Josephine Baker Read Online Free Page A

Nègre
is expected to run. One tall blond boy—Maurice Blech—will come back every night until Josephine invites him to her dressing room, and then to her bed.
    The show begins. “On one side of the stage,” reports the man from
Le Figaro
, “before a curtain on which thick-lipped faces with immense black eyes stand out among the geometric designs in dazzling colors applied by some local Picasso in Tallahassee or Honolulu, eight musicians in red tailcoats take their seats.”
    The “local Picasso” is, in fact, the Mexican painter Covarrubias, the eight musicians are Claude Hopkins and his orchestra, and once they begin to play,
Le Figaro
’s critic loses all objectivity. “The music seems to have captured the echoes of the jungle and to mingle the moan of the breeze, the patter of rain, the crackling of leaves . . .”
    The curtain rises to reveal a backdrop of two Mississippi riverboats. Down front is a wharf where people rest in the sun. A man comes on pushing a wheelbarrow full of flowers. It’s Sidney Bechet. He picks his horn off the cart, bends his head to the mouthpiece, a short fat Pan inciting his listeners to revelry, filling the theater with genius.
    The chorus girls are young, supple, they laugh as they dance the Charleston (Paris is crazy about the Charleston), but some in the audience are disappointed that the performers are so fair. Because of the word
nègre
in the title, the French are expecting black Africans, not American mulattoes. These dancers are creamy-skinned, beige-skinned, and for the ten days since they got off the boat they have moved from astonishment to astonishment, going to the Galeries Lafayette where they can try on clothes and no one forbids it, going to the cafés, where they are served politely, walking in the streets, where they are openly admired.
    Josephine, the star, is darker than the other girls, a clown with rubber legs and rubber face. She works hard in a sketch about an abandoned bride, singing “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” (badly, because she is not yet a singer), offering a “darky impression” in blackface. She crosses her eyes, pushes her knees together, does splits, her pants rolled high. She’s part Jerry Lewis, part Chaplin, competing with Louis Douglas (they say he has “talking feet”) for the laughter of spectators already dazzled by music, speed, colors.
    The critic Pierre de Regnier describes Josephine as a strange figure “who walks with bended knees . . . and looks like a boxing kangaroo. . . . Is this a man? Is this a woman? Her lips are painted black, her skin is the color of a banana, her hair, already short, is stuck to her head as if made of caviar, her voice is high-pitched, she shakes continually, and her body slithers like a snake. . . . The sounds of the orchestra seem to come from her. . . .
    â€œIs she horrible? Is she ravishing? Is she black? Is she white? . . . Nobody knows for sure. There is no time to know. She returns as she left, quick as a one-step dance, she is not a woman, she is not a dancer, she is something extravagant and passing, just like the music. . . .”
    â€œElectric greens,” writes another critic, “burning pinks . . . what rapture. No rest for the eyes or for the ears.”
    But the real sensation of the night—the finale, a “Charleston Cabaret”—is still to come. Suddenly, Josephine, that funny girl, is being carried onstage by Joe Alex, a strong black dancer from Africa. She is naked except for a few feathers tied to her waist and ankles, and she is wrapped around Joe’s body like a vine around a tree in the forest. He is half naked, too, bent over almost double, a hunter with his prey on his back.
    First, you feel sorry that the lovely animal is dead, the shape of the body is so perfect, the color, the stillness. Then she