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

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.


A triumph of biography, history, and storytelling.   July 6, 2003
4 out of 7 found this review helpful

Think you wouldn't be interested in a book about a woman who got rich selling black hair care products? Guess again. This book does not immerse the reader in cosmetics but is about hard work and its rewards, the attainment of wealth by a woman who had nothing, and the ways she spent her money, showing off as well as trying to help her race. The book traces the career of Madam C.J. Walker, child of former slaves, from Mississippi washerwoman to nationally known businesswoman and philanthropist. The author, Beverly Lowry, locates this life amid the customs, economy, and politics (black and mainstream) of the years between 1874 and 1920. She invites the reader to join her on the trail of her subject, about whom much is known but much is unknown, and in parallel keeps us abreast of the state of race relations from the annual number of lynchings to the attitude of whoever was president at the time to the changing role of black women in business. The book is full of word pictures. Where Walker can be definitively placed at a particular time, Lowry gives us a clear view with enough details to put us at the scene. We see, for example, the week-long laundry process of the 1880s, what the regimen was when she stayed at the Battle Creek Sanatorium (founded by J. Kellogg of cereal fame), her travels in the automobiles of long-gone makes that she drove for hundreds of miles at a time promoting her products, and we stand with her when Booker T. Washington visits, the culmination of years of effort to be recognized by him as an important businessperson and "race woman." These are swift strokes, enough but not too much, and then Lowry moves on. Her Dream of Dreams is a perfect marriage of imagination and research--facts unearthed by painstaking attention to detail, and conclusions drawn in just the right narrative tone. Lowry's is a voice of rich language and metaphor, a voice resonant with appreciation of Walker's character and achievement that does not fail to mark her limitations. Overall, Her Dream of Dreams is a good read--a triumph of biography, history, and just plain storytelling.


Tracing the Dream   May 25, 2003
Celia Morris (Washington,, District of Columbia USA)
4 out of 8 found this review helpful

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.