Josephine Baker Read online

  A kind neighbor, wanting to give Carrie a peaceful Sunday at home, had offered to take the hyperactive Josephine to the vigil. They found Uncle Joe ensconced in his coffin, supported by four chairs, in the living room. Mrs. Joe was serving booze, coffee, and cake to the mourners, and all the children were sent out to play. In the yard, a snake wriggled by, and Josephine, picking it up, rushed into the house. She had a present for Uncle Joe.

  Seeing the snake, women screamed, and one in her fright kicked a chair out from under the coffin, which fell. Uncle Joe rolled onto the floor, whereupon Josephine dropped the snake, and a man stomped on it. Josephine ran to the man and beat at him. “You killed my friend!” she howled.

  Eventually, Uncle Joe was put back in place, but the damage had been done. When the tired neighbor lady restored Josephine to her mother, she said, “Carrie, I feel sorry for you! She’s such a monster, you can’t take her nowhere.”

  Soon, Carrie banished the monster again. “I know someone who’s looking for a child to work for them, and they’ll provide room and board,” she told Arthur. “I’m going to send Tump, she’s a burden on us and she’s the oldest. What do you think?”

  Arthur never argued with Carrie. “Do what you want, she’s your daughter,” he said.

  For Josephine, it was a double betrayal—her mother, as always, ready to forsake her, her stepfather too weak to say no. She was seven years old, and her childhood was over.

  Chapter 4

  CHILDHOOD IN ST. LOUIS

  “There are no bastards in my family!”

  Mrs. Kaiser had no heart. She lived out in the country, and viewed her small scullery maid as a beast of burden. “She gave me cold potatoes and sent me to bed,” Josephine said. “At 5 A.M., she got me up to work. At nine, I went to school because she was required by law to send me, but it made her furious. . . . After I returned . . . I had a dish of cold corn bread and molasses. Then the work began again.

  “I was forced to carry coal for the night to each room, chop wood, clean and trim the lamps, wash the meal dishes and clean the kitchen. . . . I slept in the basement. . . . In the corner was a large box where the dog slept: he had to move over to make room for me.”

  Josephine shared her food with the dog; the dog shared his fleas with Josephine. But Mrs. Kaiser didn’t like to see the child scratching herself in the house, “and she beat me terribly, completely naked, because she said that clothes cost too much and beatings wore them out.”

  Comfort came from the dog and Tiny Tim, a chicken Josephine fed until he got fat. Then Mrs. Kaiser ordered her to kill him. It’s normal for a farm animal to be killed for food, but Josephine was traumatized by the terrified warm body between her knees, the squawking, the feathers drowned in blood when she cut Tiny Tim’s throat. Still, in the face of Mrs. Kaiser’s awful authority, what could she have done for the wretched chicken?

  More and more she felt helpless against the adult world, Mrs. Kaiser’s world, her mother’s world, Aunt Caroline’s world. Every slight became huge in her memory, every offense against her was magnified. She once told a fellow chorus girl her aunt had chained her to a bed. (Her brother remembered that she wasn’t even good to herself, banging her head against the floor in violent tantrums.)

  At Mrs. Kaiser’s, worse was to come. According to Josephine, one day she left the dishwater boiling too long on the stove, and Mrs. Kaiser plunged her—Josephine’s—hands into the pot. “I scream, I scream, Mother, Mother, help me. I escape to the next house screaming like a lunatic. I fall in front of the door. All my skin and my fingernails are boiled, ready to fall off. The blood is cooked. When I wake up, I’m in the hospital.”

  Richard didn’t recall any of this; I think Josephine had been so agitated by hearing Elvira’s accounts of slavery, of vinegar and salt poured on raw wounds, that these stories got mixed up with Mrs. Kaiser’s cruelty in the susceptible child’s head. In any case, Carrie was forced to take her daughter home again.

  That winter, Josephine and Richard went to classes at Dumas. “The black schools,” Richard said, “were down by the tracks. If you were out in the yard playin’ at recess, and the train came by, all the smoke and cinders, you’d get that in your eyes. Our schools were only for blacks, and we would have to pass by the Catholic school, and the little white kids would be sitting on the fence, and they’d yell at us, ‘Hey, Blue Gums,’ and ‘Where you goin’, Shine?’

  “I was small for my age, and the older boys tried to beat me up, and Tumpy would jump in and holler, ‘Leave my brother alone!’ One day a kid hollered back at her, ‘He ain’t your brother, he’s a bastard!’

  “When Mama came home from work, Tumpy grabbed her. ‘Mama, Mama, the other kids say Richard is a bastard.’ Mama looked so tired, but when Tumpy said that, Mama’s eyes just got wild. She screamed, ‘There are no bastards in my family, you all come from the same hole!’ ”

  In Panama a great canal had been dug, joining the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea; across the Atlantic, World War I was raging, but President Wilson had proclaimed U.S. neutrality, and the paroxysms of Europe did not seem as real to the poor people of Gratiot Street as figuring out where their next meal was coming from.

  Christmas was around the corner; Josephine wanted to make it festive for the younger children. “She’d bring home dolls without heads and arms that she found in garbage pails,” Richard said, “and she’d make presents for us.” Still, Josephine recalled, Christmas of 1914 was a disaster. “Mama had too much to drink, and each time she drank, she wanted to beat me and hurt me. . . . At one point she said she hated me and wished I were dead.”

  One week after Christmas, Jo Cooper found another job for Josephine. Through her laundry business, she knew what jobs were available in white people’s houses. This time, Josephine would be sent to a couple named Mason.

  The childless Mrs. Mason was kind. “She gives me a good warm bed and I eat well. . . . She lets me play with other children in the basement of her house, she sends me to school because she finds me gifted and intelligent . . . she gives me pretty dresses and shoes.”

  Dressed in Mrs. Mason’s old clothes, including a hat “with an immense feather,” Josephine resumed performing, singing and dancing for her schoolmates. “I was the star.”

  She ate with the Masons; she was made much of. Then Mr. Mason started giving her wet kisses, which she found repulsive, and one night, he appeared in her room. Thinking he might be a ghost, next morning she told Mrs. Mason.

  Mrs. Mason said only, “Promise you’ll call me if it happens again.”

  The next night, Mr. Mason reappeared. “He slid into my bed, and I screamed, ‘Oh, it’s the ghost, Mrs. Mason, please come quick!’ ” That was the end of that job.

  When Mrs. Mason brought Josephine home, Carrie was furious. “Tumpy, how could you ruin such a wonderful chance?” And Arthur laughed at the story about the ghost. “What a fool you are, child.”

  In the next five years, as times got worse, the Martins used their horse and cart to move their belongings no less than ten times. When Arthur and Carrie could no longer afford Gratiot Street (a three-room apartment with stable cost $6.50 a month), they took an apartment on South Fourteenth. After that came 2327 Walnut, 1537 Papin, and a couple of different addresses on Bernard Street. At Papin Street, they were closer than ever to the railroad yard, not even a fence separated the house from the tracks, and Josephine, lying in bed, listened to the train whistles and dreamed of escape from the bedbugs, from being poor and black. She would have settled for a coach seat to anyplace on any train chugging its way out of St. Louis.

  It was the Booker Washington Theatre at Twenty-third and Market streets that fed her soul. Offering employment to black artists, it billed itself as the “Home of Mirth, Music and Merriment.” Every Sunday, Josephine went there with Richard and Margaret. For ten cents apiece, they saw movies, musical comedies “direct from 9 weeks run in Chicago,” and vaudeville acts, “15 all star performers 15.”

  Queen Dora, �
��the celebrated fire dancer” played the Booker. So did the Russell-Owens Company (headed by Bob Russell and Billy Owens), presenting The Dope Fiend’s Dream. Josephine’s favorite performers were the female impersonators. All her life she would love them. She also loved the animal acts like “Williams’ Dogs and Monkeys,” which featured a police dog in uniform and a patrol wagon pulled by a dog, with a monkey sitting in the driver’s seat.

  Once she discovered the theater, it became ever harder for her to stay in school. Albert Scott, the truant officer, would come to Gratiot Street, and the neighbors would laugh. “Try the Booker.” After a while, he went directly to the theater, but Tumpy, the Phantom of the Booker, running like a mouse between the rows of seats, knew every nook and cranny that could hide a small body. And everyone—ushers, box office people, even performers—knew her and sheltered her.

  The theater was on a cobblestoned street with trolley-car tracks running past it. Sometimes, Josephine performed for people out front, and they would throw coins at her feet while trolley passengers, riding by, applauded.

  Once, her little sister Willie Mae got a splinter in her eye. “And our father,” Richard said, “he tried to get it out by rubbing her eye with his big hands, and she lost it.”

  “That eye came out of her head and hung down,” Helen Morris says. “And Mama said, ‘Carrie, why don’t you have that eye taken out?’ And she kept after her and finally Aunt Carrie did have the eye taken out, and Baby Sis just had a socket there, and she went that way for many a year, until Tumpy sent a beautiful eye from France.”

  By 1916, Josephine’s hooky-playing was out of bounds. School records show that she went to class for a grand total of sixty-seven days that year. She spent most of her time with a family named Jones that lived across the street. The Joneses were traveling musicians, and how could algebra or spelling compete with the sounds pouring from their house, horns wailing like human voices, sometimes a human voice wailing like a horn.

  “It was a curious family,” Josephine said. “Mrs. Jones was not married to Mr. Jones . . . he held her under hypnotism and she said she could do nothing against him. . . . He would cut locks of her hair, twist them around two nails that he would place in her side of the mattress. . . .”

  The possessive Mr. Jones played saxophone, Dyer Jones played trumpet; their daughter Doll, the same age as Josephine, and their son Bill were in the band too. In years to come, Dyer’s great talent would be recognized—“She was playin’ before Louis Armstrong knew what a trumpet was,” said the pianist Ikey Robinson—but back then, the Jones family was going around performing in coffee shops.

  Dyer Jones coached Josephine on trombone (“The trombone was bigger than I was”), and then put her to work. “They asked my mother for me, promising clothes and food. My mother gave me away. While I learned the music, I carried the big heavy instruments because we walked many miles from one restaurant to the other. I used to carry the bass drum and arrive dead.”

  For Josephine, still grievance collecting, Carrie was again the villain, selling her child into servitude. But I think Josephine loved her life with the Joneses. She was in show business, no matter that it was more show than business, and except for the discipline of the music, she was free. It was what she had spent her whole short life waiting for. The Joneses traveled the Strawberry Road, a circuit so named because ripe strawberries don’t grow in neat rows, you pick one here, another there, and during that summer, the Strawberry Road took the group from village to village, wherever they were offered cake and lodgings.

  Sometimes the band would perform in a green-and-white-striped circus tent. Dyer Jones, Josephine at her side, would stand in a spotlight, doing a solo on her trumpet, a tiny woman who could blow like the archangel Gabriel. The tent would be pitched just outside of town, in a field, and audiences arrived by horse and buggy. There was a colored entrance and a white entrance; there were monkeys and a medicine man.

  It was during these travels that Josephine first met Ethel Waters, then touring as one of a trio called the Hill Sisters. In her memoirs, Waters mentioned Josephine. “She was with one of those Negro kid gypsy bands they have down there.” Waters described Josephine as “a mugger with a great comic sense. . . . She could dance and she could clown joy into you. She could also play the trombone.”

  That Dyer Jones was important to Josephine Baker becomes clear when you read Une Vie de Toutes les Couleurs (My Life of Many Colors), another of her early autobiographies, this one in collaboration with André Rivollet. In 1935, at the height of her popularity in France, she ended this book by talking about “the woman with the trumpet, the one who belonged to the company of strolling musicians in which I found myself when I sang on the pavement of the coffee shops.”

  Dyer Jones had written to say that Josephine’s success made her happy, Josephine reported. With the letter, Dyer had enclosed one of the nails around which Mr. Jones had twisted strands of her hair those many years ago.

  “Is this nail on which one had to bang, bang in order to shape it, not a little bit the symbol of my life?” asks Josephine in her book. “When I think about the troubled days, I feel like crying: it is so far.”

  Chapter 5

  RACE RIOTS, AMD TUMPY LEAVES TOWN

  “Oh God, why didn’t you make us all one color?”

  In 1917, race relations in St. Louis were worsening. A faltering economy set white men to worrying that blacks were being imported from the South to take their jobs, even though most whites were not eager to work for $2.35 a day at the sewer-pipe factory.

  But to eleven-year-olds like Josephine, this was not a matter of great importance. The heat came early that summer, and on sultry nights, excursion boats offering the hope of cool air plied their way up and down the Mississippi. Sometimes the young Martins would go to the pier at the foot of Olive Street and watch the steamers set out in the moonlight. Departure time: 9 P.M. Admission: thirty-five cents. They could hear the music, and see people dancing on the lower deck. The St. Louis Argus touted a “Family Boat Excursion” to take place on Monday, July 2; it would feature entertainment by the Ragtime Steppers, and it promised to leave on schedule, “rain or shine.”

  As it turned out, rain or shine didn’t signify. July 2, 1917, would be memorialized in blood.

  RACE RIOTERS FIRE EAST ST. LOUIS AND SHOOT OR HANG MANY NEGROES. DEAD ESTIMATED AT FROM 20 TO 76 ran the headline in The New York Times. The details were ugly.

  “A mob of more than 100 men, led by ten or fifteen young girls about 18 years old, chased a negro woman at the Relay depot about 5 P.M. The girls were brandishing clubs and calling upon the men to kill the woman. A lone negro man appeared in the railroad yards. The mob immediately gave up the charge of the woman and turned upon the man. He was shot to death. . . .”

  Whites had attacked streetcars, taken blacks off them and beaten them, militiamen were helpless against the crowds, white men who tried to give blacks medical attention were prevented at gunpoint from doing so, policemen in patrol wagons were bombarded with bricks. Martial law was finally declared, and the killing stopped, but The African American, a Baltimore newspaper, compared the riots to “the ruthless, devastating German drive through Belgium.”

  Hundreds of blacks abandoned their burnt-out homes; they fled by way of the Eads Bridge and the Free Bridge to St. Louis proper, and many of them found refuge in the neighborhood where the Martins lived. “We kept a couple of families who came over cross the river, came over in St. Louis,” Richard said. “We had two, three families; we got them on the street.”

  Josephine, of course, always claimed to have been smack in the heart of East St. Louis when it blew up, and insisted she remembered being shaken from sleep by her mother, who told the children, “It’s the whites. Hurry!”

  The reality was that she had learned about the riots by listening to people who had escaped them; it was from the safe side of the bridge that she and Richard watched the flames. “We could see the houses burning and the sky red with fire, smo
ke,” he told me. “I was not afraid, because it was on the other side.” Even so, years later, she would still be describing herself as an eyewitness. “I never forget my people screaming. . . . I see them running to get to the bridge. I have been running ever since.” But the stories she told of escaping the mobs, her mother crossing the bridge like Marianne, symbol of France, pulling her children with her, were somebody else’s stories.

  It was a bloody time—thirty-eight lynchings were recorded in 1917—and it would get worse. (The following year would bring sixty-two lynchings; of these, fifty-eight victims were black, four were white.)

  In New York City, under the auspices of the NAACP, thousands of black men and women and children responded to the East St. Louis riots by taking part in a “Silent Protest Parade” along Fifth Avenue. Children dressed in white marched in formation, one carrying a banner inscribed “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and on the sidelines, a little girl was holding a sign: MOTHER, DO LYNCHERS GO TO HEAVEN?

  By fall, America was in the war. The black population of St. Louis, though offended by government questionnaires—each carried the words, “If person is of African descent, tear off left-hand corner”—was still willing to do its bit. In early November of 1917, twenty-five thousand people gathered at Union Station to cheer for 480 black draftees leaving for army camp. (Arthur Martin, having turned thirty-two, just escaped being drafted.) Living so close to the station, Josephine was in the midst of the excitement, watching men kiss their wives goodbye and mothers faint.

  In 1918, pestilence was added to war. A flu epidemic—it would claim 550,000 victims across the United States—encircled the world, killing more people than any sickness since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Theaters closed, and the Dumas school shut down for a short time too. This enforced vacation pleased Josephine; what did not please her were the endless confrontations with Carrie. Josephine’s brown skin continued to be a tacit reproach to her black mother, living evidence of Carrie’s dalliance with a white man; when they went out together, both felt they were being stared at, whispered about.