Josephine Baker's Last Dance

by Sherry Jones

  Who needed all the fuss and worry of sex, anyway, at her age? She was too old for that, going on fifty now and every year showing on her face, in her hips and waist and arms.

  “I love you,” she said. “But—it isn’t enough, Jo. I need more.”

  “You know I do not mind if you have lovers, too.”

  “That phase in my life is long gone. I want a husband—”

  “Until death do we part, remember?” Clearly thinking she was about to ask for a divorce, he grabbed her hand like a drowning man. Good.

  “I want a husband and a family. I’ve never made a secret of this. We’ve talked about it from the beginning. It’s not the love of a man I’m missing, but children.”

  His face lifted in a smile. “Yes, of course, we will adopt as soon as the castle is ready.”

  “It’s good enough now, isn’t it? A baby won’t know the difference. Look, Jo.” She opened a desk drawer and pulled out her letter from her friend Miki, who had moved back to Japan with her husband when he’d retired. “She has invited me to visit her new orphanage. I could bring a child back with me!”

  He burst into laughter.

  “So that is what you are up to.” He gestured toward the table, the flowers, the music, the wine. “You didn’t have to go to so much trouble. You didn’t need to play the vamp. You need only to ask me for anything you desire.”

  She moved over to the champagne bucket and refilled their glasses. “How could any gown be too beautiful for this occasion?” She handed him his coupe, and raised her own for a toast. “Here’s to our new baby boy. The first of many, I hope.”

  “Here’s to our family.” He touched his glass to hers. “I had thought such a thing was impossible for me. But now, thanks to you, I will at last have a son.”

  “Many sons. We’re going to adopt an entire tribe, remember?”

  “A tribe, yes,” he said. “And a tribe needs a chief. I wonder which of us that will be?”

  JOSEPHINE WAS THE one in charge today, here in Miki’s orphanage surrounded by precious children, including the cute slippery little Korean fish now climbing into her lap and then, when she tried to get hold of him, sliding down again and running away.

  “Just like every man I’ve ever known, he slips right through my fingers,” she told Miki.

  “I think he’s more clever than any of your men,” Miki said. The boy’s name was Akio, meaning “autumn.” He’d been found under an open umbrella, a small red pouch around his neck, a talisman inside inscribed with his name and the precepts of Buddhism.

  “But of course, you could baptize him as a Christian,” Miki said. “He is only about eighteen months old.”

  “Buddhism is perfect,” Josephine said.

  By the time she said goodbye, the older children had grown bored with her and run outside to play. Carrying little Akio, her arms full at last, she walked alongside Miki to enjoy the afternoon sun—and spied an infant sitting under a tree wearing only a diaper and a frown.

  “Now, that’s a sad-looking baby,” she said.

  “Yes, but not as sad as when he has to go indoors. You should hear him cry. How funny that he is named Teruya, which means ‘shining house’ in Japanese.”

  Josephine asked if he were Buddhist, too, and Miki said, no, this child was Shinto, whose eight million gods were found everywhere, even among the dead. Josephine put Akio on the ground beside him and peered into the baby’s face. He returned her gaze with such gravity that he might be a god, too. Josephine wavered, almost regretting her hasty choice of Akio—until her baby put his arms around Teruya and kissed him, making him smile.

  “Look at that! These two were made to be together. I’ll take them both,” she said. After all, she had two arms.

  “Two babies? Won’t your husband mind?”

  “Who knows?” Josephine said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “Who cares? They’re my damned children, not his.”

  ON THE FLIGHT home, juggling the crying babies with the help of her maid, Josephine wondered what she’d done. Akio and Teruya—whom she’d renamed Janot, which means “serious”—had seemed so happy and peaceful in the orphanage. But now, nothing could quiet them. As with dogs, the howls of one set off the other and back again, until Josephine wanted to throw them both out the window. All her life wanting babies, she’d never thought about the squalls or the stink.

  She had never felt so glad to feel wheels touch pavement. As soon as it happened, the babies calmed down. Josephine could hardly believe her ears, which continued to ring.

  “They must know they’re going home,” she said. “Maybe they feel Jo’s presence nearby.”

  “I think they have finally exhausted themselves,” the maid said, and it was true. Both had fallen asleep.

  Disembarking from the plane, Janot in her arms, Josephine beamed at Jo, who reached tenderly for the child.

  “Be careful, he’s asleep.”

  “And he will sleep again, later. This is an important moment, when I hold my son for the first time.” Janot did indeed wake up, but instead of crying he gazed into Jo’s face as gravely as the first time Josephine had seen him.

  The maid came over with Akio, who had also awakened.

  “Give him to Jo,” Josephine said. “He wants to hold his son.”

  With one baby in each arm, he furrowed his brows. “Which is ours, chérie?”

  “Both. Aren’t they wonderful? Just pretend that we were expecting a child, and that I had twins.”

  Seeing his annoyance, she turned on her heel and began walking toward the terminal, her heart thumping. Jo would come around. The important part was not to show any weakness, or how desperately she wanted him to love the babies.

  And then he called out her name and she stopped, and he caught up to her, one baby in each arm. She reached for Janot, worried that Jo might drop him on the tarmac, remembering her mama’s bitter words hurled so often in anger: I wish that doctor had let you fall on your head, right on the concrete floor. You’d be dead, and I’d be free.

  She hadn’t meant it, Josephine knew that now. But she would never say that to her babies, because it wouldn’t be true. I was so afraid he might drop you that I shouted at him not to run, to stop where he was, and I walked up and took you out of his arms. My only thought was to keep you safe.

  “Don’t drop one just to get rid of him,” she snapped.

  Jo looked confused for a moment but then, when she’d taken Janot, he kissed her cheek.

  “You were right to adopt two children,” he said. “This way, we will be twice as happy.”

  After each night’s performance of Joséphine à Bobino, Josephine feels energized—but tonight is different. Tonight, she brims with life, popping and spritzing with it like the bubbles in her glass. She cannot sit still, but hops onto the table and begins to dance, kicking plates to the floor and laughing like there’s no sorrow and no tomorrow. From the floor, her costar commands her to come down, his eyes snapping with French contempt, his thin mustache twitching over a trying-to-be-patient smile. She will injure herself in those heels, he says, she will fall and break her neck and they will have to perform twenty-two sold-out shows without her. They will have to hire a replacement—ha! As if anyone could take the place of Josephine Baker, the most famous woman in the world, fifty years on the Paris stage and still dancing like a girl.

  “Have some dignity, don’t be a bouffe, you are embarrassing us all.” With each admonition his voice rises, hammering, insistent, crackling with indignation over the attention she commands, over the fact that every pair of eyes in the room watches her shake and twist her body, which remains, even at sixty-eight, magnificent.

  Giggles bubble from Josephine’s mouth. He folds his arms and narrows his eyes, playing the stern father but reminding her of one of her children—twelve in all, her Rainbow Tribe—pouting when he didn’t get his way. She slows her dance and reaches toward him, “Mon cher,” she mouths, beckoning; she would caress that handsome face and kiss those pursing lips
until they smiled, but he isn’t interested in her, none of them are, not anymore, not that she cares. She wouldn’t want him, anyway, pretty mouth or not, baguette in his tight pants or not, torso muscles rippling under her hands or not. She renounced all that years ago, tired of giving herself to men who pressed their mouths to hers and sucked out her vigor and her love, and never gave enough in return. She was made to do so much more, and, by God, she did it all.

  And she has relived it all tonight, flooded by memories throughout Joséphine à Bobino, not the stage life but the real, which is, she understands now, better than any show could ever be, even with the hunger and the illnesses and the ghosts. Josephine Baker is unstoppable! Even the US government couldn’t, ultimately, defeat her. Even this petulant child in the body of a man cannot subdue her.

  “We have all had a long day,” he says. She kicks off her shoes and slaps her feet on the wood, flaps her arms like wings, arches her back and hitches up her bottom. Shake-shake, thrust-shake, shimmy-shammy kick-kick. What does he know about long days? Has he sung thirty-three songs, danced his way from toddler to twelve to nineteen to sixty-eight, zoomed a shuddering Harley-Davidson across the stage, and held two straining dogs on leashes while wobbling in four-inch heels down a staircase, all while his head throbbed from having his face stretched tight and pinned under a sweating, stinking wig, and from the recorded music pumping from the enormous speakers on either side of him? Yet Josephine never faltered even a single step, never tripped over a single note.

  A professional, that’s what she is, fifty years of experience—no, more than that, for she has been dancing since she was in the womb. “Wore me out with all that kicking, like she was doing the Charleston in my insides,” Mama used to say. The Charleston, the Mess-Around, the Black Bottom, the splits: she was born with dancing in her bones.

  And what about him? What has he done that he should be so tired? Has he risked his life for the country he loved, risked his career for the people he loved, risked anything at all that mattered for something bigger than himself?

  She whoops and spins again, and then someone plays the Charleston on the jukebox and her knees and elbows start flying, her arms crossing and uncrossing and her eyes crossing, too, at the dancers turning their faces away and laughing, not because she is funny, but because she is old.

  “Sit down, Grandma,” somebody mutters. “My God, it’s embarrassing. One hundred and four years old, and she behaves like a child.” How can they speak of her this way, she who has lived in ways they have not even begun to comprehend?

  “One hundred and four?” She laughs and lifts her hands into the air, shakes and shimmies her body, the table, the whole damned joint. “Look again—I’m seventeen!”

  “All right, Josephine,” the costar says, advancing toward her, extending his hand, “we believe you.” Smirking like a sullen teen, he’ll roll his eyes at her next. “We believe you are seventeen. You have convinced us. Now come down from that table—please”—there it is, the eye roll!—“before you revert all the way to infancy.”

  CHAPTER 33

  1975, Paris

  Now she’s tired, so tired. She feels like she’s been dancing all night and she has been: on the stage in Josephine à Bobino; in the café, dancing on tables; and now, in bed, reading reviews while dancing and living and loving in dreams that really aren’t dreams but memories, the events of her life unspooling like a film whose plot she cannot understand. What does it all mean?

  She’s been tested so many times that she doesn’t know what she was supposed to learn or what good she has been or done. It seems like every time she tried to make a difference, something got in the way.

  And now, in her mind’s eye, another scene: 1963, two hundred fifty thousand people, many “Afro-American,” as her people came to call themselves, and white people, too, and brown and yellow and red, a vast sea of brothers and sisters converged in Washington, DC, in a mighty protest to demand an end to racial prejudice and discrimination, and, in their place, equality. See the humanity filling the streets, waving signs, holding hands, embracing one another, singing “We Shall Overcome”; chanting “Freedom”; everyone peaceful, altogether, all together, the ultimate Rainbow Tribe.

  She starts to cry at the sight of Dr. King leading the march, wearing a suit and tie as always in spite of the brutal August heat, his kind face shining and serene, the picture of pure love. If only she could warn him—Be careful, Martin, or you’ll be dead within the year. But if he had known, would he have done anything differently? Would he have stopped preaching, exhorting, demanding, talking, daring the world to dream?

  And there is Josephine, in her Free French Air Force uniform, taking the podium just before the great man himself, the only woman to speak on that day. She has flown in from Paris for the occasion, honored to be invited, and also a bit surprised.

  After the performers sing their protest songs—Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; Bob Dylan—Josephine steps up to the mic, not a performer today but something more: a woman who has lived the horrors of oppression, hatred, and fear, and yet speaks of love. All she ever wanted to do was wake the world up to this reality: We are all human. She beat relentlessly against prejudice like waves breaking against a stone wall and taking it away piece by piece, and now she stands before her people to bear witness.

  “This is the happiest day of my life,” she says, and it was, she knows that now as she watches herself at that podium addressing the crowd with dignity, with grace, with love. It all came together in those perfect moments: her own past full of travails; the present when so many gathered together in the name of equality and sang that they were not afraid; and the future that looked—to her, to them all—filled with possibility.

  “I am not a young woman now, friends. My life is behind me. There is not too much fire burning inside me.

  “And before it goes out, I want you to use what is left to light that fire in you, so that you can carry on, and so that you can do those things that I have done. Then, when my fires have burned out, and I go where we all go someday, I can be happy.

  “You know, I have always taken the rocky path. I never took the easy one, but as I got older, and as I knew I had the power and the strength, I took that rocky path, and I tried to smooth it out a little. I wanted to make it easier for you. I want you to have a chance at what I had. And we know that that time is not someday. We know that that time is now.”

  And the crowd lifts its voice as she puts the coda on her own protest song, the cheers of two hundred fifty thousand people arising from the earth as though the earth itself exults, but Josephine hears only her own self crying out, understanding, now, the measure of her life.

  And in her bedroom, the robed figure from her childhood, the man with the beard like a white flame and eyes of pure love, appears before her with a sound like the wind, his hands reaching toward her with a gleaming golden crown, placing it on her head, pinning it there with a star. At last. Elation fills her, and light, shooting from her fingertips, pouring from her mouth as she finishes.

  Thank you, and may God bless you. And may he continue to bless you long after I am gone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my literary agent, Natasha Kern, for her unflagging and enthusiastic support over more than a decade; my good friends Mark Allen Williams, Karlee Etter Turner, Trish Hoard, and Richard Myers for all the time spent listening to me talk about Josephine Baker and providing your valuable insights; to Gwen Moore at the Missouri History Museum in Saint Louis for driving me in the rain on a fruitless search for any intact residence where Josephine lived as a child, for telling me about the demolition of her entire neighborhood, and for taking me to the Soulard Market; to author and radio host Dennis Owler of Saint Louis for regaling me with tales of the golden age of jazz in that city; to Olivia Lahs-Gonzales at the Sheldon Art Galleries in Saint Louis for her information and conversation about Josephine’s life and work; to Charles E. Brown at the Saint Louis Mercantile Library and William “Z
elli” Fischetti at the State Historical Society of Missouri library for their help researching old Saint Louis; to Tomy Rouleau and Ophélie Lachaux in Paris for opening the wonderful Theatre des Champs-Élysées to me for a private tour of the theater where Josephine Baker made her debut and, at 19, became a star; to the documentary filmmaker David Burke in Paris for talking with me about African-American life and music in the city during the 1920s and ’30s, and, as always, to the members of my wonderful street team, Sherry’s Sirens.

  More from the Author

  The Sharp Hook of Love

  Four Sisters, All Queens

  White Heart

  GALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE

  Josephine Baker’s Last Dance

  Sherry Jones

  INTRODUCTION

  Famous for her sexually charged performances as a scantily clad Paris revue showgirl, Josephine Baker also had a secret career as a pilot and intelligence spy for the French Resistance during World War II, and as a civil rights activist who was the only woman invited to speak at the 1963 March on Washington.

  In this revealing biographical novel, Sherry Jones revisits Josephine Baker’s difficult childhood in Saint Louis, Missouri, and examines some of the many troubling experiences with discrimination that would propel her lifelong fight for racial justice.

  As Josephine’s star rises in Europe, she finds herself mingling with some of the greatest artists of the Jazz Age, including Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Colette, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin. Following her extraordinary transformation from “Tumpy” McDonald to Joséphine, “Queen of Paris,” and her momentous decision to become a citizen of France, Baker experiences personal and professional triumphs and disappointments that reveal her fascinating character in all of its complexity.