Chapter 1Freda Josephine

Foreword

Every musician I have written about stayed. I did not notice this until I began this book. The men and women who made the American century in sound — the ones who invented a music in the after-hours rooms, the ones who carried the church into the charts and the charts back into the church — endured America, argued with it, were wounded by it, and stayed. They made their art out of the staying. Josephine Baker did not stay.

She is, in that one respect, the opposite of every subject I have chosen. She left the country that made her, left it early and left it hard, and she found in Paris the thing the country of my own work could not give a Black performer in 1925: the freedom to be looked at without being sentenced. I have spent a career explaining what America did to the artists who refused to leave. I did not understand, until I followed her out of it, what the country had cost the one who refused to stay.

She is also, on paper, outside my period. She sailed for France while the men I usually write about were still children, and she was a comedienne and a dancer long before she was ever a singer. For years I told myself she belonged to someone else's book. But the American sound I have chased for thirty years did not begin with the horn players. It began in the rooming houses and the segregated trains and the theaters that billed themselves, without shame, as Tough On Black Artists. Baker came up inside exactly that grammar. She is the first chapter of the thing I thought I had been studying from the middle.

I expected, going in, to write about the banana skirt and the myth — the scandal, the Paris of the twenties that has been photographed to death. The record gave me a woman of relentless, almost frightening seriousness instead. I worked from the public materials a life this public leaves behind: her own memoirs, and the many versions of her story that she told and revised across a lifetime; the press that adored her and the press that hunted her; the citations, the court filings, the paper trail. The mythology is thick, and she built most of it herself. The work was learning where the myth ended and the will began.

At the center of it are the twelve children. She adopted them from four continents, raised them in a château in the Dordogne, called them the Rainbow Tribe, and meant them as an argument. She had watched a city burn across a river when she was eleven — Black houses, Black bodies, the sky red over East St. Louis — and she had asked God why he had not made everyone one color. The twelve children were her answer to her own question, assembled by hand and set under one roof: proof, she believed, that the thing done to her people was not the only thing the world was capable of. This book takes its title from them because they are the truest expression of what she was — a performer who could not stop trying to prove that the world might be otherwise.

Why she is worth a book is the same reason she is hard to write. She refused every category she was offered — American and French, clown and goddess, mother and monument — and she refused them not out of confusion but out of a conviction that the categories were themselves the lie. I write about the people who made American sound. She is the one who had to leave America to be free enough to be fully heard, and the sound of that leaving is in everything she did afterward. I went looking for the entertainer. I found one of the most complicated Americans of her century, who happened to spend most of it as a Frenchwoman.

— Calvin Renard, Paris

Chapter 1 · Freda Josephine

The child who would become the most famous woman in France was born in a city that did not want her. St. Louis, Missouri, on the third day of June 1906, on Bernard Street, in the kind of dwelling where poverty was the only constant. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, was twenty-one years old, unmarried, and Black. The father was listed nowhere on the birth certificate. This absence defined Josephine Baker's first decade as thoroughly as any presence could have.

Baker herself remembered the beginning with a wryness that masked the wound: "I was born there, on Bernard Street, June 3, 1906, state of Missouri, the United States of America, very beautiful and funny, beau et très amusant." The humor was already there, in the first sentence she ever wrote about herself. So was the defiance. A girl born into those conditions was not expected to describe herself as beautiful and funny. She did it anyway.

The child was named Freda Josephine McDonald. She would shed every part of that name in time. The Freda first, then the McDonald, finally even the Josephine remade into something the original could scarcely have predicted. But in June 1906 she was another unwanted infant in a city that sorted its people by color with the efficiency of a machine.

St. Louis in 1906 was a border city in the fullest sense. It sat on the western bank of the Mississippi, looking east toward Illinois and the memory of free soil, while behind it stretched Missouri, a state that had entered the Union as a compromise and never stopped compromising. The city had hosted the World's Fair two years before Josephine's birth, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, which had drawn twenty million visitors to gawk at exhibits that included, without apparent irony, a human zoo of Filipino and Native American people displayed in their "native habitats." The announcement of modernity did not extend to the neighborhoods south of Market Street where Carrie McDonald lived.

The particular geography of Black St. Louis in 1906 requires a precise map, because Baker spent the rest of her life remaking it into mythology, and the mythology has obscured the concrete reality of the streets. The Black population of St. Louis was concentrated in a corridor running roughly along Market Street and its tributaries south and east of downtown — the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood, the Ville, and the tenement blocks near the rail yards where the Wabash, Missouri Pacific, and Terminal Railroad tracks converged. Bernard Street, where Josephine was born, sat in one of the most congested parts of this zone, a street of rooming houses and shared flats occupied by recent migrants from the South, the laboring class of a city that needed their labor and resented their presence in roughly equal measure.

The housing stock on Bernard Street was typical of the accommodation available to poor Black families in turn-of-the-century St. Louis: frame construction, two or three rooms shared by multiple families, outhouses rather than indoor plumbing, a single coal stove for heat in winter. The 1910 federal census, taken when Josephine was four years old, shows the Martin household — Arthur Martin, Carrie McDonald Martin, and the children — crowded into a dwelling that census enumerators recorded with the spare notation of the era. The same block housed washerwomen, day laborers, railroad porters, and the families of workers in the slaughterhouses and packing plants that were among the largest employers of Black men in the city.

Across the river, in East St. Louis, Illinois, the situation was comparable and, in some respects, more volatile. East St. Louis was an industrial satellite, its economy built on aluminum smelting, meatpacking, and railroad freight, all industries that had, since the 1890s, recruited Black workers from the South as a reserve labor force to be deployed when white workers struck or when production demand exceeded the existing workforce. The aluminum plant owned by the Aluminum Ore Company and the meatpacking operations of the National City Stockyards were the largest employers. By 1917, the Black population of East St. Louis had risen to approximately ten thousand, roughly eighteen percent of the city's total, and the white working-class neighborhoods viewed this presence with a hostility that intensified as wartime production demands brought more Black workers north.

What the records show is this. Carrie McDonald had been adopted as a child in Little Rock, Arkansas, by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both of whom had been born into slavery, and had migrated to St. Louis as part of the great movement of Black Americans out of the South. She had some talent as a dancer. The identity of Josephine's father has never been established with certainty. Carrie named Eddie Carson, a drummer, and Josephine later referred to him as her father, but Carson drifted away almost immediately. By 1907, Carrie had married Arthur Martin, a laborer the family called "Weatherbird," and the household that formed around that marriage was the one Josephine grew up in: crowded, impoverished, and frequently hungry.

"Mama was colored," Baker said. "Papa was white. Aunt Elvira was an Indian. It's true, I haven't confessed everything to you yet. There's Indian blood in my family, too." She described her mixed heritage with a matter-of-factness that concealed its cost. In a city organized by racial categories, Josephine's brown skin was, as Jean-Claude Baker later wrote, "a tacit reproach to her black mother, living evidence of Carrie's dalliance with a white man."

The neighborhoods around Gratiot Street and the rail yards were the geography of Josephine's childhood, and they need to be understood precisely because she spent the rest of her life constructing a mythology to replace them. In her many autobiographical tellings, the details shifted constantly: the father was a Spanish dancer, or a Jewish businessman, or simply absent; the mother was a washerwoman of noble bearing, or a failed dancer, or a tyrant. The only constant was the poverty, which was too large to mythologize away.

Arthur Martin was not unkind, but he was defeated. Work was irregular. The family moved repeatedly among the cheap rooming houses and tenements of the Black neighborhoods. By the time Josephine was old enough to form memories, the household included her younger half-siblings: Richard, born in 1907; Margaret, born in 1909; and later Willie Mae. Four children in rooms that could barely hold two adults. Carrie took in laundry, the default employment for Black women in St. Louis, and even that work was uncertain.

The laundry business that supported the Martin household was part of a city-wide economy in which Black women's labor was the foundation on which white domestic comfort was built, invisibly and without acknowledgment. Carrie McDonald's work followed the pattern established by generations of Black women in American cities: she collected dirty clothes from white households, washed and ironed them at home, and returned them clean, for rates that barely covered the cost of soap and coal. The 1910 census counted roughly twelve thousand Black women in St. Louis engaged in domestic service or laundry work, forming the largest occupational category among the city's Black female population. It was work that destroyed the body — the hours of standing over hot water, the lifting, the ironing — and it was work that could be interrupted without notice, since white households terminated domestic arrangements for reasons that ranged from dissatisfaction to the simple fact that a cheaper alternative had presented itself. Josephine grew up in a household where the primary income source was as precarious as the weather, and the precariousness was structural, not personal: it was the condition of every Black washerwoman in St. Louis.

The schools Josephine attended — intermittently and with decreasing frequency as household demands imposed themselves — were the segregated Black schools that received, per pupil, approximately a third of the funding allocated to white schools. The Sumner High School, which served the Black community of St. Louis and would eventually count Chuck Berry and Tina Turner among its notable alumni, was miles from the tenements where the Martin family lived. The elementary schools closer to hand were overcrowded, poorly supplied, and staffed by teachers who were underpaid by design. Josephine attended school through what would have been the sixth or seventh grade, acquiring enough literacy to write the memoirs that would document her extraordinary life, and not much more. The education she received was on the streets, in the theaters, and in the unsparing classroom of American racial capitalism.

"My childhood was the type where you have no stockings," Baker remembered. "I was cold, and I danced to keep warm."

The poverty was not abstract. She remembered eating from garbage bins behind restaurants. She remembered winters without adequate clothing, huddling with her siblings for warmth. At the age of eight she was sent to work in white households, scrubbing floors and tending children. "We were all so very hungry and cold at home," she said, "Mama the only one making a little money. We couldn't go on like that." She called herself "the big man of the house."

One employer scalded her hands in boiling water as punishment for putting too much soap in the laundry. She was eight or nine years old. She ran home. Carrie sent her to another household.

It is worth pausing over this detail because Josephine herself returned to it throughout her life, telling and retelling it with variations that suggest not fabrication but the compulsive revisiting of genuine trauma. The scalding. The hands. The punishment for an error so minor that no child could reasonably have been expected to know better. And then the mother's response: not comfort, not outrage, but the next placement, the next kitchen, the next white woman's house. When Josephine Baker later built a castle in the Dordogne and filled it with children she swore she would never send away, the roots of that decision reached back to Gratiot Street and the smell of lye soap.

Another employer forced her to kill her pet chicken, a bird she'd named Jacki. "Oh! That memory," Baker said decades later, and the sentence trails off into an ellipsis that says more than any elaboration could. "It taints my childhood."

But there was another life alongside the one that scalded children's hands, and Josephine found it in a cellar on Bernard Street. She was not yet ten when she built her first theater underground. The curtain was made of pieces of cloth all joined together, scraps sewn by a child's hands. She placed candles on top of cans of New Zealand peaches and set a dozen neighborhood children on crates as her audience. Admission: one pin.

She performed in her mother's heels and an oversized dress. "I looked like a prisoner in a sack." Not a penny for admission. A pin. The fact that she charged it at all tells you everything about Josephine Baker at nine: she understood that a performance without a transaction was not a performance but an imposition, and that the audience's investment, however small, was the thing that made the exchange real.

The other children watched, rapt, and then the candles set fire to her dress. The audience fled. She was alone in the cellar with the flames, slapping at the burning fabric, and in that moment the architecture of her life declared itself: the audience, the improvised stage, the costume that was simultaneously ridiculous and transformative, the disaster that she survived through sheer refusal to stop. She was nine years old and already Josephine Baker.

The street was her next stage. The corners near Union Station, where travelers might throw coins. The sidewalks outside the Booker T. Washington Theatre, the premier Black vaudeville house in St. Louis. "Every Sunday, I would go to watch dance shows for fifteen cents at the Booker T. Washington Theatre," she remembered. Fifteen cents was a fortune in a household where the children cleaned snow off steps for pennies to buy Christmas gifts, where Josephine herself went barefoot in winter and wore stockings only when the cold was unbearable. But the fifteen cents was never negotiable. The theater was where she went to learn, and the learning was the one investment in her future that poverty could not cancel.

She learned by watching the performers who played the Theater Owners Booking Association circuit, known without much affection as Tough On Black Artists.

And she was funny. This matters, because the later image of Josephine Baker, the glamorous, the exotic, the embodiment of Parisian chic, tends to obscure what everyone who saw her perform as a child and a teenager emphasized: she was extraordinarily, physically, inventively funny.

She absorbed the particular grammar of comedy that would become her signature. The crossed eyes. The rubber face. The willingness to make herself grotesque in order to be seen. There is something painful in this when examined closely: a Black child in a racist city learning that the surest way to gain attention was to perform a version of foolishness that confirmed what white audiences already believed about Black people. Josephine would spend decades negotiating with this inheritance, alternately deploying and subverting the stereotypes that had given her a way out. The tension between the clown and the goddess would power her performances for the rest of her career.

But before the escape came the event that seared itself into every Black person living near East St. Louis in the summer of 1917. Josephine was eleven years old when the massacre came.

What happened in East St. Louis, Illinois, beginning on the second of July 1917 and continuing for two days, was a coordinated assault by white residents on the Black population of the city, provoked by labor tensions, enabled by police indifference, and executed with a savagery that shocked even a nation accustomed to racial violence. Black workers had been recruited from the South to work in the aluminum and meatpacking plants, white workers felt threatened, and the newspapers fanned the resentment until it ignited. Houses were set on fire, and when the inhabitants ran out, they were shot or beaten. Black people were pulled from streetcars and killed. The Illinois National Guard did little; some guardsmen reportedly participated.

The sequence of events that led to July 2 had been building for months. In May 1917, a union meeting at City Hall had produced calls for the expulsion of Black workers from the city. On the night of July 1, a car of armed white men drove through the Black neighborhoods of East St. Louis firing into houses, and Black residents armed themselves in response. When police arrived in an unmarked car, residents, believing it to be another attack, fired at it, killing two officers. The killing of white police officers was the trigger that opened the massacre. On July 2, mobs formed by mid-morning and proceeded through the Black neighborhoods with a systematic efficiency that investigators later described as organized rather than spontaneous. The East St. Louis Journal, whose editor had spent weeks publishing articles inflaming white workers' fears about Black economic competition, did not report the massacre on its front page until it was over.

The Illinois National Guard, with roughly five hundred troops deployed by Governor Frank Lowden, proved ineffective and, in some documented instances, complicit: guardsmen who fired their weapons did so, in multiple accounts from Black survivors, at Black people rather than at white rioters. A subsequent investigation by the House of Representatives Select Committee on the East St. Louis Riots, conducted by Congressman Ben Johnson of Kentucky and Representative Merrill Moores of Indiana, concluded that guardsmen had "stood by and saw burning and rioting go on." The committee's report, issued in 1918, identified no guardsmen for prosecution.

The death toll was never precisely established. Official counts put it at thirty-nine Black people and nine white people killed. The NAACP, whose secretary Roy Nash visited the city in the aftermath, concluded the true number of Black dead was far higher, perhaps two hundred. The journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose career had been defined by investigating racial violence, traveled to East St. Louis and interviewed survivors, documenting atrocities that the official count had failed to record. Six thousand Black residents were driven from their homes. Property losses to the Black community ran to approximately $400,000, equivalent to several million dollars in contemporary terms, none of it ever compensated.

Josephine was living in St. Louis that summer, on the Missouri side of the river. She watched from the western bank. Her brother Richard remembered it plainly: "We could see the houses burning and the sky red with fire, smoke." Refugees streamed across the bridges into their neighborhood. The Martin family sheltered refugee families who came across the river.

"I never forget my people screaming," Baker said. "I see them running to get to the bridge. I have been running ever since."

She prayed the prayer of an eleven-year-old: "Oh, God, why didn't you make us all one color? It would have been so much simpler."

The massacre was one of the formative events of Josephine Baker's life, and she said so explicitly and repeatedly for the rest of it. In her later accounts she described the East St. Louis massacre as the event against which she measured every later horror — the enormity of what she had witnessed as a child having given her a reference point for human evil that nothing subsequent could exceed, and the possession of that reference point having made her brave in the ways she was subsequently required to be brave. When she stood at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, she was speaking from a memory that was forty-six years old and still burning. When she carried intelligence for the French Resistance during the Second World War, part of what she carried was the knowledge, acquired at eleven, of what organized hatred looked like when allowed to proceed without opposition. And when she insisted, with the stubbornness that characterized all her great commitments, on adopting children of every race and raising them together, the experiment had its origins in the fires across the river.

The response of the national press to the East St. Louis massacre was, with notable exceptions, inadequate to its scale. The New York Times covered it as a labor disturbance. The Chicago Tribune framed it as a riot rather than a massacre. The exceptions were the African American press — the Chicago Defender, the NAACP's Crisis magazine under W.E.B. Du Bois, the St. Louis Argus — which covered it with the horror it deserved and whose coverage reached the Black communities of the country with a speed and directness that the mainstream press could not match. Josephine's awareness of the massacre was shaped by this community knowledge: the stories that came from East St. Louis through the networks of Black churches and social organizations, the firsthand accounts of refugees who had crossed the river and been sheltered by families like the Martins, the photographs that circulated in the Black press showing burned houses and bodies in the streets. This knowledge was not available in the white newspapers that reported the events as unfortunate but comprehensible. It was community knowledge, passed from person to person, family to family, the way community knowledge is always passed, through the living and the telling.

The riot accelerated everything. The neighborhood was more frightened, more unstable, more desperate. Her attachment to school, already tenuous, effectively ended. She was working, performing, surviving by her wits in a city that had just demonstrated, as though demonstration were needed, that Black lives were conditional. The question was not whether she would leave St. Louis. The question was how and when.

The how began to take shape in the months after the massacre, as Josephine attached herself more firmly to the world of Black vaudeville. The Jones Family Band was one entry point; the Booker T. Washington Theatre was another. She haunted the stage doors, begged for work, offered to do anything, sweep floors, carry costumes, hold props, in exchange for proximity to the performers she idolized. She was learning the craft not in any school but in the wings, watching night after night, studying how a performer held an audience, how a comic timed a joke, how a dancer used every part of her body to tell a story.

By 1916 she had attached herself to the Jones Family Band through sheer persistence, showing up at their performances and dancing alongside them uninvited until they incorporated her. She was small for her age, wiry, electric. The Joneses let her stay.

And around this time, she was briefly married for the first time, at the age of thirteen, to a man named Willie Wells. The marriage lasted weeks. It represented the default trajectory for girls in neighborhoods like hers: early marriage, early children, early entrapment. That she recognized, at thirteen, that the expected life was not the life she intended to live was the first great act of will in a life defined by acts of will.

Even in poverty, she was someone who gave rather than hoarded, who turned deprivation into generosity. The pattern would repeat itself, at vastly different scales, for the rest of her life.

By 1919, she had joined a traveling show, one of the small troupes that crisscrossed the Black vaudeville circuit. She was thirteen. She had no formal education. She had a failed marriage behind her. She had the memory of fire and blood. And she had a talent so obvious that adults who should have known better put her on a stage and let her go.

When the other chorus girls mocked her wild, self-invented dancing, she refused to change it, certain that the very movement they ridiculed was what would carry her further than any of them.

She was thirteen years old, and she meant it.

The circuit was hard. The conditions were brutal: long journeys in segregated trains, rooming houses that might or might not have clean beds, towns where the wrong look at the wrong white person could mean jail or worse. For a Black performer in the American South in 1919, the year of the Red Summer, another wave of racial massacres across the country, the professional and the existential were indistinguishable. You performed and you survived, and the performing was part of the surviving, because on the stage you were someone, and off the stage you were a Black person in America, which meant you were no one the law was required to protect.

Josephine learned all of this. She learned it in her body, not as abstraction, and the knowledge shaped everything she became. The decision to leave America, when it came, was not a rejection of her country so much as an acceptance of what her country had already told her: that she was not wanted, not safe, not fully human in its eyes. She would spend the rest of her life alternately fleeing from and returning to this knowledge, and the tension between the two impulses, the exile's longing and the exile's fury, would make her one of the most complicated Americans of her century.

But that was still ahead. In 1919, Freda Josephine McDonald was on a train heading somewhere else, anywhere else, away from the smoke that still hung in her memory over East St. Louis. She was thirteen years old. She could dance. She could make people laugh. She had nothing else, and it would have to be enough.