By Tananarive Due
Ballantine. 375 pp. $25.95

Reviewed by Robin Givhan, who is a former fashion writer for The Washington Post.

Sunday, July 23, 2000

The legend of Madame C.J. Walker, the first African-American woman to become a millionaire, has been whispered from one generation of black folks to another, with both pride and disbelief. It has been handed down as perhaps the ultimate exemplar of the success that can be accomplished through hard work, dedication and the simple, stubborn refusal to accept defeat. Using material unearthed by the historian and novelist Alex Haley, author Tananarive Due has taken the facts of Walker's life and composed a novel of ambition, damaged love, greed, hubris and ultimately racial pride.

Here is the history informing the legend. Sarah Breedlove Walker was born in poverty in 1867 to former slaves on a Louisiana plantation. Her father and mother died when she was a child, leaving Walker and her older sister, Lou, to fend for themselves. Lou was a realist, unlikely to attempt change; Walker was a dreamer. Despite her lack of formal education, she had a sharp mind, one constantly on the lookout for an angle or a lucky break. From the beginning she was a seeker in search of something--riches, contentment, respect.

She achieved riches by creating a celebrated hair tonic and by refining the first heat-activated straightening comb, which allowed black women to smooth and lengthen their hair. (The comb, which was heated over a flame, is still used today in beauty parlors around the country.) The mysterious tonic and the fine-tooth metal comb brought Walker incredible wealth, as black women across the country sought ways to improve the health of their hair and scalp and to alter the texture of their locks. This, after all, was a time when having "good hair"--fine and silky--was more than vanity or a neurotic obsession. "Good hair" could open doors to society, politics and education; it made respectability easier to achieve and was an integral advantage in the complicated game of color politics.

The now-rich Walker built an enormous Italianate villa in Irvington-on-the-Hudson, N.Y., and stocked it with a staff of servants who waited on this former washerwoman. In addition, she offered employment to "her people"--as she so often referred to other African Americans--and, through that, independence to many other black women. She also immersed herself in the politics of liberation.

In The Black Rose, Due has written a tale intended to inspire. It speaks of Walker's unflagging spirit, her relentless hard work and her uncanny common sense. Still, Due does not create a perfect heroine. She paints Walker as a woman prone to uncompromising opinions, a "race woman" who by turns sought to uplift her people even as she occasionally declared her own hubris and ostentation beneficial to the race.

She indulged, for instance, in gold leaf and marble for her home, Villa Lewaro:

" 'My only reason to have the villa is to share it,' Sarah told everyone who expressed astonishment at its opulence. 'It belongs to the race.' " One can't help but think of today's young rap millionaires tooling around scarred city neighborhoods in Bentleys and mink coats, claiming that their reason for such garish display is that it's inspiring to other black folks to see their own dripping in finery. Ostentation for the common good seems to have a long history.

Due is an engaging storyteller. Her tale moves along at a breezy clip as she zips through Walker's childhood and abused adolescence, all of which feeds the reader's anticipation of Walker's discovery. Unfortunately, the eureka moment, when Walker develops her mysterious formula, is also the most disappointing. The facts are sketchy; no one knows for certain precisely how and where it happened or what the exact ingredients were. (It's believed to have contained sulfur and assorted herbs and oils; Walker and her husband, C.J., whom she later divorced for his infidelity, told those who inquired that the formula had come to her in a dream.) To be honest, in Due's telling of the story, it's hard to discern whether Walker was selling a real cure for sluggish hair growth or merely snake oil that took advantage of vanity.

But then, the tonic is not the point. To her credit, Due moves far beyond potions and hair care tools. She creates an intriguing portrait of Walker-- and uses her to explore the broader issue of how a white culture's scripting of the definition of beauty has historically oppressed and damaged black women personally, politically and culturally. Due even dares to discuss the difficulty with which black women made their voices heard in the early stages of the Civil Rights movement, and to reveal and critique the swaggering omniscience of men such as Booker T. Washington.

The real-life Walker would probably have been pleased with the way Due depicts her: as a credit to her race. Still, one longs for more skepticism, for a greater understanding of the tensions of ambition and ego that drove a wedge between Walker and her husband, between Walker and her daughter Lelia, between Walker and peace of mind. But as a fairy tale of how a downtrodden woman overcame the disadvantages of her birth to leave a mark on this world, The Black Rose is an inspiring, motivational book.