Josephine

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain

I want to bring your mom muffins and coffee the day after your birth and tour 1906 St. Louis after we’ve eaten; I want to tag along when you start cleaning and babysitting for White families just eight years later — because I don’t trust strange men with little girls and I’ve read you were often “poorly treated” in those homes, and I don’t know what “poorly treated” entails, but your childhood must have been unhappy for you to run away from home at 13 and marry a man you’d quickly divorce — but whatever happened or didn’t happen, it doesn’t seem to have broken your spirit, because women without gumption don’t move to Paris and perform in nothing more than a feather skirt, and they don’t date other women, and they don’t smuggle secret messages for the French Resistance in their sheet music and underwear, and they don’t keep falling in love after love has failed them, and they don’t adopt a dozen kids, and they don’t refuse to perform for segregated audiences in 1950s America, and they don’t join MLK for the March On Washington, and they don’t earn a standing ovation at Carnegie Hall, and they certainly don’t get the French to love them so dearly they’re buried with military honors and given a 21-gun salute; and I know you were truly as French as you were American, but I wish I’d learned about you when I was learning about Mark Twain and and George Washington Carver and Harry Truman, because no offense to those legends, but I needed a brave, femme, openly queer Missourian to look up to back then even more than I need one today.

“Josephine” appears in Liz’s chapbook, which was published by Etchings Press at the University of Indianapolis in 2023.