Author Biography

A'Lelia Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, is Walker's biographer and great-great-granddaughter. Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker, the fictional four-part Netflix series inspired by this New York Times Notable Book and starring Octavia Spencer, premiered in the number one slot during its first weekend in 2020. She is chair emerita of the National Archives Foundation and a former ABC News Washington deputy bureau chief. She lives in Washington, DC. Visit her website at ALeliaBundles.com.

Review

"A fascinating book about a fascinating woman." -USA Today "The life of Madam C. J. Walker is one of the great success stories of American history. . . . [This is] the first full-blown biography of an amazing woman." -The Philadelphia Inquirer "Well-paced and well-written . . . as much social history as biography, filled with the detail and texture of culture and politics." -The New York Times

Review Quote

" On Her Own Ground is a fascinating book about a fascinating woman." -- USA Today "The life of Madam C. J. Walker is one of the great success stories of American history. . . . [This is] the first full-blown biography of an amazing woman." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer "Well-paced and well-written . . . as much social history as biography, filled with the detail and texture of culture and politics." -- The New York Times

Excerpt from Book

Chapter 1: Freedom Baby 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. Life and living arrangements were so scrambled after the war that Owen and Minerva, both born around 1828, remained on the plantation where they had lived as Robert W. Burney''s slaves since at least 1847. Their African family origins, as well as their faces and voices, are lost to time, silenced by their illiteracy. Because the importation of slaves had been illegal since January 1, 1808--though the law was flouted for years--they had been born in the United States. Whether Burney purchased them from an auction block in Vicksburg, New Orleans or Mobile--places he frequented--will likely never be known. Before the war, Owen and Minerva''s labor had helped make their owner a wealthy man. In 1860, a banner year for cotton in Louisiana, Burney''s "real property"--including his land and the sixty people he owned--was valued at $125,000, his personal property at $15,000. Such holdings secured his place in the top 10 percent of slave-owning Southern planters, and put him among the 30 percent who owned more than 1,000 acres. But now, with the South defeated, the Burney fields were "growing up with weeds," their house and farm buildings--like those of most of their neighbors--destroyed as they fled with their slaves during the first campaign against Vicksburg in 1862. Hoping never to see Union soldiers again, they had found themselves in a rented home in Morton, Mississippi, and squarely in the path of General William Tecumseh Sherman''s destructive 1864 march across that state, a prelude to his more famous 1865 swath through Georgia. By the spring of 1865, when the Burneys returned to the peninsula where their plantation sat, the Union commanders at Vicksburg had confiscated the land for a refugee camp filled with several thousand newly freed men, women and children. "The scenes were appalling," wrote one Freedmen''s Bureau official. "The refugees were crowded together, sickly, disheartened, dying on the streets, not a family of them all either well sheltered, clad, or fed." The Burney farm had also become a burial ground pocked with mass graves for hundreds of the 3,200 Union soldiers who had died of dysentery, typhoid and malaria as they kept watch over Vicksburg during the scorching summer of 1862 and the soggy winter of 1863. The troops, along with 1,200 slaves confiscated from nearby plantations, had followed a Union general''s order to excavate a canal--a kind of jugular slash through the base of the peninsula''s long neck--intended to circumvent the impenetrable hills of Vicksburg. By late 1867, as the Breedloves awaited Sarah''s birth, all that remained of a once grand plantation were "one or two little houses or shanties near the river" and a large ditch marking the failed bypass. Robert W. Burney was only twenty-two years old in August 1842 when he arrived with his oxen and farm implements on 167 acres of rented land in Madison Parish, Louisiana, near the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg. By the following February, when he purchased the land for a mere $1.25 an acre, he already had a small group of enslaved people at work preparing 65 acres for corn and cotton. His personal good fortune was the result of a nationwide economic crisis that had financially strapped the previous owners. For a young man as ambitious as Burney, the uncultivated soil of the Louisiana frontier held more lucrative promise than the depleted farmland of the more heavily populated eastern United States. Overextended land speculators, ruined in the Panic of 1837, were forced to sell to men like Burney, who, unsaddled by debt, could dictate advantageous deals for modest amounts of cash. A native of Maury County, Tennessee--home of President James Knox Polk--Burney became the recipient of some of the country''s most fertile farmland, its alluvial soil so suited for long-staple cotton that it would soon become one of Louisiana''s wealthiest parishes. In April 1846 he nearly doubled his holdings with the $300 cash purchase of 160 acres just three and a half miles south of Vicksburg, one of the busiest cotton-trading ports between St. Louis and New Orleans. This time his land abutted the water, providing direct access to passing steamboats. It was situated on a mile-and-a half-wide peninsula that jutted northeastward toward Vicksburg like a finger poised to make a point, and its picturesque panoramas earned it the name Grand View. What Burney did not plant with cotton and vegetables in this dark, fertile turf remained a virgin forest of moss-draped oak, elm and cypress. Eventually a railroad designed to link trade on the Mississippi River with the Atlantic and Pacific oceans would pierce the center of his cotton fields. With prime property and favorable future prospects, Burney''s relative affluence made him a most eligible bachelor. In October 1846, he chose for his bride Mary Fredonia Williamson, the educated seventeen-year-old daughter of the late Russell McCord Williamson, a wealthy Mississippi landowner and delegate to the second Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1832. Williamson, who like Burney had grown up in Maury County, had been a childhood friend of the Polk boys, their families so close that one of the men he owned had assisted in the funeral of the President''s father. Williamson also had ties to another President, Andrew Jackson, under whom he had fought as a teenager in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans. In 1834, during the first year of his second term, Jackson appointed Williamson surveyor general of all public lands south of Tennessee amid the feverish Mississippi land rush for the confiscated ancestral territory of the Choctaws and Chickasaws. At least a second-generation slave owner, Williamson had no re

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