The biographer’s Joy Goddess (Scribner, June) explores the life and times of her great-grandmother A’Lelia Walker, the daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and heiress to the Walker hair care fortune.
How did you first become interested in A’Lelia’s story?
When I was in high school and first discovering Black authors, I found books on the shelf at home that had belonged to A’Lelia Walker during the 1920s: Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues, Countee Cullen’s Color, and others. I came to realize she personally knew many of these Harlem Renaissance writers. Then, I read Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, in which A’Lelia was mentioned in all her glory with her parties and her homes. That made me fascinated. This was somebody I have a connection with, who knew these people who fascinate me. And we share the same name and almost the same birthday.
Tell me about your desire to correct the historical record about her.
What has been written about her is a caricature—that her mother made the money, and she spent the money. In one writer’s version, she spent the Harlem Renaissance playing bridge. I knew she was more interesting, nuanced, and complicated than that. I’m fortunate that I have this incredible body of letters. From the letters, I knew that she had a great sense of humor, thought about the world around her, and was pretty sophisticated about how the world operated. I also interviewed some of her contemporaries in the 1980s; they recalled her as down-to-earth.
You frame her ability to bring people together for parties, salons, and other events as “her talent and her gift.” Why do you think this was important?
She wanted to create a space that was international, multiracial, and where people were coming together, not judging each other. They weren’t excluding people, because she had certainly experienced and observed exclusion. She wanted a wide range of people to be able to be in the same room. At the same time, it was a space that was created by a Black woman. That was a statement for that time, because there were very few others who were able to do that.
What do you hope readers take away from A’Lelia’s life?
I hope they see something of the times we’re living in now, where there are all of these creative people who are bursting with talent and energy, who are politically aware, and who see the inequities in our society. There is all of this exciting creation that’s going on, and this urge to shut it down. But it can’t be shut down. The Harlem Renaissance came after a president who was very racist, after a war, and after a lot of repression of Black people. Despite that, or perhaps inspired by that, people were compelled to create. You cannot stop this massive creativity and all of this talent. It is going to keep on coming.
