Josephine Baker Read online

  They tried, but they could not find common ground; Josephine longed to be loved, Carrie longed to understand her, but it just never worked. Josephine prayed for answers. “Oh, God, why didn’t you make us all one color? It would have been so much simpler.”

  Her road trips with the Joneses had contributed to her dissatisfactions. It was hard to come back to the discipline, the poverty, of home. She had no pity for her mother, no respect for the stepfather who endured visits from Carrie’s former lovers. Occasionally, Eddie Carson popped through the front door to check on Josephine, who didn’t give a damn about him. Or Alexander Perkins came by to say hello to his biological son, Richard. “He was a nice man,” Richard said.

  Poor Weatherbird was now jobless, and Carrie was going off, sometimes for weeks, with other men. “Once in a while,” Richard told me, “my father would get jealous and Mama would get a black eye.”

  Still, away from his wife, Arthur Martin was an easygoing person. On weekends, he would hitch up his old horse and cart and carry the children across the Eads Bridge. They would camp along the river and fish, and Arthur would make a fire and fry the catch—sometimes catfish, sometimes buffalo fish—in hot oil. “Tumpy would get so excited,” Richard remembered.

  Josephine still worked as a kitchen helper, a baby-sitter, one of the girls who delivered laundry for Aunt Jo Cooper. She loved handling the silky bedsheets of rich white people, the lingerie trimmed with handmade lace, even though Aunt Jo was strict, and would make her wash her grimy paws before she touched a single handkerchief.

  But relations between Carrie and her eldest had become so difficult that Josephine was once more living with Elvira and Aunt Caroline. “I think,” Richard said, “it’s because Josephine was a little lighter than the rest of us children—that’s me and Margaret and Wilhelmina [Willie Mae]—I think that’s why my mother just gave Josephine to my grandmother.”

  By now, both Elvira and Caroline were widows, and in addition to Josephine, they had taken in a boarder, a man who was seventy-two years old.

  On the morning of March 22, 1918, Josephine was wakened by her grandmother, tears streaming down the old woman’s face. Aunt Caroline, who had chronic endocarditis, was dying. “Run home and fetch your mother,” Elvira said. Josephine ran home, but Carrie wasn’t there. Arthur said she was at Aunt Emma’s, Emma had gone into labor. “Once more, I set off through the darkness. ‘Come quick, Mama. . . .’ ” Carrie refused. “I’ll be along as soon as I can, Tumpy, I can’t leave the baby, my place is here right now.”

  It was another lesson. Life took precedence over death. Back at Elvira’s, Josephine found that Aunt Caroline had stopped breathing. Elvira said there was nothing to be scared of. “There’s more to fear from the living than from the dead, child.”

  Now living with Elvira and the boarder, Josephine began to suspect that the man was stealing money. Elvira had inherited Caroline’s little pension, and some life insurance, but it was disappearing fast. “Grandmother would have had enough for the rest of her life, but she couldn’t count,” Josephine said. “This man . . . became her secretary. He spent her money with other women.” Josephine went to Carrie and reported that the boarder was a thief. Carrie “fired the man,” and took her mother into the Martin household.

  Naturally, Josephine came home too. According to her, Elvira still had some funds, “and with that small amount, the whole family was happy . . . as long as it lasted. Then life got hard again.”

  Especially for someone who was forced back to school by a mother weary of arguing with the truant officer. Carrie laid down the law: The choice was school or a correctional institution. But even in school, there were good days. Josephine didn’t mind going to Sally Henderson’s class, because Miss Henderson praised Josephine’s imagination, her creativity. Miss Henderson also kept a turtle in a box.

  Once a week, short, plump, sweet-natured Sally Henderson would read aloud to the class the latest news of black Americans fighting in France. The Argus printed the letters they wrote home. “The people here are good to us. They don’t know anything about color prejudice.” “Many places, the people met us with flowers.” “No wooden houses here, all are made of stone, with beautiful lace curtains at the windows.”

  Josephine had heard of Joan of Arc, she knew there was a country where a girl dressed as a boy had saved her king, and even if she died in the fire, they made a movie about her, which almost made the sacrifice worthwhile, and now it turned out the people in this amazing land loved the colored people of America. (The Booker had advertised “Joan of Arc, a Wonderful Picture of the Historical French Revolution,” so how do you expect Josephine Baker to know about history?)

  Until she died, Sally Henderson talked about Josephine’s ability to shake off the yoke of reality. “After the Thanksgiving holidays,” Miss Henderson said, “the kids stood up and described what they had for Thanksgiving dinner. And Josephine Martin told about the fabulous meal at the Martin house, she described a feast fit for a king, and the other kids were young enough that some of them believed it. She never backed down. She said that’s what they had.”

  At the age of thirteen, Josephine was tall and thin with a long face, light brown eyes that seemed to burn, and kinky hair that she hated to have to comb. It must have been just about that time that she encountered Mr. Dad. Her version of their relationship was filled with melodrama:

  “There was a fifty-year-old man who liked to have little girls live with him. He was called Mr. Dad. . . . Mummy let me clean his house. . . . He clothed me, gave me money. Then one day he asked me to spend the night with him.

  “I left. He was very upset and drank cider. He came to the house, spoke with Mama. Then she was upset and insisted I stay with Mr. Dad. I refused. She took off my clothes and beat me until the skin came off. . . . I ran in the street, naked. . . . Soon I came to the courtyard of a house and I went into the coal cellar. I hid.

  “It was night. I prayed to God: ‘Father, help me . . . let me die, I beg you! . . . I am so unhappy on earth.’ ”

  Waking, Josephine says, she covered her nakedness with a “mouldy” coat she found in the coal cellar and took off for the Booker Washington. “When I arrived at the theatre . . . Mr. Bob Russell, the director of the company working there that week, came close to me, a very black man with white hair and very tall. He looked at me kindly and said, ‘What do you want, my child?’

  “I . . . begged him for work. . . . I said I had never danced but if I was allowed to, I would do my best. . . .

  “Mr. Russell had me stand on the stage to observe. Seeing them prancing and jumping, I was impatient to do the same as the ‘girls.’ . . . I wished I could have leapt . . . to the beat of this music . . . for me, it was . . . a physical intoxication. . . . Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body? . . . It was like if I had drunk gin. . . . Everybody was surprised to see how quickly I learned. . . .

  “That same night, we left St. Louis. I was happy to travel and to work. I adored that life. I wished to work more. I was never tired.”

  Chapter 6

  JOSEPHINE MARRIES AT THIRTEEN

  “She cut his head open with a beer bottle”

  What went through your head, Mother, leaving St. Louis on one of the night trains you had listened to, lying in the crowded bed of your childhood? The way you recounted (in books, in interviews) the events leading up to your flight was not precisely accurate. For one thing, you erased two years of your life, and a husband; you forgot to mention Willie Wells. As for your brush with Mr. Dad, your brother told me the way it really happened.

  “The man we called Mr. Dad worked in the steel foundry,” Richard said. “And on the side he had an ice cream parlor. He made ice cream and candy and Josephine would sell it, and she went to live with him in his house, and people were talking about that.”

  Like Mr. Mason, Mr. Dad loved young girls. He bought them clothes, he fed them well, and Josephine was practica
l. In her dreams, she was a princess, but when she wasn’t dreaming, she had few illusions. Already, she had learned there was a price for everything, and it was better to shut up about what you paid.

  Because in the Martins’ neighborhood—by now they were living on Bernard Street—everybody knew everybody else’s business. And when Josephine, following in Carrie’s footsteps, established her own independence, the neighbors were on Carrie’s side. Her thirteen-year-old daughter playing house with Mr. Dad? It was a scandal, and everyone on Bernard Street concurred.

  Carrie dragged Josephine home, and announced, one more time, “I’m going to send you to reform school.” Even Elvira couldn’t calm her. “Don’t say a word, Mama! You just lost all your money to that old man, maybe we should put you in a home!”

  Aunt Jo Cooper, who had always been a kind of fairy godmother to Josephine, saved the day. “The child is not a child anymore,” she said to Carrie. “She wants to go with men? Let’s find her a nice fellow, marry her off.”

  Thus did Willie Wells come into Josephine’s life.

  “He was a steelworker,” Richard said. “He was too old for her. He was about twenty-five or thirty, she was thirteen, when she married.”

  In 1919, Josephine attended the L’Ouverture school for a grand total of thirty days. On December 22, she got married, and that was the end of her formal education.

  On the day after Christmas, the wedding was noted in the Argus: “Willie Wells, 2617 Pine; Josephine Martin, 2632 Bernard.” It was the first time Josephine would see her name in a newspaper, and it was on the same page with an editorial asking readers, “Have you been True, first to yourself, then to your friends and to your race?”

  Carrie needed to consent in writing to Josephine’s marriage because the bride was underage. (Even so, it wasn’t legal, but neither Carrie nor the minister knew this. In 1919, the marriage laws of the state of Missouri stated that even with parental consent, “no marriage license shall be issued for any person under the age of 15 years unless authorized by an order of circuit or probate court for good cause and unusual conditions.”) Aunt Jo Cooper gave the wedding party, serving roast pork and macaroni. “It was a very nice thing, very happy,” Richard said.

  The newlyweds spent the evening at the Booker, where Nettie Berry buck-danced, and some trained dogs waltzed. A female impersonator named Sammie Lewis opened the show.

  At first, Josephine and Willie lived on their own in a furnished room on Laton Avenue. They paid $1.50 a week, gas and electricity included, and had kitchen privileges. After a while, Willie couldn’t make the rent. He was still working, but Josephine spent every penny he brought home on dresses. Then, to assuage his anger, she produced some knitting, and announced that she was pregnant. The couple moved back to the Martin house, and Carrie melted. A new baby would be a joy to the family.

  “They lived with us about two weeks,” Richard said, “and after that, they were fightin’ and she cut his head open with a beer bottle.”

  Why had they quarreled? Apparently, Willie had come home one night to discover Josephine was having her period, and had lied about a baby. For sympathy? For attention? Because she so much wanted a baby? All I know is she told every man she ever got involved with, “I love you, I want your baby,” and there never was a baby. Her sister Margaret has told me, categorically, that Josephine was never pregnant.

  Willie Wells took his bleeding head to a doctor, and never came back to Bernard Street. The marriage was over.

  Now Josephine got a job in a restaurant called the Old Chauffeur’s Club. “She worked serving tables and washing dishes,” Richard said. “The place was on Fourteenth and Chestnut. She made three dollars a week.” There was gossip that after hours, she made money a different way. “There was a woman told me Aunt Tumpy would be considered a fast girl,” says her nephew, Richard, Jr. “That meant a girl who would take one or two dollars to go with a man. You can only believe half the bull people tell you, but Aunt Tumpy was like her mother, and my grandmaw, Carrie, was a humdinger.”

  Numbers of people deny these stories. In 1983, Blanche Felix wrote to assure me that her old Dumas schoolmate “never was a street woman, she was a respectful girl. . . .”

  Blanche Felix recalled that she too had auditioned at the Booker for Bob Russell, who was hiring for a second road company, but that she didn’t have Josephine’s spark. “Josephine got onstage, and she made good, I guess she must have been cut out for it.”

  And she was ready. Over-ready.

  If her attendance at school had been ridiculous, her attendance at the Booker had been fanatically faithful, and what she learned there, she could not have learned anyplace else. She had heard Bessie Smith sing blues before Bessie Smith had top billing. (There were four Smiths performing on the circuit then—Bessie, Mamie, Clara, and Trixie, none of them related.) Josephine had watched her favorites come and go, checked out their new tricks, recognized when one was having an off night.

  She had spent eight years mimicking every line, every gesture she had observed onstage. She had studied the quick changes of the transvestites. She had fallen in love with their feather boas. And she had a nose for what worked. She watched Clara Smith pick out the ugliest man in the audience and sing a love song to him; later, she would work the same trick into her own act.

  But there would be more to her relationship with Clara Smith than that. “It was Clara who asked Bob Russell to hire Josephine,” Booth Marshall told me. Booth often toured with Russell (“I performed in drag, as an old mama, big bottom, big breasts, kerchief on my head, wearing big, big shoes and blackface, I was a killer with that number”), and he said Clara had spotted Josephine waiting tables at the Chauffeur’s Club.

  “Bob told me how he got stuck with Josephine in St. Louis. She had become Clara’s protégée, you know, her lady lover as we called it in those days. Bob did not like that kind of hanky-panky, but Clara was a big draw, and anyhow, better a steady date than a fight in every city. Josephine had no real experience, you know, but Bob saw she had potential, and Clara did the rest.”

  Clara, who disliked publicity and all the fuss that went with it—this was not a dislike Josephine would ever share—was only twenty-six years old in 1920, with a voice Carl Van Vechten described as so powerful and melancholy “it tears the blood from one’s heart.” Josephine could not have found a better singing coach.

  Besides Clara, billed as the South’s “favorite coon shouter,” the troupe, forty-five strong, featured Henry “Gang” Jones (a comedian), some bathing beauties, and a female baritone named Anna Belle Cook. No Russell company had played St. Louis in two years, but now the entertainers would be there for two months. The first show would open on Monday night, the twenty-ninth of November. Mr. Russell wanted it clearly understood “that he permits no smutty or suggestive words or action in any of his plays.”

  That her new boss wasn’t thrilled with the relationship between his star and a chorus girl had not been lost on Josephine. “I thought I understood what was bothering Mr. Russell,” she tells us, ingenuously. “He felt that his leading lady was monopolizing my time. He wasn’t paying me to spend hours in Mama Smith’s dressing room improving my penmanship.”

  Or massaging Mama Smith’s feet, either.

  St. Louis went wild over Clara, but Josephine didn’t get to go onstage until the week of January 17, in Twenty Minutes in Hell, a melodrama “with a good moral.” It told the story of a man who dreamed he had sold his soul to the devil. A scene in hell was replete with fairy costumes and electrical effects, Clara Smith sang “Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone,” and Josephine flew.

  Literally. “I remember the first role they gave me. I was to be an angel. I wore pink tights and had big wings to flap. They expected me to swing around on a wire. But my wings kept getting tangled in the sets and my feet were dangling in every direction. After a while, I got so badly tangled up they fired me.”

  Nobody fired her, and another time, in another mood, she told what re
ally happened. “I returned to the wings, to find Mr. Russell weeping with laughter. ‘You’re a real clown, Birdy. A born comic.’ ”

  The Booker’s stage manager remembered that Willie Mae showed up backstage every day after school. “That one-eyed girl had a whole lotta mouth, she wanted everybody to know she was Josephine’s sister.”

  For the Russell company’s final show, Toby’s Breeches, Josephine danced in the chorus, which got several encores, and the Argus raved, “Nine weeks without a taint of smut or suggestiveness . . . The fastidious Mr. Russell has raised the standard of the stage here.”

  Even so, Mr. Russell’s fastidiousness did not entice Carrie Martin to come out and see her daughter perform. In those days, show business gave a girl a worse reputation than going with men for money, or drinking homemade gin.

  Sunday, January 30, the last show. A frenzy. Everyone packing, Josephine feeling—what? Sadness? Regret? Fear? She was detaching herself from Tumpy, like a butterfly breaking painfully from the cocoon, slowly unfolding its wings.

  Now they are hurrying to Union Station to catch the last train to Memphis. It is just past midnight. The weather is fair and cold, thirty degrees, and Josephine runs along the platform, following Clara and a bunch of the bathing beauties.

  As the train starts to move, Josephine recognizes the same excitement she had felt on top of the coal wagon. “I had never seen curtains as pretty as those in the Pullman-car windows. From my seat at Mrs. Russell’s side, her cigar smoke pricking my nose, I peered nervously out the window, looking for Mama’s angry face, Grandma’s reproachful eyes or the stern gaze of Daddy or Aunt Jo. No, Daddy Arthur would already be in bed, so full of beer that nothing could wake him. I was safely on my way. Closing my eyes, I dreamed of sunlit cities, magnificent theatres, and me in the limelight.”