by Sherry Jones
“And in the audience? Are they permitted there?”
He puffed from his cigarette and blew four thoughtful smoke rings.
“No colored person has ever tried to attend a Copa City show.” He unfolded his legs and sat up.
“I won’t perform in your club unless there are Negroes in the audience,” she said. She held her breath, knowing what she might be giving up. The money he offered would enable her and Jo to remodel her castle and start their Rainbow Tribe.
“I’ll pay you nine thousand a week,” he said. “Ten.”
“I’ll happily take your money if you’ll integrate your club.”
Annoyance crossed his face. She knew what he was thinking: why did she have to keep harping on about this? She felt tempted to walk away, but the stakes were too high. So she sipped her ice water and hummed “J’ai Deux Amours,” and Ned Schuyler, who had been contemplating his empty glass, looked up at her and laughed.
“Hell, why not? If a Negro came to the Copa City I wouldn’t refuse him, so why not let them in?” There might be a scandal, he warned: “Cosmopolitan” Miami was not that sophisticated, it had a 6 p.m. curfew for domestic servants—meaning colored people—to leave Miami Beach.
“We Jews had similar difficulties during the war,” he said. “The hatred was immense. Some businesses hung GENTILES ONLY signs on their doors.”
His story did not surprise her. After playing Boston earlier this year, she’d gone down to give a speech at Fisk University in Nashville, traveling incognito for another Paris Soir piece. Fear and suspicion of colored folks ran rampant in the South even today. Josephine had been yanked off a “whites only” toilet mid-piss, the owner of the gas station screaming bloody murder like she’d put an end to civilization. The white clientele had raced to the exits at the Savannah Woolworth’s just because she’d sat at the lunch counter and ordered a milk shake—and the manager, red-faced, had grabbed her arm and dragged her to the door. The worst, though, had been walking into a coffee shop in Mississippi using the door marked WHITE and coming out to face some of her own people staring like she was some kind of ghost. “Go back to France,” someone muttered.
“They looked scared,” she told her friend Donald Wyatt, a teacher at Fisk.
“Yes, they are scared,” he said.
“But I’m trying to help them.”
“And after you’re gone? Then what? They’re stuck here with the mess you leave behind: their white neighbors saying they’re ‘uppity,’ thinking Negroes need a lesson in who’s boss, busting heads, setting houses on fire, stringing people up.”
Josephine closed her eyes, remembering the flames and smoke from her childhood, hearing the screams. Smelling the burning bodies.
“This isn’t 1917,” she said, wiping her tears. She looked at him, lost.
“In the southern United States, it is.” He took the apples she’d bought and put them in his coat pockets, and, after a final look around, touched a hand to her elbow and steered her toward their car. “And it always will be.”
NOW HERE SHE was in the Copa City nightclub in a strapless black Dior gown, high ponytail pinned to her scalp—a cross between Carmen Miranda and the Empire State Building, a critic had written of her new look—glued-on eyelashes so heavy she could barely open her eyes, and a big smile to hide her worry as she listened for the protests that were sure to mar this special occasion. Tonight’s would be the first mixed-race nightclub performance in Miami or, possibly, anywhere in the South. It wouldn’t be the last, if she had her way. Lord, let it go well. But she’d faced down Nazis with guns, and she could deal with picketers.
A group walked in, and Josephine went to greet the celebrities Ned had flown in from New York, colored people as well as whites: the prizefighter Joe Louis; Thelma Carpenter, a jazz singer; Billy Daniels, a white singer headed for the front table with Walter Winchell, the famous white journalist regaling them with the story of how Ned Schuyler had called to ask if he minded that Josephine was now a citizen of France.
“Walter, I know you’re a champion for the Negro cause, but we weren’t sure that extended to French Negroes,” Josephine chimed in.
“French, Swedish, Timbuktu: if they’re as easy on the eyes as you are, they’ve got my backing. “He kissed her hand, his fingers lingering on her arm a beat longer than necessary.
Backstage, Sophie Tucker, the “Last of the Red-Hot Mamas,” a big, brassy-haired singer in a beaded dress and feathers, helped her scan the room for angry faces.
“Don’t worry, honey, honest to God. If they blow the place up, they’ll blow me up, too,” she said, and took the stage, a white woman opening for a colored one, another first in America, Josephine was willing to bet. She did all right, too, had them laughing and all loosened up by the time Josephine walked out singing “J’ai Deux Amours” and dragging a fur behind her. When she’d finished and the applause and whistles had finally subsided, she opened her mouth to make the speech she had rehearsed. But when she saw twenty-one colored faces mixed among the whites like salt and pepper—a seasoning she had never expected to taste in America—she forgot every word.
“This is really my first appearance in my native land in twenty-six years,” she said, improvising. Winchell’s eyebrows shot up and he scribbled on his notepad, probably thinking of her previous U.S. tours.
“The other times don’t count,” she said. “Now it is different. I am happy to be here and to be performing in this city under these circumstances, when my people can be here to see me. This means so much to us, doesn’t it?”
Nobody, white or colored, appeared uncomfortable. They all looked happy except for Walter Winchell, who frowned and squinted as if he couldn’t understand a word.
“When I say ‘us,’ I mean my people,” she said, looking at him. “And when I say ‘my people,’ I mean my race. Congratulations—we’ve done it at last!”
Someone in the back shouted, someone else agreed, and if there was a third response no one heard it over the applause. Joe Louis rose to his feet, and Thelma, and everyone else. Josephine felt like she could fly.
Winchell stayed in Miami for a week, coming to every show, waiting afterward at her dressing room door with roses and champagne, so much like an eager puppy she had to stop herself from scratching behind his ears although it was pretty clear how much he’d like it if she did. He gave her a big write-up, called her the biggest thing to hit Miami Beach since the hurricane of ’35.
The Copa City sold out every show, and clubs from all over the country started calling, wanting to book her. Josephine made Ned her agent for a 10 percent cut. But the best part, to her mind, were announcements by two other Miami clubs that they would allow mixed-race audiences, too. I don’t care if they’re green, as long as they pay the minimum, one club owner said in the newspaper. People were finally starting to understand.
“Be nice to Winchell,” Ned kept saying, as if she wouldn’t be on her best behavior with a syndicated writer publishing in two thousand newspapers and broadcasting a New York City radio show. She drew the line, though, when he made the moves on her. At one time she might have slept with him for the good he might do her career, but those days were long gone. Variety loved her, Ebony, the Miami Herald, the New York Times: She didn’t need to sleep with anyone. She was finally famous in her own country—but the irony was, she didn’t seek fame now except as a means to an end, at forty-five no longer chasing what she had hungered for as a youth.
Winchell didn’t like it when she slapped him, but he ought to keep his hands to himself, then. At first she’d thought he might hit her back. She’d balled up her fists, ready to fight, but he’d just left red-faced and muttering something about her being sorry. What had he expected from a newlywed?
Ned had warned her not to get on his bad side, saying Winchell destroyed careers as easily as he made them—but he couldn’t hurt Josephine, she was on a roll! Ned had booked her on a nationwide tour with Warner Brothers. She’d be performing in theaters between films, st
arting at the Strand in New York: headlining on Broadway at long last. If someone had told her during her Ziegfeld Follies run that this would happen, she’d have laughed in their face. Or she’d have wondered why it would take so long for Josephine Baker to catch on in America, even as, deep in her heart, she knew the reason.
A new socko face on the American scene . . . Her comeback is a signal click, a Variety reporter wrote of her Strand performances that consisted of seven songs, seven costume changes, and five curtain calls, four sold-out shows every day between showings of Storm Warning, a movie about the Ku Klux Klan that Josephine left the theater to avoid. Between songs, she talked about the heartbreak of being Negro in America, of being reviled for the color of her skin, a hatred she had encountered in only one other place in the world: Nazi Germany. That last point made some white folks squirm, but the nodding of colored heads was all the affirmation she needed. For the first time in America, Negroes and whites watched a movie together. For the first time, musicians of both races played in the orchestra.
In Jackson, Mississippi, she went to the Hinds County Jail to visit Willie McGee, a colored man on death row for raping a white woman in 1945.
“She wanted me, and I wanted her,” he told Josephine. A neighbor, seeing Willie leaving her house one night, asked the woman about him. Frightened, she said he had raped her.
“She was scared they would take away her child,” he said. “I don’t hold it against her, but I wish I didn’t have to die.” She asked why he didn’t just tell the truth, but he’d tried that in his third trial. The jury of Southern men refused to believe that any white woman would consent to sex with a Negro. “They took it as a confession. And sentenced me to death.”
Before she’d left him, Willie had asked her to sing “Amazing Grace.” The song brought all the inmates to the bars of their cells to reach out to her as she passed. “Be careful,” said Ned, who’d accompanied her, but Josephine touched palm to palm to palm, kissing hands, thinking of the cages their ancestors—her ancestors—had come to America in.
“This is a travesty,” she said in a press conference outside the jail. Willie McGee was innocent, she said, and a symbol of the plight of the Negro: emancipated long ago but still in chains.
“For almost twenty-five years I have lived in France, where we have legal equality of the races,” she said. “And I tell you beyond any doubt that for white women to desire Negro men is not unusual. In fact, it is very common.”
She was doing this—the relentless touring, the trials and NAACP events and sit-ins, the interviews and photo sessions, the biographical movie they wanted to make in Hollywood, the musical that still-handsome rascal Ernest Hemingway was writing for her—she did it all in the name of equality. And she did it for the money, of course, to prepare Les Milandes for the babies she would adopt.
Sometimes, though, her dreams of racial harmony seemed hopeless. On May 8, she walked onstage in Detroit to announce the death, by electric chair, of Willie McGee.
“A part of every American Negro died with him,” she said, choking out her words, tears smearing her makeup. “I’m going to perform tonight, but I hope you’ll understand if my heart isn’t in it.” She pasted on a smile along with her sequins and feathers and sang. At Willie’s funeral, she posed with his wife, Rosalie, but the press wouldn’t take the photo, they wanted Josephine alone, so she went to her car and drove away. She didn’t want attention for herself, not anymore, couldn’t they see that?
EVEN ON “JOSEPHINE Baker Day,” when one hundred thousand people filled the streets of Harlem to celebrate her work against discrimination, even as she blew kisses from the lead car of a twenty-seven-car motorcade, even when, that evening, a man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize presented her with an honorary lifetime membership to the NAACP and performers paid tribute, singing her songs: Noble and Sissle and members of the Shuffle Along chorus, Duke Ellington, Gypsy Rose Lee, Buddy Rogers, Lionel Hampton; even when Walter White, president of the NAACP, gave a speech praising her courage and efforts to end discrimination in America, Josephine never forgot why she was there, and what she was doing. Equality of the races was possible, she told the thousands who packed the auditorium: all they had to do was claim it.
“Claim it?” Her old friend Evelyn Anderson, who’d danced in La Revue Nègre, said after the show. “How do you expect us to do that?”
“I’ll show you,” Josephine said.
In Washington, DC, she went into the whites-only room at a segregated café and ordered a Coca-Cola, then told her audience how the owner had refused to serve her.
In Los Angeles, a white man in the audience shouted at her to “go back where you came from.”
“I am back where I came from,” she said. “And you, sir? Where did you come from?” She got a standing ovation, and a front-page story in the next day’s paper. Let her people see, and believe.
When she walked into the Biltmore Hotel dining room that night to meet Ned’s attorney Shirley Woolf, a white man in a suit uttered a loud curse.
“I didn’t know they allowed niggers in here,” he said.
The year 1927 returned to her, then, the celebration of Lucky Lindy’s transatlantic flight, the rude American’s “nigger” comment. How often had she chastised herself for hanging her head, wishing she could do it over again?
God helps those who help themselves.
Josephine took up her handbag and strode out the door to the police station. In ten minutes she was back, in a car with flashing lights. She walked into the restaurant flanked by officers and stood over the man, who cringed as if fearing she might touch him. She was placing him under citizen’s arrest for harassment, she said. The look on that man’s face as he was handcuffed and taken away!
“I only wish the press had been here,” she said to Shirley.
“Ned will be thrilled. What great publicity!”
Josephine hadn’t done it for publicity. But what she wouldn’t give for America to see a white man being carted off to jail for insulting a Negro. It had to be a first—and, surely, not the last. When her people understood what was possible, they would rise up.
CHAPTER 31
New York would be a tougher nut to crack. For all the city’s worldliness, it guarded its institutions carefully, among them the opulent private rooms reserved exclusively for “high society,” which meant white people.
But that barrier could be broken, too. When the Stork Club, the city’s most fashionable restaurant—off-limits to Negroes, of course—sponsored a contest for the “World’s Best-Dressed Woman,” its white patrons voted for Josephine. Walter Winchell had called with the news, congratulating her. No one else had even come close, even though the runners-up included the actress Marilyn Monroe and Eva Perón, First Lady of Argentina.
“Evita?” Josephine said. “I adore her.”
“You know Mrs. Perón?”
Josephine bit her lip. Ned Schuyler had warned her last May, after Josephine Baker Day, to choose her words to the press more carefully. A newsman from the Daily Worker had asked for the names of her personal heroes and she had mentioned Evita and why not? The people of Argentina loved Eva Perón; she did so much for the poor and for orphans; she founded hospitals; she was helping her own people. She’d grown up in poverty like Josephine and had also found her escape on the stage. A famous actress when she met her husband, she’d given up the theater to serve her country. Who wouldn’t admire her?
“We are like sisters,” she’d said then. The reporter had looked surprised for reasons she couldn’t fathom. The next day Ned and Shirley were at her door, Daily Worker in hand, Ned’s brow creased with worry. Didn’t Josephine realize that the Peróns were dictators, that Juan Perón had praised Mussolini and Hitler? They were not a good couple to be associated with.
“If you’re seen as sympathetic to these dictators, your career will go down in flames,” he said. “People are already calling you a communist for speaking out against segregation. If you want to make money,
I advise you to tone it down a bit.”
“That’s the same advice I get,” Paul Robeson told her over supper in a Harlem soul-food joint. Josephine was shocked to see how he’d changed in the months since her Miami debut; the once-robust singer had shrunk into a small, tightly wound man.
“In Russia, they use racial prejudice as propaganda against our nation. That upsets the government, they think it makes us look bad. But instead of stopping the genocide against our people, they tell us to change our story.”
“What are we supposed to say?”
“That things have improved.” Paul slammed his fist on the tabletop. “Like hell they have.”
Josephine kept her thoughts to herself. She could see that things had improved for her people since she’d come back to America, but she agreed that they had a long way to go. Still, if the lily-white Stork Club had named a Negro the best-dressed woman in the world, who knew what might happen next?
“When is the ceremony?” she asked Winchell, moving the subject away from Eva Perón. “I’ve never been to the Stork Club.”
“Don’t hold your breath for that one. To tell you the truth, Sherman Billingsley doesn’t like Negroes in the place. It’s the worst thing about him, but he’s my friend and I’d rather not fight.”
So what else could she do but invite her friends Roger and Solange Rico and Bessie Buchanan for drinks and dinner at the Stork Club? Roger, who was white, went there all the time, and made a reservation in the club’s super-exclusive Cub Room. Josephine put on a long black gown, elbow-length satin gloves, and a diamond necklace, and took Bessie after her final show out the Strand’s front door to wade through the crowd and sign autographs and promise that, yes, she would come back to New York, the city had captured her heart and so had America, and no, she had no plans to return to Europe anytime soon.
She and Bessie took a cab to the Stork Club, the driver doing a double take when Josephine told him where they were going. On the way, Josephine squeezed Bessie’s hand so hard the woman cried out. What if the restaurant wouldn’t let them in? She was French, Bessie said, she had no reason to worry, it was the American Negroes they wanted to keep out—“people like me”—and besides, it was high time they put a stop to this kind of discrimination. If not Josephine, then who? And besides, what could happen with Walter Winchell there?