Free Josephine Baker by Jean-Claude Baker, Chris Chase

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?’
    â€œI . . . begged him for work. . . . I said I had never danced but if I was allowed to, I would do my best. . . .
    â€œMr. 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. . . .
    â€œThat 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.”

Chapter 6

JOSEPHINE MARRIES AT THIRTEEN
“She cut his head open with a beer bottle”
    What went through your head, Mother, leaving St. Louis on one of the night trains you had listened to, lying in the crowded bed of your childhood? The way you recounted (in books, in interviews) the events leading up to your flight was not precisely accurate. For one thing, you erased two years of your life, and a husband; you forgot to mention Willie Wells. As for your brush with Mr. Dad, your brother told me the way it really happened.
    â€œThe man we called Mr. Dad worked in the steel foundry,” Richard said. “And on the side he had an ice cream parlor. He made ice cream and candy and Josephine would sell it, and she went to live with him in his house, and people were talking about that.”
    Like Mr. Mason, Mr. Dad loved young girls. He bought them clothes, he fed them well, and Josephine was practical. In her dreams, she was a princess, but when she wasn’t dreaming, she had few illusions. Already, she had learned there was a price for everything, and it was better to shut up about what you paid.
    Because in the Martins’ neighborhood—by now they were living on Bernard Street—everybody knew everybody else’s business. And when Josephine, following in Carrie’s footsteps, established her own independence, the neighbors were on Carrie’s side. Her thirteen-year-old daughter playing house with Mr. Dad? It was a scandal, and everyone on Bernard Street concurred.
    Carrie dragged Josephine home, and announced, one more time, “I’m going to send you to reform school.” Even Elvira couldn’t calm her. “Don’t say a word, Mama! You just lost all your money to that old man, maybe we should put
you
in a home!”
    Aunt Jo Cooper, who had always been a kind of fairy godmother to Josephine, saved the day. “The child is not a child anymore,” she said to Carrie. “She wants to go with men? Let’s find her a nice fellow, marry her off.”
    Thus did Willie Wells come into Josephine’s life.
    â€œHe was a steelworker,” Richard said. “He was too old for her. He was about twenty-five or thirty, she was thirteen, when she married.”
    In 1919, Josephine attended the L’Ouverture school for a grand total of thirty days. On December 22, she got married, and that was the end of her formal education.
    On the day after Christmas, the wedding was noted in the
Argus:
“Willie Wells, 2617 Pine; Josephine Martin, 2632 Bernard.” It was the first time Josephine would see her name in a newspaper, and it was on the same page with an editorial asking readers, “Have you been True, first to yourself, then to your friends and to your race?”
    Carrie needed to consent in writing to Josephine’s marriage because the bride was underage. (Even so, it wasn’t legal, but neither Carrie nor the minister knew this. In 1919,