Rewriting Black History:
A Letter from the Author of On Her Own Ground:
The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker

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August 6, 2003

Esther Iverem
Publisher
Seeingblack.com
Washington, DC

Dear Esther Iverem:

I applaud your July 13, 2003 Washington Post Book World review of Beverly Lowry's Her Dream of Dreams, an error-filled, often historically inaccurate biography of my great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker. Like Nelson Price of the Indianapolis Star and other reviewers who had read my earlier biography, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (Scribner 2001), you brought a critical eye to your analysis of the Lowry book, whose publication is, as you say, "puzzling" since it adds nothing of significance to the existing literature on the subject.

As Madam Walker's longtime biographer and as a family member with exclusive access to voluminous historical documents, I have spent more than three decades conducting research and earning a reputation as the authority on her life. So it was troublesome to me when reviewers for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times—all white males who exhibited little previous knowledge about Madam Walker in their articles—failed to point out Lowry's mistakes or to mention On Her Own Ground, especially since it is standard practice to cite previous works of biography when they are the first major accounts of a life as is On Her Own Ground. Certainly it seemed not only appropriate, but necessary and expected, to give a nod to Edmund S. Morgan's Benjamin Franklin and H. W. Brands's The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin in the recent reviews of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Why should it be any different for a biography of Madam Walker, one of early twentieth century America's most interesting entrepreneurs, philanthropists and political activists?

What troubles me is that those reviewers' apparent lack of knowledge about the already existing scholarship on Madam Walker—or their lack of regard for the canon of African American history—is allowing Lowry to claim credit and be given credit for work and research that was not done originally by her. This is how history gets distorted.

In the April 23, 2003 Wall Street Journal Nicholas von Hoffman praises Lowry's footnotes and bibliography. But it is obvious to me that Lowry, whose book includes only four pages of footnotes, has relied heavily on the contents of On Her Own Ground as well as on its 76 pages of detailed endnotes. As well, von Hoffman thanks Lowry for bringing "Madam Walker [to] us again," as if readers had been waiting for Lowry to "discover" a subject whose life is well known to many, though perhaps not in von Hoffman's social circle.

Thomas Fleming's July 13, 2003 New York Times review treats Lowry's book as if she had broken new ground in her research when, in fact, the "obscure. . .facts" that he cites—"about Sarah's parents and their antebellum white owners, a forgotten husband and a startling number of hitherto unknown Breedlove relatives"—all appeared in On Her Own Ground more than two years ago. And while Lowry may give the impression that she unearthed previously unknown information about Madam Walker, I am aware that she knew very little about Madam Walker before the mid-1990s—after I already had published a young adult biography, Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur (Chelsea House, 1991) and several other articles about Madam Walker. During that time, representatives of the Alex Haley estate presented Lowry with preliminary research that I had prepared for a project on which Mr. Haley and I had been collaborating before his death. Lowry was engaged briefly to complete the unfinished Haley project, but when a disagreement arose between Lowry and the estate, they parted ways and she was asked to return the research material. I might also add, that at the time, I was asked to assist her in the writing of the proposed book since I was the one with the most knowledge of my family's story. I declined the offer. It is, of course, more than curious to me that Lowry appears to have been unable to complete her version of a Walker biography—which had been under contract with Knopf since at least 1995—until after the publication of On Her Own Ground with its 76 pages of very detailed and specific endnotes that referenced extensive primary source material and all of the libraries and archives that housed the key Walker documents that Lowry makes much of "discovering." As I read Her Dream of Dreams and examined its mere four pages of endnotes and accompanying selected bibliography, I was hard pressed to find any new information or any primary sources of any real significance that did not first appear in my book.

While the New York Times reviewer may think that the second half of Her Dream of Dreams "cries out for the fictional techniques Lowry used in Crossing Over," I could not disagree more. I am not a fan of the current trend of mixing fact and fiction in biography. The struggle for the true biographer and historian is to take the facts as they are and do the best he or she can to reconstruct a life without needless speculation or fudging of the facts. One of the many things that gives me great pause about Lowry's book is the assumptions she makes about Madam Walker and other African Americans, especially when she creates fictional conversations and scenarios that never took place. I am concerned that readers who first learn about Madam Walker or her daughter, A'Lelia Walker, from Lowry will be misinformed.

I am not at all reluctant to have On Her Own Ground—which received several awards, appeared on bestsellers lists across the country and now is used in many college courses—compared to Her Dream of Dreams. In fact I welcome a comparative critique of the two books. In addition to finding that Lowry has added little to the record, I think a careful reader also would be surprised to learn how heavily she has borrowed not only from my research but from my actual words. One knows that historical facts can not be copyrighted. Perhaps I should not be shocked that an author who had access to my book and a roadmap to my sources would have many similar passages. But it is quite eerie to read a book that includes more than a few sentences and paragraphs that are paraphrased in such a tortuous manner that it appears the writer was attempting to make just enough alterations to escape accusations of outright copyright infringement.

I invite any interested reader to put the two books side by side and compare Lowry's words with mine. As I read Her Dream of Dreams, I was stunned at how many passages were hauntingly similar to mine and how many sections of the book tracked sections of my book. One could argue that as a life unfolds chronologically, there are only so many ways to tell a story. But I contend that there are several places where the books are just too much alike for comfort. A list of examples is attached at the end of this letter and I am happy to provide an annotated document with more details.*

In a few instances, there is attribution. But there are many more sections where there is no attribution at all for my research, including interviews that I personally conducted with now deceased subjects and unpublished documents that are part of my private collection of Walker papers. One section (page 123 of On Her Own Ground and page 268 of Her Dream of Dreams) is particularly glaring because Lowry not only fails to give proper attribution to my research, but in using the same material, confuses the documents to which I was referring and ends up drawing an incorrect and factually unsubstantiated conclusion.

Lowry has acknowledged in interviews with The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times that she is not a historian and that she was not accustomed to the kind of research required for a historical biography. But one finds it impossible to give her a pass on less than careful research when she names James Madison, rather than Thomas Jefferson, as the third president of the United States; when—perhaps because of an incomplete reading of the available literature or lack of understanding of the situation—she mischaracterizes the nature of Madam Walker's relationship with Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, and other members of the National Association of Colored Women; and when she falls into the trap of giving a superficial, clichéd account of the life of A'Lelia Walker. (This, as the editors of the New York Times well know, is not the first time Lowry has been called on sloppy research. Earlier this year, her inaccurate review of Susan McDougal's memoir required retractions and apologies and was the subject of articles that accused her of not having read the book.)

But the Jefferson and Washington errors are minor when compared to another much more consequential mistake. In taking on the subject of Madam Walker, whose hair care products were ubiquitous among black women during the first half of the twentieth century, Lowry also is taking on the conundrum of class, color, race and beauty. Sadly, she reveals herself to be out of her league on this pivotal issue. In one of the fictionalized sections, Lowry describes activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and educator Mary McLeod Bethune as having "skin color like milk with a little tea in it" and "aquiline" noses. Anyone who has spent even a few minutes studying women's history or African American history—or who has eyes to see—knows that Wells-Barnett and Bethune would never be described—at least not by another black person—as light-skinned. And while this may be of little consequence to readers who are less familiar with the nuances of class and color within the black community, it remains a sensitive issue among many African Americans. Certainly there is no excuse for someone who purports to accurately tell the life of Madam Walker to miss this crucial point.

I make no claim that I am the only person who is qualified to write about Madam Walker, and there certainly is room for additional Walker biographies. In the past, I have welcomed scholarly treatments of her life and business in Kathy Peiss's Hope in a Jar, Noliwe Rooks's Hair-Raising, Paula Giddings's When and Where I Enter and Darlene Clark Hine's Speak Truth to Power, and I was pleased when my ABC News colleague Cokie Roberts included a chapter about Madam Walker in her very popular We Are Our Mother's Daughters.

But I have no enthusiasm for Lowry's self-involved and frequently fictionalized approach to biography. Because I have spent many, many years studying the details of Madam Walker's life, I am more attuned than most readers to the errors and missteps in Lowry's work. Fortunately there are others, like the Indianapolis Star's Nelson Price, who can say what it is difficult for me to say about my own work: that On Her Own Ground "continues to be the best biography" of Madam Walker.

About Ben Neihart's novel, which also was reviewed by Mr. Fleming, I will say only this: Bloomsbury's editors know that the portrayal of A'Lelia Walker in Rough Amusements is most certainly not the "true story" of her life, but a badly fictionalized fantasy that uses her name to draw attention to a book that is more about Jennie June, who writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts calls an "aging white drag queen who in all likelihood never crossed paths with A'Lelia Walker or her group" in today's Boston Globe. One can only wonder if Neihart used A'Lelia Walker in his title because she had higher name recognition than his main character. The publisher has admitted as much and acknowledged that the title is misleading both because the book really is not about A'Lelia Walker and because as a fictional work there is nothing "true" about it. In an April 23, 2003 letter to me Bloomsbury Deputy Editorial Director, Colin Dickerman, agreed to remove A'Lelia Walker's name from the title.

Sincerely,

A'Lelia Bundles

Original Washington Post Book World Review:

HER DREAM OF DREAMS
The Rise And Triumph
Of Madam C.J. Walker
By Beverly Lowry
Knopf. 481 pp. $27.50

REVIEWED BY ESTHER IVEREM

The amazing story of Madam C.J. Walker is one that needs little flourish or imaginative fiction, but that is what we get in Beverly Lowry's Her Dream of Dreams. Born to impoverished former slaves in the miasma of post-emancipation rural Louisiana, Walker became the wealthiest and most influential black business owner of her time by developing and selling hair-care products designed for black women. By defying expectations and re-birthing herself several times over, she was, in effect, a walking billboard for the possibilities of America. At the same time, she was a critic of the injustices done to her people that lay at America's root.

Because her story is one that should be told many times over, perhaps the publication of Her Dream of Dreams is understandable. On the other hand, assuming that a new book should add to existing literature on a subject, this volume is puzzling, as it comes on the heels of 2001's On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C J. Walker, by A'Lelia Bundles, and Stanley Nelson's 1987 documentary, "Two Dollars and a Dream." Her Dream of Dreams tells virtually the same stories and uses much of the same documentation to chronicle the same events.

She describes her task as understanding how "an impoverished child born to former slaves in a sharecropper's cabin went all the way to sell the fire out of a hair-care product she'd invented for African-American women in a city she'd just moved to, then have the gumption required to turn that homemade preparation-not to mention herself-into a signifier of national renown."
To help us understand, however, she provides few new facts. Taking a swipe at existing narratives as containing "discrepancies, omissions and cagey manipulations of the 'truth,' Lowry says that her task is to "begin even before [Walker's] birth and then jump ahead, consider how she turned out then fold back to where she started." But, in doing so, she still offers little new except her own imagination. The early speculation she offers, that Walker's mother might have told her to never mind business that was not hers, to "stay out of White people's way" and to "learn to read," comes across as so patronizing and lame that it's hard to understand why Lowry feels she has the privilege, in a supposedly nonfiction book, to cook up such fiction.

Before settling into a detailed description of Walker's life based on public records, newspapers, advertisements, letters and other documents, Lowry takes multiple such liberties in the creation of possible scenes from Walker's life. "The mother slips beyond thought as the alert, big-boned girl at the foot of the bed maintains her watch," she writes, imagining the death of Walker's mother, which took place when Walker was about 7.

Tucked within detailed, researched descriptions of geography, weather and social happenings, such scenes are meant to create a vivid narrative but instead stick out like the inventions they are. Because of these fictionalized moments, repeated less often as the book goes on, but repeated nonetheless, Her Dream of Dreams reads in many places more like a treatment for a screenplay than a piece of nonfiction. Lowry mixes fact, fiction and genres in a way that might make journalists uncomfortable. Others might simply consider it "creative non-fiction," which is the name of the program she directs at George Mason University, according to the biography included with the book

Lowry also inserts herself, her reporting process and opinion into the narrative in a manner that detracts from the story she is trying to tell. For instance: "It's a fantasy of mine to stand magically mid-river and hold out my arms, touching Louisiana and Arkansas, where my parents grew up, with the fingertips of one hand and, with the other, Mississippi, where I did."
It is helpful to know a little about the author but perhaps such information would have been a better fit in the prologue or afterword. Occurring as it does throughout the book, it makes Lowry seem to be interjecting herself into a life that does not require irrelevant cameo appearances from the next century. The story of Madam C. J. Walker can walk on its own.

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