining a certain set of artists and writers, folks who lived fast lives and kept strange hours. Some days, she’d been told, Lelia didn’t climb out of bed until past noon. Sarah traveled too much to observe Lelia as much as she thought she should, but she didn’t doubt that her daughter’s perpetual debt problems were because she spent too much time playing.
Suddenly a concern loomed large in Sarah’s mind: What would happen to the company if she left it in Lelia’s hands? Mae already seemed much more prim and responsible than her mother, but she was only eighteen, and she’d just gone away to school at Spelman. Mae was too young to take over such a responsibility.
“Mama, you’re only forty-nine. Through pure stubbornness, you’ll be here longer than anybody I know,” Lelia said, smiling, as she took a sip from her tall glass of lemona
de. The dripping glass suddenly made an image flash across Sarah’s mind, a longing for lemonade she’d felt as a child. She couldn’t remember the details, but she knew it had been an awful, hopeless time. The memory of that time felt so powerful, in that instant, that it seemed as if it could peel away Sarah’s new life and reappear at will.
Sarah shook her head. “No, child. You’re wrong. That train was a sign, and it’s just up to me to see how to use it. You know what? We need to start building on that property I bought north of New York, in Irvington by the Hudson River. We need to talk to Mr. Tandy, that colored architect, and build the most beautiful home Negroes have ever owned.”
The water splashed as Lelia sat up straight, her eyes full of joy and astonishment. “Yes, Mama! With thirty rooms, at least, in a grand Italian style—”
“Yes, but it’s not just that I want such a fancy place for us, Lelia. It’s for the race. It’s something folks can be proud of, something we ain’t never had before now. And I know Mr. Ransom gets nervous when I bring up politics, but I can’t keep silent on that end either. God rest Booker T. Washington’s soul, but I think Mr. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter and the rest of them are right—the time to be quiet and keep working hard is over, Lelia. It’s like your daddy used to tell me, it ain’t enough to work hard. I’m real proud Mr. Asa Philip Randolph’s wife is using her Walker hair parlor to keep up her husband’s political newspaper, or they’d have been in the poorhouse by now for sure, but that ain’t all I can do. I need to raise up my voice. I have money now, so my voice is louder. Maybe folks will listen. Maybe this is the time for us, Lela.”
Just that quickly, Lelia’s expression seemed to deflate. Politics, apparently, didn’t inspire her as much as the talk of building a mansion. “Oh, Mama … isn’t it enough you work yourself half to death without trying to save the whole race, too?”
In her mind, once again, Sarah saw that train backing toward her in Clarksdale.
No, child, it ain’t nearly enough for me, she thought. The good Lord saw fit to give me a pulpit, and now it’s time to preach.
Chapter Thirty-three
WASHINGTON, D.C.
AUGUST 1, 1917
Sarah had known simultaneous gloom and exultation in her life many times, because she’d learned that her waves of sorrow and joy flowed over her in currents, one after the other. As she stood in front of the White House gate under the heat of the summer sun, gazing at the majestic white columns she had seen many times in photographs, she felt her heart swelling with both excitement and grief. She was grateful to be here, especially in her present company, but the reason they had all come made her stomach ache. She’d been on the verge of tears for weeks.
What was happening to her people?
Of all the places Sarah had lived, St. Louis had felt most like home. That was where all the seeds for where she was now seemed to have been planted. And East St. Louis, Illinois, right across the bridge, was as familiar to her as any city in America. She’d had customers there.
It was bad enough that the United States had entered the war overseas in April, a war with proportions that baffled and terrified Sarah. She couldn’t guess how many young men would die in this Great War in foreign lands. But now a war had been declared at home: In July a melee had broken out in East St. Louis that newspapers were touting as the worst race riot in American history. More than one hundred men, women, and children dead. Six thousand people displaced from their homes because of fires set by a mob of three thousand whites who destroyed houses, churches, and businesses. She’d heard reports from people she knew in St. Louis—Rosetta, for example, and Jessie Robinson, wife of St. Louis printer C.K. Robinson, whom she’d known from church when she was a washerwoman and who had since become a good friend—that the police and National Guard had stood by and done nothing while buildings were torched and people were beaten and lynched. Negroes had been shot as they fled their burning homes. Even a child had been shot and then thrown into a burning building to be roasted alive, she’d heard. Negroes ain’t people to them, Rosetta had written her. How well Sarah knew!
They done kilt him. I seen it. Oh, you poor girl, your man is dead.
The memory of losing Moses on that rainy day in Vicksburg was like a brand to Sarah, and it had been seared anew since the riot. The anti-lynching march called the Negro Silent Protest Parade in Harlem three weeks after the riot had helped her pain some, although Sarah had felt that same bittersweet mingling of exhilaration and sorrow. With the women and children wearing bright white and the men clad in dignified mourning clothes, ten thousand Negroes had marched in stark silence along Fifth Avenue; the only sound had been the muffled beat of a mournful drum. Sarah had never experienced anything like it; to be swallowed in the midst of her people, unified in purpose, demonstrating their undeniable humanity to all who watched them pass. Even the children’s faces had been set in sad determination as they marched for their futures under a mammoth streamer behind the American flag that read YOUR HANDS ARE FULL OF BLOOD.
Was it too much to ask to be allowed to live in peace and freedom in a nation that was sending its young men overseas to fight for it elsewhere? Was it too much to ask that lynching be made a federal crime, since states were none too interested in putting a stop to it? Two years ago, D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation had portrayed Negroes as clowns and schemers and the Ku Klux Klan as heroes instead of terrormongers. And while Negroes and fair-minded whites had protested the film, President Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, had endorsed it.
That fact, almost more than any other, kept Sarah’s heart from rejoicing as she stood in front of the White House with an assemblage of colored leaders. The man inside this White House, who publicly supported segregation, was not a friend to Negroes. He had agreed to see them—And that’s a start; it has to mean something, Sarah tried to convince herself—but the meeting probably would not bear fruit. Margaret Murray Washington had confided to Sarah how frustrated and disappointed her husband had felt in his role as a racial adviser to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft. Just because they ask your advice doesn’t mean they’ll take it, she’d told Sarah, and you can find yourself wondering why they asked in the first place.
But maybe it would be different this time, Sarah thought. So many people dead! She and other colored leaders in Harlem had brought a petition to President Wilson asking that lynching and mob violence be made a national crime. Leadership had to begin at the highest level, and at least it would be a start. How could anyone fail to condemn murder, even against Negroes?
She’d make him care, Sarah decided. She’d talk from the heart, as she always did in her speaking engagements. She would tell him about Moses. She would use the same persuasive powers she’d been practicing all these years to sell Walker products and inspire women to try to change the mind of a president.
James Weldon Johnson, who stood beside Sarah, let out a long sigh as he stared at the impressive building before them. The writer and NAACP activist had pleasant features and perfect diction. Sarah loved the stirring song he had written, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which his brother J. Rosamond Johnson had composed the music for, and she’d had the piece performed on her organ at social gatherings at her home on 136th Street. The Johnson brothers were refined, intelligent men who sparked everyone who met them, and Sarah was proud to know them.
“Well … Here goes nothing, I’m afraid,” Mr. Johnson said in a flat tone.
“And nothing’s exactly what he’ll give,” someone else in the party muttered, either New York Age publisher Fred Moore or Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Sarah didn’t see which of them had spoken.
“At least he said he’d listen,” Sarah said earnestly. “That’s how anything gets started.”
“Well, let’s pray you’re right about that, Madam Walker,” said W.E.B. Du Bois, who stood at the head of the group. Sarah was convinced the Harvard-educated leader was the most poetic and intelligent man she had ever h
ad the pleasure of meeting, with enough fire to match his intellect. The slender man dabbed perspiration from his dramatically receding hairline before slipping his handkerchief back into his coat pocket. His beard was neatly trimmed, and his mustache curled upward at both ends without a stray hair out of place. “I say we go on inside to the battlefront, then, gentlemen … and lady,” Mr. Du Bois said, recognizing Sarah with a nod of his head. “Our appointment is at noon, and we don’t want to keep the president waiting.”
After Reverend Powell suggested they bow their heads in a prayer, they formed a small processional past the gate, telling the guards in their dress military uniforms that President Wilson was expecting them. Only then did Sarah’s heart begin to pound in anticipation.
Although Sarah kept her eyes straight ahead, she could feel heavy stares following them through the immaculately polished hallways of the White House. Some of the stares were merely curious, she knew, and some were probably outright hostile. Negroes were rarely considered a welcome sight in such august surroundings. They traveled through several passages, past colorful portraits of past presidents, banners, and patriotic memorabilia. The building was blanketed in a respectful hush, except for the sound of their shoes on the floors.
According to a handsome grandfather clock, it was ten minutes to noon when they reached a fair-size room they were told was the executive waiting room, with plush antique chairs and a small conference table. All of them took their seats in thoughtful silence. The room also doubled as a library, apparently, with glass-enclosed shelves of books with worn spines. Had Thomas Jefferson read any of these books? Or Abraham Lincoln?