Josephine Baker Read online

  During the period that Josephine was mistress of the château Les Milandes, one of the men who worked for her told me she grew tobacco by the front door. She never revealed that the tobacco was a tribute to Elvira.

  Elvira grew up to marry a Virginian, an older man named Richard McDonald. They could not have children, and in 1886, in Little Rock, Arkansas, they adopted a baby, naming her for Richard’s sister, Caroline. (Caroline and her husband, Charles Crook—also a much older man—had had two children, but both died in infancy.) In time, the two couples and baby Carrie moved together from Little Rock to St. Louis.

  At the end of the nineteenth century (we know the family was there as early as 1896, because of Carrie’s school records), St. Louis was a rapidly growing city. In 1849, it had survived a cholera epidemic that killed four thousand people, and a waterfront fire that spread from burning steamboats to destroy hundreds of buildings in the narrow streets along the Mississippi. By 1874, the Eads Bridge had been built across the river, which meant the city could be reached by train from Cincinnati, rather than by ferry. The population of St. Louis was polyglot; the French settlers had been followed by Spaniards, Germans, Irish, and British. There was also, in the mid-1800s, an influx of blacks like the McDonalds and the Crooks from the rural South. By 1900, there were 575,238 people in the city, 35,516 of them black.

  Charles Crook had a government pension of fourteen dollars a month. He had been one of 186,017 black soldiers to join the Union army during the Civil War; he had fought with Company D of the Sixty-first United States Colored Infantry, and suffered a gunshot wound in his left hand. In St. Louis, he found a job as a porter in a store; his two incomes established him as head of the household. He, his wife, and the McDonalds shared a third-floor railroad flat in a row house at 1534 Gratiot Street. Richard McDonald worked as a laborer, Elvira worked as a laundress, and little Carrie was left at home in the care of Caroline Crook.

  When Carrie McDonald was seventeen years old, a conductor working for the St. Louis Transit Company—electric cars were replacing the old horse cars—was paid twenty-one cents an hour, and the city was playing host to a World’s Fair. The fair—technically the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904—brought visitors from all over the globe, but did not treat them all equally. One restaurant on the exposition grounds posted a sign, NO COLORED PEOPLE SERVED, and the company with the fresh-water concession refused to set out water for blacks “even when they offered to drop a cent in the slot, as do white folks.”

  Slavery was long gone, but many people of color felt that true freedom came only to those with light skins. A member of the black press who called himself Dr. Midnight wrote in The Indianapolis Recorder that he had visited a lady friend in St. Louis and been appalled to find her ironing her hair. “These men here don’t go with kinks,” she told him, “so if you want to shine in St. Louis, you must do away with kinks and get straight. I also have a preparation for making my face white by degrees.”

  “Some of our women look like circus riders,” Dr. Midnight railed in another newspaper. “Rosy cheeks, ashy faces and wigs seem to be the go . . . Negroes clamouring for recognition in this world, but they will not get it as long as they are getting away from themselves. It is disgusting to hear colored women say, ‘He’s too black.’ ”

  Other black editors reflected on white people’s fear of “Negro domination.” The Gazetteer and Guide printed the words of a white man named Tom Watson—he had run for vice president under the banner of the Populist party in 1896—who agreed that such fears were baseless. “What words,” asked Watson, “can paint the cowardice of the Anglo-Saxon who would deny ‘equal and exact justice’ to the ignorant, helpless, poverty-cursed Negro, in whose ears the clank of chains have scarcely ceased domination . . . .”

  By then, Carrie McDonald, who was without racial prejudice—she liked pretty boys, no matter what color they were—would have been able to follow Dr. Midnight’s musings if she had stumbled across them; she was the first person in the Crook-McDonald household to learn to read and write. Coal black, pretty, tall, slender, full of life, the only child cared for by four adults, she was a bit spoiled.

  She and Elvira adored each other. Aunt Caroline was the disciplinarian, demanding that Carrie study hard. To catch up with the white world, one had to fight.

  But Carrie was young, and the streets of St. Louis were filled with music, especially if you went down to the red-light district (Market Street, Chestnut Street) where there were gambling joints, gin mills, and the sounds of ragtime pianos pounding through the nights. During the summers, ladies of the evening would stand outside the houses where they worked and sing blues songs. To Carrie, all this was a lot more fascinating than staying home listening to Aunt Caroline’s sermons.

  Or going to school. Carrie loved to dance, and one of her boyfriends, Eddie Carson (thought by many to be Josephine’s father), was a good dancer. Years later, Josephine’s half-sister Margaret would remember, “Mama was the most popular girl at the dance hall on Sundays. No one could dance like she could, with a glass of water balanced on her head, not spilling a drop.”

  But Carrie worked, too. By the time she was nineteen, she was employed as a laundress. An improvident laundress, because she got pregnant, and Aunt Caroline turned her out. Elvira had nothing to say about it; Caroline ruled the roost, and was fierce in judgment. Hadn’t she warned Carrie a hundred times? Wasn’t Carrie too wild? Hadn’t the family given her everything, and hadn’t she returned bad for good?

  In St. Louis, I was lucky. I found Helen Morris (née Williams), whose mother had been Carrie’s friend. “Mama’s name was Emma Williams,” says Helen, “and she and Carrie worked together at the laundry owned by my aunt Josephine Cooper. When Carrie’s folks put her out, she ended up at Aunt Jo’s house, she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She stayed there until the baby was born, and that’s when Aunt Jo said, ‘Carrie, if it’s a girl, name it after me,’ and Carrie said, ‘I will.’ ”

  The records of the city of St. Louis tell an almost unbelievable story. They show that Carrie McDonald (“colored”), twenty years old, was admitted to the Female Hospital (at that time, almost exclusively white) on May 3, 1906, diagnosed as pregnant. She was discharged on June 17, her baby, Freda J. McDonald, having been born two weeks earlier. The baby’s father was identified simply as “Edw.” Why six weeks in the hospital? Especially for a black woman who would customarily have had her baby at home with the help of a midwife? Obviously, there had been problems with the pregnancy, but Carrie’s chart reveals no details.

  I think Josephine’s father was white—so did Josephine, so did her family—and I think he cared about Carrie. He’s the one who must have got her into that hospital and paid to keep her there all those weeks. Also, her baby’s birth was registered by O. H. Elbrecht, head of the hospital, at a time when most black births were not. Besides, Freda sounds German to me, and people in St. Louis say Carrie had worked for a German family. (Although it certainly didn’t matter; Josephine was never called Freda.)

  I have unraveled many mysteries associated with Josephine Baker, but the most painful mystery of her life, the mystery of her father’s identity, I could not solve.

  The secret died with Carrie, who refused till the end to talk about it. She let people think Eddie Carson was the father, and Carson played along.

  Josephine knew better, though her version was also folklore. “My father was Eddie Moreno, a good-looking boy with olive skin,” she would say. Or: “My father was a Spanish dancer.” Helen Morris says, “You could look at Tumpy and tell she was not entirely black.”

  (Tumpy was the nickname given Josephine as a baby; she always said it was because “I was fat as Humpty Dumpty.” But if she was fat, she was also lucky. At that time, according to the records of the health department in St. Louis, three out of five children died before the age of three. A Dr. Temms, writing in The St. Louis Argus, described the city’s more poverty-stricken sections as “a great breeding ground,” sayin
g, “Next to the Russian Jews in point of being prolific came the Negroes and then the Italians.”)

  When Carrie was discharged from the hospital, she brought her baby back to the apartment on Gratiot Street, and left her in the reluctant care of Aunt Caroline Crook.

  The McDonalds were heartbroken. They had been living for thirteen years at the same address, providing a stable home for their adopted child; they had hoped she would get an education so she wouldn’t have to do the kind of manual labor in which they were trapped. This was a new age, opportunities were opening for women of color; at the very least Carrie might have been an elevator operator wearing white gloves and mixing with the elite of St. Louis in a department store.

  On October 12, 1907, to the further dismay of her relatives, Carrie had a second baby, a boy named Richard Alexander, whose birth was not recorded. Neither was the place where he was born. His father was a black man named James Alexander Perkins, but he and Carrie did not marry, and Carrie did not change her errant ways.

  Baby Richard, called Brothercat, might not have had such a good start in life if it had not been for Helen Morris’s beneficent mother. “Mama claimed we were all family,” Helen says. “You know we colored people had been separated and moved around so much, and then life brought us together like a family. And Mama nursed Brothercat. See, she was nursing my brother Buddy at the same time, so after Aunt Carrie’s milk dried up—she was flittin’ and flyin’—Mama nursed Carrie’s baby. Mama always said that’s why he loved her.”

  Josephine, who was light brown, the color of café au lait, the color of honey, envied her new brother. “He had black skin . . . he was the welcome one.”

  Her mother didn’t entirely forget about Josephine, but visits were hard on both of them. After a day’s work at the laundry, Carrie would sometimes stop by, only to be greeted by a furious Aunt Caroline. “Who gave you permission to come in here, lazy demon?” When Elvira tried to defend her daughter, Caroline would scream at her too. “Be quiet! Your daughter, with a white man! . . . She has dishonored us as much as she possibly could.”

  “I was used to these accusations against my mother,” Josephine remembered, “but I did not understand yet what was humiliating or dishonorable about my birth.”

  Some eight months after Richard was born, Carrie finally became a bride. She and Arthur Martin, a burly, 220-pound, twenty-three-year-old, were married by a duly ordained minister of the gospel, W. H. Piner, and on December 23, they got an early Christmas present: Carrie was delivered of baby Marguerite, who was always called Margaret. She was as black as her parents.

  The new family settled into an apartment at 1526 Gratiot, just a few houses down from the Crook-McDonald ménage. Arthur hauled gravel with his horse and wagon, Carrie continued to do laundry, got pregnant again, had a miscarriage. It was 1910, the year she would try to turn her family into a tidy legal entity. When the census taker came to 1526 Gratiot, she assured him that she and Arthur Martin had been married for five years, and had three Martin children. On July 18, 1910, she gave birth to Willie Mae, a pretty baby and, like Richard and Margaret, black.

  At this point, Carrie reclaimed Josephine to help out with the little ones. “Mama took me back with her,” Josephine said. “Then she said since I was the oldest, I had to do the dishes.”

  If the five-year-old Josephine felt she didn’t belong anywhere, it wasn’t surprising. Now she was home again, but did Carrie love her or did she just need a servant? Always, the child was being sent mixed messages: Aunt Caroline moralizing, Elvira comforting, Carrie alternately fond and furious, with a temper so terrible that she almost beat Richard to death when she discovered he had stolen a bicycle. She was guilty about all her “flittin’ and flyin’,” and forever trying to regain the respect and control of her children. As for Arthur, he wasn’t strong enough to manage his wife, whose moods came and went like summer storms.

  Helen Morris says Arthur, nicknamed Weatherbird, had some domestic talent, which was lucky because “Aunt Carrie, she didn’t let any grass grow under her feet, she had a good time. Sometimes she would go away with a man and stay for a month, and Mama and Weatherbird would take care of the kids. He was left-handed, and he could clean like a woman, everything was spotless.”

  Although they were not his own children, both Josephine and Richard called Arthur “Papa.” And right from the beginning, the young family struggled to live. “We were very, very poor,” Richard remembered.

  All four children slept on a single bedbug-ridden mattress on the floor, in the same room with their parents. Richard laughed about it. “I used to put my big toe in Tumpy’s face, I would try to wiggle it up her nose, and she would scream till Papa or Mama got up and beat both of us.

  “At five o’clock in the morning, Josephine and I would go down to the Soulard market three blocks away and pick up vegetables that had fallen on the ground. She was a good sister. She worked, and didn’t make much money, maybe fifty cents a week, and when she got it, she would buy things for us.”

  The enterprising Josephine went out ringing doorbells at the mansions of the rich white people on Westmoreland Avenue—“Can I sweep your steps? Can I shovel the snow?”—and often, she and Richard and their gang, all boys except for her, would cross the railroad tracks to steal coal from freight cars. Josephine was the daring one, climbing to the top of a train: “I start throwing big chunks to the ground, the others fill the bags.”

  Down below, the boys, frightened that the train is already in motion, yell to her, “Tumpy, jump!”—and still she stays, hurling the coal down faster as the train picks up speed, testing herself as she would always do, straining against limits. Finally: “I throw myself. The train was just accelerating . . . I fall on the ground.”

  Sometimes, she did odd jobs in a house where there were other servants. In one place, a black housekeeper scolded her for kissing a white baby. This was hard for a young child to comprehend. “They’re so soft,” Josephine said, “they’re warm, the little white children, and so fragile.” (She was puzzled also by the sign over the door to Aunt Jo Cooper’s laundry that read WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. But white people would not have sent their laundry to be washed in the same tubs with the clothes of black people. And the black housekeeper might have lost her job if the white mother had caught Josephine kissing her baby.)

  Still, the Martins’ neighborhood wasn’t segregated, and the census reflected its makeup. Listed under race or color were three categories: B for black, W for white, MU for mulatto. “We grew up,” says Helen Morris, “in a kind of United Nations. Russian families, German families, blacks. There were poor people, not so poor people. There was Izzy the Jew, and Lukie Skeel, he was an Irishman, and Mexican Robert; I remember Mexican Robert would put me on his knee and sing ‘The Wang Wang Blues’ to me, and I was a little bitty thing.”

  Josephine loved the life of those streets. She played hooky from school, ranging through the neighborhoods of St. Louis with “some other little starvelings. Saturday was a party all over, everywhere accordions, banjos, harmonicas.”

  There were rent parties, where grown-ups paid to dance and drink, thus providing the host with cash for his landlord. Josephine remembered one night when her gang—Brothercat, Carl, Freckles, Sonny, Skinny, Fatty—stared, fascinated, through an open door at a piano player wearing yellow shoes, and a lady singing, “Do that one little thing Papa a long time.”

  Freckles, who had red hair, was Josephine’s first crush, but when she told him, “I like you,” he said, “You’re a nigger!” and ran away. She didn’t brood. The crap games in the back of the grocery store were even more interesting than love, and so was the church where Holy Rollers hollered. “At the height of their emotion, they raise their legs and kick in the air,” Josephine recalled. “Really, they are terribly funny. One of their friends rushes forward to hold their skirts in place, it’s more proper.

  “ ‘How can you laugh?’ the pastor erupts. ‘Leave here and don’t ever darken this doorway agai
n as long as you live!’ ”

  In the cellar on Gratiot Street, Josephine did some fancy kicking of her own. “Tumpy made a theater in the basement,” her sister Margaret said. “She made costumes out of Grandma’s cast-off dresses, and she’d sweep regally across the stage. ‘Every show is alike, Tumpy,’ Richard and I would complain. ‘We’re sick of it, we’re not coming tonight.’ . . . She would shove us down the steps. ‘Get in there and take a seat. If you move, I’ll slap your faces.’ ”

  “Tumpy made benches out of boards on boxes,” Richard told me, “and about three or four kids would come; sometimes one would bring a penny, or a pin, anything so she would let them come in. And she would sing and dance and look cross-eyed. That’s a true fact.”

  Other times, she performed in the open air, in the backyard of Aunt Emma’s house. “Mama would give her old pieces of clothes and rundown shoes,” Helen says. “Tumpy would go to the neighbors, ask for a potato, a carrot, or an onion, and she would cook them. Then while she performed, my three brothers and Brothercat would eat what she had cooked, and afterward, Tumpy would have a fit and cry. Mama would laugh and say, ‘Come on, Tumpy, I’ll cook you some more food.’ We didn’t have much in those days, but we shared what we had.”

  Listening to this, I got goose pimples. Here are the beginnings of Josephine, the entertainer. Didn’t Molière say, “What is theater but two boards and a passion?”

  Josephine had three passions—theater, animals, and little children. “Animals interest me,” she said, “because they are as simple and as uncomplicated as babies.”

  She, however, was not simple or uncomplicated. Often, she was difficult and uncontrollable, and at a wake for a local man known as Uncle Joe, she made a memorable scene.