By Sonja Gracy
“I am a compulsive documenter,” says former journalist, historian, and biographer A’Lelia Bundles, who is the great-great-granddaughter of the 20th century Black hair care maven Madam C. J. Walker. “Our stories are already dismissed by others who don’t believe what we say is true. So, I come with confidence and research 'receipts.'"
In her biography of Walker, On Her Own Ground, Bundles aimed to “convey her multidimensionality” by stewarding two roomfuls of personal annals chronicling the fascinating rise of the former washerwoman, who went on to own a mansion next to John D. Rockefeller and who the Guinness Book of World Records credits as America’s “first female self-made millionaire.”
As a child, Bundles said she first sensed her great-great-grandmother's “specialness” by some of the kiddie discoveries she’d made of Walker’s belongings stowed in dresser drawers at her grandmother’s house . An ostrich-feather fan, a pair of opera glasses, and tiny sarcophagus “mummy charms” from a trip she’d made to Egypt in 1922 – all found before Bundles could read – were proof of her family’s desire to preserve Walker’s legacy.
Born Sarah Breedlove shortly after the Civil War on the same plantation where her parents had been slaves near Delta, Louisiana, the beginning of Walker's life wasextraordinarily harrowing. Orphaned at seven, she married at fourteen, and was a poverty-stricken widow and single working mother by 20.
But the young Breedlove was also intrepid. The irrepressible mother, laundress, and night school student eventually met ad man Charles J. Walker, who became her third husband. His marketing expertise helped stoke Breedlove’s Black hair care products venture to successful autonomy (she'd initially been selling Black hair care products for another businesswoman, a Ms. Annie Turnbo Malone).
With stints in Denver, Colorado; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Indianapolis, Indiana; and then finally Harlem, Walker established her company and “Walker Method” via salons, factories, and beauty schools. That quickly pivoted her into circles of influence, and established Walker as one of the centrifugal figures of the Harlem Renaissance.
Bundles is actually named after her great-grandmother A’Lelia, Walker’s only child. She credits the research for her college thesis, experience in journalism – inculding time at both the NBC and ABC television networks – and mentorship from Alex Haley (the prodigious historian and author of “Roots” fame), as well her family’s “clear sense of preserving Walker’s narrative and legacy,” as the conduits that have buoyed her endeavors to create works about her iconic great-great grandmother that are authentic, accurate, actualizing, and that still inspire thousands upon thousands of people well beyond Walker’s passing more than a century ago, in 1919.
Bundles believes her multitudinous research reserves about Madam C.J. Walker and her daughter A’Leila Walker power her ability to rebut and transcend "pigeon-hole" minimizations of Madam Walker, to convey the historical heroine’s “multidimensionality as a patron of the arts, philanthropist, political activist, and person very much involved in the anti-lynching movement.”
Bundles believes it is these angles of research about Walker that invigorated her understanding of how Walker “fit into the pantheon of African American leadership in that first and second generation after enslavement.”
Bundles’ On Her Own Ground, published in 2001, fomented the acclaimed “Self-Made” Netflix series starring Octavia Spencer in 2020. She is currently working on a book about her great grandmother, A’Lelia Walker, entitled “The Joy Goddess.” It will highlight her role as a benefactor of artists during the heralded Harlem Renaissance.
(Photos by Anya Chibis)
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