Josephine Baker by Jean-Claude Baker, Chris Chase Page A

for laying down during the day, because the lady would say the room had been rented for the night only! She would say, ‘You didn’t tell me you wanted to sleep during the day.’ And some places, as soon as you put the light out, bedbugs by the thousand would come and bite you. I couldn’t take that, I would go down to the railroad station and sit up until morning. Rooms were a dollar a night, the better ones were a dollar and a half. Clara Smith traveled with her own clean sheets; after a while on the road, so did I.”
    In Memphis, Josephine was taken to a boardinghouse “where Mr. Russell gave me a tiny room.” That very afternoon, the troupe opened at the Venus, an opening Josephine described with gusto: “The show started. The heat was crushing. . . . Hundreds of black faces with yellow teeth died of laughter. They ate peanuts and threw the shells on the stage. The air was awful.”
    Again, she was cast as Cupid, flying with a bow and arrow over two lovers, until the lady’s husband came on and tried to pull her from the arms of her boyfriend. Then a spectator tried to do the same. He hopped onstage, brandishing a razor and shouting, “Get your hands off that woman, trash!”
    Some of the male dancers leaped to restrain him. “Everybody screamed, ‘It’s not the truth, it’s only the play,’ ” Josephine recalled.“Nothing helped. Mr. Russell was obliged to come and explain it was only a scene, and not true. Then the man put away his razor, smiled broadly and went back to his seat.”
    â€œYou know, in them days,” Booth Marshall said, “the colored people just talked back to the shows. Like a villain shoots somebody and hides behind the door, and the audience yells, ‘There’s that dirty rascal, behind the door, go get him!’ Damnedest people I ever seen in my life.”
    The audiences were no more primitive than some of the playhouses with which the Theater Owners’ Booking Association was affiliated. Black vaudevillians swore that T.O.B.A. stood for Tough on Black Asses. “Some of the theaters were so small,” a female dancer told me, “you could not cross behind the stage to go to the toilet, you had to learn to pee in a bottle. Life on the T.O.B.A. was just going from one dinky theater to another, some of them blacksmith shops where they shoed horses. You worked hard, did four shows a day, and learned a lot.”
    Josephine was living proof of that. She learned from everything and everybody, including Mama Dinks, whose routine she had seen many times. And of course she continued to study the phenomenon that was Clara Smith. “Clara outdrew Bessie Smith in Nashville all the time,” says trumpet player Doc Cheatham. “Because she was mean, and she sang mean. She would give everybody hell, give the men hell, give the women hell, in her blues singing. She was a mean woman but she was a great singer.”
    It wasn’t only Clara’s voice that Josephine loved, but the long silk handkerchief Clara used as a prop, and her blue feather boa. Blue was Josephine’s favorite color, and I still keep, like a talisman, one of her headpieces, a satin turban out of which rises a three-foot-tall spray of blue feathers. When I’m in the room with it, it’s as though Josephine is looking over my shoulder.
    Though business was good there, Memphis wasn’t memorable to Josephine, she never spoke or wrote much about it. New Orleans was different, New Orleans and the beautiful Lyric Theater where Bob Russell’s troupe next landed. An ad in the
New Orleans Item
heralded their arrival: “Beginning Monday BOB RUSSELL and His 25 Hottest Coons in Dixie.”
    Two T.O.B.A. members, a Mr. Boudreaux and a Mr. Bennett, owned the Lyric. Bennett was a friend of the racing car driver BarneyOldfield, who had given him a ring set with two three-carat diamonds, which he’d pawned for