Black Feminist in Public is a series of conversations between creative Black women and Janell Hobson, a Ms. scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of history, popular culture and representations of women of African descent.
A’Lelia Bundles is an award-winning author and journalist, as well as the founder of the Madam Walker Family Archives. This week marks the debut of her biography Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance, detailing the life of her great-grandmother and her namesake.
This work continues her journey to chronicle her family history, beginning with her first biography, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, a New York Times bestseller about her great-great-grandmother, and the inspiration for Self Made, the fictional Netflix series.
In this edition of “Black Feminist in Public,” I share my profound conversation with Bundles, covering her latest book, the legacy of Black women’s family and their cultural histories, as well as the Harlem Renaissance.
Hobson: What propelled you to write these biographies about your ancestral mothers?
Bundles: Both Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker are important historical figures. But when I was growing up during the 1950s and ’60s, these stories were not in my textbooks. And I was in college in the early 1970s when African American studies, Women’s Studies departments, women’s history, [and] ethnic history were just starting to be legitimized by the gatekeepers in the academy.
Now, 50 years later, these are established fields. But back then, there really was very little that had been published.
When I was growing up, my mother was vice president of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. So, obviously, I knew who Madam Walker was in a general sense. But what I wanted to accomplish with both books was to tell the story of the Black community and Black women through the lives of these two women in my family.
Madam Walker was born Sarah Breedlove on the same plantation in Delta, Louisiana, where her parents and older siblings had been enslaved in 1867, and she died in 1919. I had the arc of [the] Civil War, Reconstruction, World War I, and her death.
With A’Lelia Walker, born in 1885, I have Reconstruction, Jim Crow, World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression. I really tried to use their lives to tell American history.
What I wanted to accomplish with both books was to tell the story of the Black community and Black women through the lives of these two women in my family.
A’Lelia Bundles
Hobson: Early in your book Joy Goddess, you discuss the Netflix movie Self-Made (starring Octavia Spencer as Madam C.J. Walker and Tiffany Haddish as her daughter A’Lelia Walker) and how it did not capture the authenticity of these women. What were some of the misrepresentations, and what are you hoping your book will be able to correct?
Bundles: I was hoping for Hidden Figures, and I feel like I got Real Housewives of Atlanta! My book, On Her Own Ground, had been optioned by a production company, and I chose that company because the person who acquired it seemed to appreciate the history that I’d written, and I thought that I would be more engaged in the development of the project.
Now, obviously, Hollywood does its own thing, changes things. But what I realized after it had been sent over to Warner Brothers and Netflix is that the show-runners, the executives who direct the day-to-day production, and the head writer had a very different view about this story than I did.
I was excluded from the development process, but I had what was called script review. Well, the first script that they sent me, they had it focused on Annie Malone and Madam Walker and they had them calling each other the n-word and the b-word and physically fighting! These were both very influential, powerful women! I was upset for Annie Malone’s people with this portrayal. And then they wanted to give A’Lelia Walker a lesbian relationship. And first, the script that they sent me had A’Lelia Walker with Bricktop.
Hobson: Ada “Bricktop” Smith of Paris fame?
Bundles: Yes! I met Bricktop. That’s how old I am, Janell. I met Bricktop. And when I was introduced as A’Lelia Walker’s great-granddaughter, she [Bricktop] was quick to tell me that they were not friends, that she thought A’Lelia Walker was a snob. So, I said, “You know, I met her, and you think you can just pull a lesbian out of the sky and insert that person?”
When they finally shot it, they just made up a character because they were determined that that’s what they were going to do when, as you see in the book, the real conflict between mother and daughter is that A’Lelia Walker had two boyfriends—both doctors, both handsome. One was a good guy, one was a bad boy.
Hobson: That’s an interesting story in and of itself!
Bundles: For me, the real story is more interesting.
Hobson: There is a belief, though, that A’Lelia Walker was queer. Is that not true?
Bundles: I was open to this if that were the case. There is a close friendship that she had with Mamie White, the daughter of George White, the Congressman. But other people draw the conclusion that if they were that close, then they must have been lovers—there’s nothing that confirms that for me. I was open to that if I had found evidence. If I had letters, if Mamie had been mentioned in the will…
Hobson: You could not find any clues that could substantiate an intimacy?
Bundles: There are things that make you say, “Well, I cannot confirm this.”
Hobson: And being a good historian, you chose not to go down a rabbit hole without evidence.
Bundles: I’m not a fan of “fabulation”. I’ll just tell you that.
Hobson: Madam Walker is often held up as this role model in terms of being a self-made millionaire. And we’ve heard about the Harlem Renaissance artists and writers, but I don’t think A’Lelia Walker is as well-known as either her mother or any of the artists and writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Your book reveals that she had real influence in crafting that period. Could you say more about that?
Bundles: Many of the people who have written about the Harlem Renaissance have really pigeonholed her, almost caricatured her in a trope of Madam Walker made the money, A’Lelia Walker spent her money. A’Lelia Walker gave parties, she went to parties, and one historian whom I respect essentially wrote her off as someone who spent the 1920s playing Bridge. That was such a put-down! I have tried to do the research that shows, yes, she did enjoy playing Bridge, but she was very much involved in fundraising for important civic [and] political causes. She was a convener at a time when that was very unusual; a convener in Harlem, the Mecca of Black cultural and political life.
She had the money and the homes to be able to bring people together. Whether it was African American civic leaders, European royals, African diplomats, [or] the musicians and artists and writers and actors of the period, they congregated at her house. I don’t think that women during the Harlem Renaissance have been taken as seriously, and we are now retelling their stories.
Madam Walker had homes where she could entertain people, but entertaining was in the service of the race, in the service of organizing. Both women used their homes. Madam Walker’s home in Indianapolis was a space where women met to talk about suffrage for Black women before 1919. A’Lelia Walker’s townhouse on 136th Street, her apartment on Edgecombe Avenue, and of course, Villa Lewaro, the home that Madam Walker moved into in 1918, were places where people could build community.
You could also argue that the beauty salons they created were safe spaces. During the Civil Rights Movement, when the churches became too much of a target, the beauty shops were places where people could have meetings. And who would suspect that? It’s just women getting their hair done.
Hobson: It’s easy to dismiss Black women’s spaces, but we’re seeing how these spaces were so subversive. It’s also quite subversive to call your book Joy Goddess because we don’t often think of Black women and Black women’s history through that lens.
Bundles: Langston Hughes called [A’Lelia] the “Joy Goddess” of Harlem’s 1920s. Now, her life was not always happy. She had her ups and downs. She was not joyful all the time. But I think his idea was that she used her wealth, her influence and her homes to create a joyful space and a welcoming space for a wide range of people.
Just the sense of creating spaces that were welcoming for people was resistance. The Harlem Renaissance in many ways is a response to the Woodrow Wilson Administration. It is a response to the lynching that’s going on. So, it grows this desire to express oneself, to be, as Langston Hughes said, our Black selves. That is a resistance to the pressures that were happening in society.
Hobson: That’s such an important history lesson for our own times. Could you give us the history behind doing the research for your book?
Bundles: When I was a senior in high school, I wrote my first report about A’Lelia Walker, and that was 1970. And she was more interesting to me than Madam Walker because people thought Madam Walker invented the hot comb, which she did not, but at the time I thought, “I’m having no parts of that because I’ve got my Afro.” I went to predominantly white schools, and our history books said slaves were contented and better off because they were well-fed. That was the history we were learning then…
Hobson: And the history they want us to return to!
Bundles: And what they want us to return to. But Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in the spring of my sophomore year, I think. So, my senior year, I had become a good student, but I had become radicalized and with a group of friends, including some of my white classmates, we persuaded the school administration to have a Black humanities class. And for that class, I was trying to figure out what to write. It may well have been my mother who suggested that I write about the Harlem Renaissance. And then I realized that A’Lelia Walker had known these people. That report was my first step.
When I got to Columbia in journalism school, I presented my ideas to my professor, Phyllis Garland, who was the only Black woman on the faculty at Columbia at that point. She listened, and then at the end of the conversation, asked, “Your name is A’Lelia. Do you have any connection to Madam Walker and A’Lelia Walker?” I said, “Yeah, that’s my family.” And she said, “That’s what you’re going to write about.”
So, it really was the power of a professor validating this for me. And that’s 1976. Fast-forward, I write a young adult book about Madam Walker in 1991. I had that and letters, photographs, and other ephemera [filed by Madam Walker’s attorney] as my foundation for my research. Then I filled it in with interviews with the survivors of the Renaissance, and then tons of more research. I don’t know how old you are, but when I first started doing this, the only way that I could get Black newspapers was to do it on microfilm.
Hobson: I remember microfilm!
Bundles: You remember microfilm? I did that for many years. But now I can use Newspapers.com and Ancestry.com and all these digitized things. I am blessed with too much research, but I would rather have too much than not enough.
Hobson: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
Bundles: I hope people will see just how cohesive our community was, how creative our community was, and that we were working together to make things better politically, socially, economically. That we, in the face of racism and denial of our humanity, were still creating spaces for ourselves. We were creating art and music and culture, and this is what we’re doing now. I went to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter world tour in New York, and I appreciate the cultural phenomenon that she is. The American flag is all over that production. What I loved about Beyoncé, what I loved about seeing Amy Sherald’s exhibit at the Whitney, is that we are claiming our Blackness and our Americanness and not letting someone else push us out. We have to claim it.
