Josephine Baker Read Online Free PDF Page B

guests. Mistinguett, queen of the music halls, who had just opened at the Moulin Rouge, came straight from her own show just in time to discover that she had, at last, a rival.
    Josephine, however, was enjoying herself, even though, at 3 A.M ., she went home alone. Tonight, of course, Claude had been with Mabel at the party, but Josephine had other things to think about.
    The disastrous day had ended well. Until she went into her bathroom at the hotel. Hearing her scream, “Call a doctor!” Lydia Jones ran to help. “Look!” cried Josephine, pointing. The goldfish were lying dead in the bidet, which was empty of water. One more failure of communication. How could a simple child of St. Louis be expected to understand the mysteries of French plumbing?
    As the worst and the best twenty-four hours of her life came to an end, Josephine reviled the universe for having murdered her goldfish. That she herself had put the fish in the bidet was not a subject Lydia brought up. It was better, she decided, to go to bed and think about finding a less volatile roommate.
    Years before, in St. Louis, Josephine’s mother had had the same thought.

Chapter 3

ELVIRA, CARRIE, THE BEGINNINGS
“Grandma often talked about slave days”
    There is only one picture of Josephine Baker as a baby, and nobody is sure if that one is authentic.
    She was born Freda J. McDonald on June 3, 1906, in the Female Hospital, which had opened as the St. Louis Social Evil Hospital, a treatment center for prostitutes suffering from venereal disease.
    She died on April 12, 1975, in the Salpêtrière hospital, which had been built to care for the prostitutes, beggars, and criminal women of Paris.
    But what a dance in between! Though even through the years of wine and roses, she could not forget the slums she had run so fast and so far to escape. Despite herself, she thought about them. Despite herself because, a friend said, “Miss Baker does not like to remember. She lives . . . in the present.”
    So much did Josephine “not like to remember” that when she left America, she erased all evidence of her early life. Pictures, papers, cut up, torn up, burnt. Goodbye.
    And still, this impulse to cover her tracks was at war with her impulse to get the world’s attention. She would alter her story again and again, reshaping history as she went. Marcel Sauvage told me how they worked on the first memoirs, a collection of “notes, impressions, images,” when she was twenty. “Around 5 P.M ., I would go to her hotel. That was when she got up. The maid would bring breakfast, and Josephine, half naked, her pink nightgown all open, laughing, playing with a parrot, would start to remember.”
    And what did she remember, in the shadows of those late afternoons?
    She said her father and mother were married (they were not), and she said she sent a check home every month (at the time, she did). “Now, dear, you understand . . . I am the great man of the family.”
    She said that kings walked with pointed shoes in her dreams. “And the queens were blond . . . sometimes I cried because I too would have liked to be a queen.”
    She said she became a dancer “because I was born in a cold city . . . .”
    She said her childhood was filled with “stories of cemeteries. A black childhood is always a little sad.”
    Even when the sadness was once removed. Her grandmother, Elvira, “often talked about slave days. I adored Grandma. The songs she sang as she rocked me to sleep . . . told of the freedom that would someday come.”
    As a child on a tobacco plantation, Elvira had seen a pregnant woman put in a hole, belly down, and beaten. Her great-grandson, Richard Martin, Jr., told me she repeated that story over and over. “She used to say, ‘Poor Miz So-and-So, why is Master beating her on the back that way?’ And she would