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A'Lelia Bundles asks guests not to venture upstairs in her Alexandria, Va., townhouse. Perhaps it's the bloated shelves of labeled files lining the walls and desktops hidden by well-handled papers, or perhaps it's more personal. She recently spent a year and half of her life — in sweats and eyeglasses — in this room, absorbing 30 years of research from travels and letters and official documents, and getting it all down on paper. This modest office holds the guts of what she describes as the "hardest thing I've ever done." Bundles' exploration yielded On Her Own Ground, The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker, released this month by Scribner. The work is a biography of her great-great-grandmother — and surely Indianapolis' most famous African-American woman. "I was meant to write a book," says Bundles, whose family moved to Indianapolis when she was 3. "We all have a purpose in life, and I think this was one of mine."

While she needed to write a book, it wasn't that simple. In 1991 Bundles completed Madam C.J. Walker: Entrepreneur, a young-adult biography and American Book Award winner. With her newest title, she felt a need to set the record straight to validate Walker's legacy and inspire others.

Indianapolis residents and visitors to the Downtown intersection of 10th and West streets and Indiana Avenue see part of Walker's legacy everyday; there the Walker Building stands as a national historic landmark housing the Madame Walker Theatre Center and theatre. (The building's namesake made "Madam" her legal first name.) But Bundles' story behind the memorable name and Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower had yet to be told, until now, although there had been attempts.

At 29, Bundles tried to tell the story with the help of Alex Haley. But she and Haley (of Roots fame) interpreted parts of the history differently. For instance, contrary to Bundles' evaluation, Haley contended that Walker's husband, C.J. Walker, groomed his wife to become a polished entrepreneur.

After Haley's death in 1992, before much had come of the book, Bundles appealed to the Haley family for rights to the story and was refused. After some legal wrangling, a settlement gave Haley's family dibs on a fictional story, while Bundles won the right to publish a biography. Research in the Haleys' possession was turned over to Tananarive Due, who published The Black Rose in June 2000, a historical novel romanticizing Walker's life and mussing the facts, a situation Bundles describes as "distressing."

As just a few examples, Bundles' research indicates Madam Walker had five siblings rather than two; three husbands rather than two; her first husband was not killed in a race riot; her parents did not die of yellow fever; she did not build a school in Africa; and at least two of the main characters — Charlotte and America — are fictional characters. Bundles has dedicated herself to getting the story right. (In fact, she corrected parts of her 1991 bio for On Her Own Ground.)

Her journey into the life of Madam Walker took her to courthouses, historical societies and libraries in more than a dozen cities, including Savannah, St. Louis, Denver, Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York. From Walker's birthplace on a plantation in Vicksburg, Miss., to her home in Indianapolis, Bundles retraced the steps her ancestors walked, transcribing the exact quotes and the exact citations into nearly 30 notebooks.

"Every little detail I wrote down in this book," she says. "The material is just organic to me." While the research was enjoyable, Bundles says she felt overwhelmed with the deadline looming alongside her relatively new full-time position as ABC News Washington deputy bureau chief.

With a 20-year career as an ABC News and NBC News producer, Bundles was used to facing deadlines, and she knew her capacity. She worked for NBC from 1976 to 1989 in New York; Washington, D.C.; Houston; and Atlanta, and covered Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential run, several hurricanes and the Popayan (Colombia) earthquake.

In 1989 she started as a producer for ABC's World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, where she worked on award-winning segments she cared about — stories with "social value." On "American Agenda" with Carole Simpson, she covered the child murders in Atlanta, kids affected by crack, welfare mothers and the history of De Fuskee Island near Hilton Head (a slave island-turned-golf course). But no matter how consumed she became, Bundles always was "yearning to resurrect my own family saga," the new book's prologue says.

As she was growing tired of broadcast work, Scribner awarded her a book contract for the Madam Walker story. After one year as deputy bureau chief, she took a six-month break. "The week after I came back after my leave of absence, the Monica Lewinsky story happened, so my little plan of getting up at 5 in the morning and writing and going to work really fell apart. So a year later I just had to quit." Hiding away in her office, curved into a red ergonomic chair often until the following morning, Bundles gave up friends, music, her Sunday paper and her patio, buried in research, but not suffocated. She says she has no regrets.

Soaking up a warm afternoon, discovering with a bit of wonder a squirrel's nest overhead, Bundles sips coffee on her back patio and talks easily, with a sense of relief and reflection. "I knew things would work out somehow, and I really didn't have any plans to go back (to ABC)," she remembers. "I was prepared to never go back because this was that important to me. And it's not so much the book, but telling the story so that people would know Madam Walker." What most people know is she was the first self-made female African-American millionaire, but that isn't the most accurate assumption, and the dollar amount isn't the important part anyway, according to Bundles.

"Madam Walker was an extraordinary woman, and the telling of American history has left women out and has left women of color out, and so we don't really understand all of our strength," she says. "And I just think that the more we know, the more confidence women can have about themselves when they see somebody did this a hundred years ago."

In one effort to improve a deficient history and propel Walker's memory, Bundles spearheaded a campaign for the Madam C.J. Walker commemorative stamp, issued by the U.S. Postal Service as part of the Black Heritage Series in 1998.

Bundles also has personal and civic ties to the Madame Walker Theatre Center. "When I was growing up, my mother went to work in that building, so it's always been a magical place for me," she says. When she was asked several years ago to join its board, Bundles was thrilled, particularly focusing on the annual Spirit Awards — honoring someone excelling in entrepreneurial and community endeavors.

Indianapolis is blessed to have the Walker Building, she says. "Every city doesn't have a block-long national historic landmark built by a black company in the 1920s that is still standing. We just take it for granted," Bundles worries. "It's a wonderful place, and despite the ups and downs" — she mentions bouts of poor leadership and funds for the arts — "there are always enough people who believe it's a treasure." This community spirit is an attitude emphasized throughout On Her Own Ground.

"I want (readers) to see not only a successful businesswoman, but a woman who cared about the world around her, who developed a vision. When you look at people now, many just go through life everyday, they don't have time to make a contribution, and they've got all kinds of things going for them. It's just so selfish to me.

"And how people just kind of get lazy about not trying to improve the world around them and not trying to improve themselves." Bundles wonders how anyone could look at a figure such as Madam Walker and not ask, "What can I do to be good to myself and improve the world around me? I just think we all have an obligation to do that.

"She's an inspiring figure, and she's not a perfect figure. Everybody has flaws," Bundles continues. "She accomplished all these things, and she had all kinds of things working against her, and she had É " She searches for a concise phrase to express her admiration. "If I could accomplish a quarter of what she accomplished, I would still be making a major contribution, so I really want the story to inspire every woman, and I really think that it does."

The accomplishments of Madam Walker and the recognition of her legacy have been with Bundles since she was a young girl, when she recalls spooning Thanksgiving dinner off of her great-great-grandmother's Limoges china. Even today, a green Chinese cabinet of Walker's rests in Bundles' apartment, otherwise adorned in African-influenced art and peppered with Bundles' collection of kaleidoscopes.

Even Walker's famous words are with her proud descendent, inspiring the title of the book. Bundles reenacts Walker's encounter with Booker T. Washington at his 1912 National Negro Business League convention, when Washington refused Walker a chance to address the spectators.

" 'Surely you are not going to shut the door in my face,' " Bundles repeats with a clenched fist and a slight smile. " 'I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.' "

Surely the voice of Madam Walker comes through clearly in Bundles. The women in her family are an unusually strong source of influence and pride. Even the traditionally masculine passing down of names exists. A'Lelia Perry Bundles' mom was A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles, whose mother was Mae Walker Perry. Her mother, A'Lelia Walker, was Madam C.J. Walker's daughter. While the name association makes the female bond concrete, Bundles' respect for her fellow woman is not limited to blood ties. She insists there's a little "I get by with the help of my friends" in most women's relationships. "Women help women. Women make life better for women. Men are wonderful," she laughs, "but women are there." At her fifth college reunion at Harvard and Radcliffe College, she realized the connection firsthand.

"I was living in Houston, and I was feeling really removed and isolated from what was familiar to me. My mother had died a few years earlier, and for several years after her death I didn't really understand that I was grieving. I didn't know what you go through. And I think when I went back É there was a multigenerational network of women, and I think I was really attracted to that," she says. "As a woman who is 48 and never been married, I would not have survived without close female friendships. There's a lot of power in women's friendships and women's alliances, and definitely I understand that even more as a result of writing the biography on Madam Walker."

Bundles' mother, A'Lelia Mae Perry Bundles, taught her daughter by example about growing older. "You have to live a lot of life in order to really understand what it takes to get here. At 28 I knew a lot, and at 30 I knew a lot, but at 48 I really know a lot," says Bundles, noting the advances women have made through the years since her mother's generation.

"Some people don't like to age, they want to stay young," she says. "My mother died at 46, she died really young, but she always seemed to enjoy every gray hair. When she turned 40 there was a liberation about that, and so I just have enjoyed each year and thinking that there's something better," Bundles says with an honesty that permits a tear. "She was just such a wonderful role model about taking every stage of your life and enjoying every stage of your life and exploring new things."

Although Madam C.J. Walker's extraordinary memoir deserves a far-reaching audience, Bundles says her parents were the major force when she was growing up, not any idealistic heroine or overbearing reminder of how lucky she had it. (For example, Walker was abused by her sister's husband, married at 14, a mother by 17, a widow by 20, and still managed to triumph.) "Many young women today don't have to think about how it was 25 years or 50 years ago, and that's a good thing. But with each generation there's a higher level to go to. And I still think there's a lot to be done."

Before 1982, when she started her research with Haley, Bundles was most acquainted with the same paragraphs and blurbs used again and again in the annual Ebony reference and black history books, what she refers to as the "litany" of what Walker did. Her great-great-grandmother's struggles rarely touched her during her childhood in Indianapolis. "It was a really unusual neighborhood and really idyllic childhood," Bundles says.

"It was the kind of childhood where you could leave your bicycle out, and ride to the store and buy bubble gum and comic books."

The Bundles lived in what was an affluent black suburb near Grandview Road and Kessler Boulevard, made up of businesspeople (many of them associated with the Walker company), Crispus Attucks High School teachers, doctors and dentists. Her mother and father worked in the hair-care industry, were college educated and were involved seriously in community activities and politics.

Around the corner from the Bundles lived Indiana's first black state senator and Attucks' Ray Crowe, the 1950s visionary basketball coach of Oscar Robertson and national record breaking all-black teams. Crowe's wife Betty was her babysitter. A nearby resident and business owner often hitched his horse, Annie, up to a wagon and treated Bundles, her two brothers and the other neighborhood kids to buggy rides.

Bundles got her first taste of being published at age 8,with an essay on going to the moon. The piece appeared in a publication of Jack and Jill of America, a national organization that has focused on improving the social and cultural environment of African-American children for more than 60 years.

After Grandview Elementary she went on to Westlane Junior High School, where a sixth-grade creative writing class nourished her writing endeavors, with an essay inspired by a postcard from one of her father's business trips to Jamaica, and another on Hoosier Hysteria.

"Writing was so exciting to me, that I could create some scene, create an emotion. It just really turned me on," she recalls. At North Central High School, Bundles was co-editor of the paper and became "much more political," no doubt in part influenced by an American history teacher telling her class — in which she was the only African American — that before the Civil War slaves were happy. "I knew I wanted to leave Indiana. Being in high school in 1968, '69, with Martin Luther King's assassination and the Vietnam War, I was just more liberal than the environment around me, and I wanted to explore the rest of the world."

With her "progressive and radical" politics intact, Bundles looked to New York City, but her father, Henry Bundles, felt Boston would be a little less "wild." She enrolled at Harvard and Radcliffe College to study communications and worked at the school's WHRP radio, where she found her niche hosting a jazz show. Honing her reporting skills, she interned at Newsweek over a summer and hung around the set of the Boston PBS station's Say Brother, but still couldn't choose between print and broadcast. When she finished school, she joined a fourth generation of college graduates in her family, which her grandfather, especially, esteemed.
After applying to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Bundles worked as a newscaster at Indianapolis' WTLC during the summer of 1974 and then spent a year at the Du Pont Co. in Wilmington, Del., as a staff assistant in the public affairs department. She received her Columbia acceptance letter and a fellowship from NBC, and she was back in class to earn a master's degree in 1975. Upon graduation, she had to choose between two offers: an internship at the Washington Post or a year-long training managerial program at NBC.

Bundles wanted to go to Washington, where she had a steady boyfriend, but chose NBC instead. "He wasn't encouraging enough. He wasn't saying the right things," she jokes. "So that's how I made the choice between broadcast and print."

Although her decision was definitive, she made a promise to herself that by her 30th birthday she would have another story published, to prove she still had it. She didn't fall back on her pledge, contributing to a Radcliffe publication before her self-imposed deadline. The recent heavily end-noted 400-page biography, a growing public speaking career and an aspiration to follow up with the A'Lelia Walker story — whom Langston Hughes called the "joy-goddess of Harlem's 1920s" — certainly reaffirm her ability and tenacity. "That's my next 20 years, my next act," Bundles smiles.

As the great-great-granddaughter of a self-made victor in capitalism and social activism, Bundles follows in Walker's footsteps with a reverence for strong women and a similar determination. When she was falling behind on her deadlines she looked to her subject. "You really can't complain," Bundles told herself. "If this woman was able to do all that she did, certainly you can write a book." But dedicating herself to On Her Own Ground was not all for the sake of Madam Walker.

"Maybe because I don't have children or maybe it's a contributing factor," she reflects. "This is my legacy, this is what I'm leaving behind, hopefully to inspire other people, hopefully to motivate other people. It's the only thing, for me, that's going to be around years from now." Bundles is sharing a history of her own.