26. In 1908, she opened the Walker College of Hair Culture in Pittsburgh to train her hair culturists. “I am not interested in making money for myself,” she said. Graduates learned to style hair, to use her products, to open their own salons. All were instructed to slather their clients’ naturally coarse hair with the growing balm before singeing straightness by way of a hot comb.
27. The Birth of a Saleswoman: She took to the road. Door-to-door up the East Coast, around the Mississippi Basin, a stint in Canada, the Caribbean islands. Walker billed herself as an inventor, selling her hair softener to thousands, for use with a straightening comb. The saleswoman emphasized the theater of transaction on each door step, urging each potential customer to ask her questions, to grill her, so as to establish both women as actors on a stage of willed, economic power that had not and was not available to either of them in most other circumstances.
28. “And from [the kitchen] I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground,” and the crowd silenced slowly. She directed her impromptu speech directly at Washington, who stood holding court at the podium. As for Washington, who had disliked Walker for much of the same reasons that he disliked other black women — that they falsified the terms of his dubious racial compromise and exposed the righteousness of his unspoken sexist one, that Walker in particular proved his idea of black wealth could be attained in tandem with agitating for civil rights, that the black elite was engaging in protracted suicide if it would not rally for civil rights — he responded to her with silence.
29. In his essay on the useful fiction of hair color in post-WWII America, “True Colors”, Malcolm Gladwell asks “In writing the history of women in the postwar era, did we forget something important? Did we leave out hair?” In writing the history of black women in this country, we could not leave out hair; it is all we see, all we worried about. On black hair, the drama of freedom