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press who called himself Dr. Midnight wrote in
The Indianapolis Recorder
that he had visited a lady friend in St. Louis and been appalled to find her ironing her hair. “These men here don’t go with kinks,” she told him, “so if you want to shine in St. Louis, you must do away with kinks and get straight. I also have a preparation for making my face white by degrees.”
    â€œSome of our women look like circus riders,” Dr. Midnight railed in another newspaper. “Rosy cheeks, ashy faces and wigs seem to be the go . . . Negroes clamouring for recognition in this world, but they will not get it as long as they are getting away from themselves. It is disgusting to hear colored women say, ‘He’s too black.’ ”
    Other black editors reflected on white people’s fear of “Negro domination.” The
Gazetteer and Guide
printed the words of a white man named Tom Watson—he had run for vice president under the banner of the Populist party in 1896—who agreed that such fears were baseless. “What words,” asked Watson, “can paint the cowardice of the Anglo-Saxon who would deny ‘equal and exact justice’ to the ignorant, helpless, poverty-cursed Negro, in whose ears the clank of chains have scarcely ceased domination . . . .”
    By then, Carrie McDonald, who was without racial prejudice—she liked pretty boys, no matter what color they were—would have been able to follow Dr. Midnight’s musings if she had stumbled across them; she was the first person in the Crook-McDonald household to learn to read and write. Coal black, pretty, tall, slender, full of life, the only child cared for by four adults, she was a bit spoiled.
    She and Elvira adored each other. Aunt Caroline was the disciplinarian, demanding that Carrie study hard. To catch up with the white world, one had to fight.
    But Carrie was young, and the streets of St. Louis were filled with music, especially if you went down to the red-light district (Market Street, Chestnut Street) where there were gambling joints, gin mills, and the sounds of ragtime pianos pounding through the nights. During the summers, ladies of the evening would stand outside the houses where they worked and sing blues songs. To Carrie, all this was a lot more fascinating than staying home listening to Aunt Caroline’s sermons.
    Or going to school. Carrie loved to dance, and one of her boyfriends, Eddie Carson (thought by many to be Josephine’s father), was a good dancer. Years later, Josephine’s half-sister Margaret would remember, “Mama was the most popular girl at the dance hall on Sundays. No one could dance like she could, with a glass of water balanced on her head, not spilling a drop.”
    But Carrie worked, too. By the time she was nineteen, she was employed as a laundress. An improvident laundress, because she got pregnant, and Aunt Caroline turned her out. Elvira had nothing to say about it; Caroline ruled the roost, and was fierce in judgment. Hadn’t she warned Carrie a hundred times? Wasn’t Carrie too wild? Hadn’t the family given her everything, and hadn’t she returned bad for good?
    In St. Louis, I was lucky. I found Helen Morris (née Williams), whose mother had been Carrie’s friend. “Mama’s name was Emma Williams,” says Helen, “and she and Carrie worked together at the laundry owned by my aunt Josephine Cooper. When Carrie’s folks put her out, she ended up at Aunt Jo’s house, she didn’t have anywhere else to go. She stayed there until the baby was born, and that’s when Aunt Jo said, ‘Carrie, if it’s a girl, name it after me,’ and Carrie said, ‘I will.’ ”
    The records of the city of St. Louis tell an almost unbelievable story. They show that Carrie McDonald (“colored”), twenty years old, was admitted to the Female Hospital (at that time, almost