Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  She came home from her grandmama’s house on Christmas Eve with a bound bedsheet tied around the presents and slung over her shoulder, just like the real Santa Claus, and topped the staircase to see Mama swaying outside their apartment, bottle in hand, staring at a piece of paper nailed to the front door.

  “I don’t have my eyeglasses. Tell me what this says.”

  Josephine’s reading was poor, but she’d known these words before learning to spell her own name: EVICTION NOTICE.

  Mama cursed and punched Josephine’s chest with the heel of her hand, nearly sending her tumbling down the stairs. “This is your fault for losing that good job.” Mama had tried to talk Mrs. Kaiser into giving Josephine another chance, but the school principal had asked about the bruises and welts on Josephine’s body and that was that.

  “Running to teacher,” her mama mocked. “I’ve got a mind to beat you myself. You going to tell on me, too?” Josephine stood her ground: her mama would have to catch her first, but she could hardly stand up. Mama lunged and slapped her face—the pop like a firing gun, the burn spreading across her cheek and neck, her ringing ears. She snatched at the pain, dropping the sack of presents to the floor, spilling the contents.

  “You laughing at me?” her mother said as Josephine knelt to gather the gifts. “You think I’m funny? One smack of this bottle upside your head, you’ll be laughing all the way to the grave.”

  Josephine knew better than to talk back. When her mother got herself into this state there was only one thing to do: get the hell out of her way.

  “I’ve got a mind to send you to a home for juvenile delinquents,” Mama slurred.

  Josephine quickly tied the sheet around the presents again, laid the sack over her shoulder, and, ducking under her mother’s upraised arm, stepped into the apartment.

  “Ho, ho, ho!” she boomed, as loudly as she could. “Merry Christmas!”

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Mama took her to the laundry to meet Mrs. Mason, a rich woman who wore silk from head to toe and didn’t mind spending her husband’s money. She didn’t blink an eye when Mama charged her twice as much for Josephine’s services as Mrs. Kaiser had paid.

  Mama had made Josephine take a bath and put on a jumper and turtleneck shirt and a new wool coat, only a little too large, all dropped off at the laundry last September and never picked up by their owner. Having something new to wear usually cheered Josephine, giving her a special feeling like it was her birthday. Today, though, she gained no pleasure from the mustard-colored shirt of thick, soft cotton or the brown jumper with shiny brass buttons and large front pockets. Her red coat couldn’t stop her shivering as she followed her mother, blinking back tears. Willie Mae cried and begged her not to go, but nothing could stop their mama when she’d set her mind on something. She and Josephine were just alike, which, Daddy Arthur said, might be why Mama was so hard on her.

  When Mama pushed Josephine forward to shake the woman’s hand, the blond, bright-eyed Mrs. Mason seemed like she might burst into tears. She looked like Josephine felt when she saw a stray kitten or puppy wandering around lost. “She’s so thin,” the woman said, not fooled by the layers of clothing, her blue eyes moist as she took in the legs like sticks protruding from beneath Josephine’s coat, her bony knees like doorknobs, her spreading feet pushing at the edges of her too-small shoes.

  Mrs. Mason reached for Josephine, who clung to her mother’s pink uniform before Mama pushed her into the woman’s grasp. But Mrs. Mason withdrew her hands and bent to bring herself face-to-face with the trembling Josephine, who didn’t want to sleep in the basement with the dog, who didn’t want to work from sunup to sundown, who didn’t want to be called “stupid nigger” and “pickaninny,” or be forced to kill her friend or have her hands thrust into a pot of boiling water. They made us slaves, her grandmama Elvira always said. That’s everything you need to know about white folks.

  “Tumpy, don’t you want to come home with me? Mr. Mason and I have always wanted a little girl.”

  Mrs. Mason’s voice reminded her of whipped cream. Josephine lifted her gaze to the woman’s face, looking for meanness.

  “Of course she wants to go,” Mama said, making Josephine want to throw her arms around her mother’s legs. “We’ve talked all about it, and she is excited. She’s just shy.”

  Mama’s hands tightened on her shoulders, gripping like she was about to shake her. Mrs. Mason made little clucks of sympathy.

  “Poor thing, she loves you so.” Her voice was full of doubt.

  “This is breaking my heart, too, Tumpy,” her mama said. “But you deserve a better life than we can give you here.”

  Josephine burst into tears. “I don’t want to go,” she said. “Mama, don’t make me go.”

  “I’ve got a nice house with a big bedroom, just for you, and lots of toys to play with. And new clothes and lots of good food. We’re having spaghetti and meatballs tonight.”

  Josephine’s mouth watered. At home, all they had was a ham bone and cornmeal mush.

  “Your favorite,” Mama said. “If I were you, I’d go.”

  “Just for one night,” Mrs. Mason said. “Come and try it. I’ll bring you home anytime you say.”

  Josephine looked up at her mama, whose lips were smiling but whose eyes were saying, You’d better not come back.

  “Please?” the woman said. Josephine wiped her eyes and shrugged. She might as well go where she was wanted. If things got bad, she would return home no matter what her mama said, and work twice as hard so she could stay.

  But she did not ask to go back after her first night with the Masons, or the second, or in the weeks that followed. She passed the time doing simple chores for the mistress: keeping the floors swept and the furniture dusted, cleaning the toilet and sink, and washing the dishes after dinner each night before going to sleep in her own bed with linen sheets and goose-down pillows—a far cry from the misery she’d endured at Mrs. Kaiser’s house.

  The Masons were nothing like that evil woman. They lived in a nicer house, in town, and they treated Josephine like a person, not an animal. Sometimes she pretended that this was her home and these, her real parents: the pretty Mrs. Mason, who smelled of roses, sitting with her at the dining room table to do Josephine’s homework, her lilting voice cooing, “You’re so smart”; Mr. Mason, with his balding head and fluffy brown mustache and pipe curling fragrant tobacco smoke as he held her in his lap in his big leather chair, calling her his “good girl.” She felt like purring, fat with the evening meal, sated with hamburger steak and whipped potatoes and gravy and all the milk she could drink, sluggish with food, warm and dreamy under the nice man’s stroking hands as he told her she was so pretty and soft that he just wanted to pet her all over. This must be what having a daddy was like. This was how it felt to be loved.

  “Tumpy helps so much around the house, and she keeps me company on all those evenings when Lyle has to work,” she heard the mistress say to a friend over coffee one day. “And it hardly costs us anything. I felt shocked by the low price her mother asked, to tell the truth. We might not have done this if we could have children of our own, but we’ll keep her now, even if we adopt. Nannies are so expensive!”

  Thinking of living there forever made Josephine a bit sad, until she went into her bedroom filled with toys and opened her closet and saw all the beautiful clothes, a different dress for every day of the week, dresses she chose, not the faded castoffs her mama brought home from the church charity box or from Aunt Jo’s laundry. The dresses the Masons gave her were new, fresh and crisp and clean and pulsing with color. When she modeled them for Mr. Mason, he shielded his eyes, which made her smile. She wanted to razzle and to dazzle—to be seen.

  For the first time she felt like she was Somebody, allowed by Mrs. Mason to decide when to do her chores, what to have for breakfast, when to do her homework—always with the mistress sitting next to her, and with cookies or cake provided by the round-faced cook, Geraldine, who fed her treats when she got home fro
m school, warm gingerbread with lemon sauce, chocolate pudding, strawberry shortcake, saying her job was to fatten Josephine up. Then Josephine would do her chores until suppertime, and, after washing the dishes, homework—with the rest of the night free to play on her own until bedtime.

  Josephine had always hated going to bed, but at the Masons’ house, she didn’t mind. She loved to be in her room with its pink bedspread and flowered wallpaper and ruffled curtains and shelves filled with stuffed animals and toys and books, and her big, soft, warm bed, like her mama’s lap, or even better, because wrapped in all those blankets and with those squishy pillows like clouds cushioning her dreams, she felt as safe and cozy as a caterpillar in its cocoon.

  A couple of months after she arrived, Mrs. Mason mentioned that she’d gone to the laundry that day.

  “Did you see my mama?” Hope blossomed like a flower on a wild vine. Had her mother asked about her? Maybe after two months, she missed Josephine and was sorry she’d sent her away.

  “I did,” Mrs. Mason said. “I saw your brother and sisters, too. They had so many questions about you! I could tell that they miss you a lot.

  “I wondered if you might like to go home for a visit,” Mrs. Mason said, setting a piece of chocolate cake in front of her. Josephine, suddenly afraid her mistress would snatch it away, crammed the whole piece into her mouth.

  Josephine remembered her mother’s glare. You’d better not come back. “Why?” she said when she’d washed the cake down with a swig of milk. “Have I done something wrong?”

  Mrs. Mason laughed. “Of course not. I told your mother they could come to visit any time. Your little sisters jumped around as if it were Christmas morning all over again. So don’t be surprised to see them at the door,” she said with a wink.

  That night, Josephine dreamed that the teddy bear she held tight was her mother, soft and warm and welcoming.

  The following Saturday, Josephine was coloring in the living room when someone rang the doorbell. “I wonder who that could be?” Mrs. Mason said, smiling, and, rising from her sewing chair, took Josephine’s hand in hers, telling her she had a surprise. Josephine hung back, but when the mistress reached for the door, she slipped under her arm and twisted the knob, and opened the door to her family.

  “Mama!” she cried. As Willie Mae and Margaret threw their arms around her, nearly knocking her down, and Richard stared like he’d never seen her before, her grandmama stepped forward to give her a hug. Josephine looked past her, but saw no one else on the porch.

  “Well, look at you.” Elvira clenched her corncob pipe between her teeth and looked Josephine up and down. “Fat as a little pig, and all dressed up. Are y’all going to church?” She frowned. “These folks ain’t Seventh-Day Adventists, I hope.”

  Mrs. Mason rushed forth to greet Elvira, who looked so fierce with her scowl and her long hair that Josephine wanted to slam the door in her face in hopes that she would go away. What would her mistress think, knowing that her grandmother was an Indian? But Mrs. Mason declared in a voice breathless and lilting how happy she was to meet Mrs. McDonald, and to see Tumpy’s brother and sisters again, would they please come in?

  The family filed in, Grandmama and Richard and Margaret and Willie Mae, who hung on Josephine as though it had been a year since they’d seen each other. To a little kid like Willie Mae, even a single day lasted forever, unspooling lazy and dreamy as a kite in a slow breeze, but her life was not carefree. In the months before Josephine had left home, Willie Mae had started to irk Daddy Arthur. “She’s intelligent,” Mama would say. But Daddy Arthur said he didn’t see what was so smart about asking questions all the time. Why do I have to brush my teeth? Why can’t I have money for candy when you’ve got some for hooch? Why can’t I go to live with Tumpy?

  “I’ve missed you so much,” Willie Mae said, kissing Josephine’s cheek again and again, so close that Josephine hardly noticed, at first, the black patch she wore over her left eye.

  “A dog scratched her eye out, your mama told me,” Elvira said. “Arthur said it was a splinter. He tried to get it out and popped her eyeball right out of the socket. So he said.” She grunted.

  “A splinter! In her eye! Oh, how terrible.” Mrs. Mason stared at Willie Mae. “How on earth did that happen?”

  Willie Mae dropped her gaze to the floor.

  “Don’t try to get her to tell,” Grandmama went on. “She won’t say a word. I beat her with the fly swatter, and she still wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Poor thing,” Mrs. Mason said. Heat rushed to Josephine’s face as she imagined what Mrs. Mason was thinking, for neither she nor Mr. Mason had raised their voices against her, not even when she’d dropped Mrs. Mason’s pretty china teapot and it shattered on the floor. Mrs. Mason had given her a broom and a dustpan to sweep up the mess, then showed her how to dry fragile things over the countertop or the table. “Accidents happen, Tumpy,” she’d said, “and it’s only a teapot. I know you’ll be more careful in the future.” Josephine still couldn’t figure out why the mistress hadn’t beaten her.

  In her bedroom, where she took her siblings to play while Elvira drank a glass of tea with the mistress, Josephine heard the real story about her sister’s eye. Drunk and resentful about having to watch Willie Mae while Mama worked, Daddy Arthur had flown into a rage when she’d cut her thumb on a can and awakened him with her crying. Telling her he’d “give her something to cry about,” he’d knocked her upside the head so hard her eyeball had popped out. Then he’d passed out on the couch. Mama came home for lunch later that day and carried Willie Mae to the hospital, running, but it had been too late to save her eye.

  “Richard and Margaret don’t know,” the baby whispered to Josephine. “Mama said not to tell.”

  Josephine lifted the black patch, saw the empty socket, and promised not to say a word. The last thing she’d want would be for the Masons to learn about the brutality in her home. Poor Willie Mae was just five years old.

  When Richard and Margaret started fighting over her teddy bear, Josephine led them down to the basement “to see the best thing of all.” She stood on a stool to light the lamps and hopped up onto the wooden stage Mr. Mason had made for her, with a red velvet curtain Mrs. Mason had hung for a backdrop. Then, she reached into one of several boxes on the floor—boxes full of Mr. and Mrs. Mason’s old clothes—pulled out a purple hat quivering with black feathers, arranged it on her head, and sang, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” which Mrs. Mason had taught her. Her sisters and brother sat in the old dining chairs lined up in front of the stage, entranced. Afterward, they clapped and stomped their feet, making Josephine wish she knew another song.

  “You ought to try out for the Booker T. Washington Theater,” Richard said. Daddy Arthur had taken the kids to a show there before Josephine came to live with the Masons. Josephine had laughed at the clowns, watched the acrobats with wonder, and loved the animals’ tricks, but when the ladies in spangled dresses and feathered hats came out to sing, she felt like she was home.

  “We went again last week, and it was even better,” Margaret said. Josephine panged. Would the Masons ever take her to the Booker T? White folks had theaters, too, but she knew colored people weren’t allowed.

  That night, she fell into a deep, exhausted sleep, bad dreams gathering in her head like thunderclouds: babies with eyeballs dangling from their sockets and roaring monsters bearing down on her. Startled awake, she sat up, her heart lurching against her chest. Poor Willie Mae! She was Daddy Arthur’s “sweet cake,” his little “fart blossom,” the “prettiest little girl in Saint Louis,” with her big, luminous eyes looking up at him like he was some kind of god. And now because of him she had only one eye, and would have to wear a patch for the rest of her life, “like a pirate,” Richard had teased, but the horrible violence of Willie Mae’s loss was still too frightening for laughter.

  Josephine lay back and stared into the dark. She thanked Jesus in her heart for sending her to the Masons’ to live, o
ut of harm’s way.

  And then, moving in the darkness, slowly taking form, a tall shape hovered beside her bed. She lay as still as she could, gripping the covers in both hands in case the apparition tried to snatch her up. Was it a burglar? Was it a ghost? She clutched her teddy bear and closed her eyes, feigning sleep, praying to God to save her as he once had done, waiting for the intruder to realize that it was in the wrong room, that there was nothing there to steal.

  But it took nothing, nor seemed interested in stealing, just stood beside her bed, moving its arm, was it scratching? The rustle of cloth turned frantic, and she heard its breaths coming in quick, sharp pants, and she peeked through her slit eyelids, but in the darkness she could see almost nothing, could only hear the movements and the breathing like a train building up steam. And then she heard a long sigh, and a moan, and a shaft of moonlight crossed the intruder’s face. Josephine opened her mouth, a name trapped in her throat, unable to utter a sound.

  The apparition turned and slipped out of the room, closing the door all the way instead of leaving it cracked open the way Mr. and Mrs. Mason always did. A strange odor—of sweat, mildew, and shame—filled Josephine’s nose. She stared into the darkness, every nerve on edge, listening for its return—it was a “he,” she’d seen that much—and praying to God that it wouldn’t come back.

  In the morning, hands trembling from fatigue, Josephine dropped Mrs. Mason’s breakfast plate as she cleared it from the table. She watched in horror as it broke on the tile floor. Mr. Mason, reading his newspaper, may have glanced her way as she picked up the pieces and swept up the rest, but she did not look at him. She was afraid to see his face.

  He came around to help her. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Is something the matter?”

  “I had a nightmare last night,” she said.