by Sherry Jones
She couldn’t believe her luck when he smiled. “Et voilà,” he said. He reached out for her but she pulled away, wary of the punch line—or the punch.
“Why should I be angry, amore? To make you my wife has been my desire, no? And this way, we avoid the expense of a wedding. Who needs a ceremony?”
Well, she did, but Josephine didn’t say so. She’d made this bed and now she would lie in it, no complaining. But Pepito must have read her mind, because he kissed her and said they would have a ceremony if she wanted one, and a reception, too, an enormous party, one that the entire city would talk about all year. He forgot to mention that Josephine’s money would pay for it, but that hardly mattered now, she supposed; if they were to really get married all her earnings from now on, lawsuit or not, would belong to Pepito: that was the French law. She rubbed the gooseflesh on her arms, reminding herself that none of this was real. Now that they were “married,” Pepito would have what he wanted, which was Josephine, and he’d stop throwing fits at her. She’d be his and he’d be hers, and, like Cinderella and Prince Charming, they’d live happily ever after.
At their press conference, Josephine used her acting skills to play the joyous bride as she maneuvered the discussion to her upcoming film.
“Your husband has been deeply involved in your career,” a reporter said. “Will he join you on the stage, as well?” This was a silly question, Pepito couldn’t dance or sing.
“No one gets to wear the banana skirt but me.” That made them laugh, good.
“But we are making a movie together,” she said. “The first film ever to star a Negro woman. It’s a comedy, set against a background of nobility.”
Would Pepito play a sheik, like Rudolph Valentino?
“He’s handsome enough, don’t you think? But he only has eyes for me, so he wouldn’t know what to do with those other women.”
Now it was time to pose for a few loving shots. “I’m just as happy as can be,” she said, gazing into Pepito’s eyes—for the cameras, yes, but also out of love.
“I didn’t have any idea that getting married would be so exciting,” she said as the shutters clicked. “I am just so thrilled.” At last, she had a family—or a husband, at least, not a mama’s boy like Billy but a real man. And who could tell? Doctors didn’t know everything. Maybe she would have a baby. Pepito hadn’t gotten her pregnant yet but he might. Or maybe someone would—a backup plan that she kept to herself.
“Now that you are my wife, you must be faithful to me,” he’d said to her last night. He was such a jealous man. Was that bad? “I love you, and if you love me you will do as I say.”
Warmth had spread like hot, sweet syrup through her veins. Who else had ever loved her? Not her mama, who’d resented her for being born; not her grandmother, who’d married her off at thirteen; not Willie Wells, who’d left after their first fight; not Billy, who was too much a baby to love like a man; not Marcel, who was ashamed to be seen with her. In all her life, no one had loved her except Pepito. For all his flaws, she had to give him that.
CHAPTER 18
1928
Josephine had come to expect big crowds wherever she went, but she cried out to see the line at her book event, hundreds of people snaking around the block and crowding Elsa Maxwell’s Acacia Gardens tea room and spilling into the lushly blooming garden in back. As a counterpoint to the foliage, she’d worn a dress, coat, and hat with a black-and-white chevron pattern—her new favorite outfit, very modern—for the outdoor signing. One by one her fans approached with copies of her memoir and some with her records, too, wanting her autograph. Some brought their children, whom Josephine embraced, kissing their soft cheeks and breathing in their fresh smells, lotion and talcum and chewing gum and candy. Using her new stamp with her name spelled the French way, Joséphine, she put her imprint on everything placed in front of her, including a man’s bald pate, Josephine Baker dolls, and a baby’s behind.
Sitting next to her was the writer, Marcel Sauvage, wearing a cheap suit but who cared with those doe eyes? Nobody asked for his autograph but he looked pretty pleased, anyway: thinking about all the money he was going to get, most likely. Josephine had agreed to split the royalties and didn’t begrudge him, as hard as he’d worked, interviewing her for hours on end and translating all her stories into French—well, not all of them. Once she started talking about the past, sometimes, she couldn’t stop, and would tell secrets she didn’t want him to write: the real story of her childhood, for instance, including her two marriages, Mr. Dad, and the child she’d gotten rid of—stories he’d agreed, against his inclination, to leave out of the book. She should let him write it all, he’d said, pointing out that they were thin on material.
Josephine refused. And she had warned him, hadn’t she? She’d laughed when Marcel had suggested he write her memoir. She was only twenty-two, she’d pointed out. “I ain’t done enough living to fill a book.” And a lot of what she had done and seen, she didn’t want to tell. So to fill in, she gave him recipes and beauty tips, and got Paul Colin to do some drawings. Even so, she’d been surprised to see all the pages in the finished book. What had he put in there? She couldn’t tell for sure because it was all in French.
A murmur arose, and a shout. A group pushed its way in, men on crutches and canes, one in a wheelchair. A skinny fellow with yellow teeth hollered right in her face. He wore a military uniform and his breath smelled of sweaty feet and cheese. Someone waved a crutch, nearly striking Marcel, who stood up and cried, “Assez!”—enough. They were veterans, he told Josephine, come to protest.
Turning toward the men, she said, “Pourquoi?”
“Pourquoi? Pourquoi?” The man in front looked like he might faint. He talked so fast Josephine couldn’t pick out a word. He reddened and his scar turned white and twisted like a worm. The man in the wheelchair, legs amputated at the knee, glared at her like his injuries were her fault.
A reporter from Le Monde came in, a blond boy with serious black eyes, scribbling notes in a pad. “How will you explain yourself to these men?” he said.
“Have I committed a crime? They’re the ones who should explain. Their rude behavior is appalling.”
The man in the wheelchair asked a question in a jeering tone. Josephine looked at Marcel, who had jammed his hands into his trouser pockets.
“He asks if he disgusts you,” the reporter said.
“Of course he doesn’t. What kind of question is that?”
“In your book, you say that you are disgusted by veterans who are disfigured or maimed.”
“That’s not true.” Behind him, a little girl stared and clutched a Josephine Baker doll by the hair, making Josephine’s head hurt.
The reporter picked up a copy of the memoir and read aloud, creating more of an uproar than before. Josephine wanted to cover her ears. She snatched the book from his hands and stared at the page.
“I never said this.” She rounded on Marcel. “What did you do?”
“They are your words.” She remembered the conversation differently. In Chez Joséphine one afternoon, she and Marcel had talked about the Great War, in which he had fought. An explosion had torn his leg nearly off, but the doctors had saved it. Marcel told her he would rather have died than live as a cripple, weak and pitiful or, worse, reviled.
“When I see a man like that, I cannot bear to look at him,” he’d said, “perhaps because it might have been me. Is that wrong?”
Josephine had curled her fingers around his hand—at last, they were touching!—and told him she understood. “Is it wrong? I don’t know. I feel the same way. When I see anything that’s crippled, I feel sick.” She hadn’t meant it, of course—she was just trying to make him feel better.
“What the hell did you write? I trusted you,” she muttered now.
“Josephine saw the proofs, and approved them,” Marcel told the reporter. “She even made changes, which I can show you.”
“They were all in French,” she cried. “I couldn’t read a
word.
“Monsieur, this is a mistake,” she said to the poor little wheelchair man. He must think she was a monster. “I’m not disgusted or reviled by you or any man who has given so much for our country. In fact, I’m grateful.” She kissed her fingertips, then touched them to his amputated knees. She walked to the tall man and kissed the scars on his face, and greeted each of the veterans in the same manner, kissing and touching their hurt places and saying desolée, sorry, until they smiled, some with tears in their eyes. They loved her still.
“I’ll sue your ass,” she said when she’d sat down beside Marcel again. “I’ll give your royalties to somebody who deserves them—to these fellas here.”
Marcel smiled as if they were exchanging pleasantries. “A lawsuit? Be my guest. I will gladly provide the notes from our interviews—all the notes. A jury will find them enlightening. And your public—” He chuckled. “Your public will find them fascinating.”
She was nearly late for her first show that evening, the book signing having lasted many hours, but what was she supposed to do, walk away from people who had waited in line to meet her? Marcel had grown impatient, telling her to stop talking, to just sign the books “or we will be here all night,” as if he had something else to do. She’d be damned before she’d disappoint her fans.
“I don’t let people down,” she’d said. “But you can leave if you want to.”
She wished he would. She could hardly stand to look at him, knowing what he’d done. Putting shit in her book that made her look bad. It didn’t even matter whether she’d said those things, he should have known better than to quote her.
He’d admired her honesty, he’d said. To hell with him.
At the Folies-Bergère that night, picketers carried signs denouncing her: JOSEPHINE BAKER HATES VETERANS. André let her off at the stage door in back. When she stepped inside, M. Derval rushed up, wild-eyed: she was due onstage in five minutes.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “my costume only takes one minute to put on.”
The theater was half empty, the same as when Florence’s Blackbirds had been in town. Josephine didn’t get much energy back from the sparse, half-hearted audience and so, when the show ended, she took a single curtain call and headed to her dressing room. It had been one hell of a day.
And it wasn’t over yet.
At her dressing room door, several members of the press waited.
“I’ve apologized to the veterans for my mistake,” she said. “I’m going to dance a benefit for them next month. I don’t know what else I can say.”
“We are not here to talk about that old news,” one of them said. “We want to ask about your so-called ‘marriage’ to M. Abatino and his supposed title. It seems, mademoiselle, that you are not the countess you claim to be.”
Pepito came up at just the right moment and steered her into her dressing room and locked the door behind them. “And so our trick is discovered,” he said. “You must tell everyone that we did it for the film.”
So Josephine had another press conference, in which she confessed that she and Pepito had not officially wed, but that to get publicity before the debut of her movie, La Sirène des Tropiques, they’d pretended to get married. “We got carried away,” she said—but none of the journalists seemed amused. They looked bored, in fact, and none of them asked questions. The story came out in all the newspapers, but no one in Paris seemed to mind their prank. From the States, though, she had some letters.
We adored you, Josephine Baker. We threw parties in the streets to celebrate the wedding of one of our own sisters to a count. You made us believe. But it was all a lie.
She’d made them believe what? That a colored woman could marry a nobleman, that a Negress could become a countess? Her success should inspire them, not her choice of husband. Look at her on the screen, the first Negro woman film star! That was important, wasn’t it? No matter that the movie was awful—so bad that, at the premiere the following month, she had to close her eyes.
“This is terrible,” she wanted to whisper, but to whom? Beside her, Pepito wore a big smile, like he’d never seen anything so good. Elsa Maxwell, sitting on her other side, kept patting her arm and saying, “Marvelous, darling, just marvelous.” When, on the screen, she fell into a flour bin, the theater erupted in laughter. Mistinguett had tears rolling down her cheeks. Dr. Prieur held his sides, which jiggled with mirth. Was Josephine the only one who thought it was crap? She felt like calling out, “The emperor has no clothes.”
Of course they couldn’t see the truth. They thought this shit was funny, the stupid jungle girl running around like she didn’t have a lick of sense. The French have their own kinds of prejudice, Florence had said. Josephine had thought herself so high and mighty because she’d gotten away from mammy songs and blackface, but how did this differ?
The entire movie was foolishness. She longed to share her thoughts with Flo, and wondered if she might be watching, too, from her seat in heaven. She’d died so young; it didn’t seem right. They’d dipped a plane at her funeral and released a thousand bluebirds, but no one could replace the happiness that left the world when Florence Mills died. How could Josephine not have seen it coming? She’d noticed that Flo seemed ill, but had never dreamed her friend had tuberculosis.
Florence’s final letter had opened Josephine’s eyes to some things. She’d read in the newspapers about Josephine’s humiliation on the night Charles Lindbergh had landed in Paris. Josephine had interrupted that night’s performance to announce that his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, had successfully made the first transatlantic flight. She’d cried as she’d cheered with the audience, proud for the first time to be American, proud, even, to be from Saint Louis, “Lucky Lindy’s” hometown. After the show, she’d gone to the celebration at L’Abbaye de Thélème and performed a dance in Lindy’s honor before taking her seat with Pepito. In the quiet moments between songs, when the murmur of the diners and celebrants rose and fell, a man’s voice—an American voice—punched through like a carnival barker’s.
“Where I come from, nigger women belong in the kitchen,” he said.
A hush fell over the room. Josephine, the only colored woman in the place, buried her nose in her menu, pretending she hadn’t heard while wanting to crawl under the table.
“You are in France, monsieur,” the waiter said. “Here, we treat all the races the same.”
“Well, I don’t like looking at ’em while I eat.” With all those chins, he could stand to miss a meal or two—but she glanced away before he caught her looking.
“I think I’ll get either the fish or duck,” she whispered to Pepito.
“You may depart, or stay, as you desire,” the waiter said. “But if you remain, you must respect our rules.” No longer proud to be American, Josephine wanted to kiss the feet of France. The cracker stood up so abruptly that he knocked over his chair and bumped Josephine’s seat as he barreled his way to the door, his wife running behind to catch up.
I felt so bad to think of you enduring that humiliation, Florence wrote. And I also wondered what you replied to him. I’m sure it was a humdinger.
She’d sat for a long time with that letter in her hand. Why had she let that ugly man insult her? She should have stood up for herself instead of cringing. She remembered Flo’s words on their last evening together: “Won’t nobody respect us if we don’t respect ourselves.”
Even Johnny Hudgins did a better job of fighting back. When Mildred had come to join him in Paris and the three of them had walked to Chez Joséphine one night, an American mistook the light-skinned Mildred for a white woman and called her a “nigger lover.” Johnny had punched the man, spilling blood and a piece of the man’s tooth on the sidewalk. A pair of gendarmes stepped in, but when Josephine and Mildred explained what had happened, they let Johnny go.
“I see what you mean, Jo, about Paris being a better place for us,” Johnny said when the cops had gone, wiping the sweat from his face. “If this had happened in t
he States, I’d be bound for the gallows.”
“Why did you stir up trouble, then?” she said, her voice trembling. He looked at her like he’d never seen her before.
“It wasn’t me causing the trouble,” he said. “What should I have done?”
“Ignore them,” Josephine said. “Who cares what they think?”
“That’s easy for you to say, living here,” Mildred chimed in. “But we deal with this shit all the time back home. And believe me, honey, ignoring it won’t make it go away.”
“Doing nothing makes it worse,” Johnny said. “We’ve got to help our people.”
Was she helping her people with this movie? Josephine watched herself roll her eyes and play the naif, an overgrown child, and wondered if she’d done more harm than good.
When the film ended, she wanted to tell the people to stop applauding, that the movie was trash—but instead, urged by Pepito, she took a bow. He was already working with producers on a new script for her, but there would be no deal if La Sirène des Tropiques didn’t do well—and she would never become a Hollywood star. The next movie would be better. She would play a dramatic role, and do it so well that people forgot her color.
“Très magnifique,” Pepito said as the house lights went up, and everyone around them agreed. Josephine had never felt so alone.