Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  That was the day when Josephine started to sing, music always in her mind, running like a soundtrack through every moment of her days and nights. “ ‘You’re sent from heaven / And I know your worth / You’ve made a heaven / For me, right here on Earth,’ ” she sings now, on the stage, to the innocent girl dancing with her doll. But whoever said these words to her when she was a child? Confused, she turns her gaze into the spotlights shining down, looking for God, her bedazzled eyes filling with dark shapes as the song rolls from her open throat.

  Deep within her, still, the note the Lord struck with his promise—the expectation that, someday, she would do something monumental, worthy of a crown—resonates and hums. She wonders: When will God give me that crown? What must I do to earn it?

  CHAPTER 2

  1914

  Carl, the runt of Josephine’s gang and scrappy like a little Chihuahua dog, came running up one day to announce that Josephine’s mama liked white sugar. “That’s what my mama says.” His sneering tone made her face burn.

  “So the hell what?” she said, and, knuckling down, flicked her shooter into Freckles’s aggie, knocking it out of the ring. “Everybody loves sugar.”

  “He’s saying your daddy is white,” Freckles said, like he was breaking bad news to her.

  “My daddy ain’t white.” Her gaze veered like a bee looking for something to sting: the circle in the dirt, the scattered marbles, the black ant that she now crushed with her thumb, the faint scar running from nail to knuckle the only remnant of last year’s burns.

  Freckles shrugged. “It don’t matter. Carl’s stupid.”

  She lifted her gaze to his. A bit of breeze fingered his soft-looking honey-red hair. Her pulse skipping, she took aim for what should have been an easy shot, but missed. With a fingertip she brushed away the poor little ant she’d killed. What did she do that for?

  “Tumpy’s the stupid one,” Carl said. “She don’t even know her daddy is white.”

  Freckles jumped up. “Don’t you talk about her like that.”

  “You’re on her side? You must be stupid, too,” Carl said, elbowing Josephine’s brother, Richard.

  “Don’t they teach anything in that white school?” said Richard, who, in spite of having finished the first grade, could barely write his name.

  “Who’s the stupid one, cracker?” Carl jeered, dancing around behind Freckles, kicking up dust and destroying the game. They were playing in the patch of bare ground in front of the paint-peeling apartment building where Josephine and Richard lived, all of them with nicknames except Carl. Josephine was Tumpy, a name her mama had given her when she was a fat baby, “like the egg that fell off the wall” she said, getting the name wrong but it had stuck, anyway; Richard was Brothercat because he was Josephine’s brother; Skinny was from Puerto Rico and as tall as a sixth-grader; Sonny, whose broad, flat nose made him look like he’d been hit by a door, was one of seven brothers, all called “Sonny” by their dad; and Fatty, a white boy, had three chins but could run faster than any of them except Josephine. These were her friends now that she was home again, boys she could chase and holler with instead of sitting around and playing with dolls the way the girls liked to do, and who’d seen the wounds on her hands from that boiling water and thought Josephine was tough.

  She scrambled to her feet. “Don’t you call my friend stupid!”

  “You like Freckles?” Carl grinned, showing the gap between his two front teeth. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  Now the others chimed in, chanting, “Tumpy and Freckles sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.” She told them to hush, but she was smiling on the inside when she sat down again across from Freckles, who was scooping up the marbles and putting them in his sack.

  “I don’t need a girl standing up for me,” he said, and walked away with his hands over his ears.

  Josephine’s eyes filled with tears. What had she done wrong? She and her friends fought all the time. “Roughhousing,” Mama called it, and had told her not to do such things, saying it “wasn’t fitting for a girl,” and that she ought to be more careful with the blue middy dress her grandmother had made. But it wasn’t like she had anything to change into: that dress was the only clothes she had, and getting too tight and too short to play in. Even so, Mama had said that if she ruined it, there’d be “hell to pay,” meaning a beating with the birch switch or the handle of the fly swatter. Didn’t Freckles realize how much she’d risked for his sake? Didn’t he care?

  “Aw, look at the poor baby cry,” Carl said, pointing his finger at her. Richard pointed, too—her own little brother, whom she’d comforted more times than she could count, like when he helped Carl steal a bicycle and Mama beat him so hard he fainted, then locked him in the shed out back for a whole day and night. “You think that’s bad? Keep thieving and see what the police will do to you,” Mama had said when he’d crawled out, shivering and sobbing. Josephine had sat him in her lap and fed him cornbread and molasses, and look at him now.

  Now he pointed his finger at her and jeered with the others, calling crybaby and little girl and weakling. She balled her hands into fists, wanting to knock them all down, but there were too many of them and only one of her. The whistle of the noon train pierced the air like a cry. How could they treat her this way, her own friends? She’d make them sorry.

  “I’ll show you who’s a weakling!” she yelled, and took off running toward the tracks, the shouts of the boys like wind in her ears as she hurled herself through the dusty lots and across the cobbled streets in her bare feet. She ran, leaped, flew over shards of glass and broken boards with rusted nails, her legs propelling her into the air, as though the hand of God lifted her up and over all the danger and the pain, over the cutting gravel and the ditch full of stagnant, snake-infested water and the hot metal tracks, but when she arrived at the train yard, giddy and hardly even out of breath, the train had passed and now receded before her, its red caboose so small she could make it disappear with a wave of her hand.

  She heard the boys’ approaching shouts mingled with her own thumping heart as she stood in the silent yard, dreading their jeers when they found her standing there bewildered and lost. Then she heard a sigh, and the shudder and rumble of a starting engine, and the clank of a furnace door, and she saw that a train of loaded coal cars would be the next to leave. For one wild moment, she thought to lie down on the tracks so it would run her over, but the engineer would see her and call the cops, who would drag her home to be whipped. The humiliation would be worse than death. The boys’ shouts grew louder as they neared. She looked around for a place to hide.

  She ran over to a coal car, reached over her head to grasp the ladder running down the side, and hoisted herself up. By the time the boys arrived at the yard, she was climbing, up and up, another idea forming as she neared the top. She’d show them.

  “What’s she doing?” somebody yelled—Freckles! Here was her chance to win back his love.

  From the ladder’s top rung, she clambered into the bed of sun-warmed coal, which burned her feet. Puffs of gray and black dust arose as she stepped, gingerly now, fearing collapse into a hole that would suck her under the pile.

  She picked up a black chunk and, seeing the boys on the ground below, took aim and threw it at Carl, nearly hitting him on the head. “Look!” she cried, “Coal! As much as we want!”

  And she picked up two more pieces and threw them, then two more, sending the coal down as fast as she could while the boys scampered below, picking them up and stuffing them in their pockets and then into a sack someone had found on the ground. She laughed out loud. Who was the baby now? Who was the weakling? She felt like a queen, like the queen of this coal car, of this rail yard, of the whole city. To see their upturned faces and mouths open in admiration, in awe, to feel their eyes on her, to mesmerize them—that was strength.

  And then the car lurched, and she fell into the bin. As she slipped and slid in an effort to regain her footing, the train began to move. Click click, click
click, faster and faster. She stood to see the boys staring and shouting something she could not hear over the squeal of the slow-grinding wheels and the hiss of the steam rising in a black cloud from the engine. Richard’s mouth was a rictus of fear. Good. Let him worry. Maybe next time, he’d think twice before picking on his own sister.

  She threw one leg over the side of the car so her foot rested on the top rung of the ladder, and rode astraddle the car while the train flowed along in a lazy stream. With her free hand, she grabbed more coal, thinking how happy Mama and Daddy Arthur would be when she came home with it. Their home would be nice and warm this winter, thanks to her.

  More and more coal hit the ground as the boys ran alongside to keep up with the train, which was picking up speed. They were waving their arms now, Richard’s eyes so wide she could see their whites. She couldn’t hear them but she knew what they were saying: Jump, Tumpy! She waited just a hair longer, just enough to make Richard cry, she could see him wiping his eyes, thinking she was gone forever, and then she scrambled down, not looking, as Daddy Arthur had warned when they’d descended the Eads Bridge’s trestle to fish in the Mississippi. Never look down and never look back. He’d laughed like he’d made a clever joke, but Josephine knew it was good advice.

  She got to the bottom and, wanting to give them just a little bit more excitement, waited until she saw a patch of soft green grass before finally leaping. When she hit the ground, she rolled around and around until she stopped. She would have liked to lie for a moment to catch her breath, to luxuriate in the shade of the maple tree spreading its limbs overhead and listen to the boys bleating like lambs, but she didn’t want them to know she was winded so she popped up like a jumping jack and ran toward the tiny dots that they had become, laughing at them, stronger than they would ever be.

  When she reached them, she was out of breath and didn’t mind showing it, bending over with her hands on her knees, panting, allowing them to clap her on the back and exclaim over her courage and to call her a devil and an acrobat. Then Richard pushed a bag stuffed with coal at her, and she took it and came face-to-face with Freckles, whose eyes now glinted with admiration.

  She looked right back at him, smiling like she’d seen her mama do with Eddie Carson once in Aunt Jo’s laundry. “Love of my life,” Mama had said to him right in front of Josephine, but later, when Josephine asked if he really was her daddy, she wouldn’t respond. Freckles stepped forward, and briefly she thought he might kiss her on the lips the way Eddie had kissed her mother, but instead he knocked his fist against her upper arm.

  “That was something else,” he said.

  She and Richard went home, lugging the bag between them, a canvas strap in each of their hands. As they walked, their neighbors stared. “Where did you all get that coal? Did Santy Claus come early this year?” Josephine grinned, imagining her mother’s initial surprise followed by, as she heard the tale, amazement, then, finally, gratitude.

  When they got home, though, they found Mama sitting at the table pressing her forehead into her hands.

  “Look what we brought.” Josephine yanked the sack from Richard and lugged it across the threshold by herself, then dropped it at Mama’s feet the way a cat drops a mouse.

  “What in God’s name have you done to your dress?” Mama jumped up, her eyes wild.

  Josephine looked at her dress. Covered now in smears of black from the coal and green stains from her rolling in the grass, it hardly looked blue anymore. Worse, the skirt had a long tear on the left side.

  “You’ve ruined the only piece of clothing you’ve got,” her mother yelled, yanking her by the arm and stinging her bare legs with her hand. “I ought to beat the shit out of you.”

  “I brought coal!” Josephine danced and jerked to avoid her mother’s blows. “Enough to keep us warm for months!”

  “You brat! How could you do this to me, today of all days?” She grabbed a handful of Josephine’s hair and jerked it hard, making the girl scream in pain. “That good-for-nothing Arthur has gone to jail, and now my sorry-assed kids are stealing coal.”

  Choking on a sob, Josephine fled from the house, ignoring her mother’s commands to get back here right now, running as she did before, finding sweet release in the strength of her legs, the leap and soar, the feeling that, if she just jumped a little harder, she would go up and up, far from her mama’s hateful words, never to come down until she was ready, landing only where she wanted to, which was at Freckles’s house. She’d seen respect in his eyes today and needed to see that look again, to be reminded of the great thing she had done, coal-stained dress be damned.

  She found him, as she’d hoped, in the yard in front of his house, a neat brownstone in the white part of the Mill Creek neighborhood, playing marbles by himself. “Practicing so I can beat you next time,” he said as she sat across from him. She held out her hand for a shooter, but he suggested they go to the rail yard and play back slaps.

  Outside the train station, he opened his sack and spilled the marbles between two tracks, clearies and shotsies and aggies and snots, and handed her a shooter to bounce against a rail so it hit the marbles in the center. Josephine wasn’t very good at this game, but Freckles was, snickering with glee as he hit marble after marble and put them in his sack, while she got only a few.

  He tossed his shooter against the rail. It bounced and hit one of the clearies, a purple one, Josephine’s favorite, but she didn’t care, how could she begrudge him anything? She would give him all the marbles in the world if she had them, and as she turned to offer him the three in her hand she saw his eyes smiling at her, teasing, and she flung her arms around his bony shoulders and, ducking a little, pressed her lips to his, felt his warm breath on her mouth and nose and his heartbeat jump against her chest before he yelped, “Hey!” and scrambled to his feet to stare at her as if he’d never laid eyes on her before.

  “What the hell are you doing?” His voice squeaked, his face and neck now covered in red blotches.

  She had gone too far, she realized. How could she be such an idiot?

  “I did it for you,” she said, slowly standing, too, but not meeting his eyes, unable to bear his disgust.

  “Did what?” She looked and saw him lift his hand and wipe away the kiss, spitting for emphasis. He didn’t aim for her, but he might as well have spit in her face.

  “I jumped on that train for you,” she said, pleading now. She stepped toward him, her hands outstretched. “Carl was right: I do like you. I’d be your girlfriend if you wanted me to.”

  He reached out one of his hands toward her. She started to close her fingers around his, lifting her gaze—as he snatched his marbles from her palm and stuffed them into his sack, then stepped backward again, more rapidly now, like that train picking up speed before she’d jumped off.

  “You’re not my girlfriend,” he said. “And I’m not your boyfriend. Never.”

  “But why not?” she said. “We like each other, don’t we?”

  “Don’t put your nasty mouth on me. You’re a nigger,” he shouted, and ran away, faster than she’d ever seen him go, so fast even she couldn’t catch him.

  “Freckles, come back!” she wailed. “I forgot to tell you something. You were right! My daddy is a white man, do you hear? My daddy is white!”

  CHAPTER 3

  1915

  There would be no Christmas presents this year, Mama announced, not with Daddy and Josephine both out of work. The confusion on the children’s faces made Josephine cringe. What about Santa Claus? they wanted to know, and Mama had snapped that they couldn’t count on him, either. “We can’t afford cookies to leave under the tree for Santa. Hell, we can’t afford a tree.”

  Josephine saw the truth in an instant: Santa Claus was only a story, and Christmas was up to her.

  So she went out and scrounged presents from the rich white people’s garbage cans on Westmoreland Avenue and mended them with her grandmama’s help: a yellow shirt for her mother; a colorful necktie for Daddy A
rthur; a miniature train for Richard; doll babies with new yarn hair and sewn dresses for her sisters. She’d even wrapped up a couple of partially chewed steak bones for the puppies, so playful with their wagging whiplike tails and excited yaps that Mama had banished them to Grandmama’s house, saying she had more than she could handle in the hyperactive Josephine.

  Where did Josephine come by all that energy? Never sitting still, her nine-year-old self opening and closing kitchen-cupboard doors; kneeling on the floor for a solitary round of jacks; bumping on her rear end down the stairway; running back up two steps at a time to the rooftop; skittering back down to the apartment to bounce on the couch and twirl and reach for the ceiling with her outstretched fingers; grasping the hands of her youngest sister, Willie Mae, to swing her around in a dance; leaping into the kitchen to get some cornbread; running to the back to see if her other little sister, Margaret, had awakened; motoring back into the kitchen to dance in circles and sing “Jingle Bells” to Willie Mae, who laughed so hard when Josephine whinnied and crossed her eyes that crumbs fell out of her mouth and into her lap. Like a housefly zooming and careening. She must have inherited all that get-up-and-go from her daddy, whoever he was, because Mama complained all the time about being dog-tired, even though she often changed clothes after work and went out again with her friends in her red dress and flowered hat.

  Daddy Arthur used to get so mad about Mama’s gallivanting that he’d wait up for her at night to scream at her, but these days he did little more than snooze and lift the bottle to his lips, groaning as if that one act exerted him to the extent of his capabilities.

  Sit down, Mama would snap at Josephine, you’re wearing me out. Mama hated her constant motion, like a blur, she said, making her seasick, but she sure enjoyed the results: the chicken heads and feet brought home from the butcher, the nickels and dimes she earned doing jobs on Westmoreland Avenue, the sweet peaches and strawberries and fresh eggs begged, scavenged, or stolen from the Soulard Market. But all that wasn’t enough, it turned out, to keep Josephine with her family.