Josephine Baker's Last Dance Page 7

  You could have knocked her over with a feather boa when Miss Clara Smith came bopping into The Old Chauffeur’s Club, puffing on her pipe and flopping into a chair and kicking off her shoes.

  “What a night,” she said, and looked up at Josephine with that familiar smile: all gums, small teeth. Josephine felt like she’d just stepped out of a dark hole into the sun. “And it’s not over yet, is it, Tump?”

  The table was littered with half-empty glasses sticky with sweet tea and the remnants of bathtub gin surreptitiously poured from sneaked-in flasks, but Miss Clara was settled, her feet up on the chair beside her. She introduced the man by her side: Mr. Phillips, her new piano player, who barely glanced at Josephine but hung on Miss Clara’s every word like a pup eager for its master’s next command. Her former piano player, Mr. Washington, had married a Philadelphia chorus dancer and quit touring to suit his new wife.

  “Seems like whenever folks get married, they give themselves up,” Miss Clara said.

  Josephine wondered what Miss Clara had heard about her marriage to Willie Wells. She’d given herself up, all right, after the wedding that Daddy Arthur had forced. She’d tried to learn to fry chicken the way Willie’s mama made it, spent her days washing and mending his clothes and knitting hats and booties for the baby she’d told him was coming, stayed home with him most evenings since he was too tired to go out, and succumbed to his nightly demands for sex even when she was too tired, knowing she’d better get pregnant before he learned the truth. Sorry for her deception, she tried to atone by loving him, getting up early every morning to fix his breakfast and pack his lunch, waiting on him hand and foot when he got home, giving him massages, kisses, and hugs, giving everything he asked for in the bedroom, too, no matter how unpleasant.

  Then, not quite two months after the wedding, when they’d run out of money and had to move in with her family, he’d come home hollering about Mr. Dad. “I thought I was your first, but he says he was fucking you the whole time we went around together. That probably ain’t even my baby you’re carrying.” He looked like he might cry, and Josephine, who had begun to feel some tenderness for him, told him the child was his. He called her liar and whore, and punched her in the gut, right where the kernel of a baby had sprouted unbeknownst to her. She doubled over, catching her breath, and came back up with a Coca-Cola bottle in her hand, which she smashed into his face, gashing his forehead.

  He went running down the stairs, a hand pressed to the bleeding wound, pushing aside Elvira, who’d heard the shouting and started up to see what was going on. Out the front door he went, slamming it behind him, never to be heard from again, which was just fine with Josephine. If he’d stayed, she’d have ended up killing him. People said she and her mama were just alike, but Josephine differed in one respect, at least: she would be no man’s punching bag.

  “The Good Book says, A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they shall be as one flesh,” Mr. Phillips said, looking for all the world like he wanted to be one flesh with Miss Clara’s bosom.

  Miss Clara rolled her eyes and grinned at Josephine. “What time do you get off work, honey?” she said.

  SOON SHE WAS spending her nights in Miss Clara’s room in the Pine Street Hotel, not feeling November’s bite in the warmth of the soft flesh enveloping her, and days in Miss Clara’s dressing room setting out her gowns, which were even more beautiful now that she had become “The Queen of the Moaners,” the star of Mr. Bob Russell’s traveling troupe The Dixie Steppers. Exempt by her marriage from having to go to school, Josephine fell to her knees and thanked the Lord when Mr. Russell gave her a job as errand girl. The money wasn’t as good as she had made at The Old Chauffeur’s Club, but what she lost in wages she more than made up for in happiness.

  When rehearsals began each day, she’d move to the auditorium and watch the dancers; laugh at Booth Marshall clunking around in his dresses and sagging “breasts” and enormous rear end; and admire Miss Clara in her bright red wig shouting bawdy songs and, yes, moaning, not sadly, but the way she did at night with Josephine.

  One afternoon, performing with the Jones Family Band outside the theater, Josephine laid down her trombone and began to dance, as much to warm herself as for any other reason. To her surprise, the crowd of folks waiting to buy their tickets to the next performance clapped and cheered and dropped coins at her feet. As applause and Dyer Jones’s trumpeting swirled around her, Mr. Russell emerged from a car at the curb and watched with his arms folded across his chest. When they had finished, he tossed a five-dollar bill into her trombone case, tipped his hat at her, and went inside.

  When Josephine went to work that night, she found Miss Clara fully dressed—who had helped her? Josephine wondered jealously—and looking like she might bust open with excitement. One of the revue’s musical acts had broken up the night before, and its members scattered. Mr. Russell wanted to hire the Jones Family Band to perform in its place.

  “This means you’ll be coming with us on the road,” Miss Clara said. “I’m so happy, my love.” Josephine hardly noticed her kiss. She was going to be one of The Dixie Steppers!

  When the Joneses came to audition, Josephine led them into the auditorium and up onto the stage. Mr. Russell sat in the third row as they played “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?” Josephine hamming it up on her slide trombone, and Dyer Jones blowing that trumpet with all her might. The next thing they knew, Mr. Russell had leaped to his feet and was snapping his fingers and jiving to the beat. Josephine wiggled her knees and crossed her eyes and puffed out her cheeks, and hoped he was laughing the way the people did when she clowned on the streets. They finished with a big fanfare, the horns screaming, and were greeted by applause and whistles from the other troupe members watching in the wings.

  “That Tumpy is a born comic,” she heard Booth Marshall say, and turned to cross her eyes at him, too.

  “Fantastic,” Mr. Russell said as he ascended the stage. “Perfect.” He shook Mr. Jones’s hand. “Just what we need. Can you start right away?”

  Josephine squealed and clapped her hands, but he frowned at her. “Sorry, Tumpy, but this offer is only for the Joneses. I’ve already got a trombone player. A good one,” he added to Mr. Jones.

  In the dressing room, Clara had to clamp her arms around Josephine to stop her from tearing everything apart.

  “He doesn’t hate you,” Clara said, stroking her trembling back. “He’s a businessman.”

  “Well, I hate him.”

  Clara released her. “What kind of fool talk is that?” Mr. Russell had treated Josephine well, she pointed out. “But it doesn’t matter, because you aren’t cut out for show business.” This dried Josephine’s tears, that and her beloved Miss Clara turning her back. She reached out, but Clara shrugged her off.

  “If you can’t handle disappointment, you’ll never make it as a performer.” Miss Clara had been rejected more times than she could count, she said. At every audition, she’d heard a different criticism: her voice was too soft or too loud, too girlish or too masculine; her skin was too dark; she wasn’t pretty enough; she was too young; she was too old. “But did I give up? No, ma’am. I kept on trying, and now I’m the star of this show, and I’m going to be a bigger star, too—because I don’t cry and whine when things don’t go my way.” She picked up her pipe and began loading it with tobacco.

  “What should I do?”

  Clara struck a match and lit the pipe, sending a question mark of sweet smoke curling. “Me, I make the situation work to my advantage.”

  JOSEPHINE WAS FLAPPING her wings and telling herself to stay calm and keep her head high, as Mr. Bennett, the stage manager, had advised: “Acrobats and angels never look down; you see that stage far below and think about falling and you’re likely to get dizzy.” Just as Daddy Arthur had said.

  But it wasn’t the height that she feared. She’d climbed too many coal cars to be afraid of falling. If she hit the floor she’d bounce right back up again,
buoyant with joy over making her stage debut, playing Cupid in a pink leotard and glittering wings in The Dixie Steppers’ production Twenty Minutes in Hell.

  After Josephine’s rampage over Mr. Russell’s rebuff, Miss Clara had gone to him and demanded that Josephine get a part in the show. When he resisted, she threatened to quit, so he’d given Josephine a trial run in the role of Cupid and a spot in the chorus. His furry white eyebrows shot up when she’d run onto the stage and danced as though she’d been born in that chorus line. Did he think she didn’t know the steps after all the times she’d watched rehearsals with him?

  Some others might have been scared to fly around on that flimsy wire, but Josephine knew the harness she wore was safe, held by a pulley now moving her in circles over the actors’ heads. She pulled the strings in her hands, flapping the wings on her back as the horns blew and Clara sang “Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone.” She dropped to the floor to fire an imaginary arrow at two lovers on the bench just as a man walking by caught the stricken actress’s eye. Her jealous lover chased the passerby away and went after Cupid, too. The wire lifted Josephine just in time, out of his reach—then set her down, then lifted her up, just beyond his fingertips again.

  They’d rehearsed the skit many times but never with an audience, “a full house tonight,” Mr. Bennett had whispered, winking, strapping the harness across her chest before she’d risen up, up, up to the rafters to perch, waiting for her cue and trying not to look at the crowd, knowing all those faces would terrify her.

  She’d gotten the Cupid role because nobody else wanted it. Only a few among the cast had been small or light enough to fly, and none had wanted to try. Josephine had seen the gleam in Bob Russell’s eyes when he’d offered her the part; he’d expected her to turn it down, too, and then he could tell Clara that he’d done all he could—but he didn’t know Josephine. He’d never seen her shimmy like a lizard up the side of a train car and stand on the top throwing coal to the ground. He didn’t know that, except for ghosts, there was nothing she feared. But he was about to find out.

  On her final descent, the rigger set her down too close to the backdrop curtain. When the wire tugged at her harness, she flapped her wings as she had rehearsed, ready to fly all the way back up to the rafters and out of sight. This time, though, things didn’t happen the way they were supposed to. Her wings caught on the curtain, and she tipped backward, off-balance. The rope twisted and she spun, her kicking legs pulling her too far forward. The auditorium swam before her eyes, a sea of upturned faces.

  A gasp shuddered through the room, followed by the one sound in theater that no one wanted to hear: silence. The music had stopped playing. Clara no longer sang. The creak of the rafters, the squeak of the wire on the pulley wheel, the scream tearing at Josephine’s throat which she choked back—these were the sounds of her career gasping to an end with her very first performance. She spun around and saw Mr. Russell in the wings, scowling, and without even thinking crossed her eyes, not wanting to see him and, even more, not wanting to be seen.

  Titters arose from a crowd not certain whether it should laugh. Encouraged, she waved her arms, turned a somersault, and rolled her eyes around, dancing in the air, starting to enjoy herself. She turned the cry she wanted to make into a whoop as she reeled and veered, swinging from one side of the stage to the other, reaching behind to untangle the curtain from the wires attaching her wings to her wrists. From below she heard shrieks—of laughter or terror, she couldn’t tell. She tugged and mugged and flung her body out this way and that, yanking and jerking until, with a rip, the curtain fell to the floor.

  Suddenly freed of its restraining weight, she shot like a rocket across the proscenium, waving her arms as if trying to really fly, sticking her bottom up in the air, making every face she could think of, having the time of her life. When at last she ascended into the rafters, her elation turned to dread at the thought of the torn curtain and the anger that she knew would await her when she climbed down.

  Her legs felt like rubber as she descended the ladder to the backstage area, her breath coming in shallow gasps. At the bottom, she saw Mr. Russell, his tall back turned to her, his shoulders shaking. She remembered the sound of ripping cloth: he would have to pay to replace the curtain. She should go over and apologize, and beg to remain in the show. Instead, she stood in place, staring at him, imagining his rage or, worse, scorn.

  One of the technicians spoke to Mr. Russell, nodding in Josephine’s direction. He turned, and she willed herself to return his gaze. Don’t be a coward, he ain’t going to kill you—although firing her would be its own kind of death sentence—and she saw that his eyes were full of tears. Bob Russell, one of the biggest names in vaudeville, was crying, wiping his eyes with both hands, his mouth open, laughing.

  “You’re a real clown, Birdy,” he said, using the nickname the stagehands had called her in rehearsals. “You had me in stitches. Jesus, my side aches from laughing so hard.” He strode over and grabbed her hand, squeezing it as he shook it—glorious pain—and slapped her back. “Welcome to The Dixie Steppers.”

  CHAPTER 6

  1921, Philadelphia

  The train pulled into Philadelphia with a sigh, or did that sound come from Josephine’s fellow passengers, forty-two dancers, singers, comedians, jugglers, acrobats, female impersonators, animal trainers, actors, and actresses exhausted by the long days of traveling in heat-sticky cars whose windows wouldn’t open?

  At each stop on their circuit they’d stagger out, gulping for air and thirsting for an ice-cold glass of tea, to find a WHITES ONLY sign on the screen door of the only restaurant in town.

  At night, they’d perform two shows to audiences of ten huddled in an open-air theater in the drizzling rain; or, in a theater that smelled like feet, to one hundred people who threw tomatoes and rotten eggs and, once, ran up onto the stage to attack an actor in a villain’s role; or to drunkards fresh from the bars who broke out in fist fights that became messy, vomit-streaked brawls.

  Afterward, they’d sleep in a ramshackle boarding house that swayed and creaked in the wind, or in a roach-infested flophouse with bloodstained mattresses and fist holes in the walls, or in rooms whose ceilings leaked rainwater onto the bed. In Mississippi, walking to their lodging at midnight, they passed a group of white-robed figures sharpening their knives and hissing, “Nigger,” their eyes glinting hate through the slits in their hoods. The only good thing about the South, as far as Josephine could tell, was New Orleans, where everybody welcomed everybody, black and white, because the most important thing was the music.

  Maybe that slow exhale came not from relief but from resignation, because, truth be told, none of them had wanted to leave New Orleans and nobody felt thrilled by what they saw now. If New Orleans was a buxom woman with her blouse undone, Philadelphia was a stern, prim aunt buttoned all the way up to her chin. Gray buildings, gray sky, gray sadness seeping into their bones: even the people on the gray sidewalks wore gray clothes.

  Without Miss Clara, life had lost its color for Josephine, anyway. Clara had stayed in New Orleans, saying, “I’m the South’s favorite coon shouter, not the North’s.” She didn’t go north of the Mason-Dixon Line except to New York City. The North was too cold for her, even in the summer. No matter how hard Josephine begged, she refused to change her mind. “You’ve got to learn to sleep by yourself sometime, Tump.”

  Josephine cringed to think of sleeping in an empty bed where anybody might come in and get her. As unpleasant as her nights with Willie Wells had been—even though, toward the end, she’d started to enjoy herself—at least she could sleep with him, knowing that he’d protect her. Alone, she had only herself. Even with a locked door, a ghost might slip underneath and slide between the sheets. More than once in New Orleans she’d waited up for Miss Clara to come home, but that woman had other fish to fry—namely, a trumpet player she was sweet on in the Tuxedo Brass Band. On the nights when she stayed out, Josephine would lie awake until sunrise, shee
ts pulled tight to her chin so no one could slip in, listening for Clara’s key in the lock. Only when dawn broke could she finally doze off.

  In Philadelphia, she and Mrs. Jones shared a room in a colored hotel with two other chorus girls: Pontop, half-Chinese, who wore her hair like a pom-pom on her crown, and Evelyn, who complained about everything Josephine did, said, and was. When she’d compared the darker-skinned Josephine to a monkey, Josephine had run crying to Clara, who’d laughed: “If you’re going to be a star, you’d best get used to jealousy.”

  Without Clara, Josephine would have been miserable if not for Dyer Jones, who’d left Mr. Jones in New Orleans. “I tied him to the bedpost while he was passed-out drunk, and left his sorry ass,” she said. “He ain’t casting no more spells on me. I’ll make my own magic from now on.” Their daughter, Doll, had stayed behind, too, in love with a dwarf who thrilled her by tying her to the bedposts and striking her with a whip. Bob Russell, the manager of The Dixie Steppers, had frowned to hear that two-thirds of the Jones Family Band had abandoned the act, but Mrs. Jones coaxed him into letting her audition solo. “Wicked,” is all he said when she’d finished her song, and he made her a headline act.

  “A woman don’t need a man to hang like a stone around her neck,” Mrs. Jones told Josephine. “Don’t you forget that, Tump.”

  The men weren’t lining up to court Josephine, anyway. They went crazy over Mrs. Jones, with her lovely face like a heart framed by smooth, sleek hair. Josephine wasn’t pretty, but, according to Miss Clara—who was no beauty herself—she wasn’t ugly, either. “You’re cute,” she’d said, grinning with her pipe in her teeth. “Cute” didn’t cut the mustard, but what could she do? She had knobby knees and buck teeth. Her chest was as flat as a board. Her hair sprang up all over her head like unruly weeds. Better ugly on purpose than cute on accident, so Josephine grimaced while she flapped around the stage, waggling her knees and wiggling her rump, ugly as a demon, ugly as sin, ugly as the duckling before it grew into a beautiful swan.