BLACK EXCELLENCE, RESPECTABILITY, ANTIBLACKNESS, AND CLASS
Compiled to address the relative absence of black women in the archives, the 1976–81 Black Women Oral History Project is an extraordinary resource. It contains the testimonies of women of note at local, national, and international levels. When I discovered it, one collection in particular jumped out at me, that of the Cardozo sisters.
In 1928, Elizabeth Cardozo Barker, a young single mother of two, founded the Cardozo Sisters Hairstylists salon. Later, her sisters Margaret and Catherine came on board to help run what would eventually become Washington, DC’s most successful beauty salon. Elizabeth credits both Madam Walker and the Poro Company for creating the landscape in which black commercial haircare could flourish, but she observes the gap left by focusing primarily on straightening what she describes as the “harsh, kinky textures.” Elizabeth notes that these women had showed little interest in developing products or solutions for the in-between or straight hair possessed by some Negro women.
Unlike “ordinary-looking” black women, the ones “who looked like domestics,” the Cardozo clan were part of an illustrious progeny whose achievements were inarguably entwined with their position within the light-skinned Negro elite. The sisters were the children of Francis L. and Blanche Warrick Cardozo. Their paternal grandfather was Francis Lewis Cardozo, the son of Lydia Weston, a free woman of color who was herself a slave owner, and Isaac Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew.
In 1858, their grandfather Francis matriculated at Glasgow University,* and ten years later he was elected secretary of state in South Carolina, making him the first African American to hold a statewide office in the United States.
The achievements of the sisters’ generation were no less impressive. Their brother, Dr. William Cardozo, was a pediatrician who went on to become a pioneer in the treatment of sickle-cell anemia. Their first cousin Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson was a cultural anthropologist, actor, and civil rights campaigner who was married to the actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson.
Their maternal grandmother, Emma Warwick (née Jones), was the great-granddaughter of a woman who had reputedly been an Ethiopian princess before she was enslaved. Grandma Emma was an award-winning wig maker who owned salons in both Philadelphia and Atlantic City, catering to an exclusive white clientele. The Cardozos grew up in the salon, coming of age immersed in its rites of passage. Childhood days were spent making human-hair wigs for dolls and drying the long hair of the white patrons with palm-leaf fronds.
The Cardozos represent the epitome of what might today be called “black excellence.” Yet to varying degrees their transcripts reveal what an oppressive construct that can be, predicated along the fault lines of respectability politics, with an imperative toward assimilation into oppressive power structures and frequently diffuse with rampant, internalized anti-blackness. This shows that, despite the advantages of their class, they were hardly the most inspiring candidates for black uplift.
The internalized and deeply entrenched anti-blackness that exists in black communities is often denied. The sisters make outward claims of concern for and solidarity with the black community, but contradictory attitudes remain apparent in their narratives. Fascinatingly, much of what they really think about blackness—perhaps only on a subconscious level—is revealed through their descriptions of hair and hairdressing culture.
Elizabeth explains that their mixed ancestry has resulted in the different grades of hair possessed by each sister. The fact that the siblings all exist on different points of the spectrum between “good” and “bad” hair is what motivates them to create different methods for dealing with the various textures—sort of like a nineteenth-century Mixed Chicks (a hair-product brand), although, unlike Mixed Chicks, the Cardozo sisters’ systems and products took into account the kinkier textures too. (Mixed Chicks products simply don’t work on my hair. They clearly have a very particular definition of mixed-race hair, and it isn’t mine.)
But Elizabeth’s attitude to the more African hair textures is apparent when she describes the way in which she deals with different types of hair:
I didn’t treat all hair as though it were kinky. I treated the hair as it deserved to be treated and some of the medium hair, hair that is a little more on the side of straight than kinky, looks so much better if it doesn’t have the life pressed out of it. And they were very pleased with the fact that they left looking so much more natural.27
This echoes the Madam Walker strategy of associating heavily processed straight hair with looking natural. Such processes inform the deeply internalized sense that our hair is so inadequate it is healthier when it is damaged. It also advances the nonsensical Eurocentric association of straight hair with cleanliness and health. With a self-delusion I recognize, Elizabeth Cardozo could actually claim that “The chemicals made our hair better.”
The Cardozo sisters cut their teeth in a salon frequented by whites. Their own clientele extended to both white women and, in the parlance of the time, “Orientals.”
Yet Elizabeth hastens to add that the Oriental customers are few and far between. They didn’t tend to bother much with the salon at all, because “oriental hair is beautiful to start with.” Considering how many black women continue to weave Asian women’s hair on to their heads, one of the many things that saddens me reading Elizabeth’s account is the depth to which her attitude and the beauty standards it normalizes remain potent to this day.
Black women, on the other hand, with their chronic malaise, required ongoing treatment and booked lifetime appointments (in fact, the business was famed for its long-term booking system).
Despite haircare requiring the expertise that can be found only in local salons, Elizabeth cannot disguise her distaste for the black businesses that operate in the informal market:
I went to the best black hairdresser in the community, Madam Caitlin. She was better than anyone at the schools but Madam . . . had a living room and customers seemed quite satisfied to sit there for hours, play cards and gossip. That was the kind of place, I was not going to have. [my italics]
While she cannot deny that Madam Caitlin is the best hairdresser around, neither can she hide her contempt for what she considers the crass activities that are encouraged on her premises. This paradox often characterizes anti-black discourse, the thirst for black expertise or cultural knowledge existing side by side with a refusal, or an inability, to confer any worth on the creators of the work. Elizabeth needs to learn from Madam Caitlin, but she cannot hold her in high esteem. Elizabeth has a very different type of establishment in mind for herself.
We train them in the hair work and we also train them to act as professionals.
For instance like a trained nurse would act. And not like some hairdressers have often acted, loud and noisy and talking over the customers and talking their personal business.
In other words we tried to show them that the only way to uplift them from the status of little better than domestics was for them to uplift themselves and that was fairly easy when Mrs. [Margaret] Holmes was there . . . Nobody resented that but she walked around with her queenly air, which nobody resented, and they seemed to love her . . . so without any noise, or undue talking or irregularity of any kind . . .