What is the truth? Was Madam Walker a shrewd opportunist whose dizzying rise to fame and riches remains firmly mired in accusations of dishonesty? Her staggering achievements and entrepreneurial acumen cannot be denied. Her rags-to-riches narrative is kept alive by family descendants, namely great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles, a television executive and writer named after her socialite great-grandmother.
But Madam cut her teeth as one of Annie Malone’s agents, just prior to setting up shop herself. Both her “wonderful hair grower” and her business model bore little difference from the products and model of Malone’s hugely successful Poro company. These details are not emphasized in her PR-friendly legacy. However, writing in the New York Review of Books, Jill Nelson notes that it is suspected that Madam “met Edmund L. Scholtz, proprietor of the Scholtz Drug Company in Denver, who offered to analyze the ingredients in Pope-Turnbo’s formula and suggested that, with a few minor changes, she could create her own product line.”13
While Malone might have been in many ways the originator, Madam Walker was arguably superior when it came to marketing. As Nelson continues, “what distinguished Walker was her aggressive use of almost any occasion, public or private, as an opportunity for sales and publicity.” In a precursor to the personality-driven marketing of today in which YouTubers, bloggers, and influencers sell their life stories, part of Walker’s genius was to use her own life as the central point of her marketing strategy.
Her ability to self-mythologize (in contrast to the far more reticent Malone) was pivotal to the success of her brand. The packaging on Madam Walker’s products utilized astonishing before-and-after pictures of herself, her short Afro hair elevated to the holy grail: those sleek, flowing locks—that “good hair.”
The fact that Walker, a dark-skinned woman with unambiguously African features, had achieved such miraculous results also went a long way to creating faith in the powers of her product. However, the power of mixed ancestry and “good hair” was perhaps even more potent. A’Lelia did not have children and therefore there was no heir to their great fortune. The problem was solved through A’Lelia’s adoption of thirteen-year-old “Fairy” Mae Walker, the “perfect walking advertisement: for Madam’s hair products.” The circumstances of exactly how or when the Walkers met Mae are not known, but her grandmother, whom she frequently visited, lived in the same neighborhood. A’Lelia Bundles says that it was “Fairy Mae’s braids—long thick ropes that reached below her waist—that had caused Madam Walker to notice her.”14 Mae was a “bright and curious child” whose impoverished family could not afford for her to continue her education. “With Madam Walker’s interest, however, it seemed that her hair—an inky version of Rapunzel’s locks—would provide a path from poverty.”15
Reproduced by kind permission of the Freeman Institute, Black History Collection
Fairy Mae’s looks were a marketing coup. As Bundles explains, she was not “delicately featured or light-skinned,” with the “looks favored by the black elite.” But if she had been, she would certainly have been less appealing to the masses of “ordinary” women Madam Walker was targeting. Like most black people in the Americas, Mae was of mixed ancestry, but in her case it was more apparent in her hair texture than her complexion. Although Fairy Mae was dark-skinned, her grandmother was a “mulatto” and her grandfather half Cherokee, his own father a “full blood Cherokee Indian.” The result of this mixed heritage was “beautiful . . . heavy, crinkly hair that made people stare, sometimes with admiration and sometimes with envy.”16 As Jill Nelson writes, in adopting her, A’Lelia had promised Fairy Mae’s mother that they would see to her education, but the demands of displaying her most prized asset, her long thick hair, were such that Fairy Mae would not return to school until she was seventeen.
The world of big business, marketing, and PR was a far cry from Madam’s beginnings. She was born Sarah Breedlove,* in 1867, on the same Delta, Louisiana, plantation on which her parents had been slaves. By the age of seven she was orphaned, by fourteen she was married, by seventeen she had had her first and only child, and by twenty she was a widow.
Prior to her employment with Annie Malone at Poro, Breedlove supported herself and her infant daughter by working as a washerwoman. Until that point there is little to distinguish her story from the lives of millions of other impoverished black American women whose employment options were restricted to sharecropping or domestic work, the same labor their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had endured for the previous three centuries. Breedlove’s rise to fame took more grit and determination than most of us can begin to muster in our imaginations. According to the official story, Breedlove, distraught and deeply ashamed of her looks, “prayed in desperation” to cure her “frightful appearance.”17
Because of poor nutrition and damaging hairdressing methods, a lot of black women in the early 1900s had broken and damaged hair (I mean, I still had broken and damaged hair in the 1990s, so there you go). It was a world far removed from the nutritious diets and the rich butters (shea butter, or òrí) and oils (coconut oil, or àdí àgbon) applied to the hair that resulted in thick, lustrous locks for their ancestors in West Africa.
Breedlove’s petition to God was successful: “a big African man appeared,” fortuitously revealed the recipe for a magical elixir with unspecified ingredients all the way from “Africa,” and Breedlove set to it. Her hair, now favored through a lucky alliance between God and African magic, miraculously grew back. The rest, as they say, is history.
Today A’Lelia Bundles is keen to change the focus of her forebears’ achievements away from the straightening of hair. Walker herself applied a similar strategy. Yet as Byrd and Tharps point out, Madam C. J. Walker’s success was undoubtedly the result of her method of hair straightening. Nonetheless, in her lifetime Walker marketed her tonics and hot combs as necessary treatments promoting healthy hair rather than focusing on the process of straightening. In what would become a common trend in the advertising of black hair products, Walker purposely associated straight hair with health and cleanliness. By extension, straight hair became, perversely, associated with “naturalness.” Walker was so widely associated with the hot comb that she is often credited with its invention. However, unless Walker was also a white Frenchman named François Marcel Grateau, this is untrue. The Parisian revolutionized hairstyling in 1872 when he invented heated irons that could curl and wave hair. The comb could also be used to achieve a bone-straight look, in emulation of the ancient Egyptian images that were in vogue in Paris at that time. Despite its French origins, the hot comb was quickly adopted by black women in the US who sought a method to tame their kinks. Before long, the hot comb was a staple of black hairstyling culture. Until very recently, any salon I went into would have a requisite set, although these days seeing that equipment would probably be enough to ensure that I never returned.
Elizabeth Cardozo, the owner of Washington, DC’s most successful salon in the 1950s, paints a graphic picture of black hair salons in the first half of the twentieth century.