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

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.
    â€œ ‘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.’ ”
    â€œTumpy 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