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

of 1917, twenty-five thousand people gathered at Union Station to cheer for 480 black draftees leaving for army camp. (Arthur Martin, having turned thirty-two, just escaped being drafted.) Living so close to the station, Josephine was in the midst of the excitement, watching men kiss their wives goodbye and mothers faint.
    In 1918, pestilence was added to war. A flu epidemic—it would claim 550,000 victims across the United States—encircled the world, killing more people than any sickness since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Theaters closed, and the Dumas school shut down for a short time too. This enforced vacation pleased Josephine; what did not please her were the endless confrontations with Carrie. Josephine’s brown skin continued to be a tacit reproach to her black mother, living evidence of Carrie’s dalliance with a white man; when they went out together, both felt they were being stared at, whispered about.
    They tried, but they could not find common ground; Josephine longed to be loved, Carrie longed to understand her, but it just never worked. Josephine prayed for answers. “Oh, God, why didn’t you make us all one color? It would have been so much simpler.”
    Her road trips with the Joneses had contributed to her dissatisfactions. It was hard to come back to the discipline, the poverty, of home. She had no pity for her mother, no respect for the stepfather who endured visits from Carrie’s former lovers. Occasionally, Eddie Carson popped through the front door to check on Josephine, who didn’t give a damn about him. Or Alexander Perkins came by to say hello to his biological son, Richard. “He was a nice man,” Richard said.
    Poor Weatherbird was now jobless, and Carrie was going off, sometimes for weeks, with other men. “Once in a while,” Richard told me, “my father would get jealous and Mama would get a black eye.”
    Still, away from his wife, Arthur Martin was an easygoing person. Onweekends, he would hitch up his old horse and cart and carry the children across the Eads Bridge. They would camp along the river and fish, and Arthur would make a fire and fry the catch—sometimes catfish, sometimes buffalo fish—in hot oil. “Tumpy would get so excited,” Richard remembered.
    Josephine still worked as a kitchen helper, a baby-sitter, one of the girls who delivered laundry for Aunt Jo Cooper. She loved handling the silky bedsheets of rich white people, the lingerie trimmed with handmade lace, even though Aunt Jo was strict, and would make her wash her grimy paws before she touched a single handkerchief.
    But relations between Carrie and her eldest had become so difficult that Josephine was once more living with Elvira and Aunt Caroline. “I think,” Richard said, “it’s because Josephine was a little lighter than the rest of us children—that’s me and Margaret and Wilhelmina [Willie Mae]—I think that’s why my mother just gave Josephine to my grandmother.”
    By now, both Elvira and Caroline were widows, and in addition to Josephine, they had taken in a boarder, a man who was seventy-two years old.
    On the morning of March 22, 1918, Josephine was wakened by her grandmother, tears streaming down the old woman’s face. Aunt Caroline, who had chronic endocarditis, was dying. “Run home and fetch your mother,” Elvira said. Josephine ran home, but Carrie wasn’t there. Arthur said she was at Aunt Emma’s, Emma had gone into labor. “Once more, I set off through the darkness. ‘Come quick, Mama. . . .’ ” Carrie refused. “I’ll be along as soon as I can, Tumpy, I can’t leave the baby, my place is here right now.”
    It was another lesson. Life took precedence over death. Back at Elvira’s, Josephine found that Aunt Caroline had stopped breathing. Elvira said there was nothing to be scared of. “There’s more to fear