Self-Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker by Nicole Jefferson Asher (review)

The woman who would become renowned as beauty mogul Madame C. J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 on the northern Louisiana plantation where her parents had been enslaved. Orphaned, then married at fourteen and widowed at twenty, Walker would become famous by building a hair care empire with over twenty products, an international buyer base, and a veritable army of Black women sales agents. She started her business in 1906, and by 1915, Walker was being described as a “self-made millionaire.” Walker’s life, from her plantation beginnings to her opulent estate in New York, has always had the potential to be prime material for film. In March 2020, Netflix released its limited series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C. J. Walker. Written by Nicole Jefferson Asher and showrunners Elle Johnson and Janine Sherman Barrois, Self Made’s four episodes follow Walker’s life from her days as a washerwoman in St. Louis through her struggle with hair loss, her development as a savvy business woman, her rivalry with the character Addie Munroe, and the building of the Walker Manufacturing Company cosmetics empire. We are introduced to Walker’s third husband, Charles Joseph Walker, daughter Lelia, her attorney F. B. Ransom, and Munroe, whose character seems very loosely based on hair care entrepreneur and Walker contemporary, Annie Turnbo Malone.

Self Made was released with much anticipation. It features a cast that includes Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer, Blair Underwood, Carmen Ejogo, and Tiffany Haddish as Walker’s daughter Lelia Walker Robinson, and showcases writers, directors, and showrunners who are all Black women. Director Kasi Lemmons, known for Eve’s Bayou (1997) and most recently for the 2019 film Harriet about abolitionist Harriet Tubman, and DeMane Davis, who directs the second two episodes, have worked on a number of television shows including Queen Sugar (2016-present) and How to Get Away with Murder (2014–2020). The period costumes, sets, and hairstyles are showstoppers, lavishly beautiful, paying due respect to a certain type of Black life in the early twentieth century that often does not make it to big or small screens. The cinematography also takes us to the Harlem of the New Negro Movement when, in episode three, Walker sets her daughter up in New York and opens the famed Dark Tower, a beauty salon that quickly becomes a community space for Black artists. We also get to see Walker’s New York estate, Villa Lewaro in Irvington-on-Hudson.

The short series also gives us a glimpse into the sharp business mind of Walker as she competes with Munroe for Black women clients, navigates white and Black industry men and Black race leaders, and ultimately gets support from Booker T. Washington’s wife Margaret Murray Washington and the National Association of Colored Women. We get a sense of Walker’s real-life intentionality about networking, branding, and marketing. Walker was indeed on the cutting edge of product presentation: she used slides, promotional films, and the placement of her own image on her labels as early as her first product “Wonderful Hair Grower,” which debuted in 1906.

But there is much with which the series takes liberties, so much so that since its airing, A’Lelia Bundles, Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, whose biography of Walker was used as the basis for the series, expressed disappointment about her exclusion from production.¹ Specifically, Walker’s exceptional rise to prominence and wealth in the modern hair care industry would have been made stronger with a more accurate portrayal not only of her personal history, but also of her relationship and rivalry with real-life Annie Turnbo Malone, who also had an exceptional rise. Malone’s St. Louis company, complete with a large factory and a beauty school, was a part of a rather robust hair industry inclusive of both Black and white companies marketing to...