Josephine Baker by Jean-Claude Baker, Chris Chase

weather is fair and cold, thirty degrees, and Josephine runs along the platform, following Clara and a bunch of the bathing beauties.
    As the train starts to move, Josephine recognizes the same excitement she had felt on top of the coal wagon. “I had never seen curtains aspretty as those in the Pullman-car windows. From my seat at Mrs. Russell’s side, her cigar smoke pricking my nose, I peered nervously out the window, looking for Mama’s angry face, Grandma’s reproachful eyes or the stern gaze of Daddy or Aunt Jo. No, Daddy Arthur would already be in bed, so full of beer that nothing could wake him. I was safely on my way. Closing my eyes, I dreamed of sunlit cities, magnificent theatres, and me in the limelight.”
    What she could see through the window was like a silent movie at the Booker. A perfect picture, black and white, night all around, and in the darkness, pools of light from the windows she was passing. For a few seconds, it was clear—1537 Papin Street, which she could almost have touched if she had stretched out her arm, Chestnut Street, the Jefferson Barracks Bridge—and then it was gone.
    On Bernard Street, Margaret was nervous because she had promised not to tell Carrie that Josephine was skipping town. Josephine had given Margaret reasons. She wanted to be famous, she wanted to be rich and help the family.
    Loyally, Margaret followed the party line. She told me that the night the Russell company left St. Louis, Carrie asked where Josephine was. Margaret answered that she was staying over at Dyer Jones’s house. Next morning, Margaret confessed that her sister was gone. Carrie seemed to take the news calmly. “To my surprise, Mama said, ‘She has chosen her path. Let her be.’ ”

Chapter 7

LIFE ON THE T.O.B.A. CIRCUIT
“It was going from one dinky theater to another”
    On the map, the distance from St. Louis to Memphis looks to be about 250 miles, as the crow flies. But the journey is longer and prettier if you follow the curves and twists of the Mississippi, the river meandering south, dividing Missouri from Illinois and Kentucky, separating Arkansas and Tennessee.
    It was one of the trains of the Illinois Central Railroad that carried Josephine on this first leg of her wanderings; Bob Russell had a private Pullman car for his large company, their costumes and scenery. Josephine was delighted to find that Andre Tribble, a female impersonator whom she had loved at the Booker (he carried celery as his bridal bouquet) was now part of the Russell entourage.
    The Illinois Central prided itself on furnishing its dining cars with white linen tablecloths, bud vases holding fresh flowers, fine china; but black people weren’t welcome in the dining cars, they ate in their seats.
    Still, it was fun for Josephine. Bob Russell’s wife (also named Josephine)had prepared hampers of food; there were sandwiches, ribs, hard-boiled eggs, cookies, bananas, and thermos bottles full of lemonade. The train slowly built up to speed—fifty miles an hour was its limit—and the tired company began to relax. It had been a long day, Josephine was to remember. “One by one the cast dozed off, their bodies rocking with the motion of the train.” And if you couldn’t sleep, all night long there was a show outside the windows, as passengers boarded at each new stop, some of them carrying frying pans and live chickens.
    When the troupe got to Memphis, a city where the population was about 40 percent black, Josephine discovered there were three black theaters (the New Regent, the Palace, and the Venus, where Bob Russell’s troupe would spend the next seven weeks) but it was difficult for black performers to find places to stay. There were few black hotels for the simple reason that there weren’t enough well-to-do blacks who could afford to stay in hotels.
    Booth Marshall recalled the boardinghouses of his youth. “Sometimes you had to pay extra