Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  Josephine gritted her teeth to think of having Florence as a rival here: Florence’s innocent beauty captured hearts. That sweet face, that valentine mouth. She didn’t cross eyes or dance naked; she didn’t need tricks to draw the crowds. (But then, neither did Josephine, as she kept insisting to M. Derval.) Flo had a voice like an angel and she danced like the devil himself, or like she’d made a deal with him to give her all that grace. Even while Josephine told herself that this was her town, that Blackbirds was just Lew Leslie’s attempt at a Shuffle Along knockoff, she wondered, too, what Parisians would think of her after they’d seen Florence perform. Would they say that Josephine had no training and no talent, that folks only loved her for her nichons and her cul?

  A part of her dreaded seeing the revue, but she had to go: Flo had reserved the VIP table for her on opening night. Her own second show finished at eleven thirty, and after removing her stage makeup, redoing her face, and changing clothes, she walked into the opulent, gold-and-marble lobby a half hour late. She didn’t mind waiting until intermission to take her seat: she’d make a little party with the twelve escorts in white tuxes she’d brought in a sort of tribute to Blackbirds and its chorus of men dancing with Flo. But Florence, it turned out, had held the curtain for her. Josephine felt bad, but what could she do except walk in and claim her seat so the show could begin? She swept in with her train of men, everyone eyeballing her, to the most ostentatious table in the room, right beside the stage and topped with a model-ship centerpiece alight with little bulbs. Later, she’d be criticized for trying to upstage her friend, people always being so quick to judge. She heard whistles and applause—this wasn’t her night, she wished they wouldn’t—but what else could she do but wave and throw kisses?

  To tell the truth, it did feel good to have some love coming her way tonight. Marcel, her lover since their race to Deauville, had declined to come to Blackbirds with her. In fact, he hardly went anywhere with her any more. He’d moved Josephine into a fancy apartment and spent every night with her, but he kept her apart from other aspects of his life. Tonight he’d gone to another of his many business dinners, which he never invited her to attend. Fool! Any man in this club would give his right arm and his left to be with her, but after only a few months together, Marcel took her for granted, or worse.

  “Josephine, épousez-moi!” a man’s voice cried out, making everyone laugh as one of her escorts took her ermine coat and another pulled out her chair, and a waiter poured champagne for them all. Her jitters melted away: Florence might be the Queen of Happiness and the Queen of Jazz, but Josephine Baker was still the Queen of Paris.

  When she’d settled in, two men in tuxedos walked onstage carrying a giant cake and Florence emerged from it, her sequined dress flickering like a lighted candle. Singing “Silver Rose” in her girlish voice, she gave a warm smile to Josephine, who lost herself in the show. Flo’s dancing mesmerized her—she moved with an easy grace that belied the complex routine, never missing a step, something Josephine had never been able to do. Dancing came as naturally as breathing to Josephine, and to follow someone else’s choreography felt stifling, like being bound in a corset.

  And damn, could that woman sing—about the hardships of being a Negro and a woman, songs that struck deep within and rang all the way to the ends of Josephine’s fingers and toes. “Though I’m of a darker hue, I have a heart the same as you, building fairy castles the same as all the white folks do.” Josephine looked at the table of frowning Americans beside her and wondered, did they understand any of this? But then the “Three Eddies” came out in corked-up faces and white lips, serving up darky songs with their wild tap dances, and sucked the meaning right out of the show. Josephine saw relief on the Americans’ faces; order had restored itself.

  After the show, she hurried backstage to visit her friend, wanting to get there before a bunch of people crowded in. On the way she saw Johnny Hudgins in a doorway, smiling like he expected a hug. Well, he could stand there all day. Last time she’d seen him, when he and Mildred, his wife, did Plantation Days with her in Atlantic City, Johnny had lorded it over her, telling her that if weren’t for him, she’d be a nobody. “You’ve stolen every gag I’ve ever done,” he claimed. As if he hadn’t borrowed everything in his act from the comics on the circuit they’d toured with in the States. Crossed eyes, pantomime, funny shuffle: she’d seen it all long before Johnny came along.

  “Hey, Jo, it’s good to see you,” he said as she approached.

  She craned her neck around him to peer into his empty dressing room. “Mildred here?”

  “She stayed in New York with the baby.” He opened his arms to her.

  “Flo!” Josephine called out, hurrying toward Florence’s dressing room. Mildred had a baby? Josephine panged. Mildred might have an asshole for a husband, but she also had a soft, warm child to hold and love. A memory hovered like a phantom at the edge of her mind, and a twinge of remorse for what might have been, but then the door at the end of the hall swung open and Flo gave a shout loud enough for the whole city to hear.

  “Look at you,” she said, her eyes shining as she spun Josephine around, “in that beautiful velvet dress, every bit the star.”

  “Not as big a star as you, Flo. Can’t nobody compare, and that’s a fact.”

  “It’s a good show, isn’t it?”

  “The best.” From down the hall, she heard voices. She’d given the security guard a hundred francs to hold people back, but they’d bust past him in a few minutes. “You touched my heart with those songs, Flo. I felt like you were speaking for me.”

  Flo started to answer but lifted a handkerchief to her mouth and succumbed to a powerful fit of coughing. Josephine waited for her to catch her breath, but she coughed and coughed, so deeply and violently that it seemed like her lungs themselves might come out. Josephine helped her onto the divan, where she sat and wheezed for a few minutes while Josephine poured a glass of water from the tap. While she composed herself, Josephine took in the room: a lone painting of two ballerinas at the bar; a dressing table with a wooden stool; a blue rug on the wood floor; a sink; an armchair, and the divan, both upholstered in yellow with blue fleur-de-lis. Pretty bare bones: Josephine would have insisted on more.

  “I was speaking for you, and for all colored women,” Flo said when she could. “For all Negroes, in fact. It’s too bad so few of them see our show. In the States, most of our people can’t afford a ticket to Broadway, if they could even get in.”

  “Whites are the ones who need to see it,” Josephine said. Except for the Three Eddies routine—they hardly needed to see that, but how could she criticize when she wore a grass skirt and wiggled her ass onstage, the white man’s wet dream of savage conquest? “Are you going to do those songs in the Ziegfeld Follies?”

  Flo shook her head. “I turned the Follies down.” Josephine couldn’t believe her ears. If she’d accepted, Florence would have been the first colored woman to appear in that popular Broadway revue.

  “I couldn’t do it, Josie. Get up in all those feathers and parade around like a white woman, so they could cut me down for not being one? They don’t even let Negroes attend their shows.”

  “You could have shown those crackers that you’re just as good.”

  “But I’m not—not at what they do. And I don’t want to be. I’d be miserable, trying to pretend. I want to make life better for our people, not worse. Doing Negro revues, like Shuffle Along and La Revue Nègre—that’s the best way to change people.”

  A knock on the door brought Josephine to her feet. Her time with Flo was over.

  “Come with me for a ride tonight?” Josephine said. “I’ve got a fancy car, a cabriolet upholstered in snakeskin. It’s a dream of snakeskin, an indigestion of snakeskin!” She forced a laugh as she helped Flo struggle up. Although only ten years older than Josephine, Flo looked, now, like she was pushing a hundred.

  But Florence didn’t feel up to a ride, so Josephine left alone, her mood pensive even while her
men poured champagne and laughed, spilling it on the exotic upholstery. “Every time you get in that thing I think of a snake swallowing you up,” Bricktop had once said. Tonight, as the car pulled up to Le Grand Duc, Josephine thought the opposite was true. Those Blackbirds songs and her talk with Flo tonight had touched something in her so profound that, getting out of the car, she felt like a snake shedding its skin and starting anew.

  No longer, she decided, would she be merely a clown who played a fool to make the white folks laugh, or only a nude dancer who excited them—all this making her no better, not really, than the Three Eddies with their blackface and darky songs. Things were going to change—she would change.

  Flo was wrong about one thing, though. Turning down the Ziegfeld Follies had been a mistake, not only for her own career, but for their people. So what if the audiences were whites-only? It wasn’t Negroes who needed to see Florence Mills perform, to hear her heart-wrenching songs, to witness for themselves that a colored woman could play the same part as a white woman. Flo couldn’t see it, but Josephine could. Maybe, then, it was up to Josephine to show the world what she wanted it to know: that skin color meant nothing, because people were the same inside, all wanting love.

  SHE RETURNED HOME at five in the morning, just when Marcel was waking up. Good: she had a bone to pick with him. He had another dinner tonight, and would receive an award, but when she’d asked to go, he’d said no. When she’d pouted, he said she was ungrateful, pointing out the apartment he’d remodeled for her. How could she complain about being left at home in such a beautiful place?

  Overlooking the Champs-Élysées, of marble and glass and elaborately frescoed ceilings with cherubs, grapevines, trumpets—it was a stunning apartment, Josephine had to admit. Technically speaking, the place belonged to Marcel, but he had given it to her, and had even installed a marble swimming pool surrounded by aquariums of colorful tropical fish.

  He’d thought Josephine loved to swim because she’d said, “Animals who live on the ground will never be as elegant as fishes.” In fact, Josephine had a fear of the water dating back to her childhood, when Daddy Arthur had thrown her into the Mississippi for a “swimming lesson” and she’d nearly drowned. Now, though, she’d hired a swimming coach with blond hair and blue eyes who’d held her by the waist as she practiced her strokes first in the water, and then on him. Marcel had guessed something was going on between them, and when she’d admitted it, he’d shrugged. “Frenchmen are not like American men,” he’d said, which made Josephine wonder if he loved her.

  But he’d let her decorate the apartment, and paid the bill for Paul Poiret’s tapestries, curtains, and rugs; for the telephones she had installed in the bedroom, living room, and bath; and for the shockingly expensive bed, an elaborately carved antique made hundreds of years ago for an Italian doge.

  “I thought we needed an extra sturdy bed,” she’d said, sly. But she was only half joking. Josephine had the energy of three people, but she’d been put to the test during those early, wild nights with Marcel—marathon nights of sex that seemed, now, like a distant memory.

  They’d seemed perfect for each other at first. As she’d driven his car to Deauville, shyness had tied her tongue, but he’d filled the car with talk about the Ballot automobile and its “superior engine” and “luxury design.” He’d compared the 2LS sports car they were in with the Renault M. Derval had rented for Josephine, a good-enough model but it could never endure the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in which he would push the 2LS to its limit for twenty-four hours. He had also raced in the Indy 500 and the Grand Prix, he’d added, glancing over for her reaction. Josephine had no idea what he was talking about but she tried to look impressed, although she could barely focus on the words coming out of that sensuous mouth curving so beautifully around his perfect smile.

  In Deauville, they’d first gone to a service station, where he’d given the attendant a fistful of bills to repair her car and drive it back to Paris. Then they’d gone to Le Normandy, their hotel, and taken a table in the tea garden blooming with roses and silks, women in chiffons and short dresses and long strands of pearls, their lovers in summer suits and hats of cream and dove gray, and a little jazz band in the front, trumpet and saxophone and clarinet and drums and a singer whose rich, lush voice Josephine might have envied had she not been too entranced by Marcel to notice much else.

  A waiter in a black tuxedo escorted them to a table in a far corner, at Marcel’s request, nullifying Josephine’s choice of seats near the stage where everyone would see her with the most eligible bachelor in France. “I do not care for the spotlight,” he said, a strange sentiment for a famous racer. But if he wanted her all to himself, would she argue? And when they’d been seated and she noticed the whispers and sidelong looks their way, she realized that he’d made the right choice. In the front, they’d be fair game for autograph-seekers and hangers-on, but people wouldn’t bother them back here. When people started to dance, she’d looked at him inquiringly, but he’d said he’d rather dance alone with her and took her up to his room.

  Later, spent on the mangled bedsheets, she’d suggested they go back to the tea garden, but he’d said, again, that he didn’t want the attention. Josephine thought about the people downstairs enjoying the music, the warm spring day, the delicious food, and the tea in those beautiful cups while she hid on the top floor like Rapunzel in the tower. When he’d pulled her back down to the mattress for more, though, she’d forgotten about wanting anything else. Now she understood that that day had been only the beginning. For months, Marcel had kept her from his family and friends like a secret sin.

  Hiding their affair, she realized, was why he’d installed her on the Champs-Élysées.

  When they saw each other, now, it was in this apartment: Marcel never took her to his place or out to dinner with the business partners whom he saw so frequently. She would find those gatherings boring, he’d claimed, the discussions banal: the women talked about household affairs and gossiped while the men held forth about cars, business, and football, and little else. It did sound terribly dull, she’d had to agree.

  Now, though, she’d be damned if she was going to miss his awards banquet, especially if he was excluding her for the reasons she suspected.

  He was reading the morning paper in his robe and drinking coffee when she got home the morning after Flo’s show. She joined him at the breakfast table and told him that she wanted to go with him that night. He looked at her as if she’d broached the subject again just to get on his nerves.

  “What is the matter, don’t I give you enough?” he said.

  She looked around at the cold marble, the glassy pool, the frowning maid picking up the droppings her pets had left behind. What was the matter? Why, in six months together, had she never met any of his friends? She knew the answer, but couldn’t even think the words. He could not simply add her at the last minute, he said, his table was full, would she want him to eject his mother or sister to make room for her?

  “You’ve got somebody else,” she said wildly. “A wife.” Her face grew hot when he laughed, but she continued. “You have another mistress, then.” She looked around as if to find this other woman, seeking any reason for his behavior besides the one whispering like the devil in her ear. He smiled as though she were a foolish child. He’d be patting her on the head at any minute. When did he have time for anyone else? he asked. He spent every night with her.

  “You’re ashamed to be seen with me, then.” Her voice snagged on the truth still locked in her throat. “Because I’m a performer.”

  “Do not be ridiculous. How can you say this, when the reason I must work so hard is to support your extravagant habits? No, your accusations do not make sense. You have come home in a mood and want to fight.”

  He yanked on his swim suit, grabbed his towel, and stomped out of the room to the pool that might as well be filled with her tears. Was it because she performed at the Folies-Bergère? At that theater, vedette, or star, had long bee
n synonymous with cocotte, or prostitute. The famous women whose photographs hung in the lobby—Liane de Pougy, Odette, Yvonne Printemps—had earned cash, jewels, cars, houses by sleeping with wealthy men and even kings. Some became royalty, themselves. If kings weren’t ashamed of these women, why should Marcel, a mere businessman’s son and racer who had not yet won a contest, want to keep her hidden away? The answer sprang to her tongue; she bit down so hard the taste of blood filled her mouth.

  There was no need to get carried away. He loved her, didn’t he? What more did she want? Why couldn’t she ever be satisfied?

  She crawled into bed and buried her head under the covers in case he came back in, not wanting him to see her cry. Unhappy thoughts whirled like a cyclone, wreaking havoc in her mind. No one had ever loved her, not her mama or her grandmother or even Billy Baker. No, Billy hadn’t loved her, not really, or he’d be in Paris now. She’d sent him a letter begging him to come, she missed his sweet smiles and gentle touch and the way they used to laugh together, they’d been like best friends and lovers at the same time. And he’d always supported anything she wanted to do, instead of pressuring her like his mama did to quit the theater and become “respectable.” He hadn’t liked it when she left for Paris, but she’d promised to return. She’d planned to—but how could she now? “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” When she’d written and asked him to join her here, though, he’d said no. Not unless there’s a job there for me. I don’t want to be a kept man. She’d cried on that day, too, reading his letter. Where was the love in such selfishness?

  Bobo, the little monkey Marcel had given her, pushed open the bedroom door and leaped onto the mattress, crawling under the covers to cuddle. The thump of his heartbeat against her chest, his arms around her neck: This was love. This was what she used to do when her mama cried, her mama whom she loved with all her heart even as she was slapping Josephine in the face and screaming that she was “good for nothing.”