Customer Reviews

The Black Rose

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I have a new heroine. Not only did she rise above being black in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also she rose above being a black woman to become America's first female millionaire. It's an incredible story.

Her name is Madame C. J. Walker and her story is fictionalized in Tananarive Due's historical novel, The Black Rose. Based on the research and an extensive outline complete by famed author Alex Haley before his death in 1992, Due weaves a fascinating account of Walker and her times.

Madam C. J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove to freed blacks in 1867. Sarah is proud that she is learning to read and write, and dreams of reading her mother's Bible and someday attending college. Her dreams are crushed when her parents, now tenant farmers on the same Delta, Louisiana, farm where they were once slaves, die of yellow fever in 1874. Eight-year-old Sarah and her siblings are left to struggle for survival on their own. By 1878, the crops were failing and their shack was all but falling down. A year later, Sarah and her sister, Lou, move to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to become washerwomen.

The work is grueling but mind numbing. At 14, Sarah marries Moses McWilliams, a man she grows to love with all her heart, but who is killed less than a year later in one of Mississippi's infamous race riots. Devastated and left with a daughter, Lelia, to care for, Sarah moves to St. Louis. Life there is hard, but Sarah still dreams of college, of learning to read without having to struggle with each word. She has her own washing service and begins to save money so that Lelia can someday have the education she was categorically denied.

St. Louis' Annie Malone begins a beauty supply business, hiring black women as representatives to sell the products door-to-door. Sarah admires Annie, but her products do not bring relief to her own itchy dandruff and dry scalp that have tormented her since childhood. In an effort to find relief, Sarah and Lelia being concocting different remedies in their kitchen. Thanks to the help of a dream about a field of black roses and the treatment of sulfur to an injury Lelia sustains, Sarah stumbles onto the secret formula that make hair grown-she is a living example that it works. A new business if founded!

During this time she meets and marries C. J. Walker, an advertising whiz, and moves her business to Denver. With the help of C. J., but more of her own ambition and determination, Sarah begins her beauty supply business, recruiting women to sell it door-to-door. Before long, Sarah is the most sought after, most powerful woman, in America. Eventually she moves her business to Indianapolis and New York, where there is a more concentrated population of blacks.

But the more time she spends working, the less time she has for Lelia and C. J. The three grow estranged and by the time of her death in 1919, Madame C. J. Walker was the wealthiest, loneliest woman in the United States.

The Black Rose is more fiction than fact, according to Due who was in St. Louis recently. Scads of papers remain from The Madame C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, which existed until the 1960s, but little personal documentation about this powerful woman have survived the years. Due reviewed thousands of interviews, documents, and papers that Alex Haley has complied before she began writing. "I tried to be true to the spirit of Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker," Due said. And from everything else I've read about this remarkable woman, Due has done as excellent job in capturing her essence. The Black Rose is a powerful, captivating tale of a real-life heroine.

Even though I will probably feel it in the morning when I go to work it was worth it. This has been the first book in a very long time I have felt so good about. Despite a length of about 350 pages, this book drew me into the world of Sarah Breedlove daughter of sharecroppers who takes a cue from a former employee and reinvents herself as Madam CJ Walker, the 1st black female millionare. It is hard to find a postive African-American woman in books as well as any other media that is not portrayed as someone's trusty old maid, a tragic heroine, or just a woman who sits on the sidelines whether she is the main character or not. I will have to warn, the reader, since this book is not a straight biography, which caused me to shy away from it at first, but more like bio-fiction half novel half biography. The use of this bio-fiction device makes the book more interesting because Due paints the scenes so marvelously. The way Due portrays her main character as child who has to overcome hard circumstances and uses tragedies in her earlier life to become a stronger and successful woman reminded me of Arthur Golden's MEMORIES OF A GEISHA.

I had only heard of Madam C.J. Walker by way of hearsay that she was the first black female millionaire. I never knew anything more about her life, her struggles or her cause. So my curiosity got the best of me and I recommended to my bookclub that we educate ourselves on some history. Albeit The Black Rose is a fictionalize account of Madam Walker, I believe that the author did the necessary research to make her account as true to fact as she possibly could.

With that said, this is definately by far, the best historical novel I have EVER read. The author did an incredible job with taking us back to Sarah's (nka Madam Walker) childhood so that the readers could understand the very beginning of her life struggles. The book literally walks you through Sarah's life of who she was and who she became but don't let this fool you. Sarah never lost sight of where she came from and even after she gained her wealth, she remained the same well grounded person of whom she grew from. As a reader, you find out about each and every person that Sarah encountered, many of which had some affect on her life in one way or the other. You learn of her family and how they affected her struggles, whether negative or positive. But most important, you learn of Sarah's strength. Considering the time frame that Sarah lived, she surpassed obstacles that not only women but even some men couldn't even dream of.

This is a very enriching tale that every African American should read. This book is not just about making money. It's about a real life struggle to make a better life for not just self but for the entire black generation! Once you've read this story, you will immediately realize that had it not been for Madam C.J. Walker, us African Americans would not be where we are today (you'll have to read the book to figure out exactly what I'm talking about because I don't want to give it away).

Ms. Due................you have truly outdone yourself with this literary piece of work and I still get goosebumps when I think about reading the last words of your story and recognizing the history I just gained by simple curiosity. Thank you.

Prior to reading this book,I knew very little about Madame C.J. Walker. I knew she became wealthy after starting a hair product company, but after that often told fact,I didn't know very much else. This book not only enlighted me to the facts surrounding her early beginnings to her rise to fame and fortune, it also served to be a very great story. It was very well written, and an instant page turner from start to finish. The Black Rose took the reader through a journey through history and left you thinking of the characters long after the book was finished. If this had been a very strict historical fact based book, I honestly don't think that I would have enjoyed it nearly as much. The fact that the book was a very rare combination of fiction and fact made for an extremely interesting book. A must read for any serious book lover.

The story of Madam C.J. Walker,the hair care product pioneer and America's first black female millionaire is the rags-to-riches story that this country was built upon. Based on reaserch done by Alex Haley prior to his death, Tananarive Due weaves a spellbinding tale of determination, heartbreak, and triumph. Spanning the time following the Civil war to the early 1900's, she is able not only to tell the story of Sarah Breedlove, later to be renamed Madam C.J. Walker, but intertwine that compelling story with historical events. The book is character driven, and those characters come to life in these pages. This was a delightful book, and thouroughly involving.

I've read much about Madame Walker and how she created an empire through sheer determination and hard work, yet most of these accounts don't give a whole lot of insight into Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker, the person behind the legend. Madame Walker's life is such an awe-inspiring one that you can hardly blame her biographers if they seemed to focus mainly on her business accomplishments. But there was so much more to her. I understand that this is historical fiction, and as such, certain instances and characters are fabricated, but the gist of the book is based on research completed by Alex Haley. Still there are certain things that remain unknown about the great lady.

Because this is a novel, it allowed the author to create dialogue and situations that may not have actually happened to Madame Walker, but were certainly possiblities for Black women during that time period. The slights from other Black folks who thought themselves superior to the former laundress, the incident with the White men who accosted her when she was alone at the train station, pulling a gun on her cheating husband in a hotel room with his other woman, these incidents may not have occured to Madame Walker as described by Due, but these situations help flesh out the story.

Madame Walker believed in herself and in the worthiness of Black women when no one else did. Unlike other wealthy women of that era, Madame was a self-made millionaire. Her wealth didn't come from marriage or inheritance, and she helped other women make their own money along the way. Despite all this, there were those who held her in disdain either because of her humble beginnings or because they thought that she was only trying to get Black women to straighten their hair.

Tananarive Due is an wondrous storyteller, and this book will impress upon the reader just how remarkable Madam Walker really was.

[Note: This review originally appeared August 14, 2000, in the Seattle Times and is available online at ...P>This skillful biographical novel is about a woman who could have shown Horatio Alger what it really means to start with less than nothing and succeed against all odds by means of perseverance, imagination, talent, and generosity.

In "The Black Rose," Longview author Tananarive Due ("My Soul to Keep") has traced the career of Madame C. J. Walker, America's first black millionaire. Due based her narrative on research that Alex Haley had gathered for a book on Walker, which he planned to write in the style of "Roots" but failed to finish before his death.

Madame Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 in Delta, Louisiana, to former slaves. When her parents died of yellow fever (she was only seven), she and her sister moved to Mississippi and found work doing laundry for white people. Later Sarah married and gave birth to a daughter, Lelia, then was widowed when her beloved husband was killed for protesting against injustices at work.

For fourteen years, during an era of violent prejudice against black people, Sarah worked as a washerwoman, eventually moving to St. Louis in search of a better life for Lelia. Sarah had always been intrigued by small businesses, from one-man fish stands to laundries that jobbed out their services. And she was a problem-solver. One day she bought an ointment that failed to ease a painful scalp condition, and it happened just when she'd begun worrying about teenaged Lelia's poor self-image in a world of white beauty standards. Sarah used healthier ingredients to develop a skin and hair treatment for black women, and a successful cosmetics business was born that would soon be worth over a million dollars, with offices in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, and Manhattan.

Due makes an interesting, absorbing narrative of Madame Walker's philanthropy toward black causes, her work with leaders such as W. E. B. DuBois, and her complicated emotional struggles with Lelia and second husband C. J. Walker. Most moving of all is how Walker's life story and the independent, dignified work she gave to women across the nation inspired thousands of her sisters to believe in themselves.

Move over, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor and forget Terry McMillan altogether. There is a new vibrantly strong, black and female voice in fiction. Ms. Due's prose is as silken and lushly beauteous as the hair she writes about. This novel is the story of Madam C. J. Walker, America's first black female millionaire who made her fortune selling hair care products developed specifically for black women. Beyond that, she was also an untiring (and too unsung) advocate for the potent and often dismissed power of the black woman. Madam Walker, originally Sarah Breedlove, daughter of freed slaves, referring to a comment made by noted educator Mary McLeod Bethune, said "that the world better get used to seeing a black rose,.... Anyone who does not respect Negro womanhood has never seen Negro womanhood as I am seeing it now." There are endless cameo appearances from the world of post-Victorian culture from Booker T. Washington to Enrico Caruso in this seamless mix of documentary and fiction that reads like plum juice down a parched throat in August. Tananarive Due is simply a superb young novelist and this is her best writing yet. There will be greater things to come from her. There's also an Indiana connection to this book. Visitors to Indianapolis will immediately recognize the historic Walker Theatre, located near the former site of the The Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company on West Street.

I waited a year before I read this book, I deeply regret this.

I was absolutely amazed at the way this book was written. I couldn't put this book down until it was completed! I read it everywhere!

When I read this book, it was like I was transported into the story. If I believed in time travel, I'd swear that Tananarive went back in time to witness and record Madame C. J. Walker's real life story.

This is a must read. I look forward to reading all the books that Tananarive writes. All of her books are absolutely amazing!

Many historians think that fictionalized accounts are useless. Being a historian myself, I have to beg to differ in this case. Due's facts were well-researched and her dialogue brought life to a character that many of us know only by name. I feel as if I knew Madame, as if I loved her, as if I mourned her, and as if I was taking a walk with her through hardship, loss, and, ultimately, to triumph's door. Due did a fantastic job of bringing to life the legacy of Madame CJ Walker.

Thank you for remembering our history.