Bodies That Work. Tami Miyatsu

and cultural creator, rather than a business mogul, and that her body-oriented politics—wherein she built a grassroots network of females—served to enhance women’s social mobility and agency across ideological, geographical, and class divides. Her work attracted countless black women throughout the United States; despite their living in poverty and being subjected to second-class citizenship, many African American ←23 | 24→women invested whatever little money they had in acquiring a diploma from the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture and became small-business owners. Through the 15,000 agents whom she trained, Walker disseminated nationwide a formula for success that comprised not only the body but also the mind—a formula that I call “the grammar of African American beauty culture.”²³ I define this grammar as the ideas, customs, rules of conduct, and sociopolitical beliefs that link daily concerns about one’s individual appearance with collective awareness as a group, directing self-esteem into the areas of social, economic, and political agency. Walker’s grammar attracted, linked, and provided social motivation to African American women in progressive America. Walker was just one of the originators of such grammar; however, she was a determined proponent who had an especially clear vision and practical methods regarding how African American women could elevate themselves to a high plane. In 1928, Jamaican-born poet and novelist Claude McKay called Walker “a benefactor to the women of her race” who “revolutionized Negro Beauty Culture” and removed the ingrained complex that African American women had about their hair.²⁴

      This chapter investigates the relationship between Walker’s cultural role and black women’s personal goals through an interpretive approach to archival materials. The examined documents include newspaper articles, advertisements, Walker’s correspondence from the Madam C. J. Walker Papers, and The Madam C. J. Walker Beauty Manual—the textbook used at the Madam C. J. Walker Schools of Beauty Culture. In addition to the Walker System of hair care techniques, this manual describes her business philosophy and the basics of chemistry, physiology, bacteriology, trichology, skin care, manicuring, diet and weight control, and shop management.²⁵ Through a detailed analysis of texts and images, this chapter provides insights into Walker’s mobilization of geographically dispersed black women and her transformative work of elevating hair into a source of strength that would be an impetus for social change. To learn the origin, implications, and legacy of her grammar, which influenced black women’s minds and bodies, I examine the historical significance of hair, the meaning of hair care in the Progressive Era, and Walker’s two “A”s for disseminating her grammar—advertisements and agents, the individuals whom her company hired as sales staff and franchised hairdressers.

Walker’s Transatlantic Vision of Hair Culture

      Hair care in the United States is, as in all societies, a cultural construct that comprises both artifact and artifice.²⁶ As Wendy Cooper notes, hair is second only ←24 | 25→to skin as the body’s most racially defining feature: “Its texture, its color, and, to some extents, its distribution vary widely between races.”²⁷ The author and cultural documentarian Candacy Taylor claims that hair plays a significant role in creating ethnocultural identities: “Practically every ethnicity has developed a specialized product or procedure to change their hair texture, and as a result, beauty shop culture is a window into contemporary understandings of race, segregation, and integration.”²⁸ Hair salons—often racially segregated—can, thus, serve to (re)produce ethnic culture.

      Incidentally, progressive African American hair culture dated from premodern Africa. In West Africa, the ancestral homeland of many African Americans, hair was socially and culturally significant.²⁹ In the early fifteenth century, in African tribes, such as the Wolof, Mende, Mandingo, and Yoruba, hairstyles were an elaborate tool indicating “marital status, age, religion, ethnic identity, wealth, and rank within the community.”³⁰ Hairstyles also signified beauty and fecundity, particularly for women.³¹ The task of grooming was sacred to the Yoruba, who believed that hair—being at the very top of the body and, thus, nearest to the gods—was a medium for humans to communicate with the gods and spirits.³² Time-consuming, skillful hair grooming commanded respect in African cultures, and hairdressers were considered cultural creators in such societies wherein hair had enormous significance.³³

      In early twentieth-century black America, as in premodern Africa, hair was culturally coded, albeit in a different fashion. With an increasing emphasis placed on appearance, hair became a symbol of a person’s social consciousness and aspiration. McKay aptly says, “The texture of the Negro hair is not merely a physical appearance [but] it is also a social importance” and that people were even “categorized according to the quality of [their] hair.”³⁴ For some African Americans, hair was a part of “genteel performance.”³⁵ Tiffany Gill maintains that African Americans’ genteel performance reflected “the debates happening in African American politics concerning the best approaches to confronting racism and its attendant economic disparities.”³⁶ For African Americans, well-groomed hair implied a means of group survival and was an expression of their commitment to alleviating racial tensions.

      African American women responded to hair fads more subtly than men because for progressive black women, hair was a stronger gauge of racial and gender performance. As African American authors Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps note, as a representative of the group, progressive African American women shared a mission of individual and collective social upliftment by pursuing sophisticated New Negro Womanhood, and hair was one of its determinants.³⁷ Therefore, for ←25 | 26→African American women, groomed hair was much more than a product of vanity: it was a means of presenting a new black identity.

      As a hair care promoter, Walker emphasized that she owed her invention of hair culture to her African American ancestral heritage. In her often-cited self-invented story, Walker ingeniously connected her work with Africa.³⁸ She claimed that she had dreamed of a black man of large stature who told her the secret formula for the care of black women’s hair. “Some of the remedy was grown in Africa,” said Walker, “but I sent for it, mixed it, put it on my scalp, and in a few weeks my hair was coming in faster than it had ever fallen out.”³⁹ Tananarive Due, a biographer of Walker, claims that the substance that Walker was referring to was organic sulfur, or methylsulfonylmethane, which is known to improve “allergies, constipation, and problems with parasites,” “[maintain] normal metabolism,” and “[supply] the building blocks for the production and repair of the skin, cartilage, ligaments, and tendons.”⁴⁰ Walker also shrewdly cited her mother’s wisdom as having been passed down from her African foremothers: “Don’t want you gittin’ wet, Sarah, but this sulfur will clean yo’ head without no water.”⁴¹

      These stories assumed her link with Africa that provided her grammar with historical and geographical importance. Walker’s cultural enterprise materialized what Paul Gilroy called the “black Atlantic,” the locus of the black modernist consciousness rooted in and routed through the Atlantic.⁴² “The telling and retelling of these stories [of loss, exile, and journeying],”