CHAPTER 2
Motherless Child
Night riders and vigilantes bloodied Louisiana’s back roads during the score-settling campaign of 1868. Still an infant, Sarah was sheltered from knowing about the year’s one thousand politically motivated murders, many of them sanctioned by the Democratic leadership in its efforts to vanquish Republican rule and cower black elected officials. But soon enough she would understand the fearful midnight whispers of her elders and the courageous tales of those who escaped the wrath and the rope of the Knights of the White Camellia. Later in life, she would crusade against such outrages with both her wealth and her passion.
Throughout the late 1860s, Owen and Minerva did their best to protect their children from the turmoil around them. White conservatives and Confederate sympathizers made no secret of their resentment at being governed not only by a racially mixed, Republican dominated legislature but by Governor Henry C. Warmouth, a corrupt carpetbagger, and Lieutenant Governor Oscar James Dunn, a man of ethical reputation whose primary flaw in their eyes was his African ancestry. He was “as black as the ace of spades, but a grander man from principles never trod God’s earth,” said Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, his successor as lieutenant governor.
The Democratic offensive to regain power was so exacting and pervasive that by November most of the parishes that had supported Republican candidates in the April gubernatorial election had flip-flopped to the Democratic column as a result of ballot tampering and a petrified, stay-at-home electorate. Once again, however, Madison Parish’s proximity to the Freedmen’s Bureau regional headquarters in Vicksburg had spared it the more blatant bullying that prevailed elsewhere in the state. Consequently, Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant received 90 percent of its votes, his widest margin anywhere in the state, over Democrat Horatio Seymour, a man whose platform declared “This Is a White Man’s Government.”
No doubt Curtis Pollard, the Breedloves’ minister and a Louisiana state senator, had played some role in keeping the night riders at bay. Often called bulldozers, these self-appointed vigilantes earned their name for plowing down defenseless blacks. Twenty years Owen’s senior, Pollard was a man Owen could admire, because of his success as a farmer and grocer, as well as for his outspoken advocacy of the freedmen’s interests. That summer The Daily Picayune called this former slave “a black man, uncompromisingly so; and a Republican equally uncompromising.” During his first year in the state senate, and two years before the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Pollard had championed Louisiana legislation that protected farm laborers from employers who threatened to fire them for supporting Republican candidates.
Fortunately for the Breedloves, the abundant 1868 cotton harvest ushered in the first of the two most productive growing cycles since before the war. Owen’s skills as a blacksmith also made him a likely candidate for extra work rebuilding the railroad that ran through the Burney property. Its tracks destroyed during the war, the North Louisiana and Texas Railroad Company decided that year to construct its eastern terminus at Delta.
The crop of 1869 was called “so unmanageably large” that laborers, for once, had some bargaining power for their wages. The penny a pound the Breedloves and others earned probably meant sufficient food for their families and brought such “improvements in dress and appearance” that an official in the nearby Freedmen’s Bureau headquarters took note. The family’s relative prosperity may have provided the catalyst and the confidence for Owen and Minerva to pledge the $100 marriage bond that allowed them to wed on December 16, 1869, legalizing the union they had formed nearly twenty years earlier during slavery. Senator Pollard conducted the modest ceremony, which included the almost two-year-old Sarah, her two-month-old baby brother Solomon, and the four other Breedlove children, whose ages now ranged from seven to fifteen.
Years later Sarah’s childhood friend Celeste Hawkins remembered her as an “ordinary person, an open-faced good gal” with no remarkable traits to predict her future achievements. “We played together an’ cotch craw-fish in de bayous,” she told an interviewer who attempted to capture her dialect. “We went to fish-frys an’ picnics; we sot side by side in the ol’ Pollard Church on a Sunday.” They also worked alongside their parents in the fields, the suffocating Louisiana heat blasting against their chests. Using a nickname that Sarah had long ago discarded, Hawkins recalled a glimmer of the competitive woman she was to become. “Twasn’t nobody could beat me an’ ‘Winnie’ a-choppin’ cotton an’ a-pickin’ dem bolls clean,” she proudly said.
Hawkins also remembered their look-alike hairstyles. As with many black girls, their hair, said Hawkins, was “twisted and wropped with strings” in an ancient African grooming custom guaranteed to make them wince in the process. After their mothers had pulled the strands and sections tautly at the roots, their temples and scalps smarted for days.
Their world was insular, circumscribed by the peonage of their parents. During 1874, when Sarah was old enough to enter first grade, public schools in Louisiana—where they had existed at all—were shuttered when the state legislature declined to fund them. By then the Freedmen’s Bureau had disbanded its education division. Throughout the region, “the hostility to schools for the Negro,” noted one traveler, “is . . . often very bitter and dangerous.” In some parts of the state, schools were torched, teachers harassed, even killed. The freed men and women fervently sought education for their children and themselves. Just as during slavery, planters feared a literate workforce, especially one that could choose to keep its children in class during harvesttime or learn enough to challenge the political and economic status quo.
Sarah later told a reporter that she had had only three months of formal education, its quality undoubtedly inferior. If the Pollard Church helped her learn her ABCs and other rudimentary literacy lessons in Sunday school, she was more fortunate than most children in her parish. At least she was surrounded by the stimulation of commerce, especially around the time of her third birthday, when the trains returned to Madison Parish. Arriving every morning at eleven o’clock not far from her family’s cabin, the whistling locomotive roused the village into a busy hive. Certainly the passengers—whether in finery or rags—would have stirred a young girl’s imagination as she watched them embark upon journeys far beyond the dusty roads of Delta.
Without warning, whatever carefree moments Sarah enjoyed as a child ceased with the death of her mother, Minerva, probably in 1873. Within a year, perhaps less, her father remarried. By late 1875, he, too, was dead.
Decades later, after Sarah had become the well-known entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, she reminded audiences that she had had to fend for herself since childhood. “I had little or no opportunity when I started out in life, having been left an orphan and being without mother or father since I was seven years of age,” she often recounted in stoic acknowledgment of her loss.
Publicly, at least, she did not elaborate with details, dates or causes of death. The particulars remain unknown but the possibilities are many. Disease stalked the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi Valley, often in the form of epidemics poised to activate at deadly, unpredictable intervals. Cholera, once in motion, lurked in drinking water contaminated by open privies and raw sewage. In the absence of a death certificate, there is no way to know how Minerva died, but she was vulnerable to the 1873 cholera epidemic that claimed thirty-four Madison Parish victims. Without vaccines or medical treatment, pneumonia, smallpox, measles, typhoid, tuberculosis and a half dozen other highly infectious diseases went unchecked. Less likely as a cause of the Breedloves’ deaths was yellow fever, a disease usually more fatal to whites than blacks because of its West African origins and the immunity many blacks carried as a result.
If Sarah witnessed her mother’s and father’s final breaths, she left no clue about the bewildering heartache a young child experiences at the loss of a parent. But the painful aftermath shaped her attitudes for the rest of her life. Dependent upon her older and now married sister, Louvenia Breedlove Powell, she was forced to live in the household of her brother-in-law, Jesse Powell. Years later she would describe him as “cruel,” suggesting, but never fully revealing, the extent of his threats, taunts and abuses.
Rather than be destroyed, Sarah learned to turn her vulnerability into resolve and resilience. Her determination to escape was her most reliable asset.
If Sarah was personally at risk, her entire community’s safety was subject to the statewide political turmoil that had only grown more intense since the murders of 1868. The gains blacks had realized during the early days of Reconstruction were being snatched systematically from them throughout the early 1870s. By the spring of 1874, Louisiana had become “an armed camp.” Determined to oust the Republicans, many conservatives—including a number of former Confederate military officers—established the White League, heir to the Knights of the White Camellia. Emboldened by the Democratic Congress in Washington, the League frequently carried out its assaults in broad daylight, vowing that “there will be no security, no peace and no prosperity for Louisiana . . . until the superiority of the Caucasian over the African in all affairs pertaining to government, is acknowledged and established.”
With the country’s economy teetering from the lingering effects of the Panic of 1873, and the House of Representatives no longer under Republican control, President Grant and his party had few resources and even less will to devote to black enfranchisement or civil rights. In 1876, with both parties claiming victory for local races in Louisiana and for the presidency in Washington, the contested outcome placed the Republicans in a tenuous position. In order to seat Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, the national party struck the Bargain of 1877, a compromise that secured a sufficient number of Democratic electoral college votes to install Hayes in the White House in exchange for his agreement to end federal intervention in the South. In short order, Senator Pollard and most of the state’s black representatives were stripped of their posts in Baton Rouge. With the removal of federal troops from Louisiana in April 1877, Radical Reconstruction collapsed resoundingly.
The next year, during statewide elections, the violence that had long bombarded Madison Parish’s neighbors edged ever closer to its borders. If any members of Sarah’s immediate family were beaten or threatened, she did not discuss it as an adult. But there were many opportunities for her to witness the results of such intimidation in her parish, whether in the form of whip marks and bruises on the living or on corpses as they were retrieved from nearby bayous.
Three weeks before the 1878 election, a black Republican candidate for Congress escaped a band of “bulldozers” less than forty miles from Delta in Waterproof, Louisiana. After hiding overnight in a moss-covered hollow log, the politician dressed as a woman to gain passage on a New Orleans–bound riverboat. The story was so well publicized in the Northern press and so widely told among local blacks for its defiant conclusion that Sarah and her friends almost surely heard it. By December, close to seventy-five people had been murdered in neighboring Tensas and Concordia parishes. The remaining black state representative from Madison, William Murrell, later recalled seeing a man with a companion, “hanging in the swamp . . . with a brandnew grass rope around him.”
“This of course excited the colored people in my parish at the time,” Representative Murrell later testified before a congressional committee. “They proved to be good prophets. They said it was only the question of another election, and they would reach Madison, too.”
That terror—and the economic disaster brought on by yet another bad cotton year and one of the worst yellow fever epidemics in the nation’s history—pushed Sarah and her sister and brother-in-law off the farm and across the river to Vicksburg. In mid-November 1878, the Hinds County Gazette predicted that as many as four thousand of the area’s black laborers would be “homeless, breadless and in rags in January next.” With no cotton to pick, there would be no work.
Jesse and Louvenia, like many others, were forced to look for jobs in Vicksburg. Both illiterate, their prospects were limited, and Jesse’s violent temper in all likelihood only added to their problems. For Sarah, however, the move meant more opportunities to see Alexander, her eldest brother, with whom she had remained close. Already living in Vicksburg for at least a year, he worked as a porter at C. L. Chambers Grocery on busy Washington Street and lived on Crawford Street near the crowded waterfront, where rents were cheapest.
Despite Sarah’s wretched surroundings, a magazine reporter who interviewed her in her richly furnished Harlem town house years later wrote that “as a child she craved for the beautiful. She had an inordinate desire to move among the things of culture and refinement.” Such longings would not have been unusual for a curious adolescent who frequently walked past the manicured gardens of Vicksburg’s grand antebellum homes. Near the grocery where Alexander worked, shopwindows displayed bolts of taffeta and dotted swiss, pastel hats and supple leather shoes. Waistcoated dandies on steamboat layovers always drew attention as they strolled to Vicksburg’s saloons. Even in Delta, Sarah had been inside the well-furnished home of Lillie Burney Felt, one of the six daughters who had returned to the Burney plantation in the late 1860s. Around 1875, with the help of her new husband, Lillie had carefully re-created part of the floor plan and façade of the home her parents had lost during the war. It seems certain that luxury was not an alien concept to young Sarah. It seems equally certain that she had no reason to expect she would ever possess it.
Because Jesse Powell viewed Sarah as a burden, he expected her to contribute to the household income. Even for girls as young as ten, and sometimes younger, there was always work tending to the needs of white children or helping with housework behind the walls of the town’s mansions. Sarah was just old enough to work as a laundress, “the province of black women exclusively,” according to historian Jacqueline Jones. The work, in fact, was so “onerous” that it was the main chore nineteenth-century white women “would hire someone else to perform whenever the slightest bit of discretionary income was available.”
While Sarah may have felt safer in town with Alexander nearby, Vicksburg was no haven of security. After the 1874 election, a group of whites had ambushed a meeting of black men at ten o’clock in the morning. “The whites came with the 16 shooters and just shot and killed every Negro they saw,” a man who witnessed the attack later told a congressional committee. “I think they killed about a dozen or so; they killed them because they were Republicans. Nothing was ever done to them for the killing.” Again in 1876 whites shot and killed two black men in full view of the courthouse.
The freedmen were alarmed at the continued brazenness of the assaults. They were also panic-stricken over a proposal in Louisiana’s legislature that was designed to abridge their rights in ways that closely resembled slavery. Those fears, along with their inability to turn a profit after thirteen years of sharecropping, made thousands in the Mississippi River valley ripe for flight from debt and oppression.
In early 1879, just as black farmers were receiving the now perennial news that they owed more than they had earned, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a charismatic black Tennessean, visited several river communities touting the solution for which many had prayed. Cheap land, the right to vote and freedom from harassment awaited them in Kansas, he promised with evangelical enthusiasm. “Now is the time to go,” he declared. “Ho for Sunny Kansas,” announced fliers trumpeting Singleton Settlement’s prime location on the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway. Like the railroad company circulars that had lured French, German, Norwegian, Swedish and Welsh immigrants to the unsettled West, Singleton’s pamphlets guaranteed “plenty of coal, water and wood” on “one of the finest lands for a poor man in the World.”
Having lost faith and patience, thousands of black men, women and children spontaneously journeyed to the riverbanks laden “with their poor, battered and tattered household goods.” Within weeks they had clotted together at Vicksburg, Delta and two dozen other Louisiana and Mississippi levees from Greenville to Natchez, convinced that steamboats were en route to convey them north to Kansas-bound trains. During late February, when sixty Madison Parish residents boarded a steamer for St. Louis, eleven-year-old Sarah undoubtedly watched family friends depart. Within days, when another large group headed up the river toward Missouri, the Vicksburg Herald sarcastically reported that “the African hegira continues.”
From the pulpit and in public places, Curtis Pollard preached deliverance and urged the emigrants on. Having seen the evil intentions of the Democrats from inside the state senate chambers, he harbored no illusions about the freedmen’s immediate future in Louisiana. Pollard actively aided two Richland Parish men who had tried to migrate against their employers’ will in mid-February. “One of them [was] cut very bad . . . [T]hey said the bulldozers had got a hold of them for wanting to go to Kansas, and had pretty nearly killed them,” he later said.
When former Lieutenant Governor Pinchback visited the Delta levee in early March 1879, the promised exodus had drawn nearly 700 refugees to that site alone. He found “every road leading to the river filled with wagons loaded with plunder and families who seem to think anywhere is better than here.” Pollard, who had led a rally in Delta on the day of Pinchback’s visit, was forced to flee his home and abandon his family three days later when a white Madison Parish doctor threatened to kill him. “I was accused of teaching the people to immigrate to Kansas [and was told] my neck would be broke,” he later testified. Because Sarah had known Pollard all her life, word of his escape must have frightened her. More significant, however, was the departure of twenty-one-year old Alexander, who was old enough to understand the political implications of the movement. His job in a downtown store must have made him more aware than most of the dangers a young black man faced. If he missed the 1879 wave, Alexander was part of the second surge in March and April 1880, his own departure possibly triggered by the election-eve murder of Madison Parish’s black Republican Club president. In the end, nearly 20,000 black Mississippians and Louisianans joined the migration. Madison Parish, with 1,600 Exodusters, lost more than any other district.
Like many of the migrants, Alexander never reached Kansas, settling instead in St. Louis, where the African Methodist Episcopal and black Baptist churches welcomed the refugees with housing, food and advice. His first job as a porter quickly led to another as a barber. Such rapid progress was more than enough encouragement for Owen Jr. and James to trail him up the river before the end of 1882. With all three of her older brothers gone, Sarah was fully at the mercy of Jesse Powell.