On June 6, 1919, just three days after she buried her mother, Lelia turned thirty-four years old. That same day, she also married Wiley Wilson.
Despondent at her loss and overwhelmed by the responsibilities now thrust upon her as president of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, Lelia was desperate for an emotional anchor. James Arthur Kennedy, the man she had promised her mother she would marry, was separated but not yet divorced from his first wife. Unwilling to wait even a few months, Lelia impulsively turned to Wiley. It was a decision she would soon regret.
Meanwhile in Indianapolis, F. B. Ransom was earnestly reassuring customers, vendors and creditors of the company’s stability. At the same time he also was discovering that his boasts about the value of Madam Walker’s estate had been wildly optimistic. In mid-June, when Lelia and Wiley stopped briefly in Indianapolis—en route to a two-month honeymoon in California and Hawaii—Ransom informed Lelia of the distressing financial news. That week they also learned that John Davis, Madam Walker’s second husband—from whom she had not been legally divorced—was making claims against the estate, as were a few estranged family members who had not been included in the will. Lelia, who wanted no part of the confusion, headed west with Wiley, abdicating her responsibilities to Ransom in a way that her mother never would have done.
It always had been difficult enough for Lelia to measure up to her mother’s private expectations, but now the comparisons were being discussed in public. Lelia, nearly everyone said, was neither the businesswoman nor the leader that Madam Walker had been.
Nevertheless, when Lelia returned to Harlem, she made every effort to focus on Lelia College and her New York and Pennsylvania sales agents. But her marriage was already faltering and she was preoccupied with personal matters. That fall, hoping to regain Wiley’s affection, she handed him the deed to a handsome four-story Seventh Avenue building for his new medical clinic. Instead of thanking her, he flaunted an affair with an old girlfriend, both humiliating her in public and daring her to protest. Just as Madam Walker had predicted, Wiley had broken her heart. By the fall of 1921, they were separated.
That November, Lelia Walker Wilson sailed alone for a five-month trip to Europe, Africa and the Middle East, turning heads as she strolled the decks of the Paris in her plumed hats and expensive jewels. Weary of the gossip in Harlem, she had decided to spend time abroad freeing herself from thoughts of Wiley. Still struggling with her mother’s death, as well as her own role in the Walker enterprise, she also confided to a friend that she hoped to “find” herself.
Lelia’s arrival in Paris was greeted with an “excellent write-up in the French papers.” In fact, La Liberté’s coverage had been quite favorable. But a week later L’Intransigeant called her a “négresse” in a short article by a reporter who had been on board the Paris covering French Premier Aristide Briand’s trip from America. “I am utterly surprised that a French paper would print an article, so unkindly phrased, concerning a person . . . that happens to be a black American,” she wrote to the paper’s editor from her suite at the Carlton Hotel on the Champs-Elysées. “From what the black soldiers of America told on their return after the war, I had expected more kindness from a French press.”
The incident did little to dampen Lelia’s pleasure throughout the holiday season as she shopped at Cartier and celebrated the new year in Paris, then traveled to Monaco, Nice and the South of France during January. In London she caused a sensation at Covent Garden as she was escorted to her box. “Her appearance,” a friend later wrote, “was so spectacular that the singers were put completely out of countenance.” In Rome, Lelia attended the coronation of Pope Pius XI, then sailed to the Middle East for a tour of Palestine. In Cairo she rode among the pyramids on camelback. Then, after steaming down the Suez Canal, she traveled the length of the Red Sea, disembarking at Djibouti for an overland sojourn to Ethiopia. In Addis Ababa, she became the first American to meet Empress Waizeru Zauditu, the daughter of Menelik II, the emperor who had distinguished himself among African leaders by defeating the invading Italian army in 1896.
For one of the few times since her mother’s death, Lelia was having fun. She was also allowing herself to fall in love again, rekindling her relationship with Kennedy through a series of affectionate letters. Within days of reaching Paris, she had cabled her “Artie” of her safe arrival. In reply, he urged her to “have every pleasure that can be offered,” just as he had done while in France during the final days of the war. “I think of the whole of Europe in terms of you,” he wrote, with hopes that her “entire tour may be like . . . a beautiful long road strewn with fragrant crimson flowers, the end of which terminates within the circumference of my arms.” By the time Lelia returned to New York in April 1922, they had decided to marry. Finally, after both their divorces were final, they had a quiet wedding ceremony in F. B. and Nettie Ransom’s living room in Indianapolis on May 1, 1926. Lelia joined Kennedy in Chicago for a few months before returning to New York with the agreement that they would live in both cities. But one financial setback after another, and the day-to-day obligations of his medical practice, prevented Kennedy from traveling to New York as often as he had promised. Determined not to borrow money from Lelia, and not to take advantage of her in the way Wiley had, Kennedy accepted Dr. Joseph Ward’s offer to become second-in-command at Tuskegee’s new black veterans hospital, where Ward had been named chief medical officer. Lelia had been willing to commute between New York and Chicago. Tuskegee, however, would prove to be another matter entirely.
Despite Lelia’s distractions, the Walker Company enjoyed unprecedented sales during the two years after Madam Walker’s death: $486,762 in 1919—or the equivalent of $4.8 million today—and $595,353 in 1920—equal to more than $5 million today. In 1921, however, a brief postwar depression pushed sales below the $400,000 mark, and they continued to decline steadily during the next decade. Ransom, along with a cadre of very capable national sales representatives, made valiant efforts to carry on Madam Walker’s work. By the end of 1920, the company could proudly claim to have trained 40,000 Walker agents since 1906. But without the benefit of their founder’s charisma and vision, Ransom, Lelia and the others found themselves faced with fierce competition from Annie Pope-Turnbo Malone’s Poro Company, Sarah Spencer Washington’s Apex Company, Anthony Overton’s Overton Hygienic Company and a score of other regional firms by the mid-1920s.
The eagerness to please her mother that Lelia had displayed when she ran the Denver and Pittsburgh offices, and when she first opened the Walker Salon in New York, was now gone. Out of a sense of obligation she continued to attend the annual conventions and to make occasional trips to represent the company. She sat on several boards—including the Harlem Child Welfare League, the Music School Settlement and the women’s auxiliaries of the NAACP and National Urban League—and she contributed $25,000 to the Hampton-Tuskegee Endowment Fund, but her interests increasingly were elsewhere. In 1923, when Ransom solicited her suggestions for improving sales in the Harlem office, she had little to offer. “I do not know of anything that can be done to improve the New York sales,” she wrote. “New York is a peculiar city; anything that is a nine days wonder takes, but just let it be ten days. Nothing excites blasé New York.”
In fact, Harlem’s corners were saturated with Walker, Apex and Poro salons. But whereas Lelia seemed willing to allow her competitors to make inroads, her mother would have been devising strategies to best them. “I feel we have exploited this field thoroughly and are getting as much right now out of this business as any concern is getting or can get,” Lelia rationalized, convinced that the Walker Company’s best days were long gone. “Everything has its day and lives its life. People are not as much interested in whether their hair grows or not, due probably to the short hair or bobbed hair style and there are numbers of similar preparations on the market that seem to grow hair as fast as ours.”
Clearly Lelia lacked her mother’s fortitude and perseverance. Nevertheless, she had inherited her flair for the dramatic. Whereas Madam Walker had influenced the commerce and politics of her era, Lelia would help create the social and cultural aura of hers. Sometime during 1922 she initiated her own personal transformation by changing her name. A few months after returning from her overseas trip, she added an “A” and an apostrophe to “Lelia,” though exactly why she chose “A’Lelia” remains a mystery. With her new name—just as her mother had gone from “Sarah” to “Madam”—Lelia seemed to be lowering the curtain on one act of her life and lifting it on another. As if on cue, the lively, glamorous Harlem Renaissance was being ushered in by several cultural milestones, among them the debut of the all-black Broadway musical comedy Shuffle Along. A number of other notable literary events celebrating the “New Negro” and a talented generation of poets, novelists and artists were just on the horizon.
“It was the period when the Negro was in vogue,” wrote poet Langston Hughes, one of Harlem’s brightest lights, in 1925. The movement’s “mid-wives”—Howard University’s Alain Locke, Opportunity founder and editor Charles S. Johnson and Crisis literary editor Jessie Fauset—all hoped their cultural revolution of art, poetry and music would improve race relations in America in ways that six decades of post–Civil War protest, blood and politics had failed to do. But for all its high-flown cultural aspirations, the “renaissance,” for many, was as much—or more—about the opening of Harlem’s cabarets and speakeasies to downtown white revelers as it was about the creation of literature and sculpture. Harlem’s nightlife, reported Variety, “now surpasses that of Broadway itself . . . from midnight until after dawn it is a seething cauldron of Nubian mirth and hilarity.” Historian Nathan Huggins attributed the desire of a “generation of Americans to lose themselves in cabarets, rhythms, dances, and exotica” to a “postwar hangover.” F. Scott Fitzgerald simply said that “America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.” And A’Lelia Walker was poised to ride. “She wanted to miss nothing,” remembered a friend. “She tried to miss nothing.”
A’Lelia was the first to admit that she possessed no particular artistic talent, but she genuinely enjoyed the company of the free-spirited writers and had already developed longtime friendships with musicians Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, as well as Flournoy Miller, one of the stars of Shuffle Along. Among this crowd, she was comfortable. As hostess to Harlem’s cultural elite, A’Lelia had finally found her niche.
“She looked like a queen and frequently acted like a tyrant,” wrote her friend Carl Van Vechten, the novelist and former arts critic who famously interpreted Harlem for other downtown whites. “She was tall and black and extremely handsome in her African manner. She often dressed in black. When she assumed more regal habiliments, rich brocades of gold or silver, her noble head bound in a turban, she was a magnificent spectacle.” Her son-in-law, Marion Perry, remembered her as a woman with “royal instincts.” Langston Hughes called her “a gorgeous dark Amazon.” At five feet nine inches, with excellent posture and an evenly distributed 190 pounds, she was six feet tall when she dressed in her heels and turbans. “She had a superb figure, the type that artists like to draw,” wrote one reporter who knew her well. W.E.B. Du Bois’s assessment that she was “without beauty but of fine physique” may have said more about him than about her. Surely he found no agreement among Richmond Barthé, Augusta Savage, Berenice Abbott, R. E. Mercer and James Latimer Allen, a few of the many well-known artists and photographers for whom she sat during the 1920s.
A’Lelia “made no pretense of being intellectual,” Langston Hughes later recalled, but she could be a charming and generous hostess, who “could engage you in conversation on most any topic and who gave you the impression of being well-informed on all of them.” She had learned, she told the Inter-State Tattler, “the art of reading headlines, and the trick had served [her] well.” And while one observer judged her attention span to be no longer than “seven minutes,” at least one of her friends thought she was “one of the most subtly humorous women in Harlem.”
A’Lelia’s guest lists were quite diverse. “At her ‘at homes’ Negro poets and Negro numbers bankers mingled with downtown poets and seat-on-the-stock-exchange racketeers,” Hughes remembered. Of course, her Harlem friends formed the core. Besides the young writers like Hughes, Countee Cullen and Bruce Nugent, regular visitors included Edna Lewis Thomas, Madam Walker’s former social secretary, who was now an actress, and her husband, Lloyd; actor Paul Robeson and his wife and business manager, Eslanda (when they were in town); singer and vamp Nora Holt; Pittsburgh Courier columnist and New York School Board member Bessye Bearden and her husband, Howard; painter Aaron Douglas; entertainer Florence Mills; voice teacher Caska Bonds; Inter-State Tattler managing editor and Pittsburgh Courier columnist Geraldyn Dismond (later know as Gerri Major); Mayme White, A’Lelia’s constant companion and social secretary; and McCleary Stinnett, a well-known bootlegger and A’Lelia’s favorite dance partner. From downtown, Carl Van Vechten probably introduced poet Witter Bynner, writer and salon hostess Muriel Draper and novelist Max Ewing to A’Lelia’s soirees.
A’Lelia’s parties also had an international flavor and “were filled with guests whose names would turn any Nordic social climber green with envy.” Among the European royalty and near-royalty were Princess Violette Murat of France, Osbert Sitwell and Peter Spencer Churchill of England, Prince Basil Mirski of Russia and a Rothschild or two. When A’Lelia was informed that a Scandinavian prince had not been able to maneuver the crowded hallway leading to her apartment, she “sent word back that she saw no way of getting His Highness in . . . nor could she herself get out through the crowd to greet him. But she offered to send refreshments downstairs to the Prince’s car,” Hughes recounted years later.
From time to time A’Lelia hosted celebrations at Villa Lewaro, on one occasion throwing a July Fourth extravaganza complete with fireworks for Liberian President C.D.B. King, on another, a lavish Christmas dinner in Kennedy’s honor. But she did most of her entertaining at her 136th Street town house or at her much smaller pied-à-terre at 80 Edgecombe Avenue, where a large swath of rose and green taffeta draped sensuously from the living-room ceiling. There in Apartment 21, her collection of elephants—in “jade, velvet, metal, ivory and ebony”—were displayed everywhere, but especially on the built-in shelves of her custom-made mahogany studio couch. With accompaniment by the hot pianist of the moment, A’Lelia’s Thursday visitors were likely to hear Showboat star Jules Bledsoe perform his signature “Ol’ Man River” or see Al Moore and Fredi Washington teach the steps to their latest dance routine. After one of A’Lelia’s parties, writer Max Ewing described the “extremely elegant” surroundings in a letter to his mother. “You have never seen such clothes as millionaire Negroes get into,” he wrote. “They are more gorgeous than a Ziegfeld finale. They do not stop at fur coats made of merely one kind of fur. They add collars of ermine and gray fur, or black fur collars to ermine. Ropes of jewels and trailing silks of all bright colours.”
In November 1923, A’Lelia turned her skills as an impresario to her daughter Mae’s wedding, both orchestrating the event and choosing the groom. That Mae was not particularly keen on Dr. Gordon Jackson, a Chicago surgeon who was thirteen years her senior, seemed to be a minor detail as far as A’Lelia was concerned. “I look upon this wedding as the very biggest advertisement we have ever had [except for] Villa Lewaro,” A’Lelia wrote Ransom a week and a half before the ceremony, sure that the photographers and reporters would be out in full force to cover everything from the linen shower to the magnificent reception at Villa Lewaro. “This is the swellest wedding any colored folks have ever had or will have in the world. While its purpose certainly is not for the advertising, God knows we are getting $50,000 worth of publicity. Everything has its compensation.” Although, in this case, it was at Mae’s expense.
A’Lelia had sent out 9,000 invitations to friends and Walker agents in every state in the union, as well as to Nigeria, Liberia, England, France, Haiti and Panama. By midmorning, on November 24, despite a cold rain, thousands of people “white and colored, drawn out of curiosity,” had gathered on 134th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues in front of St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church. Inside the sanctuary, which was lavishly decorated with chrysanthemums, autumn leaves and palm trees, nearly two-thirds of the pews were filled a full hour before the ceremony was scheduled to begin.
The bridesmaids—mostly members of the Debutante Club that A’Lelia had started for Mae after her graduation from Spelman Seminary in 1920—wore silver dresses covered with cream Chantilly lace and trimmed with ropes of orange blossoms. The groomsmen, in formal morning attire, included five doctors and two attorneys, among them Henry Rucker, Jr., the grandson of nineteenth-century black Georgia Congressman Jefferson Long. The mother of the bride was stunning in her elegant gold metallic gown from Paris.
Although the bride was miserable, her breathtaking dress drew “gasps of admiration” as she moved slowly down the aisle. Luminescent sea pearls accented her train and created the frame of her headpiece, a crownlike ornament inspired by Egyptian artifacts from the recently opened King Tutankhamen tomb. In Mae’s wedding photographs—taken later that day at Villa Lewaro and the day before her twenty-fifth birthday—she was noticeably melancholy. Gordon, on the other hand, looked stern and cocksure as he stood behind her. Predictably Mae’s efforts to be the dutiful wife A’Lelia had advised her to be failed in the face of Gordon’s volatile temper. In May 1926, when she was eight months pregnant, she moved from their Chicago home into her own apartment near Michigan Avenue. By early December, three years after the $46,000 wedding she had not wanted, Mae was divorced and back in New York with her six-month-old son, Gordon Walker Jackson.
The following August, she married attorney Marion R. Perry, Jr., who adopted young “Walker.” Their daughter, A’Lelia Mae Perry, was born on July 22, 1928.
By early 1926 A’Lelia had begun to move as freely among her white downtown acquaintances as among her black Harlem pals. But few friends, white or black, were as close to her during the late 1920s as Carl Van Vechten. When James Arthur Kennedy, soon to be her husband, could not join her in New York for Easter 1926, she spent the holiday with Van Vechten and his Russian-born wife, Fania Marinoff, in their impressive apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street.
Van Vechten, who had been a well-known New York music critic until he was forty, had begun writing fiction in 1922. When he trained his sights on Harlem for the subject of his fifth novel, he was no stranger to African Americans. His father had helped support the Piney Branch School for Negro Children in Mississippi and he prided himself on his “fully integrated guest lists.” But when Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven reached the bookstores in August 1926, its title alone scandalized many black New Yorkers. And while Van Vechten was careful to depict intellectually capable and socially refined black characters, he seemed, to some critics, to be overly fascinated with the racy underworld of numbers bankers and pimps, as well as the sadomasochistic sexual encounters between two of the book’s main characters.
Du Bois, in a scathing review in the December 1926 Crisis, called it “cheap melodrama” and “a caricature” of Harlem life. But James Weldon Johnson, with whom Van Vechten had developed a close friendship, called Nigger Heaven “a fine novel” and praised him for being an early champion of black culture by writing “frequent magazine articles and by his many personal efforts in behalf of individual Negro writers and artists.”
The character Adora Boniface was unmistakably based on A’Lelia. Although Adora was a former “music hall star” who lived on Striver’s Row and had inherited her husband’s real estate fortune, Van Vechten did not veer far from the truth in drawing her personality. “She was undeniably warm-hearted, amusing, in her outspoken way, and even beautiful, in a queenly African manner that set her apart from the other beauties of her race whose loveliness was more frequently of a Latin than an Ethiopian character.” If she was nicer to Van Vechten after the book, as he later wrote a friend, perhaps it was because she appreciated his description of her “good heart” and “ready wit.” Self-conscious about her size and her dark skin—Wiley had made it clear that he preferred light-skinned women—A’Lelia also appreciated the thoughts Van Vechten placed into the mind of Mary Love, the novel’s prim librarian. “She was beautiful, of that there could be no question, beautiful and regal,” Mary said of Adora. “Her skin was almost black; her nose broad, her lips thick . . . She was a type of pure African majesty.”
A’Lelia may even have taken some perverse satisfaction in Van Vechten’s fictional depiction of her relationship with some members of the city’s black elite. “Frowned upon in many quarters, not actually accepted intimately in others—not accepted in any sense of the word, of course, by the old and exclusive Brooklyn set—Adora nevertheless was a figure not to be ignored,” Van Vechten, the narrator, observed. “She was too rich, too important, too influential, for that.”
With a first printing of 16,000 copies—and thirteen subsequent printings—Nigger Heaven became the most widely read of the Harlem Renaissance–era novels. Translated into at least ten and possibly eleven languages, it made A’Lelia one of “the most discussed women” in New York and may have done as much to immortalize her role in Harlem’s 1920s as did The Dark Tower, the salon she opened in 1927.
Although A’Lelia was never a patron in the sense of underwriting the living expenses of any of the young Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, she frequently opened her home and her kitchen, filling them up with her spicy spaghetti—the secret was cheese and wine—and staking them at poker games. During early 1927, at several gin-soaked brainstorming sessions, writer Bruce Nugent, painter Aaron Douglas and a few others talked with A’Lelia about creating a salon for poetry readings and art exhibits, something “completely informal . . . homey [and] comfortable” where they could bring their friends. At Nugent’s suggestion, they agreed to call it The Dark Tower, a nod to Countee Cullen’s Opportunity column of the same name. But after the project was delayed by much procrastination—and apparently even more gin—A’Lelia moved forward without the original team of “consultants.”
“We dedicate this tower to the aesthetes,” announced the engraved invitations that began arriving in mid-October 1927. “That cultural group of young Negro writers, sculptors, painters, music artists, composers and their friends. A quiet place of particular charm. A rendezvous where they may feel at home.”
But instead of a place of reverie and reflection, the opening-night reception was like all of A’Lelia’s other parties: crowded, bustling and well stocked with food, champagne and gin. Nugent, ever the tieless bohemian, almost was not admitted because of his casual dress. At any rate, he found the prices on the menu much too high for the struggling artists A’Lelia had initially intended to benefit. The “hall was a seething picture of well-dressed people,” Nugent later wrote. “Colored faces were at a premium, the place filled to overflowing with whites from downtown who had come up expecting that this was a new and hot night club.”
At one end of the room—which stretched across the back of A’Lelia’s 136th Street town house—stood a customized bookcase. Designed by Paul Frankl in the shape of a skyscraper, it was filled with first-edition copies of books by Hughes, Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Jean Toomer and many of the other new Harlem writers. On the right side of the room Hughes’s prize-winning poem “The Weary Blues” was carefully lettered on a buff-and-gold wall, its rhythmic words celebrating the black folk idiom:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Directly across from Hughes’s blues was Countee Cullen’s more formal sonnet “From the Dark Tower,” which heralded the emerging voices of black writers.
We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap.
Dark rose tables and chairs matched the wood of the piano and complemented rose-hued curtains and wine-colored candlesticks. A sky-blue Victrola was available whenever no live music was being played. A red graphic of The Dark Tower bookcase appeared atop all menus and stationery.
What had been conceived originally as a casual setting was now an upscale tearoom. But if A’Lelia hoped to make a profit from the enterprise, she soon was disappointed. Her friends were not accustomed to paying for her hospitality and the young artists couldn’t afford the prices. Within a year the original Dark Tower was officially closed. “Having no talent or gift, but a love and keen appreciation for art, The Dark Tower was my contribution,” A’Lelia announced on an engraved card that she mailed in October 1928. She blamed the “members” for not making use of the facility, but she had failed to mention that at least part of the reason the effort had lost money was that her hostess, Sari Price Patton, had embezzled some of the daily receipts. After November 1, A’Lelia continued to rent The Dark Tower for private parties, luncheons, teas, card parties, meetings and receptions.
In August 1928, during the twelfth annual Walker agents convention, A’Lelia and Ransom welcomed the delegates to the dedication ceremonies of the spectacular $350,000 headquarters and factory of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in Indianapolis. “It is the culmination of the dream of the late Madam C. J. Walker, who in her life planned for this very event . . . as [she] desired to give to the race the most modern plant for the manufacture of toilet preparations,” wrote the Amsterdam News after the groundbreaking the previous year. “Like Villa Lewaro . . . it will contain the best that money can buy.”
The building was indeed one of the most magnificent any African American company had ever built, but it could not have opened at a worse time. The next autumn, on October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed, sending the entire country into an economic tailspin. By then end-of-the-year company revenues had dipped to $213,327 and A’Lelia had been forced to rent the 136th Street town house to the New York City Health Department for a pediatric clinic. In 1930, when President Herbert Hoover asked Congress for $100 million to fund a public works program, soup kitchens had become a common sight and annual Walker Company revenues had fallen below $200,000 for the first time since 1917. By the end of that year, more than 1,300 banks had closed and 26,355 businesses had failed.
That fall the trustees of the Walker estate were so financially strapped that they arranged to auction Villa Lewaro’s contents. On Thanksgiving weekend 1930, cars lined both sides of North Broadway in Irvington for a quarter of a mile in either direction. The more disrespectful buyers drove their cars through the front gate and parked on the grass.
Throughout the house cardboard tags hung from Madam Walker’s treasures. Thousands of bargain hunters—some of them the very people who had sneered as they passed the house—trampled through her “dream of dreams,” picking off the items she had so lovingly selected. “What am I bid for this beautiful Chickering concert grand piano?” said auctioneer Benjamin Wise of the gold-trimmed piano, as music played softly on the Estey organ at the other end of the music room. And so it went for three days on every floor of the house. Arthur Lawrence, the president of the Westchester County Parks Commission, bought one of the Aubusson tapestries from the drawing room for $1,150. Madam Walker’s ten-piece Hepplewhite dining-room suite went for $1,100. The contents of the library—including the $15,000 ten-volume opera set by James Buel—sold for close to $1,800. In the end, the auctioneer estimated that he had received about twenty cents on the dollar. “Sale of Villa Lewaro Nets $58,500 in 3 Days as Millionaires Bid,” read the Pittsburgh Courier headline.
Three weeks later A’Lelia and Ransom sent their annual Christmas telegram to all Walker Company employees. “Worry won’t help matters. We must be cheerful as possible under existing conditions,” A’Lelia wrote, though she was feeling anything but optimistic. “Worthwhile is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong.”
Ransom’s holiday message, however, minced no words. “Dear Coworker. True there seems to be nothing to be particularly joyous about this Yuletide but when you know you have done your best you can at least enter the festivities with a clear conscience. Any number of you no doubt are thinking if the founder Madam C. J. Walker had lived things would have been different,” he continued, anticipating their concerns. “If so you are wrong. No one could have foreseen the financial crisis that has gripped not only America but the world.” He had only to look to Detroit—and to much larger corporations—to prove his point. The Ford Motor Company, which had employed 128,000 workers before the Crash, would be down to 37,000 by the following summer.
In 1931, Ransom’s job only became more difficult as annual sales fell to just over $130,000. More than ever, he was pressuring A’Lelia to find a buyer for Villa Lewaro. At one point she even turned to Carl Van Vechten for help. “I have been holding on to this place through sentiment (my mother), but I’ve arrived at the conclusion it is foolish of me to maintain such a large and expensive home with no family ties.” She was willing, she told him, to sell the house to him for $150,000, forty thousand dollars less than its assessed value. “There isn’t a person I’d rather have Villa Lewaro than you,” she closed. Van Vechten replied as gently as he could to his distressed friend, “But, dear A’Lelia, what would I do with a house? I am always away all summer. And where do you think I’d get all that money? A’Lelia behave!”
With Villa Lewaro’s annual upkeep at $8,000, the fairy castle had become a white elephant, hungry for heating oil, maintenance and property taxes. Because the Indianapolis building produced revenue, Ransom concluded that the factory’s mortgage should take priority over the maintenance of a house that was rarely used.
With Villa Lewaro on the market and 108 rented out, A’Lelia had still managed to hold on to her Lincoln, her baby grand piano, her sterling silver and enough trappings to keep herself comfortable. But she had pawned much of her jewelry and there were signs that she was depressed. Although she knew her blood pressure was hovering near the 200 mark, she refused to restrict her diet.
In March 1931, after five years of a long-distance marriage, she and Kennedy divorced. During the doctor’s four and a half years in Tuskegee, A’Lelia had managed to visit only a few times. And demands of the veterans hospital prevented him from traveling to New York with any frequency. Kennedy filed for desertion, but they had both agreed several months earlier that a divorce was the best solution. “There was no place in A’Lelia’s life for crickets, sandflies and firebugs, husband or no husband,” a friend observed. “She could enjoy the country for a day, a week, perhaps a month, but not beyond that.”
“In love and in marriage she was unsuccessful as was but natural,” Carl Van Vechten wrote years later. “She was too spoiled, too selfish, too used to having her own way to make any kind of compromise.”
In a letter dated August 12, 1931, Ransom delivered yet another blow: “We are merely taking in money enough to take care of the payroll, notwithstanding the fact that the payroll has been greatly reduced. We are able to do nothing about our outstanding bills,” he wrote. “I am letting the factory people off every other week . . . I just want you to know how things are going.” It is unclear whether A’Lelia ever received the letter, for three days later she and her close companion, Mayme White, drove to Long Branch, New Jersey, for their friend Mae Fain’s weekend-long birthday party. On Sunday, after a day at the ocean and an indulgent dinner of lobster, champagne and chocolate cake, A’Lelia awakened with a headache so severe she could not see. At 5:03 the next morning she was pronounced dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was only forty-six years old.
A’Lelia “knocked herself out, because she wanted to be knocked out,” her son-in-law, Marion Perry, said years later. With Walker Company sales at a trickle and no end to her personal financial woes, she saw nothing but poverty ahead.
Just as A’Lelia’s parties had been grand, so was her funeral. More than 11,000 people filed past her casket at Howell’s Funeral Home the following Friday. The mourners were “mostly women . . . young women, already stooped with the drudgery of work . . . old women, muttering indistinctly of the days when they knew ‘Madam’ . . . well-dressed women to whom the living woman’s career had been a challenge,” reported the Philadelphia Tribune. In the open casket, A’Lelia wore a gown of gold lace and tulle over lavender satin with a pale green velvet sash draped around her body. Her feet were covered in apple-green satin slippers. Around her neck were her cherished Chinese amber prayer beads. On her third finger was the silverand-amber ring Mayme had given her. Three orchids, a gift from Bessye Bearden, had been placed in her hands. Above her head a spray of two dozen orchids decorated the inside of the casket.
By early Saturday morning nearly 1,000 people had gathered outside the mortuary for the invitation-only funeral. “But, just as for her parties, a great many more invitations had been issued than the small but exclusive Seventh Avenue funeral parlor could provide for,” Langston Hughes remembered. For a few moments before the white-maned Reverend A. Clayton Powell, Sr., opened the service with the Ninetieth and Twenty-third psalms, he stood “motionless in the dim light” behind A’Lelia’s silver casket. From the front row, Mae, Marion, Mayme and F. B. Ransom watched quietly. Among the dozens of Walker agents and longtime family friends who sat nearby were Jessie Robinson, Alice Burnette, Lucille Randolph and Edna Thomas. Even Wiley Wilson made an appearance, though Kennedy did not. The Van Vechtens and Countee Cullen were out of town.
Appropriately the service was filled with music performed by A’Lelia’s friends. The Bon Bons, a female quartet, opened with “I Ain’t Got Long to Stay, for My Lord Calls Me by the Thunder,” then later sang “Steal Away to Jesus.” Paul Bass, the tenor, who often had entertained at 80 Edgecombe, offered “I’ll See You Again,” A’Lelia’s favorite melody from Noël Coward’s 1929 play, Bitter Sweet.
Mary McLeod Bethune, speaking “in that great deep voice of hers,” delivered the eulogy. “She recalled the poor mother of A’Lelia Walker in old clothes, who had labored to bring the gift of beauty to Negro womanhood, and had taught them the care of their skin and their hair, and had built up a great business and a great fortune to the pride and glory of the Negro race—and then had given it all to her daughter, A’Lelia,” Hughes remembered. As friends and family sifted through the meaning of Mrs. Bethune’s words, Inter-State Tattler columnist and music critic Edward Perry read “To A’Lelia,” a poem that Langston Hughes had written two days after A’Lelia’s death.
So all who love laughter,
And joy and light,
Let your prayers be as roses
For this queen of the night.
As Perry took his seat, several Walker agents lined up to place flowers on the closed casket.
At Woodlawn Cemetery, Mae, Marion, Mayme, Mrs. Bethune and a small group gathered around the flower-filled space that had been dug beside Madam Walker’s grave. From above, Colonel Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, the world’s first black licensed pilot, dropped two bouquets of gladiolas and dahlias from a small plane. “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem,” Hughes later wrote. “The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negroes had but few pegs to fall.”
In most of the obituaries, A’Lelia was inevitably compared with her mother. Almost always, she came up wanting. The New York News & Harlem Home Journal was harsh: “The happy, hapless life of A’Lelia Walker was a tragedy.” Calling her “generous and free-handed to a fault,” the best that Du Bois could manage was to say that “her memory, with all the things that mar it, is not altogether unlovely, and her life surely not quite in vain.” But her closest friends, who understood her struggles and her disappointments, were more charitable. “A’Lelia’s wealth had packed too many thrills into her life . . . It got to the point where her existence virtually depended upon a succession of swift and colorful events, like in a kaleidoscope,” wrote the Inter-State Tattler’s Edgar Rouzeau. And in fact she once had told her son-in-law, Marion Perry, “I had everything I wanted in life. I just didn’t have it long enough.” But it may have been Carl Van Vechten who remembered her most enthusiastically. “You should have known A’Lelia Walker,” he declared in a letter to author Chester Himes twenty-five years after her death. “Nothing in this age is quite as good as THAT. Her satellites were shocked and offended by her appearance in Nigger Heaven, but she was nicer to me after that, even than before. I miss her . . . What a woman!”