11

Founding the Black Hair Industry

PEORIA, ILLINOIS

On a cold evening in 1878, as snow fell, the winter winds swirled outside a small wood-frame house in Peoria, Illinois. Inside the kitchen with a black wood-burning stove at its center, Annie Minerva Turnbo stood on a wood crate behind her older sister Sarah, parting and plaiting Sarah’s hair. Annie was nine years old with a round face the color of mahogany. She was small for her age and looked even tinier, draped in three sweaters and a thick pair of trousers to protect against the cold. She had an outsize personality and was quick-witted and precocious. As her small fingers wove through her sister’s thick, curly hair, two of her sister’s friends, Lilly and Bea, sat a few feet away at the kitchen table, making small talk and watching Annie. “She’s got the knack,” Lilly said. “She can do hair like nobody’s business.” “And it’s going to be my business,” said Annie as she continued to wrap sections of her sister’s hair around her fingers and then weave them together. “You might have the knack, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Lilly cautioned Annie. “My granny makes the best fried catfish this side of the Ohio River, but that doesn’t put food on the table or clothes on her back.” Sarah chimed in as Annie moved on to another section of hair, “She might be able to charge a penny. She might even earn a little spending money on the side, when she gets a real job.”

Annie’s future seemed to come up any time the girls got together to have her work on their hair. Annie imagined that she would start a business doing hair and make enough money that she didn’t have to work as a maid or on a farm as her sister and friends did. That type of thinking was what worried Sarah and her friends—“Annie’s dream,” they called it dismissively. In Peoria it was hard enough for African Americans, most of whom worked long hours as domestics in the mansions of the rich on the Illinois River waterfront, or as hands on the pig and cow ranches on the outskirts of town. In Peoria and many communities like it, Emancipation had left African Americans only a half step out of slavery. It seemed that the only jobs available for blacks were frustratingly similar to the ones they had worked before the Civil War. After Emancipation it was common for African Americans to be forced to work for the same families that had once enslaved them. Sarah and her friends warned Annie not to put her hopes in foolish dreams. Who had ever heard of a black hair business, anyway?

Annie and Sarah had endured enough suffering already. Sarah, Annie’s parents, and Annie’s other older siblings had been enslaved in Kentucky, on a plantation near the childhood home of Abraham Lincoln. When the Civil War began, her father, Robert Turnbo, had enlisted in the Fifth Kentucky Cavalry of the Union Army and sent his wife, Isabel, and his children on the Underground Railroad to the free soil of Illinois. In 1866, he surrendered his horse and gun, hung up his blue Union uniform and cap, and trekked to Illinois to reunite with his family, hoping they could build a better life in the emancipated world. One of his first acts as a free man was to go to city hall and apply for a marriage license. He bought a farm in Metropolis, Illinois, where he and his family worked the soil for their own gain, not that of a plantation owner.

On August 9, 1869, the Turnbos welcomed their tenth child, a girl whom they named Annie Minerva Turnbo. In the years after slavery, black farmers like the Turnbos faced a world that was both free and perilous. Black farmers, if they could bring in a good crop, could make as much as or more than white farmers. However, in addition to the backbreaking labor of farming, they also faced threats of violence from white supremacist groups. In some cases, the groups would damage their crops, kill their livestock, or threaten their very lives. When Annie was a toddler, Isabel and Robert Turnbo fell ill, and died within months of each other, leaving Annie an orphan. She then went to live with her adult sister Laura in the nearby town of Peoria. She slept on a cot in the kitchen of her sister’s small house, the same room where she worked on Sarah and her friends’ hair in her spare time.

“She’d sure earn a penny if she could fix that hair of yours,” Lilly cracked, motioning toward Bea, the other friend, who had been sitting silently at the table. Bea had a blue scarf tied around her head, covering her hair. She had dark brown skin and big brown eyes, which she cast downward, frowning in response to Lilly’s remark. “It’s your own fault,” Lilly admonished her. Bea had been using a hair straightener she had purchased from a traveling salesman that had caused her hair to fall out. “You might as well jump in a river of lye as to put that mess in your hair,” Lilly said. “Can you help?” Bea asked, looking at Annie. She lifted the scarf to reveal that half of her head was hairless. Annie got down from the crate she was standing on and walked over to the table to take a closer look. The skin on Bea’s head was red and swollen. “I thought you learned your lesson,” Sarah said to Bea unsympathetically. Bea seemed to be obsessed with changing her appearance. She had tried skin-lightening tablets, which contained cyanide, skin-bleaching creams, and whitening powders. Recently, she had bought a whitening lotion, which had irritated the skin on her arms and hands.

The black beauty industry in the years after slavery ended was dominated by traveling salesmen and beauty companies that sold products to alter the appearance of African Americans to make them look more like white people. Black skin removers, whitening pills, and hair straighteners were advertised in pamphlets, broadsides, and flyers with the goal of ostensibly helping black people to assimilate into white society. The products were snake oil but sold well, in part because some black people believed that looking whiter would help them achieve higher self-esteem and social status. Lye soaps and tins of animal fat were the most common hair products used by African Americans in those years. Hair was more of a social institution than a business; women had their hair braided and styled by family members or friends in their homes, usually with no money being exchanged. At the time, it was hard to imagine anyone making it into a business.

During enslavement, African Americans had been treated as chattel and been deprived of adequate clothing and soap. As a result, there was no defined black aesthetic or hair care in the years after Emancipation. Black women often wore braided styles adapted from African hair-braiding techniques. Or, like Mary Ellen Pleasant, they kept their hair hidden under bonnets and scarves. Black men, such as Frederick Douglass and Robert Reed Church, cut their own hair, then slicked it back with bear oil, imitating the hairstyles of white men as best they could. The New York millionaire Jeremiah Hamilton chose to shave his head of tightly coiled hair, which the newspapers referred to as “wool,” and wear a wig of straight black hair. In 1878, as Annie dreamed of having a hair business, black beauty was yet to be defined or commodified.

White beauty salons and barbershops, on the other hand, were booming and were often run by black men and women. Robert Reed Church’s first wife, Louisa, made a small fortune dressing white women’s hair and wigs in Memphis. She used her money to help her husband open his first business and buy the family’s first home and a horse-drawn carriage. In Atlanta, Alonzo Herndon, a former slave, opened the “Crystal Palace,” the most famous barbershop for white men in the South, the beginning of a million-dollar business empire. It would be years before the Herndons and the Churches would become well known as the richest black families in the South, so to Sarah and her friends, Annie’s insistence that she could turn black hair into a business was more foolish than visionary.

“Maybe your hair will be better when it grows out,” Annie said as she finished examining Bea’s head. “If it grows out!” Lilly jabbed. Bea put her head into her hands, shook it from side to side, and began to cry. “All I wanted,” she said, her voice breaking and cracking, “was to look nice—you know, pretty.”

Bea’s problem wasn’t uncommon. With their scalps damaged by chemicals and their hair follicles clogged by heavy oils, many women like Bea were losing their hair. Annie might have been good at styling hair, but getting it to grow again was another matter.

ABOUT A WEEK LATER, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, ANNIE awoke in a coughing fit. She flailed about, gasping for air and tugging at the neck of her nightgown. Sarah was awakened by the noise and rushed into the kitchen. She put a pot of water on the stove, lit a fire, and threw a handful of herbs from a jar into the water. Then she opened the front door and let a rush of cold into the kitchen. When the chilly air hit Annie in the face, she gasped. Her airways opened slightly. Sarah snatched her up and held her face over the pot of boiling water, telling her to inhale the steam coming off the herbs in the boiling pot. After an hour, she was breathing normally and Sarah put her to bed.

Annie stayed in bed for three days after the incident. On the fourth day, she asked to return to school. “You’re not going anywhere, you’re at death’s door,” Sarah told her. Sarah kept Annie in the house until spring. One warm day in April, she sent her out on an errand to buy some herbs from the local herbalist. She handed Annie a jar made of clay with money in it. “Don’t dawdle,” she told her, pressing it into her chest. Annie took the pot and headed out, leaving the house for the first time in months.

The herbalist lived in a cabin in the woods just outside the city. Annie wandered to the outskirts of Peoria until she reached a dirt path. She followed the path through an open field, past a grove of walnut trees, past a creek, and up and down a hill, to where the herbalist lived in a cottage by a small creek-fed pond. There she saw a woman working in the garden in the front yard of the house. She wore an apron with dozens of pockets, which she was stuffing with flowers and leaves that she picked from the garden. Annie went up to her and handed her the clay pot.

The woman greeted Annie. “You still having those spells, Annie?” Annie nodded. “You’ll grow out of those spells,” the woman told her and then led her inside the house. The aromatic house was filled with shelves of labeled jars containing herbs and oils. The woman pulled three jars from the shelf and led Annie to a table, where she sprinkled some of the herbs from each jar into a mortar and crushed them together with a pestle. As the woman worked, Annie wandered the room looking at the jars on the wall; “Sage, cures coughs,” “Feverfew, cures rheumatism,” and “Valerian root, brings sleep.” As she read the labels on the hundreds of jars, they seemed to offer a cure for any ailment thinkable—heartbreak, weight gain, teeth grinding. Suddenly, Annie remembered Bea and her hair loss problem.

“Do you have anything for hair?” she asked. “A plant that grows hair?”

“No,” the herbalist said, “I have many.”

She took down three jars of herbs, sprinkled some of each into her mortar, and crushed them. She then took down a thick, creamy yellow liquid and mixed some of it into the herbs. “This is a hair elixir,” she told Annie. “Just take some of it and rub it into your scalp and let it sit for thirty minutes.” She pushed the mixture toward Annie. “Now that’ll be a dime,” she added. Annie took the mixture along with the herbs her sister had asked her to buy and headed home.

The next time Bea came over, Annie told her about the concoction and asked if she could try it on her. Bea agreed, and Annie applied the substance to her scalp. After a few days, Bea’s skin started to heal. A few weeks after that, her hair started to grow back. Annie’s health continued to improve that spring, but Sarah kept her out of school, fearing that she was too weak. Annie asked Bea to get her science books to study while she was out of school. Bea was grateful to Annie for curing her baldness and got her mother, who worked as a cleaning woman at the white school in Peoria, to borrow books from the school, which she gave to Annie.

Throughout her childhood, Annie read anything about chemistry, biology, and hygiene she could get her hands on, hoping she could learn something about hair. One day she came across a text on dairy farmers’ use of ointments to treat the skin of cows’ udders. After reading about the ointments, she went into town, purchased a cow ointment from the drugstore, took it home, and mixed in various hair-growing herbs from the herbalist. She tried the ointment on a stray cat she found suffering from mange. The solution seemed to help regrow some of the animal’s hair after a few applications. She decided it was time to try it on a person.

She tried out her concoction on one of Sarah’s friends who had tried to straighten her hair with lye soap and burned her scalp. She had bald patches all over her head where she had scalded herself with the straightening substance. When the friend came to Annie, she washed her head, then applied her new solution of ointment and herbs. After she was done, the friend asked her how long it would take for her hair to start growing again. “I don’t know,” Annie replied. “You are my first human experiment.” The friend returned a few days later to show Annie that the patches that had been bald were now sprouting hair. The solution had worked. Annie had invented her own hair elixir.

Next Annie began to make her own elixir by copying the ingredients used in cow ointment: petroleum, sulfur, and lanolin or beeswax. Over the next ten years, she continued to treat women in Peoria, using them as test subjects to perfect her solution, tweaking its ingredients and their proportions. The sulfur removed damaged tissue, and the petroleum and beeswax helped heal chemical burns and moisten the skin. She added herbs she learned about from the herbalist that were purported to grow hair faster. She named her invention the Wonderful Hair Grower.

Annie’s reputation grew in Peoria, as not only could she do hair “like nobody’s business” but she could help women who were going bald from the chemicals sold by traveling salesmen grow hair again. It was a small miracle.

AS ANNIE GREW OLDER, SHE ADDED WOMEN TO HER CLIENT LIST and tinkered with her Wonderful Hair Grower and hairdressing methods. Through her teenage years and early twenties, she grew into a woman, but she shunned dances, social gatherings, and boyfriends, preferring to spend her free hours working at her craft. “I’m beginning to worry you don’t know how to have any fun,” Sarah would tell her. “This is fun!” Annie would reply as she spent her hours toiling on hair.

By Annie’s thirtieth birthday, in 1899, she had more than two hundred clients, the majority of the three hundred or so black women in town, but she still wasn’t making much money. She had dropped out of school and had to work odd jobs to help Sarah with the household bills. Annie was unmarried, overworked, and barely getting by, but she was undeterred. She decided what she needed was a larger customer base.

At the turn of the century, Annie and Sarah moved to Lovejoy, Illinois, to try to turn the Wonderful Hair Grower into a full-time business. Lovejoy, now called Brooklyn, was the oldest incorporated black town in the United States. The city had been founded by escaped and emancipated slaves from St. Louis in the early 1830s. Its black population was twice the size of Peoria’s. With any luck, Annie could double her business.

Annie and Sarah rented an office for $5 ($146) a month in the back of a wood building near the town’s main street. The day they moved in, Annie took out a piece of paper and scribbled down the rent, then wrote an amount for supplies and living expenses under it. She added up the numbers and showed the total to Sarah. “That’s how much we have to make if we want to be here a second month.”

Annie then left the office and went for a stroll around town. She noted the location of the drugstore, where they could purchase their supplies. She kept walking, stopping to note the locations of the black churches and the houses where women’s clothes were drying on the laundry lines. Those are where our potential customers are, she thought. She hurried back to the office and drew a map from memory of where she thought they could find customers.

The next day, just after sunrise, she set out. She had divided the map she was carrying into six sections. She would canvass one section of the map per day. She went from door to door and told women about her hair products. By the end of the week, she had covered the entire town. However, her initial solicitations weren’t fruitful. Most of the women thought she was another snake oil merchant and were dubious of her claim that she could regrow hair.

Annie decided she needed to do something dramatic to convince the women of her new town that her product worked. She dug into her and Sarah’s savings and rented a horse and buggy. She loaded the buggy with her products, buckets of hot water, and a chair. She went around the town searching for a gathering of women leaving church or running errands. She would stop the buggy and lecture the women on the importance of proper hygiene and hair care. Afterward she’d do one of the women’s hair on the cart free of charge. Her demonstrations won over women at nearly every stop. At the end of the month, Annie and Sarah had earned more than enough to stay another month.

After Annie had been in Lovejoy for a few months, a teenage girl named Alice visited Annie in her office. By then Annie’s business was thriving, and Alice had heard that Annie could work miracles with hair. She carried with her a picture she had torn from a magazine and handed it to Annie. “Can you make my hair look like this?” she asked. The picture was of a “Gibson Girl.” The woman in the picture was white with pale skin, ruddy cheeks, and straight hair pinned in waves on top of her head. Annie was puzzled; how could a black woman be made to look like a Gibson Girl? She led the girl to her salon chair. “You’re too beautiful to try to look like something you’re not,” she told her. “I’m going to give you my Wonderful Hair Grower treatment.” “Just like the Gibson Girl?” Alice asked excitedly. “I can’t do that and wouldn’t if I could,” Annie responded. “But I won’t do anything until you stop talking about the Gibson Girl, agreed?” Annie said warmly. “But I’m tired of it in my eyes,” Alice explained. She was in stenography school, and her hair, which dropped over her forehead, dripped sweat into her eyes. Annie washed and combed Alice’s curly hair and pinned it behind her head. She then took the strands on Alice’s forehead and neck and pinned them to her head with a set of ornamented combs. After she finished, she handed Alice a mirror. “I’d like to say you look like the ideal American beauty,” she told her. Alice was smiling as she looked herself over. Annie paused and thought a moment. “Would you like a job selling the Wonderful Hair Grower?” she asked. Alice was overjoyed and wanted to start that afternoon. It had taken Annie several weeks to win over the women of Lovejoy; perhaps hiring a local who could give firsthand testimony of the benefits of her products would make selling more efficient. Soon after hiring Alice, Annie hired two more Lovejoy women as salespeople.

A few weeks after she was hired, Alice came into Annie’s office and laid another piece of paper before her. “Is this another Gibson Girl?” Annie asked with exasperation. Alice laughed. “Here’s your chance,” she said, turning the paper over.

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION

Meet the World in St. Louis in 1903

People from around the country.

Representatives from around the world

will be in St. Louis in 1903 at

The World’s Fair

IN 1903, ANNIE MOVED TO ST. LOUIS TO TRY TO CAPITALIZE ON the excitement and population growth occurring in the city in anticipation of the World’s Fair. In the years leading up to the fair, more than twelve thousand people moved to St. Louis to take jobs working in the construction crews building the fairgrounds in the city park. Annie rented an apartment in downtown St. Louis with indoor plumbing, a kitchen and bathroom, a bedroom, and a separate living room. The streets of downtown St. Louis were filled with horse-drawn buggies and streetcars. Telephone poles lined the busy sidewalk where men, women, and children moved among office buildings made of brick and brownstone, hotels, theaters, and shops.

In her first few nights in St. Louis Annie couldn’t sleep. The sound of fire engines blaring and street traffic seemed extremely loud compared to the country towns in Illinois where she had spent all of her thirty-four years. She wondered how she could accomplish anything in St. Louis without a good night’s sleep, but after a few days she got used to the noise and slept soundly.

She set out on the town with a case of product samples and began knocking on doors. She had a full line of products to go along with her Wonderful Hair Grower: cleansing cream, shampoo, face powder, and assorted cosmetics. On one of her outings, she happened upon a small apartment building in the colored section of town. She knocked on the door and was greeted by a woman named Sarah Breedlove. Breedlove had a stocky build, brown skin, a round face with wide-set eyes, and a broad nose. One of the first things Annie noticed was her hair. It was short and matted, and her scalp was dry and flaky and had bald spots. She convinced Breedlove to let her come in and shampoo her hair. She was wearing expensive clothes and her hair was, as it always was, clean and pinned behind her head.

As Annie shampooed her hair, Breedlove told Annie that she was a widow and mother and had immigrated to St. Louis from Louisiana. She lived with her seventeen-year-old daughter, A’Lelia, and worked as a laundress in St. Louis. Like Annie, she was the daughter of enslaved African Americans and had become an orphan when her parents had died when she was a girl. The two women connected as Annie washed and detangled her curly hair, massaged her scalp, and applied her Wonderful Hair Grower to the skin on her head, which was covered with dandruff and scabs. Annie then told Breedlove about herself. She offered Breedlove a job selling her products and promised that not only would her hair grow back, but she would make more money than she did as a laundress. Breedlove accepted Annie’s offer and within a few weeks was one of her best saleswomen in the region.

THE WORLD’S FAIR BEGAN ON APRIL 30, 1904, HAVING BEEN POSTPONED a year due to its growing in scope and size. The event was staged on a 1,272-acre park in the middle of the city. President Theodore Roosevelt attended the fair along with more than two hundred thousand Missourians and tourists from all over the country and the world. There were nine hundred buildings made of white stone, statues, man-made lakes, a zoo, and villages where Apache Indians, Congolese Pygmies, and Filipinos lived in huts and tepees and wore tribal garb. The grounds, which were interconnected by looping dirt roads, curved through the grass. There was also a train, which visitors could ride for ten cents.

Annie, at thirty-four years of age, had never left the Midwest. The World’s Fair, however, brought the world to her. At the fair Annie met black tourists from the South, the West, the East, and the Caribbean and pitched their selling her products in their hometowns. She used the opportunity to begin building a national sales network and take her company from a regional business to a global brand.

Annie visited the fair as often as she could for the year it ran. She was particularly fascinated with the exhibit of Africans at the fair called “African Wilds.” The exhibit spanned more than 40 acres of the park. There, hundreds of African men, women, and children lived in huts made of sticks and leaves and dressed in loincloths. Around this time, she named her company Poro Products. She chose the name, in part, because it sounded like an African word, and Annie was fascinated with the continent of the tribesmen at the fair and her ancestors.

Shortly after the World’s Fair, Sarah Breedlove met with Annie to tell her she was moving to Denver, Colorado. Her hair had grown back in and was full and thick. She offered to sell Annie’s product in Colorado. Annie agreed that it was a good idea and wished her well in her travels. She did not have a sales rep in Colorado, whose black population was growing rapidly as so-called Exodusters, black refugees from the Jim Crow South, were settling there by the hundreds.

Breedlove took the train to Denver with her daughter, her belongings, and a supply of Poro products to sell. She sold Poro products in her new city and worked part-time as a laundress. A few months into her move, her boyfriend from St. Louis, a traveling salesman named Charles James “C. J.” Walker, moved to Denver. They married a few months later. Charles convinced his new wife that she should stop selling Annie’s products and they should start their own line. Annie hadn’t trademarked the name or the formulas and was powerless to stop the copycatting.