Beverly Lowry - Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker

A picture of an impulsive, generous, furtive, commanding, entrepreneurial person. By books end you cant help feeling that Madam Walker must have been a real corker to be around. Thanks to Beverly Lowry, Madam C.J. Walker is with us again.

The Wall Street Journal

[Lowry] brings a narrative approach to her portrayal of Walker, a novelists recognition of the way a life, like a story, develops and arcs over time.

Los Angeles Times

The depth of [Lowrys] research gives the writing real solidity. Her Dream of Dreams does everything a biography ought toevoke a life, a personalitywhile pushing the form beyond its limits.

Newsday

Highly evocative. Because of Lowrys tireless, creative research, Madam C.J. Walker breathesand inspiresonce again.

The Plain Dealer

Vivid. [Lowrys] research is amazingly thorough.

Houston Chronicle

Lowry has combined the skills of a novelist and the perseverance of a painstaking researcher to produce the most complete account yet of Walkers extraordinary rise from abject poverty to fame and riches. Lowry invests her telling of Walkers story with a depth and breadth of social, political, and economic context that makes the African-American businesswomans achievement seem all the more remarkable.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

This beautifully written biography puts the Horatio Alger story to shame. With crystal-clear prose, lively anecdotes and dutiful research Beverly Lowry tells how Walker, against all odds, became a pioneer business woman and civil rights activist extraordinaire. Lowry should be saluted for giving Walker the kind of grand historical recognition she deserves.

Douglas Brinkley

BEVERLY LOWRY
Her Dream of Dreams

The author of six novelsand of Crossed Over, the story of her friendship with Karla Faye TuckerBeverly Lowry is the director of the Creative Nonfiction Program at George Mason University. She lives in Washington, D.C.

The Track of Real Desires
Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir
Breaking Gentle
The Perfect Sonya
Daddys Girl
Emma Blue
Come Back, Lolly Ray

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2004

Copyright 2003 by Beverly Lowry

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hill and Wang for permission to reprint excerpts from The Big Sea by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1940 by Langston Hughes. Copyright renewed 1968 by Arna Bontemps and George Houston Bass. Reprinted by permission of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows: Lowry, Beverly.
Her dream of dreams : the rise and triumph of Madam C.J. Walker / Beverly Lowry.1st. ed.
p. cm.
1. Walker, C.J., Madam, 18671919. 2. African American women executivesBiography. 3. Cosmetics industryUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.

HD9970.5.C672 W3558 2003
338.766855092dc21
[B] 2002027494

eISBN: 978-0-307-76595-6

Author photograph Elena Seibert

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

In memory: Polly and Dora, mother and daughter, fire and ice

T here has never been anyone like her. This is an extraordinary statement to make, but I believe it. And when you hear what she did, the impossible leap she made against such odds, maybe you will too.

Her name when she was born, or so we are told, was Sarah Breedlove. There is no birth certificate, no family Bible or church record, and Sarah Breedlove does not appear on any census record in any state until 1900, and by then she had married twice and changed her surname. Unable to document even this most basic clue to her whereabouts and existence, we have to find her in stories and legends, in marriage certificates, deeds, interviews, insurance maps, city directories. We have to put these scraps of information alongside allegations and patently untrue tales, paste them together, see what we come up with.

On her tombstone she is called Madam C.J. Walker. That for the historical record there is no Sarah or family name makes sense. She is a woman remembered by who she became: a product, an icon, a legend and an exemplar. Whoever visits her grave does not come to remember Sarah Breedlove; they are there to pay respects to her creation, who was often called, simply and grandlyas became appropriate to her demeanorMadame, often with a culminating e when used, almost as a title, without the initials or the last name.

Names are labels, and sometimes, like Post-its, they come unstuck. When my mother died, my father proposed that we carve MRS. DAVID L. FEY into the Austin marble that would mark her grave, sincehe reasonedshe hated her name. I knew he was right, but suggested that we had to consider the connections her marker established for later generations, one death to the next birth. So we put her legal name, Dora Smith Fey, on the top line and after that, the ones she liked better: PRECIOUS HENRI , her marker reads. BELOVED MOO .

Madam Walkers only child, a daughter, is buried beside her, and the name carved on the left-hand side of the marble is ALelia, also a chosen name. Born Lelia McWilliams, Madames daughter claimed the surname of her mothers third husband for business purposes and added the A-apostrophe after her mothers death. Neither woman felt bound to a destiny restricted by biology; they made their lives up as they went, and in time became, by name, the chosen, dreamed-of self. The two of them lie side by side in a shady spot up in the Bronx in Woodlawn Cemetery, not far from the much grander digs of J.C. Penney and F.W. Woolworth. The tombstone is modest, with WALKER across the top. There is a blank place on Madames right, and so far as we know, no one is buried there. Had one of ALelias husbands chosen to lie in the Walker plot, Madame wouldve separated him from his wife for eternity.

Its beginnings Im after, the rising arc of how Sarah Breedlove became Madam C.J. Walker. I want to try to understand how a child born to former slaves in a sharecroppers cabin went on to sell the fire out of a hair-care product shed invented for African-American women in a city she had only just moved to, then have the gumption required to turn that homemade preparationnot to mention herselfinto a signifier of national renown, then found a business empire the likes of which no one had ever yet seen, and to renovate a Harlem town house in high style and build a mansion on the Hudson River and fill it with antiques and books, Persian rugs and works of art, and there entertain politicians, statesmen and classical musicians.