Baker later described watching the glow of burning Black homes from the Missouri side of the river. The image stayed with her. The specific mechanics of her later choices — the decision to leave America, the willingness to risk her life for a country that had given her something her birthplace could not — were rooted in part in what she had seen as an eleven-year-old watching fire across the river.
She began dancing on street corners and in clubs. She joined a traveling troupe, the Jones Family Band, and later the Dixie Steppers, touring the American South and Northeast. She was small, quick, funny, and physically extraordinary — a natural performer with an instinct for the audience that no training fully explains. By her mid-teens she was working in theater, performing as a chorus girl, doing the deliberate comic mugging and eye-crossing that she had perfected as a way of standing out in an ensemble.
In 1921 she joined the chorus of *Shuffle Along*, one of the most successful Black Broadway productions of the era, written and performed by an all-Black cast at a time when such a production was not a given on a New York stage. She later performed in *Chocolate Dandies* and at the Plantation Club, where she shared the stage with Ethel Waters. She was developing a reputation as a performer — sharp, athletic, capable of moving from comedy to genuine emotional reach — but she was also absorbing the specific limitations that American racial structure placed on Black performers of her era.