The first time Josephine read a report of her own death, she was more than five thousand miles from St. Louis, lying on a chaise among the flowering trees that perfumed the roof of Mohamed Menebhi’s palace. It made her laugh. In an interview for The Afro-American, she told Ollie Stewart, “There has been a slight error, I’m much too busy to die.” She said this, he reported, with “a gay smile and a French accent . . . her face uplifted toward the eternal snows of the nearby Atlas peaks.” She also asked Stewart to help her find Carrie, through his newspaper. She said she hadn’t been able to reach her since the outbreak of the war. “I cannot locate my mother. I know she still lives in St. Louis, but where?” (Josephine hadn’t been in touch with Richard, either, but then, he himself had been gone from St. Louis. “My father was drafted into the U.S. Navy,” his son Artie says. “He went to Great Lakes, Illinois, and I hate to say it, but with six kids in the family, that was the best thing that happened to us, when the money started coming in.
