Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

by Mackrell, Judith

  These once decent houses were now collapsing slums – freezing in winter, fetid in summer. The noise on the street was constant: babies, domestic arguments, and the roar of passing trains. Smuts and smoke from the tracks added to the miasma of dirt that hung over the street, dirtying the laundry that flapped across every courtyard. There were only the most basic amenities for every household. The Martins shared an outside toilet, got their water from a communal tap, and all four children slept together on the same thin mattress, restless from the itch of bed-bug bites and the sound of rats in the walls.

  Yet still the Martins were a family, and Josephine clung to her place in it, doing what she could to please her mother by playing big sister to the little ones. On Saturday nights she led Richard and a gang of friends out through the neighbourhood, where parties spilled out onto the sidewalks and the music of banjos, accordions and pianos could be heard from the Rosebud Café or the Four Deuces Salon. St Louis always claimed to be the home of ragtime. It was here that Tom Turpin and Scott Joplin had improvised their witty parodic tunes, setting classic 2/4 marches against a raggedy syncopated rhythm, creating a style that every St Louis musician was making their own.

  Other evenings Josephine organized raids on the coal trucks that lined up in the station yards. She showed the smallest children how to harvest nuggets of coal that had fallen onto the ground, while she clambered up onto the cars and threw down the bigger chunks for them to collect. Over the Christmas holiday she searched the garbage bins of the wealthy white neighbourhoods, looking for discarded toys to take home. As she grew older and bolder, she knocked on doors, offering to run errands, sweep leaves or mind babies. Most of her earnings she spent on her family – Richard recalled her being ‘a good sister … she didn’t make much money, maybe 50 cents a week, and when she got it, she would buy things for us’.5 Yet as dutiful as Josephine tried to be, when she was barely seven years old she was sent away from her family to earn her keep as a live-in scullery maid.

  As far as Carrie was concerned, Josephine’s departure made one less mouth to feed. Perhaps she genuinely assumed that her daughter’s new employer, Mrs Kaiser, would demand only light duties from such a small child, especially as she was legally required to maintain Josephine’s attendance at school. Yet Carrie had delivered Josephine into the hands of a sadist who sent her down to the cellar at night, with just a crippled old dog for company. When she wasn’t in school she was working – lighting fires, emptying chamber pots, washing dishes and clothes. If Josephine lost concentration or was too weak to manage her chores, she was beaten. ‘I would have loved to run away,’ she wrote later, ‘but I was too small.’6

  This, at least, was the way she presented the story. Parts of it were probably true – for the rest of her life she would do anything to avoid sleeping on her own at night – yet Josephine was no less of a myth maker than Tamara, and couldn’t resist exaggerating and editing her life into a more dramatic shape. According to her version of events, she was delivered from her torment only when Mrs Kaiser’s brutality led to her being hospitalized. She’d left a pot of water to boil over on the stove one day, and as punishment her employer had thrust her hands into the scalding water. Her injuries were excruciating – ‘My skin and my fingernails … boiled, ready to fall off’ – and there was apparently no question of allowing her back into Mrs Kaiser’s care.7

  In truth, no one in the family could remember Josephine suffering such burns, and in all the thousands of column inches subsequently written about her, no one commented on her hands being scarred. Yet this Cinderella story made emotional sense to Josephine. Her imagination had been formed by the few fairy tales she’d been told when she was little, and in her head was a world of rescued princesses and happy endings, to which she escaped when her own life was too hard.

  That fantasy world remained necessary to her, even once she was back with her family. By 1915 the Martins were sliding towards destitution. Arthur could find little work and they were forced out of Gratiot Street and into a succession of smaller, filthier apartments. For a time Josephine had just one dress to wear, held together by patchwork and darning, and she either had to walk barefoot or totter through the streets of St Louis in a cast-off pair of women’s evening shoes, their high heels amateurishly filed down by Arthur.

  Unlike her clever little sister, Willy Mae, Josephine neither sought nor found any escape in school. She was a poor student and spent most of her lessons crossing her eyes and pulling faces to make the other kids laugh. News of the outside world meant little to her. If papers or magazines came into the house, it was only because Arthur was using them to insulate the walls of the apartment against the cold and damp. America’s entry into the war in 1917 made almost no impression on her. But the events of July that year, as St Louis was overtaken by waves of racial violence, gave eleven-year-old Josephine her first inkling of a larger and even more dangerous world that existed beyond the ghetto.

  Historically St Louis had been known as a place of relative tolerance. At the beginning of the century it became a draw for thousands of blacks escaping the entrenched and still unchallenged abuses of the rural South,* and there were sufficient opportunities for work and schooling for the city to develop a small, but significant, black professional class. Of course St Louis had its own racial divisions: public places were segregated, and at the laundry where Carrie worked large signs assured their customers ‘We Wash for White People Only’. When Josephine walked to school, the children from the all-white Catholic school nearby hurled routine insults at her: ‘Hey blue gums’, ‘Where you goin’ shine?’

  All this was normal to her, and to every other child in the ghetto. Blacks were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, with quadroons and octoroons, the mixed race or ‘high yellows’, ranked marginally above. Further up the ladder were the white European immigrants, while at the top were the ‘pure’ or American-born whites. Although Josephine’s inexplicably coffee-coloured skin might be disparaged within her family as a badge of Carrie’s shame, many black women paid good money to acquire a more Caucasian look. Drugstores were piled high with products to whiten skin and with bottles of Mary’s Congolene, or ‘conk’ – a noxious liquid that promised to straighten every kink in a black woman’s hair and to give her a small notch up the city’s racial hierarchy.

  In good times, that hierarchy was a relatively stable fact of life in St Louis. However, in late 1916 a nationwide recession created a sharp rise in unemployment. White workers, paid at higher rates than blacks, were laid off first, and it was their bitterness and economic frustration that helped drive the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Leaders of the racist cult were finding a newly receptive audience across America, prophesying the triumph of a rampant Negro race. And by July, St Louis had become electric with tension. It took just one incident, a white mob attacking a few blacks, to spark a wave of rioting and lynching. In the eastern part of the city, across the river from Josephine’s district, entire black neighbourhoods were torched. Many were killed, thousands more made homeless and Josephine and her family watched incredulous as smoke and flames raged on the opposite shore of the Mississippi.

  For several months, Carrie and Arthur were unusually vigilant about keeping the children near the house. Then, in 1918, a new danger threatened St Louis: the outbreak of Spanish flu. Schools and theatres were shut down, a curfew was imposed and again Carrie tried, in her irritable fashion, to keep her children close. By now, however, Josephine was twelve, going on thirteen, and she no longer considered herself a biddable child.

  In many ways she had long been frighteningly adult for her age – scavenging in garbage cans, scrounging money and skipping school to take on extra work – but when she reached puberty, Josephine’s boldness turned to rebellion. She stayed out late, refused to explain where she had been and began to flaunt herself around men. In the last few months her skinny body had acquired the provocative jut of buttocks and bust, and she had started to style her hair in cute little spit curls. She l
iked the way men looked at her now; and Carrie, who saw her own former wildness breaking out in her oldest daughter, was terrified.

  Foremost in her mind was the fear that Josephine would get herself pregnant and bring new trouble and expense to their already chaotic household. She attempted to impose stricter curfews and threatened harsher beatings, but it was only a matter of time before the situation exploded. One night Josephine came back so late, and with such a maddeningly secretive look on her face, that Carrie lashed out especially hard. Whimpering and cussing, Josephine ran from the house; the following day it was all over the neighbourhood that she had left home and gone to live with a man.

  Later Josephine would claim that this man had forced himself on her, that she had been the victim of an exploitative paedophile, yet her brother Richard remembered only that she had been dragged back home, spitting fury at losing a safe and easy billet. She was, he claimed, like ‘a wild cat’ in the house, and her behaviour became so out of control that Carrie started threatening her with reform school. This was an institution little better than prison, and almost certainly would have damaged and hardened Josephine beyond repair. She was saved by the intervention of Jo Cooper, Carrie’s friend and employer, who had always taken a benign interest in Josephine and even been a kind of unofficial godmother to her. Sensibly, Jo Cooper suggested that if Josephine could no longer be contained as a child, she would have to be dealt with as a woman.

  So at the age of just thirteen and a half, Josephine was married off to Willie Wells, a steelworker twice her age. How she ended up with him is unclear – some accounts suggest that Jo Cooper had heard of a decent, employed man in search of a wife and introduced Willie to the family, others that Josephine had met him at a dance. Either way, the courtship was pragmatically brief, and in late 1919 the couple were married by a pastor in Jo Cooper’s house, and given a wedding supper of pork ribs and macaroni.

  No one was concerned about Josephine’s extreme youth. Officially, the Missouri statute allowed for underage girls to marry only if there was ‘good cause and unusual conditions’, yet in the black ghetto good will on both sides was considered sufficient grounds; form-filling was rarely an issue.*8 Certainly for a very few short weeks the marriage seemed to work. Willie Wells had rented a large furnished room, which Josephine considered a wonderful improvement on her old home. And aside from a few light chores, it seemed to her that being a wife to Willie involved little beyond amusing herself and spending his money.

  Reality punctured Josephine’s naive contentment, however, when Willie discovered that she had not only spent her housekeeping allowance on treats and new clothes, but had run him into debt. Unable to afford the rent for their room the newly married couple were forced back into Carrie and Arthur’s apartment, where they had to sleep alongside the other children. Willie was furious, and it may have been in an effort to win back his approval, or even to protect herself from his fists, that Josephine began virtuously flourishing knitting needles and declaring herself to be pregnant.

  Perhaps she was, and perhaps she miscarried, but almost as soon as Josephine had begun to make clothes for her baby, there was no longer any sign of one. This seems to have prompted her final row with Willie, who may have believed she’d deliberately got rid of their child. By her own account, Josephine feared for her life as her husband roared up the stairs, threatening to break her neck. It was in her own defence, she claimed, that she hit him over the head with a beer bottle and sent him away with blood running down his face.

  With that blow the marriage was over. Yet however short-lived, it did have one very satisfactory outcome for Josephine: she was now officially a woman, no longer subject to Carrie’s rules, and without consulting anyone she got herself a full-time job as a waitress at the Old Chauffeurs’ Club. Malicious gossips told Carrie that her daughter was supplementing her $3 weekly wage by going with men, but Josephine didn’t care what anyone said. She planned to be out of St Louis soon, and to be launched on an entirely new life.

  * * *

  It was about three years before her rash experiment with marriage that Josephine first became stage-struck and began slipping off to the Booker T. Washington theatre, close to her home. The Booker advertised itself as the city’s premiere black venue, and by putting aside ten cents from her odd-job earnings, Josephine could buy a Sunday matinee ticket for the latest musical comedy or vaudeville programme. As a very little girl she used to sit her younger brother and sisters down on boxes in the cellar of Gratiot Street, where she performed her own impromptu shows. At the Booker, however, she was awed by the dazzle and variety of the professional talent on display – dancers who kicked their feet as high as their ears; singers; acrobats; performing dogs; comic female impersonators who strutted haughtily and ridiculously in feather boas.

  Josephine was especially awed by the dancers and, with an intensity that would have astounded her teachers at school, she studied every move they made onstage. At home she practised what she had seen, trying to shimmy her bony, ten-year-old shoulders like a chorus girl, and to tap and shuffle her feet. After spending a few weeks on polishing a routine, she secured herself a spot on the sidewalk outside the Booker, from which she set herself to smiling and capering a few cents out of the people passing by.

  Josephine was a cute, comic sight, and sometimes she was even thrown a nickel or two, but she faced stiff competition for the public’s attention. St Louis was crowded with buskers, dancers, musicians and comics, all of whom were hoping to use their talent to escape the ghetto. Many got no further than working the local bars, or performing for the tourists, who paid thirty-five cents for an evening cruise of ‘moonlight dancing and drinking’ on the Mississippi riverboats. However, even as a small child Josephine was determined. Across the street from the Martins lived a family of musicians: Mr Jones, his common-law-wife Dyer and their children, who between them scraped a gypsy kind of living, playing in bars and pool halls or at country fairs on the outskirts of the city. During the winter of 1916–17 Josephine latched onto the Joneses, helping to carry their instruments from one gig to the next in return for learning their skills. Dyer Jones was a very talented musician and not only was she willing to teach Josephine the rudiments of trumpet, banjo and fiddle, she occasionally allowed her to sing and dance along with the rest of the band.* Trying to project her breathy little voice across a noisy bar, or tapping her feet on a rough wooden stage in a field, Josephine had her first experience of performing to a proper crowd.

  Josephine’s association with the Jones family was curtailed by the 1917 riots and the city’s subsequent shutdown, but her dreams continued to grow. At the Booker she could now identify the best of the visiting performers: Bessie Smith, the blues singer with a voice that tore the blood out of your heart; chorus dancer Mama Dinks, who wooed the crowd with her bowlegged walk and goofy grin; and, in the winter of 1919, her favourite was a raucous singer with a bright red wig called Clara Smith, who performed with Bob Russell’s troupe, the Dixie Steppers.

  Onstage Clara’s trademark routine was to pick out the ugliest man in the audience and sing a melting love song direct to his face. Offstage, however, her preference was for young women. When she started going to the Chauffeurs’ Club, for a meal or a glass of corn liquor, she noticed Josephine and was touched by her mix of ghetto hardness and dreamy ambition. To Josephine, Clara was a fabulously glamorous creature, even without her stage make-up and blue feather boa, and even when she was smoking the filthy corncob pipe to which she was addicted. When Clara offered to give her singing lessons, Josephine was overjoyed, and she didn’t much care when it became obvious what Clara expected in return. She already knew that sex was part of the price you paid for things; better to do it with Clara than a no-hoper like Willie.

  Clara grew sufficiently fond of Josephine to coax Bob Russell into giving her a trial job in the theatre. And it was this that caused the final divide between Josephine and her mother. Perhaps Carrie knew Clara’s involvement with her daughter was more
than professional, perhaps she believed, as many Americans did, that show business was a godless world. But even though Carrie flew into a righteous temper, abusing Josephine as a whore, Josephine simply shrugged off her mother’s rage. Clara’s good opinion was all that mattered to her now; that and the fact that she was about to make her first appearance on the Booker stage. Wearing a pink tunic, trussed up in a rope and harness, she was going to have a brief moment in the spotlight as a flying cupid, swung out across the stage during a romantic love scene.

  Her debut was almost a disaster. As Josephine was hoisted into flight, her wings got caught in the curtain and she was left dangling in mid-air. Yet rather than being mortified by the crowd’s catcalls, she seemed to know exactly what to do. Instinctively, she turned her face towards the laughter and grinned, her radiant response turning the public mockery into delight. Bob Russell could spot a natural comedian when he saw one, and by the time his troupe were due to leave St Louis he had signed up Josephine as a permanent member.

  Just a few weeks later she graduated from general dogsbody and walk-on to a place in the chorus line. One of the dancers was injured, and when Josephine showed Russell her basic repertory of moves – the Itch, Tack Annie and the Mess Around – he was impressed by her potential. She also offered the hugely promotable assets of her pretty, adolescent body and enormous smile. Some of the chorus line were well into their thirties, their muscles hard and stringy from the unforgiving stages on which they had to perform. To emphasize the cuteness of his new teenaged acquisition, Russell decided to bill her under her family nickname, Tumpy. For his regular punters, she was fresh meat.

  Josephine had succeeded in launching her career before she’d even turned fourteen, however life in the theatre bore little resemblance to her fantasies. Later she wrote that it was hard to have her illusions shattered so early, and to realize that most of her fellow performers worked principally because they didn’t want to starve. Black troupes like the Dixie Steppers were restricted to a limited touring circuit,* whose management – the Theater Owners Booking Association – were so ruthlessly exploitative they were popularly known as ‘Tough on Black Asses’. Wages were bad – even working four shows a day Josephine earned just $10 a week, from which she had to fund her own board and lodging. The Association also did nothing to address the dire inadequacies of their living and working conditions. In many towns and cities it was almost impossible to find a rooming house that would take blacks, while the few that did were so squalid many preferred to doss down in a station waiting room. Everyone got sick at some point – the facilities in theatres were primitive, with no toilets and barely any running water, and many venues were filthy. Josephine recalled that the ‘air was awful’ from the food that audiences brought to eat during shows – ‘day-old pork chops, fruit and corn patties, peanuts whose shells were lobbed onto the stage’.9