Overlooking the golf course at the J.W. Marriott Turnberry in Aventura, A’Lelia Bundles sits with the assurance of someone who understands the weight of her work. Her silver hair, Toni Morrison–esque in tone if not texture, gives her a presence defined by grace and gravity. Below, the ballroom hums as members of The Links, Incorporated, the influential Black women’s service organization, mark the 70th anniversary of the Greater Miami Chapter, installed on Nov. 5, 1955. The scene feels suspended in time: fascinators atop finger-waved hair, sequins catching the light, men in tuxedos gliding across polished floors. It is Harlem Nights energy in modern dress, an apt backdrop for a woman devoted to restoring Black cultural memory.
The atmosphere reverberates with history, and Bundles responds instinctively, putting the needle back on the record whenever the story threatens to skip a beat. A century after A’Lelia Walker lit Harlem with a brilliance that drew artists, writers, and musicians into her orbit, Bundles—the great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker and her namesake—returns her ancestor to the center of the narrative. In “Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance,” she offers a biography supported by documented fact and committed to Black women’s self-definition.
For Bundles, understanding Walker begins with seeing her. Photographs, letters, travel diaries, invitations and handwritten notes form the book’s scaffolding. “The ‘lot of stuff’ in my family let me tell the story,” she jokes. That “stuff” includes more than 40,000 documents preserved by Madam Walker’s executive team. “Don’t put it in unless I can document it,” Bundles insists.
Decades of research dismantle the flattening of Walker beneath her mother’s legend. “She’s flawed. Who among us is not?” Bundles says, refusing to smooth the edges that made her human. More than an heiress, she was a convener, someone who could claim a room the way Zora Neale Hurston claimed Eatonville’s porches and New York’s literary circles, making strangers feel they belonged. Her salons energized the Harlem Renaissance, drawing creative minds into shared space.
The story begins with her mother’s rise. Madam C.J. Walker, Bundles explains, lifted herself from washerwoman to millionaire before her death in 1919. From that journey, Walker learned that economic independence was a pathway to power, first imagined for one daughter, then extended to thousands of women.
Still, she forged a legacy uniquely her own. Bundles calls her the first Black heiress-celebrity, an early icon of style and influence. Her gatherings were incubators for Black creativity, welcoming writers, musicians, entertainers, and international artists who might never have crossed paths otherwise.
Bundles also renders Harlem as a living character, tracing its rise alongside Walker’s life. The music and community that surrounded her childhood shaped the salons that followed.
Truth-telling is the throughline of Bundles’s work. At 23, seated at her mother’s hospital bedside as she lay dying of cancer, she received lifelong instruction: “Tell the truth, baby.” With Joy Goddess, she honors that charge, restoring A’Lelia Walker to history’s center and letting the record play, clear and uninterrupted, at full volume.
