Chapter Three

A FUTURE WITH PROMISE

HOW CURIOUS A LAND IS THIS—HOW FULL OF UNTOLD STORY, OF TRAGEDY AND LAUGHTER, AND THE RICH LEGACY OF HUMAN LIFE; SHADOWED WITH A TRAGIC PAST, AND BIG WITH FUTURE PROMISE!

—“Of the Black Belt”

Up until the sixth grade, I wore and kept my hair as best I could—pulled back, braided, or under a scarf. My hair had never been properly cared for and was, consequently, at least in the back, a mess of snarls and mats. Tess, my birth mother, knew of a black hairdresser in Portsmouth, and less than a year after we had reunited, she wasted little time in scheduling an appointment.

Elease’s salon smelled like hot metal, Vaseline, and hair spray. Small and lightless, it had a funky, colorless carpet, and plastic helmet-shaped hair dryers lined up on top of fake leather chairs along the walls and into the waiting area, where a squat brown Formica coffee table held outdated issues of Ebony and Jet. Tess and I waited as Elease went seriously about her business of jerry-curling and hot-combing, while a few suspicious glances spilled our way from the other women waiting or being serviced, particularly toward Tess, the only white woman there.

Elease gestured with a free hand, the other encased in a plastic glove smothered with straightening cream, for me to come over to her chair. I sat down reluctantly while she removed a glove, capped a jar, and rummaged around in a drawer for just the right tool. She dug her fingers into my thick, unkempt hair and summarily declared, “My goodness, girl, who on earth has been takin’ care of this here hair?”

It marked the first time that my hair had been brushed out thoroughly and completely, and it was not a painless process. As a very young girl, long before I met Tess, when I still wore my hair in a simple untamed Afro, I had let only my father tend to it with a soft-bristled brush, which then, even I knew, had mainly just been a gesture. My kind of hair needed to be brushed with a hard-bristled brush and detangled thoroughly on a regular basis, then my scalp greased and my whole head wrapped at night, which I didn’t know but which Elease sharply instructed. And, too, it had been a good thing that we’d come when we did, she declared on our way out the door, giving a reluctant and understated, yet entirely genuine, nod of credit aimed toward Tess.

I don’t suppose Du Bois gave much thought to the treatment and grooming of black hair. Although it is clear from this chapter’s epigraph—“How curious a land this is—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!”—that he did care about and respect those who rose up from adversity to succeed on their own terms. Whether or not these were terms that incorporated black hair care—and what is now, one hundred years later, one of the best-known, ritualistic, and often hotly debated legacies of black culture— may or may not matter.

Born to former slaves as Sarah Breedlove in 1867, Madam C J. Walker was orphaned, married, widowed, and a single mother by the age of twenty. Impoverished and with very little formal education, she supported herself and her daughter for eighteen years by working as a washerwoman in St. Louis, Missouri, before making a single and momentous observation that would lend value and credence to Du Bois’s notion of “a tragic past … big with future promise!”

Through both her own experience and her attentiveness to that of others, Walker established that black hair, particularly black women’s hair, required a different kind of product and maintenance from that of Caucasian hair.

In 1905, two years after the publication of The Souls of Black Folk, Walker’s seemingly simple yet remarkably astute assessment resulted in the development of a hair product that would soon grow into a million-dollar business, bringing to light the concept of hair straighteners and hot combs, and transforming forever the modern aesthetic of black women in America.

Although there is so far no formal historical data that indicates how well Walker and Du Bois knew each other, there is evidence that, as contemporaries, the two corresponded briefly over issues of community activism and philanthropy. That evidence appears in the 1999 biography On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, written by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia P. Bundles.

Bundles, who for years resisted her connection to Walker because of the widely agreed-upon but wholly incorrect conjecture that Walker invented the hot comb, thereby promoting the straightening of black women’s hair to effect a more white semblance, has said that her decision to write her great-greatgrandmother’s biography was due, in part, to the discovery that Walker was respected by the person who had been Bundles’s cultural icon when she was growing up: W. E. B. Du Bois.

A’Lelia Bundles

When I was in college, at Harvard, I was in the stacks of Widener Library one day doing some research—I don’t even remember what I was looking for, but somehow I ended up in the stacks—and discovered a shelf of books written by some of those European pseudo-scientists from the nineteenth century who believed that black people were inferior because our hair was like sheep’s wool. In their twisted minds, that meant we were equivalent to animals. As it happened, somewhere near those books were bound issues of The Crisis (the magazine of the NAACP). I flipped through a couple of volumes and came upon the August 1919 issue, which included an obituary of Madam C. J. Walker by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Now, at this point, I was somewhat ambivalent about being the great-great-granddaughter of Madam Walker. Having grown up in a family where my mother was vice president of the Walker Company and my father was president of another company that manufactured black hair care products, I knew the basic story, but I really didn’t know the truth about Madam Walker. I was, in many ways, interpreting her through the lens of other people, and the lens that was the clearest, or so it seemed at that point, was the one that said Madam Walker had invented the straightening comb and wanted to make black people look white.

In high school during the late 1960s, when I wanted to express my blackness by having an Afro, my father and I had one of the most memorable standoffs of my teenage years. He said, “You know, boys are never going to look at you if you get an Afro, and how do you think we are going to pay for college if everyone wears an Afro?” and all that. When my father and I had this set-to about my hair, my mother, who was much wiser on this particular issue than my father, must have worked on him. Finally, he came around after I’d had a very vivid and violent nightmare about all this—about my struggle for personal expression. He had been traveling at the time, and when he learned of my nightmare, he called me from the road, and he said, “Okay, you can have this Afro.” I look back now and think, It’s just hair, but at the time, it was so important to me.

A week or so later, my mother took me to the Walker Beauty School, and the students there rolled my hair up on permanent-wave rods and transformed my chemically straightened hair into this Angela Davis–size Afro. As a little girl, my hair was always long, and that made people tell me they thought I was cute, but when I got the Afro, that made me feel strong. And the truth is, I would take strong over cute any day, because strong is much more lasting.

At the time, I equated natural hair with strength, and from what others had said about Madam Walker, she was about straightening natural hair. So when I discovered Du Bois’s obit in The Crisis that afternoon at Widener Library, it was a pivotal moment for me. You see, Du Bois had been my intellectual hero ever since I first read The Souls of Black Folk in high school. At the time, it was the most profound and nuanced treatment of race I had ever read. And, as an impressionable seventeen-year-old, it helped me to better understand the conundrum of race and identity. So, after reading the obit, I felt that if my intellectual hero thought there was some value in this woman, Madam Walker, and could see beyond what other people had said, then I needed to reexamine her. And that reexamination led to three decades of research about her, and a real admiration for what she accomplished.

One of my frustrations, though, especially as I was researching On Her Own Ground, is that I was never able to find any real body of correspondence between Madam Walker and Du Bois, so I still don’t know the exact quality of their relationship. I do have a letter where he asks her to contribute to the Music School Settlement, and there are little signs here and there—including an invitation to his conference at Troutbeck—that indicate he respected her. Maybe it was her money and her ability to fund things that attracted him to her, but for someone who was as much of an elitist as Du Bois was, to recognize Madam Walker as a self-made woman who, as he said, helped “transform a race” is remarkable, and it made me see her in a different light.

Now, as we know, black people’s hair has a history that can be both painful and humorous. Early in the twentieth century, hair became the tyranny of our existence: If your hair was not straight, if people saw the slightest evidence of your nappy hair, then they believed you wouldn’t get a job, you wouldn’t get married, and that you would be considered ugly. By the 1960s, the backlash, of course, was all about loving what had been so rejected and repressed. I think today we need to be more accepting of our style choices, and what we are born with, although I also understand the pain many people associate with childhood memories about hair. Many black women tell me horror stories about how their mothers were borderline abusive when they combed or pressed their hair. I know there is a lot of negative emotion associated with that, but I also think that sometimes we give hair more power than it deserves.

Madam Walker’s initial goal was to help women heal scalp disease, which was very common at the time and was causing women to go bald. It’s very hard for people to hear that, because what they think they know, as I thought I knew, is that Madam Walker invented the straightening comb. Over time, the myth about the hot comb took hold and was perpetuated by some Walker Company employees. But it’s just not true.

What is important to me now is for people to understand that Madam Walker loved black people, and she used her wealth and influence to help her community as a philanthropist and political activist and as a supporter of Du Bois’s antilynching movement. Her early life was difficult and tragic. She overcame obstacles and made a future for herself and others. She embodied the fact that as a people we played a key role in the making of America. We are more than slave history. She lived what Du Bois knew: that we must be taken seriously, that we deserve to be taken seriously, and that we are valuable … that we are a brilliant people.