Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker

This beautifully written and researched book is more than a biography of the remarkable Madam C.J. Walker, America's first female millionaire who was born to former slaves, it is also a cultural history of the early twentieth century. It presents an amazingly vivid portrait of the lives of African Americans and their struggles. The detail of the hard work and business accumen of Madam Walker, her ultimate financial success, as well as the political and social landscape this writer presents should make this book a classic. A classic that is an inspiring American story.

It is a little bizarre to read reviews complaining that a second book about Madame C. J. Walker has been published. One of the measures of an individual's importance is the number of books they inspire, and by that measure Sarah Breedlove (later Madame C. J. Walker) deserves to be the subject of many books, articles, dissertations and term papers. That this is, apparently, only the second major life of Breedlove is proof -- as if we needed it -- that there is a centuries-long history of discrediting and erasing (1) women of achievement (2) Blacks of achievement (3) Black women of achievement. It is exciting to find this book enthusiastically reviewed in the Wall Street Journal as a book about a business pioneer. It is disheartening to me as a feminist and a researcher to read in a later issue of the same paper a whining letter from A'lelia Bundles, complaining that Lowry's book is unnecessary because her own book preceded it. Is there a rule that white guys can have a hundred books about them but Black women only get one each? Lowry's obvious admiration for and liking for the subject of her book is very welcome in an age where biographers sometimes seem so hostile that you wonder why they spent years studying their chosen person. The enthusiam also makes the reader want to know more, and Lowry provides an impressive and generous list of sources she consulted, including the jealous Bundles.Also, there is an honesty in Lowry's book that is refreshing in a time when some important biographies (such as "Dutch," about Reagan) include invented scenes and material. The reader always knows exactly where the writer is coming from. I liked that.

Shouldn't the point be more along the lines of gratitude for another book on Madame that we have for history? I'm more inclined to agree with what the Kirkus Reviews articulated about Lowry's book: "impeccable research informs a prose that sings, whirls, and delights." I speak as both an educator and a person of color: I would never neglect reading this book in favor of Bundles' book; read both, decide for yourself. Maybe you'll be inspired to write the third, who knows? (As for holding Lowry's account as inaccurate because she isn't African American herself--I don't think that kind of ideology is really going to get us anywhere. Honestly, do you?) Peace!

Beverly Lowry's Her Dream of Dreams is a bold and stunning adventure of mind and spirit-a white woman's attempt to know a black woman born just after the Civil War in the troubled part of the country where she herself came to awareness some seventy years later. Lowry invites her readers along on a process of discovery, an exploration of the fragmentary record that remains in courthouses, libraries, folk memory, music-the record of an unlettered girl, the daughter of slaves, who became the most famous and affluent black woman in America. Such is Lowry's integrity that she never lets us forget how hard, ultimately, it is to know another person, however fiercely we try, but her admiration for Sarah Breedlove, a.k.a. Madame C.J. Walker, never flags. The South is in the pulse of Lowry's blood, and so, while illuminating otherwise dry pieces of information like the layout of Vicksburg, she explores her own heritage of racial burden. Her reader therefore emerges with a more nuanced sense of what it has meant to be black-and white--in America, whether in the Deep South, where Sarah Breedlove spent her formative years, or in the border regions of St. Louis and Indianapolis, or in Harlem, where Madame C.J. Walker was a star.Her Dream of Dreams is exhaustively researched, wonderfully written, and in the end a tribute to a woman of unusual courage and persistence.