The Honeybee Emeralds by Amy Tector

Author:Amy Tector
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Turner Publishing Company

CHAPTER 20

A Javanese Princess

Alice was back in the Richelieu reading room, surrounded by another pile of books. She settled herself into a comfortably worn leather chair and sighed with pleasure. As before, the room was still, interrupted only by low murmured voices at the reference desk and the sound of carefully turned pages. She loved the sense of purposefulness and dedication that permeated these walls. She also loved the fact that all of this research distracted from her peculiar mania for touching the Honeybee Emeralds. If she concentrated enough on Josephine Baker, maybe her obsession would fade away entirely.

She had already spent an hour poring over the volumes she had previously skimmed, looking for the reference she had mentioned at this morning’s meeting regarding Charles Leboeuf. She found it at last in one of the thicker biographies. A quick mention of Leboeuf as one of Josephine’s many prewar admirers. She flipped to the endnotes to see where the reference had come from. The source was the correspondence between Adeline Proulx, companion to Josephine Baker, and a Mr. Francis Pike. Alice smiled in delight—the letters were held at the Richelieu Library.

Alice turned to the catalog description of the Francis Pike Fonds to discover that the collection consisted of letters written to Francis, who lived mostly in Harlem, from Adeline, usually writing from Paris. The correspondence was one-way—only from Adeline to Francis. Perhaps the French woman had destroyed or lost the letters that Francis had sent back to her, or perhaps another institution held them.

According to the description, Adeline had spent about twenty years in Josephine Baker’s employ, from the singer’s first arrival in Paris in 1925 to shortly after the Second World War. Adeline had met Francis when he had danced with Josephine in the early Paris years. She wondered why the young Black American dancer from Harlem had kept up a long correspondence with the white Frenchwoman born and raised in Paris.

After a short wait, the librarian brought over the two boxes of letters. This was the entirety of the Francis Pike Fonds. Perhaps here were the answers to their questions.

A good couple of hours passed as she read through the letters, getting a sense of Adeline’s spiky, upright personality, her deep affection for Josephine Baker, and her connection, which crossed the color and class barrier, to Francis Pike. By the 1930s Francis had given up dancing and trained as a plumber. The disparities between their lives—Adeline immersed in the glamour of the Parisian music hall world, Francis struggling with segregationist American policies, new fatherhood, and insecurities about his livelihood—didn’t seem to matter, as the two evinced a deep affection for one another.

There were hundreds of letters, spanning three decades, penned in Adeline’s spidery, old-fashioned script. Written in English, the letters often came with envelopes, all addressed to Francis Pike, New York, New York. The return address on the envelopes changed as Adeline traveled with Josephine; sometimes it was Paris, other times the south of France, Morocco, and even Argentina.

The first mention of Charles Leboeuf came at last in November 1938.

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