the economic depression called the Panic of 1893 that the downtown tobacco processing plants, slaughterhouses, rendering factories, whiskey distilleries, and lead companies mushroomed. This was St. Louis in the early 1900s — the early years of a time we would later call the “gilded age of black business.”

10. It was standing above metal steam basins in basement laundries, those tubs emitting a froth of unknown chemicals lively enough to seep through Sarah and the other laundresses’ hands, faces, and scalps, that she began to lose her hair. Awful, yes, to reach up to the temple and find less hair than there was yesterday, the coarse texture having already been a nuisance. Unnerving, certainly, to find no way to reverse this misfortune. Like an unfriendly wind bending the crop backwards, she combed over to simulate plenitude where, little by little, baldness crawled in. We can assume this follicle rot was accompanied by a smell. It must have hurt.

11. The city of St. Louis, mused T.S. Eliot, “affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done.” St. Louis got into the working poor’s black bones, too. Every day was lead weather in Factory Town. The worst of it was not inhaling the particulates and lead dust from paint manufacturing — a laundress got most intimate with noxious fumes. They glistened on her as she leaned against the balustrade at the end of the day; bristled on her nape when the check came late. The worst was always the physical deformation: that the women were relieving the new crooks in their backs on the balustrade, that the women were losing their hair.

12. “Wealthy Negress Dead,” read the New York Times on May 16, 1919: “Madame Walker completed at Irvington, on the banks of the Hudson, in a mansion that cost $250,000.” What a curious way to say it. “Completed,” as in “reached,” or “attained” a status that in the case of Walker’s life equated death with wealth, specifically the acquisition of property.