CHAPTER 12

Breaking Ties, Making Ties

Less than two weeks after Madam Walker returned home from Chicago, F. B. Ransom filed papers for her divorce from C. J. Walker. As one of Indiana’s few black attorneys, Ransom—nattily dressed in his three-piece suits—was easily noticed in the halls of the courthouse. Working for the city’s most prominent black entrepreneur had only enhanced his reputation. Now in Sarah Walker v. Charles J. Walker, Ransom discreetly set about to terminate a union for which no marriage license existed. The possibility that a financially strapped C.J. might claim rights under a common-law marriage—or as a member of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company board of directors—surely occurred to the meticulous young attorney. A clean, legally recognized severance was the most prudent strategy for a client with the resources Ransom now realized Madam Walker was capable of generating.

With an undisputed case of adultery involving Dora Larrie—as well as Louise’s letter as further evidence—Ransom had no difficulty extricating Madam Walker from a potentially costly and embarrassing situation. On October 5, after C.J. had failed to appear in the judge’s chambers, the divorce was made final. According to the docket, “no money” was paid to either party.

Banished from 640 North West Street, C.J. retreated to Louisville to the home of his sister, Peggie, and her husband, Calvin Prosser. Desperate for money—and cocky enough to believe that he could compete with Madam Walker on her own turf—C.J. placed two advertisements for his “Walker-Prosser Wonderful Hair Grower” in the September 14, 1912, Freeman. The larger of the ads was nearly identical to Madam Walker’s three-panel before-and-after layout, one that C.J. may have helped design.

By year’s end, Larrie, herself not yet divorced, had joined C.J. in business. “We did not do so well under the name of The Walker-Larrie Company,” C.J. later wrote, “so she planned to get a divorce that we might marry.” But soon after their March 1913 marriage, C.J. realized that he had been duped. “We were not married long before I discovered she did not love me, but that she only wanted the title Mme., and the formula,” he lamented, calling his life “hell” since Larrie had had him arrested for “interfering with her business.” The woman who had promised to make him “master of the situation” had instead “tied up what little mail there was coming in, so I could not get a cent,” C.J. later complained in a letter to the editor of the Freeman. “All I got was ten cents on Sunday for a paper and shoe shine.”

Madam Walker would publicly maintain that her third marriage had failed because of “business disagreements,” and perhaps in the larger sense that was true. C.J. himself conceded that they “could not agree along business lines.”

“When we began to make ten dollars a day, he thought that amount was enough and that I should be satisfied,” Madam Walker later told a reporter. “But I was convinced that my hair preparations would fill a long-felt want, and when we found it impossible to agree, due to his narrowness of vision, I embarked in business for myself.”

But of course their philosophical differences were only part of the problem. By his own admission, C.J. had “let drink and this designing evil woman come between” him and Madam Walker. In a public apology in a March 1914 issue of the Freeman, he denounced Larrie as “the cause of all my sorrow.” In truth, C.J. himself had been responsible for his predicament. Now no amount of flattery could budge Madam Walker, the woman he unconvincingly claimed to “still love better than life.” A few months later, when C.J. wrote begging for money and work, Ransom sent him $35 and some advice. “Madam does not understand why you do not go to Key West, Cuba, and other places which afford splendid fields, and in which she has few if any agents,” he wrote. Ever the teetotaler, Ransom also suggested that C.J. “keep sober and build up a big business.”

Not long afterward, Peggie Prosser warned Madam Walker not to send an additional $100 that C.J. had requested. His plan, Peggie wrote, was to use the money to start yet another company, this time with a Mrs. Barksdale, a woman she called “worse than” Dora Larrie. Perennially down on his luck, C.J. continued to appeal to his former wife, his pestering approaches ranging from breezy and conciliatory to pathetic. “Say Mme, How would you like to give me employment as one of your traveling agents?” he blithely queried a couple of years after their divorce. “I am sure I could be of much service to you . . . There is no one that knows the work better than I.” Understandably, she remained unmoved.

At times C.J.’s entreaties were pitifully melodramatic. “My heart is changed,” he vowed, doubtless when his wallet was empty. “I am tired of Louisville and am writing these lines with tears dripping from my eyes.” In another letter he whined about his rheumatism and accused her of ignoring his pleas. But Madam Walker had long since lost any sympathy for the man Ransom had accused of selling her formula to others and of teaching it to “some three or four women.” As Madam Walker’s buffer, Ransom warned C.J. against any “unwarranted” legal actions he might try to mount. Madam Walker, he threatened, “would spend every penny that she ever had in court before she would agree to give you one penny.” For the rest of his life C. J. Walker would try, but fail, to maneuver his way back into the company that was to make his name a household word.

Neither Madam Walker nor Lelia could claim much luck when it came to matters of the heart. By the fall of 1912 John Robinson had been gone for more than two years, though Lelia had not yet filed for divorce. Without any existing correspondence between mother and daughter during the early 1910s, there is no reliable way to discern their thoughts and feelings on the subject of men and marriage. But one thing is clear: they discussed the absence of a family heir.

With no prospective groom in place, twenty-seven-year-old Lelia legally adopted thirteen-year-old Fairy Mae Bryant less than three weeks after her mother’s divorce had been granted. Exactly how and when Lelia and Fairy Mae met remains unknown, though Lelia likely saw her while in Indianapolis for the Knights of Pythias convention in August 1911 as well as during the Christmas holidays later that year. Family oral history suggests that Madam Walker first encountered Fairy Mae as she ran errands for Walker hair parlor employees and customers. One of the better-educated neighborhood children, she easily would have qualified for the “secure position” as a “young girl solicitor” for which Madam Walker advertised in the Recorder. Certainly Fairy Mae’s widowed mother, Sarah Etta Hammond Bryant, would have welcomed the “good commission” Madam Walker promised the youthful employees who distributed fliers and delivered Walker products. But it was Fairy Mae’s braids—long, thick ropes that reached below her waist—that had caused Madam Walker to notice her. What more perfect walking advertisement for her bestselling hair grower than a young girl with hair so healthy and abundant that it captivated strangers? What more dramatic illustration of her hair care system than the transformation of Fairy Mae’s bushy, cascading mane into soft, pliable plaits, something that Madam Walker could achieve with just a light touch of the heated metal comb she now marketed with her products?

Fairy Mae was petite, barely five feet tall, and well mannered. Approaching graduation from the eighth grade, at a time when most Americans had considerably less formal education, she was a bright and curious student. But her family could not afford to send her to high school. With Madam Walker’s interest, however, it seemed that her hair—an inky version of Rapunzel’s locks—would provide a path from poverty.

“Mae had beautiful hair, and that’s the thing that they wanted. Someone with nice hair,” an envious in-law remembered decades later. But Fairy Mae was not the delicately featured, light-skinned beauty favored by many members of the black elite. As a symbol of the Madam Walker Company, however, her smooth cocoa complexion was an asset, an acknowledgment that Walker products were designed for brown and black women, rather than the near-white models often featured in newspaper ads. Fairy Mae’s prominent nose, especially when viewed in profile, provided a physical reminder of the strong Native American genes that mingled with those of her African and European ancestors. Her penetrating almond eyes switched from warm to melancholy to intense. And when she smiled, the small gap between her upper front teeth appeared. Still, it was always her heavy, crinkly hair that made people stare, sometimes with admiration and sometimes with envy.

Mae had grown up in Noblesville, Indiana, with her seven siblings. In the summers and on holidays she often visited her grandmother, Samira Thomas Hammond, a washerwoman, who in 1911 had moved into rented rooms at the rear of 636 North West Street, two doors south of Madam Walker’s factory. Samira—born in 1838 in Orange County, Indiana, and old enough to have been Madam Walker’s mother—was the matriarch of a large extended family whose members regularly traveled the twenty miles via Interurban train between Noblesville and the Indiana Avenue neighborhood. Her daughter—and Fairy Mae’s mother—Sarah Etta Hammond Bryant, was also a laundress who, like Madam Walker, had been born in 1867. Another of Samira’s daughters, Della Hammond Ashley, and Della’s husband, James Ashley, owned a small, popular Indiana Avenue cafe. “Aunt Del,” who had no children of her own, doted on Fairy Mae and other visiting nieces and nephews.

Madam Walker had come to know Samira and Del as neighbors. And it is possible that she had met Sarah Etta, a Court of Calanthe sister, as early as March 1910, when she happened to have been in Noblesville during a revival at Sarah Etta’s church. Because Bethel AME was the center of much black social activity in the town, Madam Walker could not have missed the handsome Bryant clan, a rainbow of complexions ranging from cream to chocolate, all three daughters with flowing, hip-length hair. That spring the other parishioners would have focused more attention than usual on Sarah Etta, who was still mourning the loss of her husband, Perry Bryant.

*   *   *

While Samira Hammond was by no means part of Indianapolis’s colored elite, some of her ancestors had been among Indiana’s earliest settlers of color. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were respected enough that their family illnesses and church activities warranted the occasional mention in the “Noblesville” column of the Indianapolis Recorder. “Little Miss Farrie [sic] Bryant, who has been visiting her grandmother and aunt in Indianapolis,” the paper noted in August 1909, “returned home last Sunday evening.” Although Samira’s financial circumstances dictated a modest existence, she cherished her unusual family history. Unbeknown to most of her neighbors along North West Street, her great-grandfather, Ishmael Roberts, had been among a small group of freemen who had served in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. At the time of the first United States Census in 1790, Ishmael—who was born circa 1755 in Northampton County, North Carolina—and his Cherokee wife, Silvey, were among North Carolina’s 5,041 free people of color. Between 1787 and 1826, he had purchased and sold more than 900 acres of land in Robeson and Chatham counties.

Descendants of the Roberts and Hammond families proudly claimed that their ancestors had never been slaves. But during the first three decades of the nineteenth century they had begun to lose some of their privileges because North Carolina plantation owners—fearful of slave revolts and abolitionists—had tightened laws affecting both slaves and freemen. With each successive term, “the Legislature stripped the free Negro of his personal liberties,” so that by 1835 the state’s lawmakers had clamped down on their migration into and out of the state, outlawed their freedom to preach, and rescinded their right to vote regardless of how much property they owned. In response, organized groups of free blacks fled the state, including dozens of Robertses, who had begun migrating to Indiana in the 1820s. By 1840, more than 150 people with the surname Roberts were living in nine southern and central Indiana counties.

The Hoosier State, however, was only relatively more welcoming than North Carolina had been, having passed a law in 1831 requiring all newly arrived Negro families to register with county authorities. In 1833, after settling in Orange County, Indiana, Ishmael and Silvey’s son, Elias Roberts, and his wife, Nancy Archer Roberts, presented a certificate of freedom proving that “although persons of Couleur, [they] are free and entitled to all the rights and privileges of white persons.”

Twenty years later, in August 1853, their daughter, Candiss, and her husband, Jordon Thomas, were compelled by Indiana law to enroll themselves and their children in the Orange County Register of Negroes and Mulattoes. Because the state legislature had adopted a provision in 1852 stating that “no negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in the State” unless already a resident, those who wished to stay were required to register. One of those children was Samira, who was described on the ledger as a “mulatto 4 ft 11 1/2 in high.” Six years later, when she turned twenty-one, she married Littleton Hammond, a Vigo County, Indiana, widower with a small son and another North Carolina transplant. Hammond’s father, Elijah, was considered a “full blood Cherokee Indian.” Sadly Littleton died in 1876, leaving Samira with eight children between infancy and fifteen years old, just as her mother, Candiss Roberts Thomas, had been widowed with eight minors.

In 1889, Samira’s daughter Sarah Etta Hammond married Perry Bryant, one of the founders of Noblesville’s colored Masonic lodge and an active member of the local Knights of Pythias chapter. By the time the couple’s last child was born in 1907, they had settled in the town’s Federal Hill area west of the White River. Perry, who worked as a fireman in one of the local factories, and Sarah Etta created a stable family whose close ties with Bethel AME Church made them well-regarded members of the town’s African American community.

In late June 1909, however, the family’s equilibrium was shattered when Perry Bryant died of cerebral meningitis and heart disease. The Grand Master of the Masons presided over as elaborate a funeral as any black man in Noblesville might receive. But despite the charitable hearts and hands of his fraternal brethren, as well as those of Sarah Etta’s Eastern Star, Court of Calanthe and Bethel Needle Club sisters, Perry’s personal assets and benevolent society benefits could not begin to support seven minor children, including an eighteen-month-old toddler, eight-year-old twin boys and Fairy Mae, the youngest of three daughters.

Having lost her own father when she was only nine years old, Sarah Etta Bryant had no illusions about the difficulties she faced. Just as her mother and grandmother had been widowed in their thirties, she now confronted the intimidating task of rearing a large brood on her own. So when Madam Walker first asked if Fairy Mae might serve as a model for Walker products, Sarah Etta welcomed the opportunity for her child. It may have been during Fairy Mae’s trip to Harlem with Madam Walker and Lelia in early 1912 that the Walkers began to consider formally adopting her. The impressionable thirteen-year-old Fairy Mae, who had never been on a vacation, was mesmerized by a lavish Cinderella world of more food, clothes, privileges and indulgences than she had ever dreamed existed. The New York journey “turned her head,” said a relative, so that when the Walker women offered to adopt her, Fairy Mae needed no convincing and “wanted to go.”

Sarah Etta, on the other hand, was not so quickly or so easily persuaded. It was one thing to allow her child to travel and be exposed to a world she could only imagine. It was something else entirely to relinquish one’s child to another woman. Yet the Walker women offered not only to continue Mae’s education and to train her to run their business but to allow her to maintain contact with her family. Still, Sarah Etta remained torn. The unfathomable decision to surrender her child must have been made palatable only by degrees when she considered her own childhood and the fact that she, like Fairy Mae, had grown up as a fatherless child in the middle of a large group of siblings. “Mae was very special to the Bryant family, and her going to the Walkers was God-sent and deeply appreciated,” said genealogist Coy D. Robbins, Jr., whose mother had known Mae as a child. “Etta did not see it as giving up, but rather as having a way economically and socially for Mae to acquire material things and life experiences that she, as a widow, could not provide.”

Fairy Mae understandably was seduced by the opulence of Madam Walker’s Indianapolis home with its twelve lavishly furnished rooms. For a child accustomed to living with several siblings in less than half the space, the calm and quiet of the rose-and-gold drawing room—with its brilliantly patterned Oriental rugs, gold-leaf curio cabinet and Tiffany chandelier—was like paradise. In the library, Fairy Mae could hold soft leather-bound books, run her fingers across the gleaming keys of the Chickering baby grand piano and admire the lovely oil paintings of young William Edouard Scott, the local colored artist who had studied in Paris. On a table covered with Battenberg lace, she watched Madam Walker’s guests being served dinner on Havilland china with monogrammed silverware and sparkling crystal goblets. In Pittsburgh, at Lelia’s home on Mignonette, the surroundings were much the same.

In late October 1912 a Pittsburgh judge approved Lelia’s petition to adopt Fairy Mae Bryant with the consent of her mother, Sarah Etta Hammond Bryant, and with the understanding that her “welfare” would “be promoted by such adoption.” Significantly, the decree granted Fairy Mae “all the rights of a child and heir of the said Mrs. Lelia Walker Robinson.” It also legally changed her name from Fairy Mae Bryant to Mae Walker Robinson, though John Robinson would never have any significant involvement in her life. In fact, Lelia was not at all focused on Robinson, whom she would finally divorce nearly two years later.

Fascinated by business opportunities in New York and California, Lelia had persuaded her mother to buy property on both coasts. By early December she and Mae were house hunting in Los Angeles, hoping to find a base for her cousin Anjetta Breedlove to establish a West Coast Walker operation. As Lelia prepared to make the down payments on houses there and in Harlem, Ransom assured her that her mother was “very much impressed with the proposition.” For his part, he praised her discerning eye and told her that she “would make an ideal real estate agent.”

As the year ended, Madam Walker was unusually pleased with her daughter and with herself. While visiting friends in St. Louis for Christmas, she was ecstatic to learn of the Freeman’s eye-catching, full-page, holiday season layout declaring her “America’s Foremost Colored Business Woman,” and praising her wealth, her entrepreneurial acumen and her philanthropy. “The write-up in the Freeman,” Ransom wrote to her on New Year’s Day, “created quite an impression here.” Madam Walker was delighted with the positive publicity, a fitting segue to another prosperous year.