As described by the publisher, “Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance” is indeed a very fine book, a “vibrant, deeply researched biography” of the only daughter of Madam C.J. Walker, written by A’Lelia Bundles, her great-granddaughter. A dramatically engrossing tale, Bundles’ saga of A’Lelia Walker (née Lelia McWilliams, later, after three marriages, Robinson, Wilson, and Kennedy; later dubbed the “Joy Goddess of Harlem” by Langston Hughes) is related with the assurance of the consummate storyteller.
Following a childhood mired in poverty and deprivation, A’Lelia Walker deftly pivoted. As if to the manor born, she assumed the rarefied role of Harlem’s leading arts patron, showcasing such promising Black prodigies as concert pianist Justin Sandridge and artist Richmond Barthé. Equally important, Bundles tells how ultimately she transformed her showplace home into public venues, The Dark Tower and The Walker Studios — venues for events that not only promoted Black culture, but were spaces convening Blacks and whites, writers, artists, and patrons together in the common cause of social progress and partying.
(Of note: Their Harlem home was redesigned and renovated by Vertner Woodson Tandy, one of the first Black registered architects in New York State, who successfully adapted two narrow Queen Anne Style brownstone row houses, located at 108 and 110 W. 136th Street, into the Walkers’ stately Neo-Federal Style Harlem residence. The Walkers’ business premises were located on the ground floor.)
Ms. Walker’s Black uplift, mother-daughter struggles, and love intrigues, set against the backdrop of a rags-to-riches romp, from hard knocks and dreamland to the real world, are better able to hold one transfixed than any novel ever could. In accessing the story and creating a picture of her larger-than-life relation, Bundles has made a solid start. Hers is not a perfunctory or sensationalized account, as a People magazine essay might have conveyed. But then, neither is it as in-depth or profound a treatment, told over 1,000 pages or in two volumes, as one might expect to read about in the Atlantic, Forbes, or the New York Review of Books. To a few, it might be said to lack the excitement frequently derived from the best features of Vanity Fair. Nonetheless, admirers of The Root, Vogue, or smaller profiles in The New Yorker are certain to find highly admirable its easy accessibility and emphasis upon themes of universal appeal.
Bundles, by no means, intended to write merely a picture book destined to ornament coffee tables, unread. It’s been 23 years since A’Lelia Bundles’ well-received Madame C. J. Walker biography, “On Her Own Ground” (which inspired the Netflix 2020 series “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker”), appeared in 2001. Thanks to her additional research that followed, innumerable previously unknown Walker-related photographs have been uncovered. How splendidly they depict A’Lelia Walker’s houses and her unprecedented treasures: her Louis XV clock; a silver nef from the Renaissance; a bust of Booker T. Washington; a reduction of Hiram Power’s iconic white marble statue, “The Greek Slave;” her shining limousine, with a chauffeur at the wheel; all are shown. In-situ, they await their devastating dispersal, at a packed auction, forced by the Great Depression in 1930. What an enhancement they might have made. Color pictures of some of what survives — silver flatware, porcelain plates, and damask tablecloths, augmented by pictures of A’Lelia Walker’s high fashion finery — would have delighted readers as well.
Certainly Bundles is never better than when describing posh places with elegant interiors, or distingué gowns from the best Paris haute couture houses. But even her gifts are taxed, having illustrated such images to readers mostly unaware of the glories of a past that’s dead and gone. For a months-long sojourn abroad to Europe and the Levant, in 1922, Walker booked a first-class stateroom on the SS Paris. Absent an image, the grandeur A’Lelia Walker must have experienced, descending the grand staircase, must be hard for many to envision. Spotlighted beneath Rene Lalique’s dazzling glass dome, how regal she must have felt and looked.
What “Joy Goddess” lacks most is something the value of which Madame Walker and her daughter were all too aware of and alert to: How astutely they utilized carefully staged and strategically placed advertisements. In Stanley Nelson’s excellent and poignant film about the Walkers, “Two Dollars and a Dream,” Peg Fisher, the Walker Co.’s secretary, said, “She taught us how to be beautiful…” Fame and fortune brought them continual publicity. With the luxury of their lifestyle and the possibility of their success, they put the world on blast. Well before Martha Stewart was born, with every fifty-cent tin of their “Miracle Hair Grower,” the Walkers sold America’s most put-upon and disrespected women a wish to build a dream on, replete with aspirations of loveliness, and hope of better times.
Was Harlem’s Joy Goddess queer? She made a home with Mayme White, née Mary Adelyne, the daughter of a congressman George Henry White. (At the close of the Cong. White’s second term in 1901, another African American would not serve as a US representative until 1929). The one-bedroom walk-up apartment these singular women shared was on the second floor at 80 Edgecombe Avenue. Regarding the pair, Bundles offers,“…because Mayme moved into A’Lelia’s apartment, there has long been speculation about the nature of their relationship … Given the intense homophobia of the time, there would have been incentive to hide a romantic relationship…” she said, to then note the lack of evidence of a romance. Bundles mused whether, along with being overshadowed by famous parents, a shared vantage point had made them “soulmates who became lovers?” But in the end, she determines, “A century later, without personal journals, contemporaneous correspondence, or confessions, what happened in A’Lelia’s bedroom … is unknown.”
This leaves plenty of room to explore further what many in their sophisticated circle thought. According to acclaimed Harlem photographer Marvin Smith (who, with his twin Morgan Smith worked for the AmNews) and Raoul Abdul (Langston Hughes’ secretary and long-time AmNews classical music columnist), some of White’s and Walker’s friends — including Caska Bonds (an eminent music teacher and coach) and Edna Lewis Thomas (a stage star) — were emphatic about the pair being a couple. Even though Smith was briefly married and Thomas wed twice, each of these notable Harlem personalities was what is today called queer. Though known, none were “out.” (Prior to 1969, almost no one was. Identifying each other to straight people, even after they were long dead, was regarded as betrayal and unpardonable. Among themselves, it was different. Most of Harlem’s prominent gays and lesbians knew, or knew of, each other, and in detail.)
Bundles’ handling of the subject of her grandmother’s adoption is as sensitive as it is forthcoming. A’Lelia Walker and her mother were both much taken by the good looks, good sense, and conscientiousness of the fatherless granddaughter of a family friend from church. Fairy Mae Bryant was adopted by A’Lelia Walker (then Lelia Robinson) in 1912. Bundles said, “[L]ong braids made her an ideal model for Madame Walker to demonstrate her hair care products.”
Bundles shows that the Walker women’s’ wish to leave a long, loving legacy was as powerful a motivator as the exploitative explanation some people imagined. But for neither A’Lelia Walker nor for Madame Walker did affection and wanting the best for one’s children always coincide with understanding. Following her debut and graduation from Spelman College, grateful for all she’d been given, Miss Mae Robinson was wed to a husband of her mother’s choosing, the socially eminent, seemingly decorous Dr. Gordon Henry Jackson. While the wedding and the divorce had cost a fortune — and great heartache besides — the marriage lasted only a few years.
Bundles describes how, later, Dr. Jackson met with a sad fate. Still hopelessly alcoholic, married and divorced twice more, for writing illegal prescriptions and peddling morphine tablets, he wound up imprisoned at Leavenworth. He died in 1945 in a psychiatric ward for federal felons.
Going through the book, be sure not to miss either the end notes or another Bundles’ coda, titled, “What Became of the People Who Were Closest to A’Lelia Walker?” Both sections are packed with golden nuggets of information, like Dr. Gordon’s demise, hidden in the back. How one wishes some of these arresting details had been fitted in earlier, better explaining what was going on.
Overall, “Joy Goddess, A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance” is just the kind of record of African American exceptionalism that’s needed most now. Together, over the span of a century and a half and more, Bundles and all the other Walker women, have acted to explode the white supremacist lie: that in America, Black-white wealth disparity is solely due to a lack of trying. Bundles’ commendable “Joy Goddess” indicates that even working longer and harder, African Americans still always earn less.