She had tried to stay calm, but none of it was normal. Daddy always arrived home by half past five each evening. I remembered the worry in Momma’s eyes when the clock read 6:45 p.m. The night Daddy died, Momma kept glancing at the old wooden clock on our kitchen wall. I was forced to forget about playing outside after school and instead focus on helping my mother, who afterward would stare hopelessly at the sky, searching for God, and crying herself to sleep at night. On a chilly February day, Daddy’s body was found floating facedown in the raging, icy James River. ExcerptĪT TWELVE YEARS OLD, my childhood immediately ended. Now, her rich, full story is revealed in this stirring and intimate novel. DuBois and Mary McLeod, she revolutionized Richmond in ways that are still felt today. With the help of influential friends like W.E.B. Luke, founder of a newspaper, a bank, and a department store where Black customers were treated with respect. With her single-minded determination, Maggie buckled down and went from schoolteacher to secretary-treasurer of the Independent Order of St. She vowed to not only secure the same kind of home and finery for herself, but she would also help others in her community achieve the same. Her childhood in 19th-century Virginia helping her mother with her laundry service opened her eyes to the overwhelming discrepancy between the Black residents and her mother’s affluent white clients. Maggie Lena Walker was ambitious and unafraid. In the vein of The Engineer’s Wife and Carolina Built, an inspiring novel based on the remarkable true story of Virginia’s Black Wall Street and the indomitable Maggie Lena Walker, the daughter of a formerly enslaved woman who became the first Black woman to establish and preside over a bank in the United States.
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