Josephine Baker (6 page)

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 again 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.

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.

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.)