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exclusively white) on May 3, 1906, diagnosed as pregnant. She was discharged on June 17, her baby, Freda J. McDonald, having been born two weeks earlier. The baby’s father was identified simply as “Edw.” Why six weeks in the hospital? Especially for a black woman who would customarily have had her baby at home with the help of a midwife? Obviously, there had been problems with the pregnancy, but Carrie’s chart reveals no details.
    I think Josephine’s father was white—so did Josephine, so did her family—and I think he cared about Carrie. He’s the one who must have got her into that hospital and paid to keep her there all those weeks.Also, her baby’s birth was registered by O. H. Elbrecht, head of the hospital, at a time when most black births were not. Besides, Freda sounds German to me, and people in St. Louis say Carrie had worked for a German family. (Although it certainly didn’t matter; Josephine was never called Freda.)
    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 till the end to talk about it. She let people think Eddie Carson was the father, and Carson played along.
    Josephine knew better, though her version was also folklore. “My father was Eddie Moreno, a good-looking boy with olive skin,” she would say. Or: “My father was a Spanish dancer.” Helen Morris says, “You could look at Tumpy and tell she was not entirely black.”
    (Tumpy was the nickname given Josephine as a baby; she always said it was because “I was fat as Humpty Dumpty.” But if she was fat, she was also lucky. At that time, according to the records of the health department in St. Louis, three out of five children died before the age of three. A Dr. Temms, writing in
The St. Louis Argus
, described the city’s more poverty-stricken sections as “a great breeding ground,” saying, “Next to the Russian Jews in point of being prolific came the Negroes and then the Italians.”)
    When Carrie was discharged from the hospital, she brought her baby back to the apartment on Gratiot Street, and left her in the reluctant care of Aunt Caroline Crook.
    The McDonalds were heartbroken. They had been living for thirteen years at the same address, providing a stable home for their adopted child; they had hoped she would get an education so she wouldn’t have to do the kind of manual labor in which they were trapped. This was a new age, opportunities were opening for women of color; at the very least Carrie might have been an elevator operator wearing white gloves and mixing with the elite of St. Louis in a department store.
    On October 12, 1907, to the further dismay of her relatives, Carrie had a second baby, a boy named Richard Alexander, whose birth was not recorded. Neither was the place where he was born. His father was a black man named James Alexander Perkins, but he and Carrie did not marry, and Carrie did not change her errant ways.
    Baby Richard, called Brothercat, might not have had such a good start in life if it had not been for Helen Morris’s beneficent mother. “Mama claimed we were all family,” Helen says. “You know we colored people had been separated and moved around so much, and then life brought us together like a family. And Mama nursed Brothercat. See, she was nursing my brother Buddy at the same time, so after Aunt Carrie’s milk dried up—she was flittin’ and flyin’—Mama nursed Carrie’s baby. Mama always said that’s why he loved her.”
    Josephine, who was light brown, the color of café au lait, the color of honey, envied her new brother. “He had black skin . . . he was the welcome one.”
    Her mother didn’t entirely forget about Josephine, but visits were hard on both of them. After a