Beverly Lowry's speculative "nonfiction": the white author of a new Madam Walker biography is lauded by the mainstream as if Walker's award-winning black chroniclers never existed. But Lowry also acknowledges mistakes in her Walker text to BIBR and vows to fix some of them in the paperback edition.

When Her Dream of Dreams: The Rise and Triumph of Madam C.J. Walker by Beverly Lowry was published in April (Knopf, $27.50, ISBN 0-679-44642-7), it was billed as "a comprehensive biography ... of America's first black woman millionaire." Well, at least the book is hefty--481 pages that include 38 pages of endnotes, bibliography and index. But readers expecting a new perspective on Sarah Breedlove, the daughter of slaves who rose from a shanty in Louisiana to become the legendary hair-care entrepreneur and philanthropist, are likely to be disappointed, even horrified.

Lowry, the author of six novels and two nonfiction books, as well as director of the creative nonfiction program at George Mason University, tries to get inside Madam Walker's head and to fill in gaps of family history with her assumptions and guesses. The result is a self-indulgent and self-involved narrative that made me want to hurl the book against my living-room wall a half dozen times by the time I was only 50 pages into it. It took either arrogance or cluelessness to write a tome so speculative and too often factually challenged.

The definitive Walker biography remains the book completed two years ago by her great-great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles--On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (Scribner, February 2001, $30, ISBN 0-684-82582-1). Bundles, a network television journalist, approached her ancestor's underexamined life as a clear-eyed realist, determined to cut through the legendary businesswoman's hype and image polishing of nearly a century ago to find the real person. It was a bestseller on the lists of the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Essence and Blackboard. And Bundles' 1991 volume for younger readers, Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur, received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1992.

Lowry, Memphis born and Mississippi-bred, has previously written about her own heritage as a white Southerner. She told Black Issues Book Review in a July telephone interview that she became interested in Madam Walker's story when she considered doing a novel authorized by the estate of Alex Haley. Before his death, the Roots author had once considered doing his own Madam Walker book and had even hired Bundles to conduct research for him.

"The widow of Alex Haley asked me to write a novel about Madam Walker, but I didn't want to do that," Lowry told BIBR. (Subsequently, Tananarive Due wrote the fictional account The Black Rose [One World, June 2000, $25.95, ISBN 0-345-43960-0)] with the cooperation of Alex Haley's estate.) "I broke from [the estate], but I continued to do the work, and do it without inside information," explained Lowry. "A lot of people and publishers were interested."

A Wall Street Journal reviewer, Nicholas von Hoffman, wrote a glowing account of Lowry's Her Dream of Dreams on April 23. Von Hoffman noted that "when she died in 1919, [Walker] was one of the richest African-Americans in the U.S. It is astonishing that her name is all but forgotten today."

All but forgotten by whom?

In a May 12 letter to the Wall Street Journal, Bundles wrote: "As Madam Walker's biographer and great-great-granddaughter, I was rather astonished to see that Lowry was thanked by von Hoffman for bringing Madam Walker to us again. Anyone who has read my books, On Her Own Ground: the Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker (Scribner 2001), and Madam C.J. Walker: Entrepreneur (Chelsea House, 1991), or who have heard my lectures or television interviews about MadamWalker during the last 20 years, certainly was not hungering for Beverly Lowry's book to make them aware of Madam Walker."

Apparently von Hoffman was also not aware that Walker has been immortalized on a first-class U.S. postage stamp in 1997. And the groundbreaking entrepreneur was the subject of a 1987 PBS documentary "Two Dollars and a Dream" by Stanley Nelson. (The filmmaker, a Macarthur "genius grant" winner, also happens to be the sun of the late A'Lelia Ransom Nelson, who was the daughter of walker's business manager, Freeman B. Ransom.)

But there's also the matter of the errors in Lowry's biography. BIBR spoke to the author about a few of them in a July telephone interview.

* Lowry makes reference on page 19 to Madison Parish, Louisiana, established in 1839 and named, said the author, after the third president of the United States. This would surprise descendants of the third president, Thomas Jefferson, and other people with an elementary grasp of U.S. history.

Lowry was troubled that her book confused Jefferson and Madison "That is an embarrassment," she said "It was carefully vetted by copy editors. One of us should have caught that. I have no answer to that."

* On page 48, Lowry refers to Hampton College. Booker T. Washington's alma mater was known as Hampton Institute, and is now known as Hampton University. Lowry should know better since the university where she teaches is, like Hampton, in the state of Virginia. Lowry concedes this mistake, too.

* Lowry wrote on page 29 and 30: "In December of 1867, the last Breedlove baby arrives ..." Actually, one more child, Solomon, was born in 1869. The author writes about Sarah's younger sibling later in the book.

However, she stood by her description of Sarah as the last Breedlove baby, contradicting Bundles, who says that Solomon is the last baby. Said Lowry, "Solomon's identity is not clear. He may be a brother, or cousin."

"That's why," she said, "I use a lot of 'probablys' or 'perhaps' in the book."

But Lowry makes her most egregious error on pages 111 and 112: "And while such young African-American women as Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune, Anna Julia Cooper, Hallie Quinn Brown and Mary Church Terrell will soon become even more famous for writing essays and editorials, giving speeches and lectures, running national organizations, women's clubs and schools, they all have skin color like milk with a little tea in it. Their noses are aquiline, and some have soft hair.[emphasis th reviewer's] But when this dark-skinned, swamp-accented washwoman winds up her story and the plate gets passed, money is collected. Sarah McWilliams' first public moment is a triumph."

That's a powerful but fatally flawed image of the future Madam C.J. Walker. Flawed because Ida B. Wells, the crusading editor, and Mary McLeod Bethune, the famed educator, were medium- to dark-skinned women. Mrs. Bethune's nose was hardly "aquiline." Images I recall of the educator, are confirmed by a statue of her in Washington, D.C., standing erect with a beaming smile that telegraphed confidence and pride in her African features.

"I guess I was pushing it a little," said Lowry of her "milk with a little tea in it" description of Bethune and Wells when asked about it. "She [Wells] doesn't have Anglo features," said the author, "but she is light-skinned." I insisted that Wells was not light skinned. Lowry did agree her Bethune description was "exaggerated."

If Lowry can't get racial features that everyone can see right, why should readers trust her to tell "the real story" about Madam Walker? This is why it was annoying to read over and over Lowry phrases like "I believe this," "I imagine," "It's my guess," and "we have to assume." Good biograghers, don't speculate. They stick to the facts and don't mangle them.

A spokeswoman for Knopf books responded later in an e-mail message, "Yes, Beverly Lowry is working with her editor to correct the errors you discovered, and she thanks you for calling them to her attention. The corrections will be reflected in the paperback version of the book." The paperback edition is anticipated in April 2004 from Vintage, a division of Random House, said Lowry.

A'Lelia Bundles later told BIBR, "My biggest concern is that readers are being misled not just because of errors, but by the telling of the story in a voice I think is intrusive and presumptuous in its conclusions about Madam Walker and African American history."

Sharon Harley, a University of Maryland professor of African American history and editor of Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (Rutgers University Press, June 2002, $22, ISBN 0-813-53061-X) among other historical texts, said she has not had an opportunity to read the new Walker book but considered it "very unusual" for historians to mix fictional techniques in a nonfiction narrative. "Most people look for what's called a biography and want to read exactly that," Harley said. Although fictional techniques were used in a recent well-known biography of Ronald Reagan, Edmund Morris' Dutch, Harley said "generally people found them problematic.

"People confuse using beautiful language with scholarly text," said the professor.

"A biography has to be historically accurate. It's very confusing to readers. The scholarly audience would be bothered [by the Lowry biography]. I'm worried about lay readers. They're much more gullible."

--Wayne Dawkins is contributing editor with blackjournalist.com and author of Rugged Waters: Black Journalists Swim the Mainstream (August Press)