Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (26 page)

As far as Josephine was concerned, Billy had simply been a friendly pair of arms to snuggle into after she left the theatre at night; when they first became lovers she’d had no idea of marrying him. But his father, Warren Baker, had taken a shine to her and was unhappy to think his son might be taking advantage. He suggested the two of them should make their relationship official, and so on 17 September 1921, they stood in front of the Reverend Orlando S. Watte and swore that there was no lawful impediment to their becoming man and wife.

During that short ceremony Josephine had seen no reason to inform the Reverend Watte of her exact age, nor did she think it necessary to tell anyone that she already had a husband, in another city. She’d only been thirteen when she and Willie Wells had got married down in St Louis, and they’d barely been together two months. Certainly she’d seen nothing of Willie since she’d broken a beer bottle over his head and he’d stumbled, bleeding, out of the house. He was part of another life, and Josephine had done her best to forget him.

Here in Philadelphia, with Billy Baker and his family, there were no fights. Billy’s mother might disapprove of Josephine – her skin was darker than Billy’s and she was a chorus girl with apparently no family to speak of – but Pa Baker treated her with affection and respect. While most people still called Josephine by her childhood nickname Tumpy, Warren referred to her as ‘Daughter’, clearly taking pride when he ushered her gallantly to a table in the restaurant he ran. He bought new clothes for her, a silk turban and a seal-skin coat. Sometimes, on her Sundays off, he took her on the eighty-mile train journey to Harlem, where he treated her to lunch at Dabneys on 132nd Street, followed by a matinee show.

It was just a few weeks after Josephine and Billy married that Warren Baker acquired tickets for the latest New York sensation.
Shuffle Along
was the first all-black musical to succeed on Broadway for over a decade and everything about it had been praised by the critics, from the catchy wit of signature songs like ‘Bandana Days’ to the brilliance of Florence Mills, the winsomely graceful lead with the extraordinary, bubbling coloratura voice.

The
New York American
had even delivered a panegyric to the chorus line – so exuberant a contrast to the stiffly drilled routines of white girls that ‘every sinew in their bodies [had] danced’.
¹
A few months ago Josephine herself had yearned to be one of those girls, and had auditioned for the show when it was assembling its Broadway cast. But while most cities in America didn’t fuss over the age of chorus girls, in New York the rule that they had to be at least sixteen years old was strictly enforced.

Watching the show now, beside Pa Baker, Josephine’s body ached to be up onstage, performing alongside Florence Mills, whom she idolized. And when she returned home to Billy and the scrappy vaudeville show still playing at the Standard, Josephine could no longer imagine why she’d been so content with life in the Baker household. A few weeks later, when she heard that a second touring cast was being put together for
Shuffle Along,
she didn’t even think to consult Billy or his family before auditioning.

Josephine was good at focusing on the future. Her audition was successful (no one asked about her age) and in February she was hired to become one of the Happy Honeysuckle girls, earning what was, to her, the fabulous wage of $30 a week. In her excitement, she spared little thought for the effect her departure might have on her five-month marriage; she felt she had simply taken the necessary next step towards success.

When she arrived in New Haven for the start of the tour, the first person she saw was her friend Maude Russell, who had been working as a singer and dancer at the Standard. She was pleased to see a familiar face, but when Maude called out ‘Tumpy’ and held out her arms in an affectionate embrace, Josephine put up a hand to interrupt her. ‘My name is not Tumpy any more,’ she said. ‘My name is Josephine Baker.’
²

*   *   *

Names were important to Josephine. At the Female Hospital in Saint Louis where she’d been born on 3 June 1906, official records had marked the uncertainty of her provenance, identifying her father with the simple abbreviation
Edw.
Her mother, Carrie, would never commit herself to naming, unequivocally, who
Edw.
might be. Sometimes she would hint at Eddie Carson, a drummer who worked in the bars of St Louis.
*
But Carrie had gone with many men, and while Carson would become very eager to assert his paternity once Josephine’s career took off, others doubted he’d had any hand in her making. His skin was very dark, while Carrie’s was almost black, and according to the gossips, Josephine’s creamier colour had surely come from elsewhere.

During Josephine’s childhood she learned to feel ashamed of her uncertain origins, to believe that there was something ‘humiliating and dishonorable about my birth’.
³
But as she grew older she turned it to her advantage. She invented different fathers for herself – a Washington lawyer, a Spanish dancer, a Jewish tailor – depending on the audience she was playing to. She also switched between different surnames to cover her increasingly chaotic official status: sometimes using Carrie’s maiden name, Macdonald, when she filled in a form; sometimes the surname of her stepfather, Arthur Martin; sometimes that of her first husband, Willie Wells. When she decided to stick with Baker, it would be because she felt she had made the name her own.

Reinventing herself was also Josephine’s way of dodging the hurt of feeling not merely obscure, but also unwanted – especially by her mother. Carrie had been an unusual child, graceful and tall, with slanting aristocratic features. She had been bright, too, the first in her family to read and write, and her adoptive parents had assumed that someday she would lift herself out of the ghetto to a better life, working in one of the city’s new department stores or even becoming a schoolteacher. But Carrie developed a wild streak. She began to go out dancing and to run around with men, and when she got herself pregnant at the age of twenty-one the family were mortified. Even though Josephine was taken care of by her grandmother and her great-aunt she was, from the start, an unwanted baby, a misfit, a burden to Carrie and a symbol of the family’s disappointed hopes.

Sixteen months later, when Carrie got pregnant again, Josephine’s situation did not improve. The new baby was illegitimate as well, but at least the identity of his father (Alexander Perkins) was known, and his skin was the same dark colour as Carrie’s. As Josephine grew a little older she was made painfully aware of how much more acceptable her brother Richard was to the family: ‘He had black skin … he was the welcome one.’
⁴

And so it remained. When Josephine was four Carrie finally settled down with a husband. Arthur Martin was a big, slow-moving, simple man, but he was fundamentally decent, and happy to be a father to Carrie’s two illegitimate babies. Over Carrie, however, and her increasingly volatile treatment of her children, he had no control. On good days, Carrie could be affectionate and lively, showing glimpses of the gay laughing girl who had racketed around St Louis. She could even be sweet to Josephine. But the daily grind of ghetto life made those days increasingly infrequent. Often Carrie would be driven to fury by the lumbering presence of her husband and by the noise of her four children (two more had followed in quick succession: Margaret in December 1908 and Willy Mae in July 1910). She sought refuge in drink and occasionally disappeared for a day or two on the arm of another man, but mostly she vented her rages on her children, shouting and slapping them with a terrifyingly abrupt violence.

It was Josephine who Carrie saw as the source of her frustration – the baby who had first closed the door on her freedom. If there was a child to blame, a child to be beaten, it was her oldest daughter; if there were jobs to be done around the house, it was Josephine who was required to work the hardest. From an early age she was expected to wash the dishes and mind the smallest children; she was sent out with Arthur at dawn to forage for fallen fruit and vegetables in the wholesale market. Perhaps the worst moment of Josephine’s early life was the Christmas Day that Carrie got ragingly drunk and gave Josephine one of the harshest beatings of her childhood. The blows left welts and bruises, but far more terrible were the words that Carrie shouted – that she hated her daughter and wished she was dead. Josephine was only nine.

Later, she could understand how trapped Carrie felt. Her mother worked long hours as a laundress, but the wages were low, and even though Arthur struggled hard with his own trade, hauling gravel with his pony and cart, jobs were in short supply. The best he could do for his family was a two-room apartment on Gratiot Street, in a row of tenement houses that ran parallel to the two dozen train tracks leading into nearby Union Station.

These once decent houses were now collapsing slums – freezing in winter, fetid in summer. The noise on the street was constant: babies, domestic arguments, and the roar of passing trains. Smuts and smoke from the tracks added to the miasma of dirt that hung over the street, dirtying the laundry that flapped across every courtyard. There were only the most basic amenities for every household. The Martins shared an outside toilet, got their water from a communal tap, and all four children slept together on the same thin mattress, restless from the itch of bed-bug bites and the sound of rats in the walls.

Yet still the Martins were a family, and Josephine clung to her place in it, doing what she could to please her mother by playing big sister to the little ones. On Saturday nights she led Richard and a gang of friends out through the neighbourhood, where parties spilled out onto the sidewalks and the music of banjos, accordions and pianos could be heard from the Rosebud Café or the Four Deuces Salon. St Louis always claimed to be the home of ragtime. It was here that Tom Turpin and Scott Joplin had improvised their witty parodic tunes, setting classic 2/4 marches against a raggedy syncopated rhythm, creating a style that every St Louis musician was making their own.

Other evenings Josephine organized raids on the coal trucks that lined up in the station yards. She showed the smallest children how to harvest nuggets of coal that had fallen onto the ground, while she clambered up onto the cars and threw down the bigger chunks for them to collect. Over the Christmas holiday she searched the garbage bins of the wealthy white neighbourhoods, looking for discarded toys to take home. As she grew older and bolder, she knocked on doors, offering to run errands, sweep leaves or mind babies. Most of her earnings she spent on her family – Richard recalled her being ‘a good sister … she didn’t make much money, maybe 50 cents a week, and when she got it, she would buy things for us’.
⁵
Yet as dutiful as Josephine tried to be, when she was barely seven years old she was sent away from her family to earn her keep as a live-in scullery maid.

As far as Carrie was concerned, Josephine’s departure made one less mouth to feed. Perhaps she genuinely assumed that her daughter’s new employer, Mrs Kaiser, would demand only light duties from such a small child, especially as she was legally required to maintain Josephine’s attendance at school. Yet Carrie had delivered Josephine into the hands of a sadist who sent her down to the cellar at night, with just a crippled old dog for company. When she wasn’t in school she was working – lighting fires, emptying chamber pots, washing dishes and clothes. If Josephine lost concentration or was too weak to manage her chores, she was beaten. ‘I would have loved to run away,’ she wrote later, ‘but I was too small.’
⁶

This, at least, was the way she presented the story. Parts of it were probably true – for the rest of her life she would do anything to avoid sleeping on her own at night – yet Josephine was no less of a myth maker than Tamara, and couldn’t resist exaggerating and editing her life into a more dramatic shape. According to her version of events, she was delivered from her torment only when Mrs Kaiser’s brutality led to her being hospitalized. She’d left a pot of water to boil over on the stove one day, and as punishment her employer had thrust her hands into the scalding water. Her injuries were excruciating – ‘My skin and my fingernails … boiled, ready to fall off’ – and there was apparently no question of allowing her back into Mrs Kaiser’s care.
⁷

In truth, no one in the family could remember Josephine suffering such burns, and in all the thousands of column inches subsequently written about her, no one commented on her hands being scarred. Yet this Cinderella story made emotional sense to Josephine. Her imagination had been formed by the few fairy tales she’d been told when she was little, and in her head was a world of rescued princesses and happy endings, to which she escaped when her own life was too hard.

That fantasy world remained necessary to her, even once she was back with her family. By 1915 the Martins were sliding towards destitution. Arthur could find little work and they were forced out of Gratiot Street and into a succession of smaller, filthier apartments. For a time Josephine had just one dress to wear, held together by patchwork and darning, and she either had to walk barefoot or totter through the streets of St Louis in a cast-off pair of women’s evening shoes, their high heels amateurishly filed down by Arthur.

Unlike her clever little sister, Willy Mae, Josephine neither sought nor found any escape in school. She was a poor student and spent most of her lessons crossing her eyes and pulling faces to make the other kids laugh. News of the outside world meant little to her. If papers or magazines came into the house, it was only because Arthur was using them to insulate the walls of the apartment against the cold and damp. America’s entry into the war in 1917 made almost no impression on her. But the events of July that year, as St Louis was overtaken by waves of racial violence, gave eleven-year-old Josephine her first inkling of a larger and even more dangerous world that existed beyond the ghetto.