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

a thousand dollars to invest in the theater. A showplace that stood on a corner, the Lyric had arched windows, a white marble foyer, dressing rooms of marble and oak. The stage, which could be raised or lowered by hydraulic power, was thirty-eight feet deep; seven hundred patrons could sit on the lower floor, eight hundred in the balcony, and there were twelve boxes on each side.
    Josephine wrote about this pleasure palace and the city that contained it. “There are the French and the Blacks. That is the origin of the creoles. Huge theatre with real orchestra, many musicians: happy! I thought I was coming into high society. . . . It’s fashionable there to eat crabs with rice, corn cut in it, and a little green vegetable called okra. . . . And . . . I saw the Jones family again. . . .”
    Hired by Mr. Russell for the New Orleans leg of the tour, the Joneses had shown up with instruments and prop trunk. “After we had fallen into each other’s arms,” Josephine said, “Mrs. Jones suggested that I move in with them and split the costs. It seemed like a good idea. . . .”
    What seemed like a bad idea was Clara Smith’s greedy consumption of sweet-potato pies. She ate too many, “and she made me eat them too. As I had a sweet tooth, I loved sugar . . . and I fell sick.”
    Sick, maybe, but not too tired to explore the city. “The piano player had told me that it was a musician’s paradise and he was right. . . . I had never seen so many people, bars and dance halls. . . . ‘This is nothing,’ the piano player insisted. ‘You can’t imagine how it used to be. One parade after another; bands competing in the streets to prove they were the best. But Storyville’s [Storyville, New Orleans’s legalized red-light district, had thrived between 1897 and 1917.] been closed down since the war. It’s simply not the same.’ ”
    The ways Josephine remembered the rest of her tenure with Bob Russell were wonderfully creative. One variation went like this: She was fired in New Orleans, so she hid in a packing crate and was shipped on the train with the rest of the luggage, and after she was discovered, Mrs. Russell went to bat for her, and Mr. Russell agreed she could remain with the company until they got back to St. Louis. Then came a list of miseries endured. Fleabag hotels. A gas heater that rendered our heroine unconscious and caused the rest of the company to think she was suicidal. Work unending. It was Mrs. Kaiser’s house all over again. “I sewed, brushed costumes, polished shoes, ironed, dressed hair, hookedand unhooked clothes, fastened, buttoned . . . hung up, laid out, packed, unpacked.”
    In a different story, when the Russell company came to St. Louis, Josephine found her mother in a basement apartment, “her lovely teeth completely yellow and destroyed by tobacco! My stepfather continued to lie down all day and spit on the floor. . . . In a corner there was a crate full of coal, the water used to wash is frozen. Dirty curtains . . . You can’t take garbage out after six o’clock, it brings bad luck. So all the garbage is pushed under the bed.”
    This tale has Josephine going without a bath for a month in the Martins’ hovel, and having to say no to her little sister (“she had only one eye and she was despised”) when Willie Mae begged to be taken on the road.
    The only difficulty with any of these marvelous fables is that the Russell company didn’t go back to St. Louis, it went directly from New Orleans to Philadelphia, and even about Philadelphia, Josephine was not exactly candid. “I started in Philadelphia,” she contended. “In a small theatre: the Standard Theatre, in a bad revue. I made ten dollars a week. In fact I earned nothing because they nearly never