Josephine Baker (9 page)

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 really 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.”

What she could see through the window was like a silent movie at the Booker. A perfect picture, black and white, night all around, and in the darkness, pools of light from the windows she was passing. For a few seconds, it was clear—1537 Papin Street, which she could almost have touched if she had stretched out her arm, Chestnut Street, the Jefferson Barracks Bridge—and then it was gone.

On Bernard Street, Margaret was nervous because she had promised not to tell Carrie that Josephine was skipping town. Josephine had given Margaret reasons. She wanted to be famous, she wanted to be rich and help the family.

Loyally, Margaret followed the party line. She told me that the night the Russell company left St. Louis, Carrie asked where Josephine was. Margaret answered that she was staying over at Dyer Jones's house. Next morning, Margaret confessed that her sister was gone. Carrie seemed to take the news calmly. “To my surprise, Mama said, ‘She has chosen her path. Let her be.' ”

On the map, the distance from St. Louis to Memphis looks to be about 250 miles, as the crow flies. But the journey is longer and prettier if you follow the curves and twists of the Mississippi, the river meandering south, dividing Missouri from Illinois and Kentucky, separating Arkansas and Tennessee.

It was one of the trains of the Illinois Central Railroad that carried Josephine on this first leg of her wanderings; Bob Russell had a private Pullman car for his large company, their costumes and scenery. Josephine was delighted to find that Andre Tribble, a female impersonator whom she had loved at the Booker (he carried celery as his bridal bouquet) was now part of the Russell entourage.

The Illinois Central prided itself on furnishing its dining cars with white linen tablecloths, bud vases holding fresh flowers, fine china; but black people weren't welcome in the dining cars, they ate in their seats.

Still, it was fun for Josephine. Bob Russell's wife (also named Josephine)
had prepared hampers of food; there were sandwiches, ribs, hard-boiled eggs, cookies, bananas, and thermos bottles full of lemonade. The train slowly built up to speed—fifty miles an hour was its limit—and the tired company began to relax. It had been a long day, Josephine was to remember. “One by one the cast dozed off, their bodies rocking with the motion of the train.” And if you couldn't sleep, all night long there was a show outside the windows, as passengers boarded at each new stop, some of them carrying frying pans and live chickens.

When the troupe got to Memphis, a city where the population was about 40 percent black, Josephine discovered there were three black theaters (the New Regent, the Palace, and the Venus, where Bob Russell's troupe would spend the next seven weeks) but it was difficult for black performers to find places to stay. There were few black hotels for the simple reason that there weren't enough well-to-do blacks who could afford to stay in hotels.

Booth Marshall recalled the boardinghouses of his youth. “Sometimes you had to pay extra for laying down during the day, because the lady would say the room had been rented for the night only! She would say, ‘You didn't tell me you wanted to sleep during the day.' And some places, as soon as you put the light out, bedbugs by the thousand would come and bite you. I couldn't take that, I would go down to the railroad station and sit up until morning. Rooms were a dollar a night, the better ones were a dollar and a half. Clara Smith traveled with her own clean sheets; after a while on the road, so did I.”

In Memphis, Josephine was taken to a boardinghouse “where Mr. Russell gave me a tiny room.” That very afternoon, the troupe opened at the Venus, an opening Josephine described with gusto: “The show started. The heat was crushing. . . . Hundreds of black faces with yellow teeth died of laughter. They ate peanuts and threw the shells on the stage. The air was awful.”

Again, she was cast as Cupid, flying with a bow and arrow over two lovers, until the lady's husband came on and tried to pull her from the arms of her boyfriend. Then a spectator tried to do the same. He hopped onstage, brandishing a razor and shouting, “Get your hands off that woman, trash!”

Some of the male dancers leaped to restrain him. “Everybody screamed, ‘It's not the truth, it's only the play,' ” Josephine recalled.
“Nothing helped. Mr. Russell was obliged to come and explain it was only a scene, and not true. Then the man put away his razor, smiled broadly and went back to his seat.”

“You know, in them days,” Booth Marshall said, “the colored people just talked back to the shows. Like a villain shoots somebody and hides behind the door, and the audience yells, ‘There's that dirty rascal, behind the door, go get him!' Damnedest people I ever seen in my life.”

The audiences were no more primitive than some of the playhouses with which the Theater Owners' Booking Association was affiliated. Black vaudevillians swore that T.O.B.A. stood for Tough on Black Asses. “Some of the theaters were so small,” a female dancer told me, “you could not cross behind the stage to go to the toilet, you had to learn to pee in a bottle. Life on the T.O.B.A. was just going from one dinky theater to another, some of them blacksmith shops where they shoed horses. You worked hard, did four shows a day, and learned a lot.”

Josephine was living proof of that. She learned from everything and everybody, including Mama Dinks, whose routine she had seen many times. And of course she continued to study the phenomenon that was Clara Smith. “Clara outdrew Bessie Smith in Nashville all the time,” says trumpet player Doc Cheatham. “Because she was mean, and she sang mean. She would give everybody hell, give the men hell, give the women hell, in her blues singing. She was a mean woman but she was a great singer.”

It wasn't only Clara's voice that Josephine loved, but the long silk handkerchief Clara used as a prop, and her blue feather boa. Blue was Josephine's favorite color, and I still keep, like a talisman, one of her headpieces, a satin turban out of which rises a three-foot-tall spray of blue feathers. When I'm in the room with it, it's as though Josephine is looking over my shoulder.