In 1917, race relations in St. Louis were worsening. A faltering economy set white men to worrying that blacks were being imported from the South to take their jobs, even though most whites were not eager to work for $2.35 a day at the sewer-pipe factory.
But to eleven-year-olds like Josephine, this was not a matter of great importance. The heat came early that summer, and on sultry nights, excursion boats offering the hope of cool air plied their way up and down the Mississippi. Sometimes the young Martins would go to the pier at the foot of Olive Street and watch the steamers set out in the moonlight. Departure time: 9 P.M. Admission: thirty-five cents. They could hear the music, and see people dancing on the lower deck. The St. Louis Argus touted a “Family Boat Excursion” to take place on Monday, July 2; it would feature entertainment by the Ragtime Steppers, and it promised to leave on schedule, “rain or shine.”
As it turned out, rain or shine didn’t signify. July 2, 1917, would be memorialized in blood.
RACE RIOTERS FIRE EAST ST. LOUIS AND SHOOT OR HANG MANY NEGROES. DEAD ESTIMATED AT FROM 20 TO 76 ran the headline in The New York Times. The details were ugly.
“A mob of more than 100 men, led by ten or fifteen young girls about 18 years old, chased a negro woman at the Relay depot about 5 P.M. The girls were brandishing clubs and calling upon the men to kill the woman. A lone negro man appeared in the railroad yards. The mob immediately gave up the charge of the woman and turned upon the man. He was shot to death. . . .”
Whites had attacked streetcars, taken blacks off them and beaten them, militiamen were helpless against the crowds, white men who tried to give blacks medical attention were prevented at gunpoint from doing so, policemen in patrol wagons were bombarded with bricks. Martial law was finally declared, and the killing stopped, but The African American, a Baltimore newspaper, compared the riots to “the ruthless, devastating German drive through Belgium.”
Hundreds of blacks abandoned their burnt-out homes; they fled by way of the Eads Bridge and the Free Bridge to St. Louis proper, and many of them found refuge in the neighborhood where the Martins lived. “We kept a couple of families who came over cross the river, came over in St. Louis,” Richard said. “We had two, three families; we got them on the street.”
Josephine, of course, always claimed to have been smack in the heart of East St. Louis when it blew up, and insisted she remembered being shaken from sleep by her mother, who told the children, “It’s the whites. Hurry!”
The reality was that she had learned about the riots by listening to people who had escaped them; it was from the safe side of the bridge that she and Richard watched the flames. “We could see the houses burning and the sky red with fire, smoke,” he told me. “I was not afraid, because it was on the other side.” Even so, years later, she would still be describing herself as an eyewitness. “I never forget my people screaming. . . . I see them running to get to the bridge. I have been running ever since.” But the stories she told of escaping the mobs, her mother crossing the bridge like Marianne, symbol of France, pulling her children with her, were somebody else’s stories.
It was a bloody time—thirty-eight lynchings were recorded in 1917—and it would get worse. (The following year would bring sixty-two lynchings; of these, fifty-eight victims were black, four were white.)
In New York City, under the auspices of the NAACP, thousands of black men and women and children responded to the East St. Louis riots by taking part in a “Silent Protest Parade” along Fifth Avenue. Children dressed in white marched in formation, one carrying a banner inscribed “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and on the sidelines, a little girl was holding a sign: MOTHER, DO LYNCHERS GO TO HEAVEN?
By fall, America was in the war. The black population of St. Louis, though offended by government questionnaires—each carried the words, “If person is of African descent, tear off left-hand corner”—was still willing to do its bit. In early November of 1917, twenty-five thousand people gathered at Union Station to cheer for 480 black draftees leaving for army camp. (Arthur Martin, having turned thirty-two, just escaped being drafted.) Living so close to the station, Josephine was in the midst of the excitement, watching men kiss their wives goodbye and mothers faint.
In 1918, pestilence was added to war. A flu epidemic—it would claim 550,000 victims across the United States—encircled the world, killing more people than any sickness since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Theaters closed, and the Dumas school shut down for a short time too. This enforced vacation pleased Josephine; what did not please her were the endless confrontations with Carrie. Josephine’s brown skin continued to be a tacit reproach to her black mother, living evidence of Carrie’s dalliance with a white man; when they went out together, both felt they were being stared at, whispered about.
They tried, but they could not find common ground; Josephine longed to be loved, Carrie longed to understand her, but it just never worked. Josephine prayed for answers. “Oh, God, why didn’t you make us all one color? It would have been so much simpler.”
Her road trips with the Joneses had contributed to her dissatisfactions. It was hard to come back to the discipline, the poverty, of home. She had no pity for her mother, no respect for the stepfather who endured visits from Carrie’s former lovers. Occasionally, Eddie Carson popped through the front door to check on Josephine, who didn’t give a damn about him. Or Alexander Perkins came by to say hello to his biological son, Richard. “He was a nice man,” Richard said.
Poor Weatherbird was now jobless, and Carrie was going off, sometimes for weeks, with other men. “Once in a while,” Richard told me, “my father would get jealous and Mama would get a black eye.”
Still, away from his wife, Arthur Martin was an easygoing person. On weekends, he would hitch up his old horse and cart and carry the children across the Eads Bridge. They would camp along the river and fish, and Arthur would make a fire and fry the catch—sometimes catfish, sometimes buffalo fish—in hot oil. “Tumpy would get so excited,” Richard remembered.
Josephine still worked as a kitchen helper, a baby-sitter, one of the girls who delivered laundry for Aunt Jo Cooper. She loved handling the silky bedsheets of rich white people, the lingerie trimmed with handmade lace, even though Aunt Jo was strict, and would make her wash her grimy paws before she touched a single handkerchief.
But relations between Carrie and her eldest had become so difficult that Josephine was once more living with Elvira and Aunt Caroline. “I think,” Richard said, “it’s because Josephine was a little lighter than the rest of us children—that’s me and Margaret and Wilhelmina [Willie Mae]—I think that’s why my mother just gave Josephine to my grandmother.”
By now, both Elvira and Caroline were widows, and in addition to Josephine, they had taken in a boarder, a man who was seventy-two years old.
On the morning of March 22, 1918, Josephine was wakened by her grandmother, tears streaming down the old woman’s face. Aunt Caroline, who had chronic endocarditis, was dying. “Run home and fetch your mother,” Elvira said. Josephine ran home, but Carrie wasn’t there. Arthur said she was at Aunt Emma’s, Emma had gone into labor. “Once more, I set off through the darkness. ‘Come quick, Mama. . . .’ ” Carrie refused. “I’ll be along as soon as I can, Tumpy, I can’t leave the baby, my place is here right now.”
It was another lesson. Life took precedence over death. Back at Elvira’s, Josephine found that Aunt Caroline had stopped breathing. Elvira said there was nothing to be scared of. “There’s more to fear from the living than from the dead, child.”
Now living with Elvira and the boarder, Josephine began to suspect that the man was stealing money. Elvira had inherited Caroline’s little pension, and some life insurance, but it was disappearing fast. “Grandmother would have had enough for the rest of her life, but she couldn’t count,” Josephine said. “This man . . . became her secretary. He spent her money with other women.” Josephine went to Carrie and reported that the boarder was a thief. Carrie “fired the man,” and took her mother into the Martin household.
Naturally, Josephine came home too. According to her, Elvira still had some funds, “and with that small amount, the whole family was happy . . . as long as it lasted. Then life got hard again.”
Especially for someone who was forced back to school by a mother weary of arguing with the truant officer. Carrie laid down the law: The choice was school or a correctional institution. But even in school, there were good days. Josephine didn’t mind going to Sally Henderson’s class, because Miss Henderson praised Josephine’s imagination, her creativity. Miss Henderson also kept a turtle in a box.
Once a week, short, plump, sweet-natured Sally Henderson would read aloud to the class the latest news of black Americans fighting in France. The Argus printed the letters they wrote home. “The people here are good to us. They don’t know anything about color prejudice.” “Many places, the people met us with flowers.” “No wooden houses here, all are made of stone, with beautiful lace curtains at the windows.”
Josephine had heard of Joan of Arc, she knew there was a country where a girl dressed as a boy had saved her king, and even if she died in the fire, they made a movie about her, which almost made the sacrifice worthwhile, and now it turned out the people in this amazing land loved the colored people of America. (The Booker had advertised “Joan of Arc, a Wonderful Picture of the Historical French Revolution,” so how do you expect Josephine Baker to know about history?)
Until she died, Sally Henderson talked about Josephine’s ability to shake off the yoke of reality. “After the Thanksgiving holidays,” Miss Henderson said, “the kids stood up and described what they had for Thanksgiving dinner. And Josephine Martin told about the fabulous meal at the Martin house, she described a feast fit for a king, and the other kids were young enough that some of them believed it. She never backed down. She said that’s what they had.”
At the age of thirteen, Josephine was tall and thin with a long face, light brown eyes that seemed to burn, and kinky hair that she hated to have to comb. It must have been just about that time that she encountered Mr. Dad. Her version of their relationship was filled with melodrama:
“There was a fifty-year-old man who liked to have little girls live with him. He was called Mr. Dad. . . . Mummy let me clean his house. . . . He clothed me, gave me money. Then one day he asked me to spend the night with him.
“I left. He was very upset and drank cider. He came to the house, spoke with Mama. Then she was upset and insisted I stay with Mr. Dad. I refused. She took off my clothes and beat me until the skin came off. . . . I ran in the street, naked. . . . Soon I came to the courtyard of a house and I went into the coal cellar. I hid.
“It was night. I prayed to God: ‘Father, help me . . . let me die, I beg you! . . . I am so unhappy on earth.’ ”
Waking, Josephine says, she covered her nakedness with a “mouldy” coat she found in the coal cellar and took off for the Booker Washington. “When I arrived at the theatre . . . Mr. Bob Russell, the director of the company working there that week, came close to me, a very black man with white hair and very tall. He looked at me kindly and said, ‘What do you want, my child?’
“I . . . begged him for work. . . . I said I had never danced but if I was allowed to, I would do my best. . . .
“Mr. Russell had me stand on the stage to observe. Seeing them prancing and jumping, I was impatient to do the same as the ‘girls.’ . . . I wished I could have leapt . . . to the beat of this music . . . for me, it was . . . a physical intoxication. . . . Is that what they call a vocation, what you do with joy as if you had fire in your heart, the devil in your body? . . . It was like if I had drunk gin. . . . Everybody was surprised to see how quickly I learned. . . .
“That same night, we left St. Louis. I was happy to travel and to work. I adored that life. I wished to work more. I was never tired.”