Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (28 page)

But if touring was hard, Josephine had endured worse; and she did at least enjoy the buffer of Clara’s protective presence, ensuring that she had somewhere to bed down most nights. Clara continued to give her singing lessons, and even tried to coax her into improving her reading and writing. However tired Josephine might feel when she crawled into a filthy bed at night, however much she missed her brother and sisters, she rarely regretted leaving home. If she was hungry or fatigued, there was always the adrenalin of the stage to lift her up the next day, and the promise of a new town ahead.

Travelling was still an amazing novelty for Josephine. Back in St Louis, the trains that steamed out of Union Station had formed the daily soundtrack of her dreams, rattling out their siren song of distant places and better times. Now, riding these trains herself, she could lose herself in the unfolding drama of the other passengers – country rubes with their chickens and market produce, townsfolk with their pressed suits and leather cases. Some of the cities where they stopped seemed magical to her: New Orleans, succulent with the smell of Cajun cooking and the sound of calypsos; Chicago, a city of skyscrapers, speakeasies and dance halls.

By the time the tour wound up at the Standard Theatre in Philadelphia, it was April 1921, and Josephine had been with the Steppers for over a year. Clara had recently left, claiming her Southern blood couldn’t cope with the Yankee North, but Josephine no longer needed her. She had grown used to life on the road, and more importantly she had just been promoted to the prime spot at the end of the chorus line. The dancer occupying this slot was allowed to stand out from the other girls and given fragments of her own music to which she could perform solo tricks. Maude Russell, who first saw Josephine dance at the Standard, said it was clear by now that she was destined for greater things: ‘She was dressed like a ragamuffin but she killed them all the way to the peanut gallery.’
¹⁰
According to another admirer, she had a joyous comic quality that was even more beguiling than Mama Dinks, ‘doin’ all sorts of gyrations with her legs, trippin’, getting out of step and catching up, playing marbles with her eyes’.
¹¹

Josephine was making such progress with the Steppers that when she went to audition for the New York cast of
Shuffle Along,
she had little doubt in her mind that she would be hired. Nor could she believe that she would be denied something she wanted so badly. Compared to the twenty-five-cent mix of vaudeville acts in which she currently performed, this was a sophisticated musical comedy, written by four of the biggest names in black entertainment: the comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, and the song-writing team Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle. When Sissle himself informed her at the audition that she was too young to be employed, she was heartbroken. The composer was used to disappointing chorus girls, but he felt a rare pang at Josephine’s dejection: ‘Big tears filled her eyes, and with drooping head … she slowly turned, half stumbling down the steps to the stage door … without even looking back she disappeared into the rain.’
¹²

Josephine was young, however, and she recovered fast. Once she and Billy were married the two of them moved in with his family, sharing a pleasant room in the little apartment over the Bakers’ restaurant. And when the Dixie Steppers moved on to another city, she remained with the Standard’s resident troupe, still dancing in the prestige spot at the end of the line. She became close friends with two other members of this troupe, Maude Russell and Mildred Martien, who were both very sweet to her, lending her clothes and helping her wash the ‘conk’ out of her hair every night before it burned her scalp.

It was Maude, though, who noticed that Josephine was never quite present, that she ‘lived in her head and her dreams’. However willingly she chatted and laughed with her new friends it was clear that everything in her life was temporary compared to her desire to see her name in lights some day. As Maude caustically observed, when Josephine got her chance to go out on tour with
Shuffle Along,
she had no qualms about leaving everybody behind.
*
Even Billy. ‘I don’t think she stayed with her husband but a hot minute.’
¹³

Josephine’s ambition almost got the better of her, however, on her opening night at New Haven. Dancing with the other eleven ‘Honeysuckle Honeys’, she was supposed to remain strictly in step; this was not a show in which comic stunts were required. Yet out on the stage, with the eyes of the audience on her, she couldn’t contain herself. At the end of the first number she flipped into her usual end-of-line routine, crossing her eyes, kicking up her legs and flashing her electric grin. It was a glorious moment, with everyone laughing and applauding her, but when she exited the stage it was to an icy encounter with the stage manager, who ordered Josephine to pack her bags and leave.

Fortunately she hadn’t left New Haven by the time the reviews came out the next morning. All made reference to her spontaneous display, with one critic singling her out as a ‘born comic [with] a unique sense of rhythm’, and Eubie Blake, realizing he had a special asset in his cast, overrode the stage manager. Not only should Josephine stay, she should continue doing her comic routine and work it as hard as she knew how.

Josephine had secured her own little piece of limelight, but as Tallulah had discovered when she’d made her debut in
The Squab Farm,
there was a price for being noticed. The other dancers resented Josephine’s promotion and took every opportunity to punish her for it. They excluded her from the communal gossip in the dressing room, and left her alone to manage her make-up and costume changes. After the show they didn’t invite her to go out and eat with them and, most cruelly, they began to pick on her for the colour of her skin.

Shuffle Along
might be a pioneering production for black artists, but it was still dogged by racial stereotyping. On the one hand, white audiences expected to see the usual cast of comic black characters, lazy illiterate men and eye-rolling mamas; on the other hand, they required black chorus girls and female singers to appear as attractively, tactfully pale as possible. There was an unofficial colour bar in operation for shows that played to white audiences. It was known as the ‘paper bag test’ and it was implacable. One of the singers in
Shuffle Along
was a superb soprano, Katherine Yarborough, who would go on to have a career in opera,
*
but because she was very dark skinned she was required to perform nearly all of her numbers hidden away in the wings. Among the Honeysuckle Honeys, most were ‘high yallers’ who, with an application of powder and paint, could almost pass for white. But Josephine’s coffee colouring only just passed and the others used it against her. ‘God don’t love ugly,’ they hissed as they turned their backs in the dressing room.
¹⁴
And when one of the chorus was required to entertain a producer, a backer, or a rich patron, it was the little ‘darky’ Josephine who was forced to do it.

In many respects
Shuffle Along
treated its performers well, providing sleeping cars for overnight train journeys and ensuring decent lodgings for the troupe. But there was still a hierarchy in place, by which chorus girls were routinely, and unquestioningly, expected to be available for sexual services. It was a fact of show business, white as well as black. Louise Brooks admitted to being part of a group of ‘hand-picked girls’ at the
Follies
who were ‘invited to parties given for great men in finance and government’. They considered themselves to be above ‘common whores’, but only because they were fortunate enough to be well treated. As Brooks recalled, ‘the profits were great. Money, jewels, mink coats, a film job – name it’ were all on offer to the prettiest and most compliant.
¹⁵

Josephine was simply trying to hold on to her job. And for a while, as she was passed from man to man during the tour of
Shuffle Along,
her life became exactly what Carrie had feared. Yet she had long acquired the skill of sidestepping pain or humiliation by withdrawing into the world inside her head, and she considered herself lucky when Eubie Blake selected her to be his special ‘girl’, rewarding her with small gifts and genuine affection.

Far more significant to Josephine was the fact that Blake and Sissle began to single her out for extra coaching. It was clear she had talent, and critics continued to notice her; yet while she could scintillate on certain nights, she lacked the craft to deliver her comic or virtuosic effects at will. Her ‘emotions were beyond her control’, recalled Sissle, and he and Noble worked patiently to persuade her that she needed technique, as well as stage magic, to progress.

Protected by Noble and Sissle as Josephine was, the cruelty of the other dancers inevitably diminished. She also gained a new friend in the dressing room, when the tiny fifteen-year-old Evelyn Sheppard was hired for the Honeysuckle chorus line. Everyone made a pet of Little Shep, with her sweet, pointed cat’s face, but she and Josephine became physically very close. They didn’t think of themselves as lesbian – in their world that implied perversion – but the quasi-sexual intimacy they enjoyed was nevertheless very common in show business. Young women would frequently share a bed in order to save money, and would frequently take pleasure and comfort in each other’s bodies. As Maude Russell scornfully pointed out, the men in their lives were so much less appealing. ‘Most of them didn’t care about pleasing a girl.’
¹⁶

Sleeping with another woman was also safer. Maude herself had an abortion when she was very young, and she made it her business to inform others of the brutal options involved. Either ‘you went to some lady or old man and took your chances on them killin’ you and you paid them ten or fifteen dollars’, or you got yourself ‘some carbolic acid and put it in a pot of hot water and [sat] over it’, waiting for the baby to ‘dissolve’.
¹⁷
It’s possible that Josephine too had an accidental pregnancy to deal with, for when
Shuffle Along
was playing a short season in Chicago, Billy came to see it – and her. If Billy was hoping to resume their marriage, his visit was a failure. This would be the last time that he and Josephine would see one another.
*
But at the end of the Chicago run, Josephine took a few very uncharacteristic weeks of leave from the show, and one reason may have been due to that brief reconciliation with her husband.

This disappearance was one of several odd lacunae in Josephine’s early career. But if an abortion had prompted it, she recovered fast. When she rejoined
Shuffle Along
she demanded, and received, an individual credit in the programme as ‘That Comedy Chorus Girl’. When the show toured up to Canada she danced her way into even more rave reviews. A critic in Toronto wrote that she had ‘burlesqued jazz until the audience nearly fell out of their seats’.
¹⁸
By the time the show was due to appear in St Louis, Josephine was ready to milk it as a triumphant homecoming.

She was appearing not at the old Booker T. Washington, but at one of St Louis’s premiere mixed theatres, the American. Richard and Willy Mae were there to witness her glory, albeit from the cheap gallery seats designated for blacks. And even though Carrie had refused to come to the show – her feelings still darkened by envy, shame and anger – Josephine visited her and Arthur afterwards. Showing off her latest outfit, a brightly coloured taffeta frock and fringed shawl, Josephine’s real moment of triumph was being able to give her mother a present of $75 – a full year’s rent on the Martins’ grimy little apartment.

*   *   *

Towards the end of 1923
Shuffle Along
had played itself out and Josephine had to find a temporary new billing, dancing with the music and comedy double act Buck and Bubbles and sharing Buck’s bed. But only three months later she was back with Sissle and Blake, who had devised a special solo slot for her in their next production,
In Banville.
It was designed to show off the comic, inventive range of her talent. While she would be dressed as a caricature piccaninny, in a short checked frock and clown-sized shoes, her lips whitened and her skin darkened with charcoal, the two men wanted Josephine to dance with all the vivid, wild imagination she could muster.

Those who saw that solo remembered her as a protean force of nature. At moments her body seemed to be possessed by a crazy menagerie of animals as she waddled like a duck; walked like a dog on all fours; undulated like a snake, and arched into the boxing stance of kangaroo. She could be pure comedy, crossing her eyes, puffing out her cheeks and imitating the sound of a muted saxophone; or she could be pure ‘jazz babe’, dancing the Charleston and the One Step, bouncing in and out of the splits.

She was vamping her own iconoclastic version of black minstrelsy and to the poet e.e. cummings the effect was both extraordinary and unsettling: ‘Some tall vital incomparably fluid nightmare, which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly manner.’ The
New York Times
called her a ‘freak terpsichorean artist’, but the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
was unequivocal in its appreciation, praising the ‘comic little chorus girl whose very gaze was syncopation, and whose merest movement was a blues’.
¹⁹
The public was equally admiring and Josephine’s popularity not only boosted her position in the troupe – her name now appearing fifth from the top in the programme – but also earned her a payrise. At $125 a week, her wage was over ten times what she’d been paid with the Dixie Steppers, four years earlier.

Still she aimed higher. The show was scheduled for a very long tour, taking in Philadelphia (where she ate Thanksgiving dinner with Pa Baker) and Canada. Josephine used that time to perfect her craft. Inspired by a friend who’d studied classical ballet, she acquired the rudiments of pointe work and started giving herself a daily class, limbering and stretching and working on her technique. Whenever she could she watched the other performers from the wings, looking out for a rhythm, a step, an effect that she could poach. She practised her singing, and even persuaded Sissle and Blake to write her a song, for which she was allowed to exchange her plantation frock for the glamour of a gold lamé evening dress.