by Sherry Jones
An hour later she’d been rolling with Paul in his silk sheets, then taking a taxi at sunrise to Le Fouquet, her hotel, nearly falling asleep in the back seat. By the time she got to her room she was wide awake again, her aching head buzzing with memories of the night. Claude had looked right through her, as though he’d hadn’t murmured his love into her ear just the night before, their bodies naked and slick and intertwined, and whispered promises: I left her for you.
She’d wanted only to crawl into bed and forget the whole stupid mess—but then she’d decided, for some drunken reason, to put straightener in her hair and, while waiting to rinse it out, had fallen asleep. Lydia was right, she was paying the price—but for what? She’d committed so many sins since arriving in Paris, she couldn’t remember them all.
“Nobody wants to see a bald-headed gal on the stage, whether she’s wearing clothes or not,” she said, and Lydia laughed, thinking she was being funny, which made everything worse.
While Josephine wailed, Lydia called Mrs. Caroline, who called her beautician friend, André, “the best in Paris,” a small, fussy man with mirthful eyes who made a paper cap and lacquered it black and glued it to her head. Voilà!
SHE DANCED AND sang her way through La Revue Nègre to more applause than she’d ever heard in her life, all the way to the last dance, the Savage Dance, which would either make her famous or send her home to New York.
Joe Alex wriggled his eyebrows suggestively, obviously looking forward to their duet. Josephine peeked around the curtain for a look at the audience packing the rose-and-gold theater. The carved wooden chairs on the main floor were completely filled, although, while Maud warbled out her blues like somebody on the brink of death, she spotted several yawns and one white-haired man completely asleep. She heard throats clearing, even muted laughter in the front rows. The boxes on the second balcony, where the very rich sat, were mostly empty, their occupants having left the auditorium to smoke and drink on the mezzanine behind the velvet curtains, confirming M. Jacques-Charles’s prediction that Maud’s ballads would bore them. People milled about on the first and third balconies, too, but the boxes on the very top, for poorer folk, looked crammed to the gills, their inhabitants craning their necks to see as much of the stage as they could. Josephine, remembering when she and her family could afford only the cheapest seats at the Booker T, made sure to do all her dancing where those people could see it.
The evening had also featured acrobats; a celebrity impersonator; a strongman spinning on his head and using his feet to twirl a merry-go-round bearing six flying trapeze artists; and the revue: Sidney playing the sax, a solo so winsome it brought tears to Josephine’s eyes; Josephine and the chorus dancing the Charleston in grass skirts; Louis Douglas in blackface and a top hat holding a flower and singing “Columbine”; Josephine’s “I Want to Yodel,” her rolling her eyes and cracking her voice to make them laugh. How would they respond when she reappeared, naked and spread-eagled, on Joe Alex’s shoulders?
Maud’s song ended to polite applause. She waddled backstage muttering and made a beeline to the dressing room, where she’d hid a bottle under a pile of wigs. Who wouldn’t want a slug after that dismal performance? Now La Danse de Sauvage would wake them up again—but how could she go through with it? The Lord would strike her dead on the stage. She turned to flee, but Joe Alex had come up behind and put his arm around her, leaving her no escape.
The drums began their hypnotic beat, drowning out her frantic heart’s pounding. Joe, wearing little besides feathers himself, lifted her up and over his shoulders. He turned her upside down, and she draped herself over him, the back of her head resting on his chest, bare breasts facing the audience, her legs split apart. He lumbered onto the stage, carrying his captive slung across his shoulders. The breath of the gasping audience shot over her skin. She smelled heat, smoke, perfume, and, underneath it all, sex.
Using all her strength, she held herself in position as Joe rolled her off his shoulders and over his head, her legs wrapping his neck, her crotch now squarely in his face. In the audience, a woman screamed. Joe rolled her down and placed her on her feet, and she saw people scurrying toward the exits, fur-draped women dragging their reluctant husbands up the aisles and out the doors as the men craned their necks around for another look. Was this the riot Mrs. Caroline had so gleefully predicted?
The slow, suspenseful beat of the drum summoned her back to the performance. She crouched, parting her legs. The trombone uttered a long blast and the music erupted in a frenzy. Josephine forgot, then, that she stood all but naked before hundreds of staring eyes, forgot her denuded scalp and the paper cap clinging tenuously to the few tendrils of hair she had left, forgot the treacherous Claude at the piano watching her slither and slide like a charmed serpent and lusting for her, or so she might hope if he were anywhere near her thoughts, but she had forgotten all except the music. It possessed her like a seizure, or a drug; it convulsed and flung her body.
She succumbed to the orchestra, the drums pounding her blood, stomping her feet, swinging her arms, the slide of Sidney’s saxophone like a long sweet kiss over her skin, Claude’s fingers on the keys playing her, too, more deftly than he’d ever done in bed, rolling her over, flailing her arms, oblivious, panting, laughing, dancing, free. And when it had ended, the final notes still tinkling the glass on the great chandelier illuminating the hall, she came back into herself and saw that everyone had stood, the audience bringing their hands together in a great crash of noise, cheering and shouting, raising their arms to her, their eyes shining, their mouths smiling.
Encore, the audience members shouted, tossing flowers at her, cheers surging and resurging like a wave that builds and builds and never crests.
“Thank you,” she cried, and blew a kiss. “I love you all.” And the wave crested again; it could carry her up to heaven, it felt like, but as she lifted her arms, the golden curtain dropped to the floor, and she found herself looking at Joe Alex, in whose sullen eyes she saw the bow they should have taken together.
Approaching her, M. Jacques-Charles tried to look stern, although the pleasure of success softened his face.
Did Josephine not see him gesturing? he asked. Had he not signaled for the curtain to fall she might have remained out there all night, capturing accolades until the audience fainted from exhaustion.
“Yes, sir,” Josephine said. Meaning, yes, she would have. All night long.
CHAPTER 10
After the show, the theater crew set up a dinner party on the stage, sliding tables together end to end. Josephine and Claude and Sidney and Evelyn and Mildred and everybody else, all the colored singers and dancers and musicians and clowns, sat blinking their eyes at one another, incredulous, this the first time any of them had shared a table with white people.
Where had she learned to dance like that? asked M. Paul Derval, manager of the Folies-Bergère theater, a gray-haired man with a plump belly whose lips seemed always about to smile.
“You have no inhibition,” he said. “You are wild, a—how do you say?—a true force of nature, from nature. When you dance, the audience sees one with the grace of a panther and the mischief of a monkey.”
Josephine rankled: she knew what it meant when a white person called her monkey. But he went on: She seemed to have no bones. Was she double jointed? Where had she learned to dance that way?
She told him of her girlhood, the scene every Saturday outside the Rosebud Café, where those who couldn’t pay to get in danced on the sidewalk and in the street. The Chestnut Valley was Josephine’s church, music halls and brothels and taverns, music rolling out of every window, horns and banjos and fiddles and washboards and soup pots, music coming from snapping fingers and clicking tongues and stamping feet and voices singing, shouting, whistling, whooping, filling the air with melody and syncopated rhythms and happiness and jazz.
“Where was this? In New Orleans?” he said.
She mentioned Saint Louis, and the monsieur’s face went blank. “Mi
ssouri,” she added, and he drew his eyebrows together. These names meant nothing to the French, he told her. “It would be better if you said you are from New Orleans.”
“My mama taught me not to lie,” she said.
“When one is a performer, one trades in illusion.”
“Dancing in nothing but a feather felt pretty real to me.”
“Do you think we came here tonight in a search for truth?” he said. “After the war, we have become weary of reality. We do not know anymore what is true. Or, whatever it may be, we long to escape from it. If you want to be a star, mademoiselle”—he tapped his soup spoon against her bowl, as if to command her attention—“do not give us truth. Give us fantasy.”
“I was raised in New Orleans, yes, by a . . . Creole mama who was a blues singer and a daddy from . . . Spain who danced and played the guitar,” she said. “He taught me to dance when I was little, and took me onstage with him sometimes. I loved him so much.” She brushed away an imaginary tear.
M. Derval leaned toward her, his shrewd dark eyes bright as a bird’s. “What happened to him?”
“He died,” she blurted. “He was . . . killed, the victim of a, a . . . love triangle. The jealous drummer shot him right before my eyes.” Her voice faltered—she was really getting choked up.
“The musicians of New Orleans took care of us. My mother had to get a job as a washerwoman, so they took me under their wing. I grew up dancing to their songs, and I’ve danced ever since in my daddy’s memory. Every dance I perform is really for him.” She lowered her eyes. “Except for today. That dance, I did for Paris.”
“Voilà.” M. Derval clapped his hands together. “Parfait.”
Josephine laughed. With one phony story, she’d erased her past and created a new one. Just like that!
A waiter filled their glasses with champagne, and M. Jacques-Charles stood to propose a toast. “To La Revue Nègre, the new Paris sensation.” But before the glasses could clink, M. Derval leaped to his feet and added, “And to the biggest scandal of them all, our city’s new nudiste, Josephine Baker.”
Josephine took a sip of the golden liquid, which tasted like magic bursting on her tongue. This “being famous” stuff was already a lot more fun than she’d imagined.
WHEN SHE WALKED into Le Rat Mort a few nights later, everything stopped: the drunken writer’s crude joke, told to a tableful of drunken writers; a railroad baron’s hand sliding up his mistress’s thigh in a private booth; the sexy dance-floor tango between a tuxedo-wearing woman and her buxom blond partner; the tug of the cork from the Prince of Wales’s bottle of champagne. Even the music took a breath at the sight of Josephine blazing through the door, her hand in the crook of Paul Colin’s arm, her pink dress shimmying with every step like a candle flame, as though she were on fire.
“Josephine!” the sexy American writer Hemingway called out. “Are you going to dance for us tonight?”
“You know it, sugar lips, I’ll be dancing all over you by the time the night is through.”
She shrugged off her fur stole, and the writer caught it, to her surprise as well as Joe Alex’s, who’d been reaching for it—neither the first nor the last time he’d be disappointed tonight. Now, here came the prince, his eyes eager—not for her, but for Claude, who looked like handsome was made for him in his white tux, his skin like milk and honey. Mabel cut her eyes at Josephine and clutched her husband’s arm like he might fly away, which he might, given how he smiled back at the prince. But he’d never leave Mabel, he was too much of a coward to be on his own. Not Josephine—she embraced life!
She released Paul’s arm to stride ahead of the La Revue Nègre musicians and dancers walking into the club, spreading her arms wide to accept her acclaim, basking in the sound of her name echoing through the room. On the floor, she lifted her skirt to free her legs, generating whistles and catcalls. “Get a load of those gams,” a white man shouted. She wiggled her behind and a drum roll sounded, and cheers filled the room—cheers for her, a poor Negro kid with buck teeth and knobby knees! Too dark, too ugly. Not for Paris, she wasn’t.
The house musicians set down their instruments and left the floor, making room for Sidney and Claude, who, with Josephine, had sent the house into an uproar the night before. She wasn’t waiting for them, though, but danced to the song playing in her head while Claude headed for the piano, Sidney to the saxophone, and the prince to the drums. They launched into the song she was thinking of, all one with her, the players and the played. The music moved her, her muscles limbered up from tonight’s show. It had been standing-room-only again, Sidney’s horn drawing wild applause, Louis’s song of longing evoking tears, the Savage Dance sending her audiences into paroxysms of lust and fear. People running for the door like she was the devil. Now, in the club, she bared her teeth for them and rolled her eyes like a demon, and danced. And when they were finished, Sidney’s notes rolling across the room like a sigh, she lifted her arms and they cheered, and she bowed all the way down to the floor and rose again, blowing kisses, calling, Merci! Merci beaucoup!
She stepped into the crowd again, cutting like a shark through the white-faced sea. “Bonsoir, monsieur, you haven’t seen our show yet? Yes, it is sold out for two weeks but I will put your name on the list for front-row seats. Bring your wife! Oh, you have no wife? You want to marry me? Thank you for the invitation, I will consider it, maybe, perhaps, peut-être.”
Peut-être had become her favorite word. She’d said it tonight to the blond youth who had sat in the front row at every performance. A pretty boy with blue eyes, he’d waited outside for her, stood on the edge of the crush of fans, and pouted his pretty lips until she’d noticed him, hers for the taking like a sweet peach dangling from a tree, never any question in her mind about whether she ought to pluck it. Tomorrow, she said, peut-être.
Now, as she moved through the club among the tables and the cloistered, curtained booths, collecting accolades, grasping hands—it still astonished her that these white folks wanted to touch her—Josephine scanned the crowd for Paul Colin, her escort tonight. Where had he gone? Although surrounded by adoring faces, she’d never felt so alone. Who among all these people was her friend, wanting nothing from her except herself? There was Sidney, but he’d taken to the French bottle like a fish deprived of water, and his sloppy drunkenness irritated her as a terrible waste. He was sitting with Claude and Mabel and their bunch, anyway. They wouldn’t welcome her, and good riddance: she’d rather have her tongue cut out than speak with any of them.
But why fuss over a man she couldn’t have? She ought to enjoy what was, now, hers—what she had wanted all her life. We love you, magnifique, belle, superb! Josephine wished she could fill a bathtub with that praise and immerse herself; roll in a field of it, covering herself with the fragrance; pour it down her throat and into her belly, slaking her hunger at last. Peut-être.
She spied her escort at the table with M. Derval, the manager of the Folies-Bergère theater whom she’d met at La Revue Nègre’s opening night dinner. She’d hoped to stir his desire, for to sleep with one of the most important people in Paris could only work to her advantage—but he’d spoken only of the theater and show business. Now the linger of his gaze on her chest made her smile. It was only a matter of time.
“I see that you have brought a friend,” he said, touching his throat. Josephine realized what he’d been staring at: the little snake she had curled about her neck, which, now that she had stopped dancing, was sleeping against her warm skin. Had M. Derval even noticed the dangerously low neckline, nearly to her navel, of her new Paul Poiret gown? The designer had brought it himself to her room today. It was a beautiful creation, covered in fringe, light pink at the top and deepening as it cascaded down to a rich rose.
“I heard he’s all washed up,” the jealous Maud de Forrest had said when M. Poiret had gone. “Now he wants to ride your coattails back to the promised land of fame.” Josephine did not tell Maud that she had, in fact, designed this dress. Mrs. Ca
roline had taken her to an international exposition on the Seine where M. Poiret’s designs had filled three barges. He’d strutted like an overstuffed peacock in his shiny silver vest and brightly checked necktie and waved his ringed hands as he’d exulted over her, “begging,” she could have told Maud, “to design my clothes.” But as his models trotted out one outfit after another—loose harem pants, a kimono-style dress that reminded her of potato sacks—she’d nearly put a kink in her neck from shaking it so many times before asking for a pencil and sketching this design. He hadn’t liked it, she could tell, it was too much like the flapper clothes he scorned, but he’d rearranged his expression to delight and said he adored it: he would add it to his Spring 1926 collection. She’d held her tongue about that to Maud, not wanting to increase her jealousy now that she was Josephine’s roommate. The disapproving Lydia had found someone “more quiet” to room with—Maud’s roommate—and moved out. Maud couldn’t afford to live alone and spend a fortune on booze, too, and Josephine couldn’t sleep in an empty room, so she forced herself to be nice. She’d do anything to avoid ghosts, even suck up to Maud.
“I am happy you could join us,” M. Derval said as Paul Colin left the table, his sketchbook already open to draw the Fitzgerald woman, who turned her head this way and that and slurred, “Which is my good side? My left? I always preferred the right, it’s more symmetrical.” She knew he’d walked away because M. Derval had shifted his focus to her. Paul didn’t like to be ignored. He would be petulant for the rest of the evening. Why did she put up with that crap? Few things were worse than a pouting Frenchman! “I made you famous,” he’d said to her—what a load of bull. She didn’t owe him a damned thing. His posters might have drawn people to her shows at first, but Josephine’s endless days and nights of work kept them coming back. Does the candle owe its flame to the one who lit it, or to the fine wax that forms it?