by Sherry Jones
She didn’t know which made her happier, Jacques’s embrace or the letter he bought from de Gaulle commending her for her “valorous service” and saying he would like to thank her in person someday. Jacques had another surprise for her, too: he had been authorized to give her the rank of sublieutenant in the Women’s Auxiliary of the Free French Air Force. He had even brought her a uniform, which she wore even though it hung like a sack on her thin frame. She would fill it out soon, Jacques said between kisses, and of that she had no doubt.
“Let’s eat,” she said.
All the good meals in the world, though, couldn’t undo the damage two weeks of hunger and cold had caused. Josephine could not stop coughing. She coughed in the night, bouts that wracked her like seizures. Mornings, she sputtered coffee on her peignoir. She hacked during warm-ups for La Créole—but never during a performance, thank goodness. She coughed in the office of the doctor who diagnosed her with pneumonia and wrote a letter releasing her from her contract with the Opéra Municipal de Marseille just in time to leave for Morocco—narrowly escaping the invading Germans who did not respect armistices, as Pétain should have known.
CHAPTER 27
1941, Morocco
“You are invincible,” Jacques said as they walked through the Pasha Thami el-Glaoui’s gardens in Tangier, Morocco, the trees heavy with figs and dates, lilies exuding an almost sexual scent, colorful parakeets flitting among the foliage. “I think you can talk any man into giving you anything you want.”
“If that were true, I’d be married with a houseful of kids,” she said.
“How, for instance, did you convince your pasha to let us live in his palace? Didn’t you sleep with him before I came? Does he know that we are lovers?”
“Thami isn’t the jealous type,” Josephine said, watching him from the corner of her eye to see if he was jealous.
“A man with thirty wives cannot afford to be, I suppose.”
“Neither can a man with one wife.”
“I feel more jealous of your abilities than your affections,” he said. “How do you do it? And now you have gotten news for de Gaulle that no one else could.”
Josephine smiled, knowing she had done something important. The latest information she had conveyed was critical to the mission: The deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, traveling to Scotland to “negotiate” peace with the Brits, was going to demand the UK’s surrender. Meanwhile, the Germans were slowing their push into North Africa. Hitler now had his eye on Russia.
“I wish I felt invincible,” she said. They’d settled in Tangier to help her recover from pneumonia. Her cough had finally gone away, but her energy had not returned. Was the baby why? She’d discovered that she was pregnant but hadn’t told Jacques; she wasn’t sure whether he or Thami was the father. “My spirit is willing, but my body feels weak.”
“You exert yourself too much on these missions. You drive yourself like a slave.”
“I drive myself to avoid slavery. Oh!” The pain hit like a hot knife, doubling her over, toppling her to the ground where she writhed, the baby, not again, each stab more brutal than the last, Jacques’s voice in the distance crying out for help, the world pulling in, growing smaller, concentrated now in one throbbing spot, the place where her child should be growing, and then, mercy, the thoughts stopped coming and the light disappeared, and so did the pain.
BEFORE SHE OPENED her eyes, she heard a woman’s voice humming a tune. Hands lifted Josephine’s head, and a damp cloth wiped the back of her neck. She sighed with pleasure and heard a gasp, and awakened to bright black eyes on an oval face looking at her as if she had just done something wonderful.
The woman called out in Arabic, running through a door. Josephine eyed the IV drip attached to her arm and the metal rail on the side of her bed, and knew she was in a hospital. A man wearing a stethoscope walked in, his face one big smile.
“Voilà! She has risen.”
“Where am I?” Her voice creaked like a rusty hinge, as though it hadn’t been used in years. She was in a clinic in Casablanca, he told her. How long had she been here? When she’d fainted in Tangier the weather was hot and it was still hot, the windows to her room open to welcome the steaming breath of morning. Already, the nurse was closing things up, pulling tight the curtains in effort to seal out the heat. Six weeks, the doctor said when she asked. June when she’d fallen; now, it was August.
The door swung open, and Jacques burst in and fell to his knees beside the bed. “My love, you have come back to us, thank God, thank God.”
“You’re here,” she said. My love!
“He never left.” The nurse’s tender look said she’d fallen for Jacques, too. “He slept on this cot every night, waiting for you to revive—praying for it, madame.”
“You nearly died,” he said. “First the surgery, and then an infection. The pneumonia had poisoned your blood.”
Surgery. She slid her hand down her torso, felt a ridge of scar tissue bisecting her belly. No more bikinis, and then she laughed at the crazy thought.
“My baby,” she said, remembering.
“Yes, you were pregnant, but the fetus did not survive. I am sorry, Josephine.”
“It was a blessing,” the doctor said. “Your infected blood—the child would have had mental defects.”
Her next question felt too heavy to ask, so she tried something light instead.
“Come on in, then, Foxy, and let’s try again.”
Jacques’s expression crumpled, and tears filled his eyes. “Josephine, I don’t know how to tell you this. You—you cannot try again for a child.”
“That old song? Fox, you know I’ve heard it before. But I’ll never give up.” She brushed a tear from his cheek. “We’ll have the most beautiful baby ever made.”
“No, my love. That cannot be.” My love—how often she had longed to hear the words. Jacques loved her at last—but where was her joy? She shifted her gaze to the closed windows behind him as the doctor told her he had performed a hysterectomy.
“The infection was very severe,” the doctor said.
“Who gave you permission?” she shouted. Her accusing stare bounced about the room, looking for a target. “Who said it was okay to mutilate me?”
“I signed the form, Josephine.” Jacques reached for her hand. “It was the only way to save your life.”
“This is true,” the doctor said.
“You wasted your time, then.” She jerked her hand out of Jacques’s clawing grasp and turned her back on all three of them. “If I can’t have babies, I don’t want to live.”
Please, dear Lord, just let me die. The one thing she’d ever wanted in this world she couldn’t have. Why? The wail of an infant screeched down the hall and landed in her ear. Somebody else’s, always somebody else’s. She’d had her chance back in Saint Louis and blown it, and maybe the Lord was punishing her now, but what should she have done, instead? Had a kid at thirteen to end up like her mama scrubbing clothes with one hand and holding a baby to her teat with the other, then go home to a man who’d beat them both at the end of the day?
God had bigger things in mind for her, he’d told her so in that vision, offered her a shining crown like she was the queen of something, and he wasn’t talking about some low-rent hole-in-the-wall with the first drunk who’d pay the bills in exchange for nightly nooky. She became a big star, just as the Lord had promised, the Queen of Negro Women, first to dance nude on the Paris stage, first to lead in a movie, she’d even starred in an opera, and all that fame had given her the cover she needed to help defeat the most evil man ever born.
She had to remind herself of this every day as she lay in that bed, wishing for a knife to slit her wrists. She’d become a part of something vast and important, bigger than herself. They were going to bring down Hitler, and Mussolini, too, he’d turned out to be a horrible man, and that murderer Stalin, if the lunatics didn’t kill each other first. What she’d done in Paris, in Spain, in Marseille, in Portugal—it was all God’
s work, fighting the devil.
Here, too, she gave cover to the spies who met with Jacques around her bed, murmuring plans and trading notes and, in between, telling jokes with her so that anyone who overheard would think it was just a regular hospital visit. A celebrity like her could get away with having six men in her room. Never mind that she looked like death warmed over, never mind the five surgeries she’d had, sick after sick after sick upon sick, opened up so many times that, she joked, they ought to put a zipper in her stomach.
She put on her bravest face even at night, when the demons of the past tortured her with memories of her visit to a tarpaper shack in the Mississippi River bottom. She was thirteen years old but feeling like a tiny girl as the greasy-haired man snatched with grubby fingers the bills she’d stolen from Mr. Dad and yanked her into the filthy room with its dirt floor and smell of formaldehyde so strong she had to cover her nose to breathe. He’d told her to take off all her clothes below the waist, not even giving her a towel to wrap around herself as she climbed onto a metal table and lay down. His fingers prodded her privates and she flinched.
“What’s the matter, honey? Obviously I ain’t the first one down here,” he said, laughing as he inserted something sharp and cold. She cried out, the pain unlike anything before, a jabbing, jeering ache that made her feel like she was nothing, less than nothing, just a balled-up wad of sorrow thrown in the gutter for rats to chew on, for this man to hurt, snickering, while she lay helpless with her feet up and her knees spread and his fingers and eyes and judgment stabbing her like dirty knives. When he removed his hands, they were covered in blood. He opened a drawer and pulled out a wad of gauze and pushed it inside her like Mrs. Kaiser stuffing poor Tiny Tim for Thanksgiving dinner.
“Now, you stay out of trouble, hear? And keep your legs together from now on.” She’d stumbled home and crawled into bed, feverish, doubled over from cramping, chills like fingers of ice scraping her insides. For days, she’d thought she might die. Why didn’t you take me then, Lord? Why?
She spent two years in the Casablanca clinic asking the same question—Why?—off and on. Up and out only to get sick again and have to return, again and again and again. Jacques stayed with her, but she knew it was killing him to do so while, outside, the war raged on. He bore two years’ witness to the foulness and betrayals of her body, two years of listening to her cry and groan and curse and snarl, two years of praying and swabbing and hand-holding and, when possible, lying next to her and pulling her close.
He knew her better, now, than any man ever had, better than all her husbands put together, better even than her own mama had known her. If not for Jacques, she would have died, or if not for God, who refused to let her go. Obviously, the Lord had in mind something more for her, something that didn’t involve babies.
Then Jacques told her the latest bad news: the Germans had captured La Besnerais, one of the Maquis, and sent him to Dachau after kicking out his teeth. At the news, Josephine stopped begging God to let her die, and started thanking him for letting her live. So many of their gang had died or disappeared, François gunned down on a boat to London, La Besnerais killed in Dachau, Trotobas ambushed in his lover’s home and murdered in a bloody gunfight. Had God sickened her for her own good, and for Jacques’s, too?
The Lord worked in mysterious ways. Maybe he still had things for her to do. He must, since he wouldn’t let her die. Why did this surprise her? She’d always known she was born to achieve something great. She’d always thought that, someday, she would change the world.
AND THEN, IN November—nearly one and a half years since she’d fallen in that courtyard—Josephine lay on her pillow, windows open to the breeze, listening. In a chair beside her, Jacques rustled the newspaper.
“Hush,” Josephine said. “I hear something.” The nurse strode in, toward the windows, saying the breeze was too strong, that Josephine must not catch a chill.
Shhh, she and Jacques said in unison. Their heads cocked. Outside: a distant rumble, like a low moan. Doors slamming, people crying out. The smell of dust flew into the room, followed by cheers.
“Here it comes,” Josephine said, and lifted herself up as if in a dream and floated to the window. Jacques leapt up to help her but she stood on her own, gripping the railing, watching thousands upon thousands of men in uniform, dripping wet and dirty, smiling, marching through the middle of Casablanca behind the red, white, and blue flag of the United States of America.
“Praise God, we are free,” Josephine said. She staggered across the room to the wardrobe, past the nurse’s outstretched arms.
“Madame, what are you doing?” The nurse rushed after her, grasping her shoulders, but Josephine shrugged her off.
“I’ve got to go and greet them. Help me get dressed.”
“You are not well, madame. You need your rest.”
She pulled her Free French Air Force uniform from the rack, pressed it to her wild-beating heart. Free.
“Rest? Did you see the looks on those boys’ faces? They’ve had hard days and nights of fighting to get here. And now they’ve arrived, and they’re going to need cheering up. I’ve got to go and greet them. Jacques, come and help me get into this. I’ve got to go.”
And now the show nears its end, her life wrapped neatly and colorfully like a present and presented to the crowd: the Paris showgirls, the lights of New York, Yiddish Klezmer music (which, during her three visits to Jerusalem, she never heard), and, to send the spectacle through the roof, a phantasmagorical parade of wild floats and costumes and the blast of horns in an orgy of music and dance from Carnaval, the Rio festival unmatched for splendor and decadence and also where Jo Bouillon, her last husband, met another love. But she won’t sing about that, she clicks her heels and sweeps her hands upward and sings “Vivre,” which means “To Live”—what a perfect song for this performance, in particular, during which she has not only presented her life to her audience but relived it, the pain and the pleasures, assessing whether she has done enough. She could have done more, she realizes, if she hadn’t spent so much time and energy grasping for love. If she’d truly focused, instead, on loving.
What a fool she was, chasing all those dreams like rainbows, thinking a husband would make her complete. God tried to tell her when she was seven that she had all she needed to be a queen. She didn’t need a man.
And this applause the audience is giving to her, is this love? Would they love her more or less if they knew the truth? Joséphine à Bobino leaves out her secret work as a maquisard, the babies she lost, the twelve she adopted in the name of equality and peace, her crusade against hatred.
M. Levasseur couldn’t put that stuff in a musical. People didn’t want the heartbreak, the suffering, the struggle. Even the awful scene that the whole world witnessed—Josephine on the back step of her castle in her bathrobe in the rain, locked out by the bankers who took all she owned—is missing from this revue.
All the really important things have been omitted, as if written right out of her life’s story. What would M. Levasseur have done, sent Hitler dancing across the stage? She has never talked about that part of her life, anyway. The one time she asked Jacques to vouch for her, no one believed him. Josephine Baker, a French patriot? How ridiculous.
The curtain falls and the stagehands swarm like ants to remove all the props, leaving Josephine alone on the stage in her flesh-colored leotard with its racy stripe of silver feathers rippling from chest to crotch, and the fountainous spray of white feathers erupting from the crown of her head. Alone, now, to finish out the story of her life; alone as she entered this world and as she will leave it. This finale always feels poignant to her, but tonight she doesn’t mind. It feels right to stand on her own. In her best moments, this is how she lived, relying on herself.
The curtain rises and she sings the final song, a tribute to Paris, and the crowd stands, everyone in the auditorium rising to honor her. But as she accepts the accolades and takes her bows, she knows for the first time this a
doration, these glowing faces, the flowers strewn at her feet, none of this is love. They don’t even know her.
But, hell, she doesn’t know herself. Nearly sixty-nine years old, and she still hasn’t figured out the answer to the central question of her life:
How will she become worthy of that crown God promised?
CHAPTER 28
1942, Jerusalem
When her body had healed and the Americans had joined the war, at last, Josephine and Jacques resumed their work for the Resistance, gathering information to help defeat the Nazis and touring to lift the troops’ spirits. But still Josephine felt dissatisfied. She wasn’t doing enough. And yet, although she prayed for guidance, none came. Was God even listening? Maybe the chaos in Europe had him occupied, too.
It was her idea to go to Jerusalem. She’d always wanted to visit the Holy Land, and she and her band were between gigs. At the end of their tour of the city, they went to the Wailing Wall, where the guide gave them slips of paper on which to write a prayer. Josephine tucked it into a pocket, not knowing what to ask for anymore. God had turned his back on her, and motherhood was lost to her now. What good would it do to pray?
The guide took her to the women’s area, where a group of old ladies stood keening, backs hunched and shaking, heads pressed against the stones, and two teenage girls held each other and sobbed. A mother, brown-skinned and lithe, nursed a baby at her breast and rocked silently, tears sliding down her cheeks. She reminded Josephine of herself twenty years ago, before illness had taken her youth and beauty. But that was the least of what she had lost. Never would she hold her own sweet child in her arms; never would she know that devoted, unconditional love. Why, Lord? She was barren, her body an unfertile field in which no seed could take root, from which no life would ever spring. Feeling keenly her arms’ emptiness, she wrapped them around herself.