Fighting for Life

by S. Josephine Baker

  In September I knew my fate. It was all right. I had passed highest with a grade of 94. My nearest competitor had an 86. At that point I did take a short vacation—fled to the country and took long breaths of undisguised relief. My job was safe—safer than it had been planned to be to begin with.

  I was certainly a fine administrator. If it hadn’t been for political grudges, I would have gone right through my whole career with the Bureau on an irregular basis and so perhaps robbed myself of the pension that I would receive after twenty years of service. Every time I draw my pension, I think with a tender smile of the way they did me that financial favor in spite of myself.

  I doubt if anybody would have tried any such stunt if they had realized how tenaciously I had become attached to my job. I did not realize that myself until, in 1920, I was taken up on a high mountain and shown all the kingdoms of the welfare-earth if only I would leave the Bureau. The tempter in question was that great pair of philanthropists, Mr. and Mrs. Cyrus McCormick of Chicago. They invited me to lunch at the Plaza and told me that the Director of the McCormick Memorial Foundation, a great child-health institution, had been forced to resign and they wanted me to take his place. Money no object: I could have any salary I named; I could direct the Foundation into any activity I pleased; all I would have to do would be to take the Foundation’s millions and make them count. An extremely flattering offer and very graciously made. My only answer was, I am afraid, completely bewildering to them:

  “I’m sorry,” I said, over and over, “but I don’t want to live in Chicago . . . I’m sorry. I don’t want to live in Chicago.”

  And that was just it. I did not and do not have anything in particular against Chicago. But I had fought my way through so many battles, private and public, in New York; I knew so much about what lay beneath its harsh, shapeless exterior; I was so much in love with what I was doing, that to consider leaving it was like considering an operation that would completely change my personality. The McCormicks looked more and more puzzled at each repetition of my unwillingness to live in their home town. For several years they kept at me, with their ideas of my salary growing to such fantastic heights that my Health Department salary sounded like the contents of a baby’s bank. But, since it was not money I was worrying about, money did not change my mind. I was probably the first thing that McCormick money had not been able to buy, which, no doubt, added considerably to the mystery of my refusal.

  No sooner had I retired from private practice than, for my sins, I found myself starting on a career of speech-making that is not quite over yet and has taken me into every sizable town in the United States. I asked for it in a way. The only method conceivable of putting over the child-hygiene idea with the nation at large was to stand upon my feet and talk about it as often as possible; so that was just what I did. I have trouped as much as an oldtime theatrical star, I think, only, instead of being allowed to arrive in town, put on my act and move on without extra bother, I have always had to be entertained by the well intentioned committee or club that sponsored my speech. In no time I was sympathizing deeply with Jane Addams’ system of charging for lectures. (I suspect it was wishful thinking and not actual practice.) Miss Addams told me once that her charges were on a sliding scale, depending upon what was expected of her: $100 if all she had to do was talk; $150 if she had not only to talk, but to have dinner with someone; and $200 if she not only had to have dinner but to spend the night at someone’s house as well. There is no more miserable feeling in the world than to arrive in some average-sized town where you do not know a soul, be met by a collection of clubwomen, dragged to a local mansion for dinner with a lot of people you never want to see again, transported to a stuffy hall to make a speech that you have made a dozen times before and that, to judge from the reactions of the audience, nobody particularly wants to hear—and then, when the one thing that would set you right would be a quiet, empty, private hotel room, be kidnapped after the speech and sentenced to an overnight stay in somebody’s cold-sheeted and stiffly furnished guest-room.

  I went through years of peripatetic speech-making, however, without realizing that sometimes the hospitable ladies in the towns I visited might feel much the same way about entertaining visiting celebrities. That came out in Utica finally. When the invitation to speak there arrived, it included the usual suave notification that I would be suitably dined and slept. I was in a state of rebellion by then and wrote back that under no circumstances would I put anyone to such trouble; I would go to a hotel and look after myself. When I made my speech, it was received with incredible enthusiasm. You would have thought I was Edmund Burke crossed with Patrick Henry. I could not understand it until afterward, when the ladies of the committee drove me out to a country club. The head of the committee then broke down and explained my popularity. She said that, on dispatching the invitation, she had, as usual, asked the assembled committee who would volunteer to entertain me. I was the last of a long line of the season’s speakers, and there was dead silence. Eventually one woman spoke up rather shamefacedly and said that, since she had not yet taken care of any of the speakers, she supposed she would have to. Then the question of who would give a dinner for me: an even longer silence this time, broken by the offer of a lady to assume that burden, accompanied by a heavy sigh. My letter refusing hospitality altogether was a bombshell of joy to them. I could have talked about political economy among earth-worms and they still would have loved me and cheered themselves hoarse for me.

  “Why, my dear,” said the president, “it’s made you the most popular speaker that ever came to Utica.”

  That is only a sample. My years of speechmaking have been a tissue of absurdities, I am afraid, or perhaps it is just that I have the kind of memory which hangs on to the absurd and forgets things better worth remembering. Chairmen—more frequently chairwomen—used apparently to go out of their way to amuse me. Twice I have spoken at serious meetings to which I was introduced, not as Dr. S. Josephine Baker, head of the New York City Bureau of Child Hygiene, but as Josephine Daskam Bacon, the author. There was nothing to do on either occasion but plunge right ahead and try to behave as if I were Josephine Daskam Bacon, so I did my best, but I have always been afraid that my alter ego would sue me for libel any day. I have also been introduced as Dr. Josephine Hemingway Kenyon on occasion, and, back when both she and I were writing for women’s magazines, used to get much of her mail. I have had an august chairwoman at a large luncheon turn to me and whisper deferentially:

  “Will you speak now, Dr. Baker, or shall I let them enjoy themselves a little longer?”

  The effect was often as if the speaker’s subject-matter and contributions to it were not the point at all. It was rather as if having any speaker to listen to and applaud afterward were the only essential thing. On one occasion that came out with uncomfortable clarity. The first speaker was a statuesque lady with flowing robes whose subject, according to the program, was to be “In Paradise with Dante.” I was somewhat appalled by the idea of getting up and going into the ramifications of anything so practical and sometimes messy as child hygiene after that preliminary. I was even more appalled during the hour that the lady took to soar and swoop through Paradise in such distinguished company. At the end the ladies in the audience all spatted their neatly gloved hands together politely and then all eyes turned to me. I got up and mentally threw away the speech I had prepared. Now that we had been through Paradise with Dante, I was going to take them through Hell’s Kitchen with S. Josephine Baker. Purposely, with malice aforethought, I dug out of my memory the most filthy, most horrible, most excruciating details of public health work in general and child welfare in particular and laid them before my audience in the most graphic language I could muster. I went into backyard privies, the fate of stray animals, the worst cases in public hospitals, working hard. Throughout they all gazed at me with the same mild serenity with which they had listened to my aestheticizing predecessor. And, when I had finished, they all spatted their gloves toge
ther in exactly the same way and got up, chattering, to have tea. In fact afterward several of them took occasion to tell me how fortunate they had been to have two such interesting speakers the same afternoon. But the essential absurdity of the whole performance never came out more brilliantly than on the occasion when I was to talk to a large convention of public health authorities in Washington on the same program as Jane Addams and many another famous woman. I showed Miss Addams the schedule of speakers:

  “Will you please look at this?” I said. “Here they have me down to talk on “Health—an International Problem.’ Twenty minutes. How in heaven’s name can anybody say anything worth listening to on that subject in twenty minutes?”

  Miss Addams looked at me strangely—I could not tell whether it was a sob or a smile that she was choking down. Then she ran her finger on down the list to this item:

  “Jane Addams, ‘How to Feed the World,’ twenty minutes.”

  “My dear,” she said, “how would you like to try to feed the world in twenty minutes instead?”

  Still that kind of memory has its compensations. There was that huge child welfare dinner in Los Angeles given in my honor, where I was the eleventh speaker on the list. Knowing that it was a child welfare gathering, I had prepared, and gave, a speech about child welfare. I give you my word I was the only speaker who came within a mile of the subject. The others were far more eloquent and forceful than I, but Los Angeles, its beauties, past, present and future, were all they talked about, and they seemed to take it unkindly that I had not followed suit. Then there was that other medical dinner out West where I asked a local doctor how he accounted for the fact that, although Colorado and Utah were right next door and living conditions were practically the same in both states, the Utah maternal mortality rate was so much lower than Colorado’s.

  “Well,” he said, “I do have a theory. After all, any woman who would have followed Brigham Young to Salt Lake City was probably the type that has a good broad pelvis.”

  I could not get away from the queer things that happened if I tried to make a speech, not even when I went back to Poughkeepsie to address the Vassar girls on the necessity for the modern woman’s learning about and following the teachings of modern child welfare findings. At Vassar I was naturally under the sponsorship of Dr. Elizabeth Thalberg, a grand old lady who had been medical director of the college from time immemorial, and whom I had always known just as I had known my aunts and uncles. I have already recorded my own disappointment at having been prevented from going to Vassar. Dr. Thalberg’s disappointment must have been even greater than mine because, in the course of my annual lectures, she eventually had both herself and the students convinced that I was as much a Vassar graduate as any real alumna in the world. I started out, accurately enough, as a woman with strong Vassar traditions in her background who had had to give up the idea of going to the college through no intention of her own. In a couple of years, according to Dr. Thalberg, I had matriculated and gone brilliantly into my junior year, when circumstances beyond my control had forced me to withdraw. In three or four years more I had graduated with honors and gone on into medical school with every professor on the faculty looking after me and shaking his or her head and saying: “That girl will make us proud of her, mark my words.” It was done so gradually and yet so completely that Dr. Thalberg would have been outraged, I am sure, if anybody had pointed out to her that unfortunately the name of Sara Josephine Baker was missing from the college records. As for myself, I never tried to undeceive her. She got too much innocent joy out of the idea that I was a Vassar girl and, to tell you the truth, I was rather pleased myself with having received a degree without working for it at all.

  CHAPTER XII

  NEARLY EVERYONE WHO GOES TO RUSSIA ON A preordained tour rushes into print about it all, at about the time he steps off the gangplank in New York. It has taken me four years to succumb to the temptation to write about what I saw and experienced in the Soviet Union. If I were not writing about my own past, which includes so much child welfare work, I might well have resisted to the bitter end. But the Soviet Union presents the modern world’s most outstanding example of a widespread, comprehensive, centralized system of child welfare and, since I did see that system in its fairly advanced stages, my impressions of it definitely belong here. If travel in Russia were not such an ordeal, I should like to go back to see it again in a few years to discover how much they have accomplished toward filling the gaps in their practice.

  I had not thought of a trip to Russia as a possibility. But when my friend Miss I. A. R. Wylie told me that she was going to spend several months there, observing the Soviet Union in a search for material for a book she was planning to write, and asked me to go with her, the opportunity seemed one that could not be resisted, and I did not have to be asked twice. Being aware that strange complaints attacked one in that country, that there is nothing more dismal than being ill in a strange land without a doctor of your own kind and that Russian pharmacy supplies were probably not extensive, I started a medicine kit of my own devising containing remedies for almost every kind of emergency; starting at the top of the head and ending at the toes. Hectic as the trip often was, I never regretted any of it, least of all the medicines in my little bag.

  There was a fearful amount of being rubbed the wrong way about the trip, even traveling as we did, first class at from twenty-five to thirty dollars a day each with the extras counted in. We had a special guide and theoretically special accommodations. Actually the accommodations were about the same as those given the second- and third-class travelers—there were “classes” in this presumably Communistic country. But everywhere outside of Moscow and Leningrad there was only one hotel open for tourists and the first party that arrived secured the best rooms, no matter what class they had paid for, and we took what was left if we came later. The car arrangements were probably the most flagrant annoyances. Our rate was to include a Lincoln car wherever we went—Fords and Lincolns were about the only cars in Russia. Often we had one, but there were occasions when the tourist authorities blandly asked us to believe that any car with a motor that would still turn over—or no car at all—was a satisfactory fulfilling of their obligations. Down in the Caucasus, the promised Lincoln turned out to be a nameless mechanism at least twenty years old, a gasping, wheezing, rattling, brakeless outrage, in which we drove over the dangerous stretches of the Georgian Military Highway. The trip was really not so dangerous in itself but it was a characteristic mountain road, narrow and hairpin-turned, where you wanted a car with plenty of power and immediate response to accelerator and steering-gear. When we stopped for lunch, on one of the highest passes, Ida Wylie and I casually looked at this wreck and found one of the rear wheels just in the act of falling off. The chauffeur seemed to take it as a piece of bourgeois insolence that we had found out something it was not our business to know. But he forgave us for meddling sufficiently to put it back on again with a couple of spare bolts and hope. So on we went, but the thought of that wheel somehow prevented my full enjoyment of the scenery.

  When we went from Rostov to Ordzhonikidze, the train we were supposed to take was commandeered by a party of high officials on a mission of state and there was an amazing mixup that finally landed us in a desolate town called Minerali Vodi at four o’clock in the morning, tired and rebellious. Our guide, who was one of the nicest boys I have ever known, made a sortie through the town and finally obtained some eggs and a loaf of bread for us. Until noon, we sat in that railroad station and wondered what might happen next. A train arrived. The guide reported that it was absolutely packed. But by that time despair had made me stern and decided. “Ernest,” I said, “we are going on that train. It may be on the steps or the roof but that is the train we are going on.”

  That galvanized him into frenzied action. It happened to be one of the few Russian trains that carried a dining car, so he finally secured us permission to ride in that. It was filthy and full of flies but it did transport us to Or
dzhonikidze. When we arrived there with the faint hope that there might be a Lincoln, there was only one car in sight, standing empty in front of the station. We started for this car. The driver spoke sharply to us, explaining that he was waiting for an important official party. I asked where our car was and was told this was the only car in town. So again we sat on the railroad platform. After two hours of waiting, Miss Wylie and I walked over to the car, sat down resolutely in the back seat and waited for the next move. Ernest begged us not to do anything so rash. But we were foreigners and women and, talk as he might, the chauffeur was afraid to eject us, and on we went. I hope the high officials did not have to walk; it was a good many miles and a bad road.

  I know many people who have been to Russia and who have never met a bedbug. Why they were kept for us I do not know. Anyway, it was a fairly constant companionship. We had no defense against vermin, but we were careful about diet. No black bread, no uncooked fruits or vegetables and only bottled water. On the Volga, Ernest commandeered a cook, a waiter and special food, and so for that four days we had the best food on our trip. At Stalingrad we left on a twenty-four-hour train trip. It was an 1850 train which in its best moments could make fifteen miles per hour. We were in a compartment with two dingy berths and were told no windows could be opened. It was a hot night in August and that night when we could turn our attention from the bedbugs, we were conscious of the most filthy smell I have ever encountered. In the morning we opened the door and rushed out into the corridor to breathe again and then Ernest appeared ready for breakfast. The mystery of the smell was solved as he reached over our heads into the rack and produced a very inky newspaper package, unwrapped it and brought to view a piece of cold greasy pork, a mass of disintegrated caviar and the most peculiar chicken I have ever seen. It was a brownish purple and had a high gloss on it as though it had been varnished. There was no doubt about the source of the smell and there was no doubt that we were going to breakfast on tea alone. But Ernest ate this filthy, inky food. I watched him with a horrid fascination, wondering what I had with me that would be an antidote for ptomaine poisoning. I could have spared myself any worry. Ernest was a true Soviet citizen; he stayed in the best of health.