Josephine Baker by Jean-Claude Baker, Chris Chase Read Free Book Online

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.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAt 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