A'Lelia Bundles

Self Made by A’Lelia Bundles (AKA, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker”)
BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
Print: COPYRIGHT: 2/1/2001; ISBN 978-0684825823; PUBLISHER: Scribner; PAGES 416; Unabridged
Digital: Yes, available
*(This version) Audio: COPYRIGHT: 3/10/2020; ISBN: 9781508296126; PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster Audio; DURATION: 16:33:41; PARTS: 17; File Size: 472246 KB; Unabridged

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
How I picked it: I saw that it was a series on Netflix and after watching a little of the first episode decided I would probably prefer the book. (Nothing against the acting, I just wanted a version that was closest to the facts.)
What’s it about? An African American woman, Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove; December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919), who earns a living as a laundress until she turns the misfortune of hair loss into a challenge of finding a cure, and then, aware that hair loss was a common affliction in her community, marketing that cure.
What did I think? Despite questioning the length, I loved the poverty to riches aspect of the story, and learning a little more about history in general and African American history in particular.

AUTHOR:
A’Lelia Bundles
From Wikipedia: “A'Lelia Perry Bundles (born June 7, 1952)[2] is an American journalist, news producer and author, known for her 2001 biography of her great-great-grandmother Madam C. J. Walker.”

NARRATOR:
A’Lelia Bundles (See above).

GENRE:
Autobiography; biography; History; African American Nonfiction

SUBJECTS:
Business; Hair products; family relations; Mother-daughter relations

DEDICATION:
“In memory of my mother, A’Lelia Mae Perry Bundles, who knew this was my story to tell”

EXERPT: From Chapter 1:
“Freedom Baby
Into a time of destitution and aspiration, of mayhem and promise, Sarah Breedlove was born two days before Christmas 1867. It was a Yuletide that offered her parents, Owen and Minerva, no other gifts. An open-hearth fireplace provided the only source of warmth and light in their sloped-roof cyprus cabin No official document recorded Sarah’s birth. No newspaper notice heralded her arrival. No lacy gown enveloped her tiny cocoa body.
To the world beyond her family’s rented plot of ground in Delta, Louisiana, Sarah was just another black baby destined for drudgery and ignorance. But to her parents, she symbolized hope. Unlike her older siblings—Louvenia, Owen, Jr., Alexander and James—Sarah had been born free just a few days shy of the Emancipation Proclamation’s fifth anniversary. Still, her parents’ lives were unlikely to change anytime soon. For the Breedloves, even hope had its limits.
Tethered to this space for more than two decades—first as slaves, then as free people—they knew what to expect from its seasonal patterns. Spring rains almost always split the levees, transforming land to sea until the floods receded from their grassless yard to reveal a soppy stew, flush with annual deposits of soil from the northern banks of the Mississippi River. Summer dry spells sucked the moist dirt until it turned to dust. Steamy autumns filled creamy-white cotton fields with swarms of sweating ebony backs, blistered feet and bloody, cracked cuticles. On a predictable cycle, wind, water and heat, then flies, mosquitoes and gnats, streamed through the slits and gaps of their rickety home.
Beyond the nearby levee, the syrupy mile-wide river formed a liquid highway, bringing news and commerce like blood transfusions from New Orleans and Natchez to the south, St. Louis and Memphis to the north. Three miles upstream and a half-hour ferry ride away in Vicksburg, black stevedores unloaded farm tools and timepieces, china and chifforobes from steamboats, then stacked their decks with honeycombs of cotton bales just hauled in from Jackson and Clinton and Yazoo City.
During the Civil War the river had also become an avenue of invasion, so central to the Confederacy’s east-west supply trains and north-south riverboats that President Abraham Lincoln declared it the “key” to winning the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis, whose family plantation was located barely thirty river miles south of the city at Davis Bend, was equally aware of its strategic position. From atop Vicksburg’s two-hundred-foot red-clay bluffs, Confederate cannons glowered at Union gunboats and controlled this patch of the Mississippi Valley, frustrating the federal navy for more than two years until the Confederates’ decisive July 4, 1863, surrender.
Having been reduced to eating mule meat and living in caves during a forty-seven-day bombardment and siege, Vicksburg residents, and their Louisiana neighbors on the western side of the river, found their mauling hard to forget or forgive. As General Ulysses S. Grant’s blue-uniformed columns streamed triumphantly toward Vicksburg’s stalwart courthouse, thousands of freedmen cheered. But for many generations after the troops had left, the former slaves and their descendants would suffer from the federal army’s vindictive pillaging and the retaliation inflicted upon them by their former masters.”

RATING:.
3

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
11-22-2022 to 1-5-2023… (more)

This book is part biography but more so a history of the upper echelons of Black life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Essentially, Reconstruction through World War I). As a history major in college, this period of history was one of my focuses, and while I know a lot of the names of prominent Black intellectuals, artists, musicians, writers, leaders, I do not recall ever having heard of Madam C.J. Walker or her Harlem Renaissance-goddess daughter, A’Lelia Walker, even in my Black history classes. I am glad that is remedied now. The historical details were fascinating and primary source material for some of Ms. Walker's life story added rich flavor (Ms. Bundles is a descendant of Ms. Walker), but there were many suppositions that filled gaps in sources for the story that sometimes seemed forced. Nevertheless, that there is a record at all of the early years of this enterprising millionaire and her program of uplifting those less fortunate, particularly Black women, is a gift. It is no surprise that there were holes that had to be filled with guessing.… (more)

Things I liked: written by a descendant of Madam CJ Walker. That is amazing. The story of Madam CJ Walker's life, in general, and the emphasis on her commitment to giving back to the community. She is a tremendous figure, and an astonishing woman.

Things I wasn't so sure about -- there's a lot of assumed emotion that is written into the book, and a lot of things that are glossed over. Example of the first -- the book talks about how joyfully her family celebrated her birth. Entirely possible! But how do we know that? It's followed shortly thereafter by the deaths of parents, with no death certificate, so the author goes out of the way to mention that we can't be sure how they died, but is perfectly comfortable attributing emotions to the family. This is a small weird thing, but it adds up throughout the book and begins to strike a false note.

On the whole, a fine book, but I didn't feel very engaged by it.
Liked it better on second reading.… (more)