Volume 49, Number 19 · December 5, 2002
Good Hair Day
By Jill Nelson
On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker
by A'Lelia Bundles
Washington Square, 415 pp., $15.00 (paper)
In 1966 my teenage sister came home shorn of her shoulder-length, straightened hair and sporting a short Afro. My mother, A'Lelia Ransom Nelson, the last president of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, producers of hair care products for black women since 1906, had a fit. Her objections to my sister's new nappy hair did not spring from aesthetic or political distaste, but had economic reasons. She viewed my sister's short, natural haircut as a betrayal of the business that was responsible for the upward mobility and educational advancement of her family, as well as numerous other black families. For her, it was simple logic that the daughter of the company president should wear long, straightened hair, as an advertisement for Walker products. (Ironically, by the mid-1970s my mother had her own fluffy silver Afro; a decade later the company would be out of business.)
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