Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  A few days before Thanksgiving, the feed bag disappeared. Josephine knew what that meant: Tiny Tim would be slaughtered the next day. She curled in the box with Three Legs that night and held him tight, burying her face in the matted fur and trying to think only of the dog smell and not of her friend awaiting its fate in that cage. She imagined herself sneaking up into the kitchen and setting Tiny Tim free, but how? The doors to the house were locked, and the mistress had the key. Besides, if she let the Thanksgiving turkey escape, the mistress would probably cook her for dinner.

  In the morning, her chores complete, she found the mistress at the counter with a mess of potatoes and a paring knife. She pulled her stool over to start peeling, but the woman handed her scissors instead. Then she picked up the cage and took it outside, telling Josephine to take off her dress and come on out.

  “Mr. Kaiser used to take care of this, but he’s gone, and so it’s up to you,” she said as Josephine stumbled out the door. “What are you shaking for? You afraid of a little ol’ turkey?” She snorted. “It’s about as big as you are, that’s a fact, and as stupid, too, so it ought to be a good match.”

  She set down the cage at the edge of the chicken yard, motioning for the shivering Josephine to sit on the stool she used for killing chickens. She set Tiny Tim in Josephine’s lap. The bird peered at her with one trusting eye. Josephine lifted her hand to her face—

  “Don’t be touching your eyes after handling that bird, you dumb little pickaninny.” The mistress knocked her hands away. “I ain’t sending you home sick, not with Christmas coming.” Josephine wanted to jump up and push the evil woman to the ground and run with her friend out the gate and down the highway, but she couldn’t go anywhere in just her panties. She’d freeze to death, or the mistress would catch her like she did the last time and beat her until she fainted.

  She let go of the bird for a second to scratch herself—Three Leg’s fleas again—and he flapped his wings and flew from her lap to the ground.

  “He got away! Look what you’ve gone and done,” the mistress said. “I told you about that scratching, but you just can’t keep your hands out of there, can you, you little heathen?”

  “Leave me alone!” Josephine shouted, scrambling to her feet. The mistress’s gaze fell to the scissors still in Josephine’s hand and her expression sharpened to a malicious point. Go ahead and try it, her eyes urged Josephine.

  “Put down those scissors or I’ll wring your neck,” she said.

  “My mama will kill you.”

  “Your mama will thank me. Now get that turkey and kill it, and do it quick. Call me when it’s stopped bleeding so we can scald it for you to pluck. Hurry it up, or you’ll be late for school.”

  “Stupid bird,” she said to Tiny Tim when the mistress had gone inside, and she pushed his head into the killing cone. She decided to pretend the bird was just a big chicken instead of Tiny Tim, who used to come wobbling and gobbling whenever she walked into the poultry yard. She closed her eyes and, holding him between her knees, stretched his neck to snip the arteries as she’d done many times before but never to something she loved. Blood ran over the handsome purple head. His gobble sounded gargled and choked, like when Daddy Arthur would clamp his hands around Mama’s throat and shake her, shouting, Goddamn woman can’t even cook a hot dog without burning it. The bird kicked her hard in the tenderest part of her arm, then hung still and limp in her trembling clutch. As she waited for the blood to stop running, she averted her gaze from the glassy eye, the open beak.

  “Took you long enough,” the mistress said, striding toward her from the house but making no effort to take the carcass. She led Josephine to the fire pit and gestured to the pot of water on the boil. Josephine lifted the heavy bird with both hands and lowered it slowly into the bubbling cauldron, averting her face to avoid the steam and hot water breaking in bubbles over the lip of the pot. Moisture beaded on Tiny Tim’s legs, making them slip in her hands, but she managed to grasp the feet and hold on although every muscle in her body strained with effort.

  “You’re going to drop it, you idiot.” The mistress snatched the bird and pushed Josephine backward, snarling for her to get out of the way, couldn’t she do anything right? Laying the carcass on the grass, she told Josephine to start plucking and hurry up, she had to get to school, and stop that scratching or she’d get another thrashing. So Josephine plucked her friend, closing her eyes against its nakedness, and went inside to wash herself and put on her dress, which swallowed her too-thin body, but not as much as she would wish, not enough to make her disappear.

  “LOOK AT HER itching herself! You got fleas down there?” The boy pointed at her crotch with an open, laughing mouth, summoning others on the playground to gawk. Josephine wanted to run back into the classroom, where the teacher had been helping her catch up on her studies, smelling so good sitting next to her, like a garden full of beautiful flowers, scents that made her feel like she was in heaven. At one point, the teacher’s arm had brushed against hers, making her want to crawl into the kind woman’s lap and rest her head and try to forget Tiny Tim’s frightened screams.

  “She’s got critters in her crotch,” the big boy cried out, and the other kids pointed at her, too, and danced around chanting, “Critter crotch, critter crotch.” Josephine, having had enough meanness for one day, made her face blank and tuned out their taunts, thinking instead of the music she’d heard floating down the street last Saturday.

  She’d gone home for the weekend, and Daddy Arthur had taken her to the Soulard Market to beg and scavenge for food. All that work had left her hungry, so he gave her an apple from the sack and walked her over to Market Street to see the new colored theater, the Booker T. Washington, a small brick building on the outskirts of downtown. Outside, a long line of folks from Union Station waited to watch the vaudeville show, passing the time until their connecting trains arrived. Only white people were allowed in the station restaurant, but for a nickel Negro folks could spend all day at the Booker T watching jugglers, tap dancers, poodles jumping through hoops, clowns in blackface, magicians sawing ladies in half, and men in dresses and high-heeled shoes singing in falsetto and prancing up and down the stage.

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  Josephine, on Daddy Arthur’s shoulders, kicked her feet against his hips and begged him to take her inside, flying dogs and lipsticked men swinging through her mind, but he said they had to get home before her mama left for work. Outside the theater, a man with a trumpet, another with a guitar, and a woman with a tambourine played a song about gasoline, the people in line clapping to the beat; one couple broke out to dance, arms and legs in a blur and big smiles on their faces.

  “Ouch, baby, my head is no drum,” Daddy Arthur said, laughing as he trotted down Market, greeting by name folks walking to the beauty shop or the drugstore or the soda fountain, which was now selling ice cream wrapped in cone-shaped cookies. Josephine’s mouth watered, but she knew better than to ask. There had never been money for ice cream, and maybe there never would be, but it wouldn’t matter, anyway, because if she stayed at Mrs. Kaiser’s house she’d be dead before long.

  “The mistress hits me,” she said.

  Daddy Arthur laughed and said, “Welcome to the world.” He reckoned that was why colored people were born: to give the whites someone to beat up on.

  “I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Please don’t make me, Daddy Arthur. I promise I’ll be good.”

  “Best talk to your mama about that.” Meaning: you’re not my child. He loved his real children best, Margaret and Willie Mae, bouncing them on his lap and singing, “Ride a little horsey up to town, for to get him a plum.” Plums. Josephine shuddered at the thought of all that sweetness, imagined the juice dripping down her chin. Daddy Arthur loved Richard, too, even though he wasn’t Richard’s daddy, because he had dark skin like his own. Josephine’s light complexion served as a constant reminder that her real daddy was somebody else, someone whose name Mama would not say.


  “That’s because she doesn’t know,” Grandmama had said, her mouth puckering like she’d eaten sour fruit.

  People speculated. Once, two women walked past her remarking, “Carrie McDonald likes cream in her coffee,” talking about her mama. Another time, some kids in the neighborhood called Josephine and Richard bastards. Boy, that got Mama’s goat.

  “There are no bastards in this household,” she hollered when Josephine asked her about it. “You all come from the same hole.” While Richard’s daddy came around to see him every now and then, nobody claimed Josephine except Eddie Carson, who looked like a flimflam man in his bright clothes and sneaky mustache. “Got a quarter for your old man?” he’d asked one day, offering her Mary Jane candies. She’d snatched the bag from his hand and run away, but inside her head was buzzing with questions. Was Eddie Carson really her daddy? That evening, she asked her mother.

  “Daddy Arthur is all the father you’ll ever need,” was all Mama would say.

  Why, then, did he let Mama send her back to Mrs. Kaiser’s? He still hadn’t found a job, so maybe they really did need the money the mistress gave them, a quarter a week, but she had earned more from raking leaves, sweeping steps, and caring for the white folks’ babies on Westmoreland Avenue.

  She’d sent Josephine back even after seeing the marks the mistress’s belt had made. “Maybe she’ll teach you to behave yourself.”

  On the playground now, Josephine dug her fingernails into the heels of her hands and thought about that pain, nothing else, until the boy got in her face and cried, “Critter crotch!” Josephine wanted to shut him up, so she punched him in the kisser with both fists. He stumbled backward, and she hit him again, flailing, not stopping, because the minute she let up he would flatten her to the ground and she was sick and tired of being hit.

  The whole playground came over to shout and scream as the boy fell, her on top of him, slapping and scratching and pulling his hair and snarling, “Goddamn, goddamn,” until the teacher pulled her away and led her inside, into the faculty bathroom, where she closed the door and wiped the blood off Josephine’s face, murmuring, “Poor thing.” When Mrs. Smith lifted her shirt and saw the welts, she sucked air through her teeth and said, “My God, this can’t be. This will not be!” Foreboding flooded Josephine’s bones like a storm rolling in.

  THE NEXT DAY was Thanksgiving, but Josephine could think of nothing to give thanks for except that Mrs. Kaiser was too busy to pay her any mind. A bunch of folks came over to eat poor Tiny Tim, kissing the mistress when they came in the door, smiling as if touching their lips to that ugly face were not enough to make anyone sick. Josephine took everybody’s coats to the bedroom except for that of one man, who said flat out that he’d let no nigger handle his fine wool and cashmere. A woman thrust her baby into Josephine’s arms as if wanting her to pile it on the bed with the coats and hats and scarves and handbags. Josephine kissed the infant’s cheek, a boy with big blue eyes and skin like peaches. The mother shrieked and snatched the child away, her blond curls snapping accusatorily, glaring as if Josephine were the one now making the baby cry.

  Luckily, Mrs. Kaiser missed that scene. She was busy kissing the next guests and exclaiming how glad she was to see them; how sweet they were to compliment her dress, she’d had it for years, it was Mr. Kaiser’s favorite, God rest his soul; and yes, didn’t the turkey smell wonderful? Josephine’s stomach turned.

  The guests took seats around the table, and Josephine filled their glasses with sweet tea while the mistress brought in the serving bowls from the kitchen, steaming mounds of mashed potatoes, a sweet potato casserole, a mess of green beans, cranberry sauce, dinner rolls, and, making its dramatic entrance on an enormous blue-and-white platter, Tiny Tim, trussed and buttered and browned. Bile rose to her throat. She gripped the mistress’s chair to keep from fainting on the floor.

  Mistress ordered her to hold the plate while the man who’d called her a nigger sliced the meat and laid it down in layers, white meat on one side and dark meat on the other, the smell making Josephine gag, so that by the time everybody began to eat she had to hurry from the room. “Go ahead and make a plate for yourself,” the mistress called after her, the first time in two months she’d offered her a proper meal. But how could she choke anything down with her stomach in a thousand knots from thinking of poor Tiny Tim, and her teacher’s calling a meeting for Monday morning with the mistress and the school principal to talk about Josephine’s welts? When she’d given Mrs. Kaiser the note and the mistress had pressed her for information, Josephine had played dumb.

  She curled up in her box and cried until the mistress’s voice cut in, calling her to come upstairs and wash the dishes. When she got to the kitchen, darkness had fallen, the room lit only by a gas lamp on a shelf and a few candles. “Make sure you get them clean this time,” the mistress said, and headed up to bed, leaving Josephine to scrape and scrub the piles of pots and pans and bowls and platters and plates that she could barely see. If mistress spied even a speck of food on anything tomorrow, there would be hell to pay.

  She lit the stove to warm a pot of water filled with dishes, then turned and confronted the carcass on the serving platter, the bones picked nearly clean except for the legs, which wafted a faint aroma of animal fat that made her whole body leap with hunger. She grasped a leg and wrested it from the joint, releasing pieces of dark, dripping meat that she lifted to her teeth to chew and swallow in swooning bliss. When she had devoured it and finished the other leg, too, she sat on the floor in a stupor, her cheeks and jaw shiny, her skin stretched like a drum over her bulging stomach, Tiny Tim heavy in her gut and in her heart. She lifted her hands to her face and began to cry.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” The mistress emerged into the kitchen’s dim glow like a haint, her unbound hair flying about, her arms waving, her shrill voice piercing the dull lethargic bubble of satiety and shame. The woman seemed to fly through the dark and swoop upon her, grasping Josephine by the wrists and yanking her to her feet so hard that her arms felt, for a brief, sharp moment, unhinged. Mrs. Kaiser cried out when she saw one decimated turkey leg on the counter and the other in Josephine’s hand; she shrieked at the sight of the pot of water boiling on the stove, cracking her good china.

  “My mother’s dishes from Paris,” she screamed, pulling her over to look into the pot at the ruined plates. The turkey leg fell to the floor. “Look what you’ve done!” And she thrust Josephine’s hands into the boiling cauldron.

  PAIN, PAIN SHOOTING up her arms like flames, her hands on fire, a constant searing excruciating pain, her throat raw from all the screams she’d uttered without knowing what she was saying until, coming to her senses, she shrieked, “Jesus, help me,” and then lay limp and sweating.

  “Help me,” she breathed. A bright light cast a shadow on a pale, chipped wall, and a face emerged, there an eyebrow, there another, and a mouth, and a beard flowing over a long white robe. She stared until eyes formed, looking into hers, infinitely kind and full of love, love glowing in that white light down to her. Father.

  Itching, itching, itching. She slid one bandaged paw over the other, both of them fat and cushioned and as useless as if she had no hands, and a voice floated into her mind. We had to administer a palliative, something to ease her pain. Pain? Pain was a dull memory, a vague recollection of misery now passed, her hands were alive with itch. She rubbed one against the other again, grunting with frustration.

  “She’s awake.”

  Someone lifted her wrist murmuring, “Don’t scratch.”

  She opened her eyes to see her mama clutching a bandaged hand, her eyes floating in tears.

  “Mama,” she said. “I saw God.”

  What? She saw God—where? In a dream?

  “He came to me, Mama.” She smiled, anticipating the pride on her mother’s face. “He said he would pin a golden crown to my head with a star.”

  Her mother dropped her hand, which she began, again, to rub impotently against th
e other.

  “What kind of fool business is that? You think you’re special?” She stood and brushed herself off as if Josephine were a toad that had hopped onto the bed.

  “Hmpf. You’re the queen, all right—the queen of cracked plates. Who’s going to hire you now, knowing you can’t even wash dishes?” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke into Josephine’s face. “God pin a gold crown to your head—hmpf. That French china was worth more than you’ll ever be.”

  Her revue Joséphine à Bobino shows none of this, of course. She has never minded this omission; it’s a fete, not a funeral. Privately, though, every time she sees the child cross the stage with a doll in her arms, Josephine wonders: what really happened in the hospital?

  Maybe the pain medicine caused the vision, as the nurse later suggested. Maybe some trick of the lights and shadows created a bearded man’s face, as Daddy Arthur speculated. Or maybe her own active imagination—the only way, sometimes, to escape from her misery—conjured the scene. “God’s a white man, huh? That explains everything,” her grandmama Elvira had said with a cackle. Or did Josephine get the idea from one of her Sunday school books? Did God even have a face?

  There had been no mistaking the crown, though, gleaming and golden in one of God’s own hands, or the star burning like a ball of fire in the other. Josephine has never doubted these memories, or the message: I will crown thee and affix the crown with this star. Said not in a booming voice, as a child might expect, but as a thought that filled her mind like a song.