Josephine Baker
Early life

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri. Baker's ancestry is unknown — her mother, Carrie, was adopted in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886 by Richard and Elvira McDonald, both of whom were former slaves of African and Native American descent. Baker's estate identifies vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson as her natural father despite evidence to the contrary. In 1993, Josephine Baker's foster son Jean-Claude Baker published a biography titled Josephine: The hungry Heart, which was the culmination of decades of exhaustive research into Baker's life and career. In the book, he discusses at length the circumstances surrounding Baker's birth:

The records of the city of St. Louis tell an almost unbelievable story. They show that (Baker's mother) Carrie McDonald... was admitted to the (exclusively white) Female Hospital on May 3, 1906, diagnosed as pregnant. She was discharged on June 17, her baby, Freda J. McDonald having been born two weeks earlier. Why six weeks in the hospital? Especially for a black woman (of that time) who would customarily have had her baby at home with the help of a midwife?... The father was identified (on the birth certificate) simply as "Edw"... I think Josephine's father was white—so did Josephine, so did her family...people in St. Louis say that (Baker's mother) had worked for a German family (around the time she became pregnant)... I have unraveled many mysteries associated with Josephine Baker, but the most painful mystery of her life, the mystery of her father's identity, I could not solve. The secret died with Carrie, who refused to the end to talk about it. She let people think Eddie Carson was the father, and Carson played along, (but) Josephine knew better.

Josephine McDonald spent her early life on 212 Targee Street (known by some St. Louis residents as Johnson Street) in the Chestnut Valley neighborhood of St. Louis, a racially mixed low-income area near Union Station, consisting mainly of rooming houses, brothels, and apartments without indoor plumbing. She was poorly dressed, hungry as a child, and developed street smarts playing in the railroad yards of Union Station.

Her mother married Arthur Martin, "a kind but perpetually unemployed man", with whom she had a son and two more daughters. She took in laundry to make ends meet, and, at eight years old, Josephine began working as a live-in domestic for white families in St. Louis. One woman abused her, burning Josephine's hands when the young girl put too much soap in the laundry.

In 1917, when she was 11, a terrified Josephine McDonald witnessed racial violence in East St. Louis. In a speech years later, she recalled what she had seen:

I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment... frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings... So with this vision I ran and ran and ran...

By age 12, she had dropped out of school. At 13, she worked as a waitress at the Old Chauffeur's Club at 3133 Pine Street. She also lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis, sleeping in cardboard shelters, scavenging for food in garbage cans, making a living with street-corner dancing. It was at the Old Chauffeur's Club that Josephine met Willie Wells, whom she married at age 13, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Following her divorce from Wells, she found work with a street performance group called the Jones Family Band.

In her teens, she struggled to have a healthy relationship with her mother, who opposed her becoming an entertainer and scolded her for not tending to her second husband, William Howard Baker, whom she had married in 1921, at age 15. She soon left him when her vaudeville troupe was booked into a New York City venue. They divorced in 1925, during a period when her career success was beginning. Still, she continued to use his last name professionally for the rest of her life. Though Baker was often on the road, returning with gifts and money for her mother and younger half-sister, larger career opportunities drew her farther afield, to France.
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