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Just a reminder: Josephine Baker, who was 11 during the KKK/cops-fueled massacre of Black people in East St. Louis, incorporated French Jews into her touring entourage in order to protect them from deportation to concentration camps. She also spied for the Resistance.
She survived child marriage - at 13, tired of abuse and neglect from her mother and strangers to whom her mother hired her out, she married a Pullman porter in his mid twenties. She survived so much.
She married four times, legally adopted 12 children and informally adopted a few more, and - and this I will never get over - sang to prisoners at newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp. Not the people who left as refugees - the people who were too sick to be moved.
After WWII, Josephine Baker bought a huge estate and tried to get her whole family to move out of St. Louis to come live with her, because France was safer for Black families. But her aunt, the head of the family, refused. She often sent money home to help.
Joséphine Baker was never truly loved or cared for by her mother, who criticized everything about her, particularly her skin color. Her mother sometimes left for days at a time with a man, and Joséphine found solace at times with her grandmother, who was born into slavery.
Diana Ross tells a story about going to see Josephine Baker onstage. Joséphine walked into the audience, stared at Diana Ross, put her hands into the younger woman’s hair, gazed intently into her eyes, and then walked away and performed. I mean.
Joséphine Baker had left two husbands by the time she was 15 years old.
In the early days as a young teen performer, Josephine Baker was sometimes required to a.) wear skin lightening foundation to appear white during vaudeville shows or b.) wear blackface so that audiences would think she was actually a white woman. At 19, she left for France.
When Joséphine Baker got to Paris at 19 & could check into integrated hotels with other Black performers, go into any restaurant & use non-segregated restrooms, it blew her mind. France was still a racist country, but it was better. France was the great longterm love of her life.
Josephine Baker had romances with: 4 husbands (2 Americans named Willie, a French Jew named Jean and a French Catholic named Jo), American blues singer Clara Smith, Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, club owner Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith, writer Colette...
...well, some of those were sexual affairs and not necessarily romantic love experiences...okay also her secret boss in the French Resistance was her lover...and a bunch of other people, because everybody fell in love with her and she was a babe of iconic status.
I love the beauty and eroticism we commonly associate with Josephine Baker and I see it as part of her whole being, but for so long - aside from moments like the HBO biopic or Diana Ross’s public advocacy for her story - the overculture ONLY remembers her as ”sexy.”
Paris originally showed interest in Josephine Baker because “primitivism” was a trend & she was a deeply talented performer - already a veteran at 19. And that is absolutely part of her legacy, but we do her a disservice by stopping at the banana dance.
While Josephine Baker is hardly the first beautiful, talented Black woman to be primarily remembered for said beauty and talent, neglecting her other qualities, she is surely one of the most prominent examples.
Her whole life is just extraordinary, full of all the brilliance and flaws in any human life, but magnified to an incredible degree. Everything about her - the successes and the fuckups - is huge. I really encourage you to check out the bio of her by her son Jean Claude Baker.
P.S. This is the best resource I’ve found so far on this beautiful, complicated, idealistic, troubled, powerful, brilliant, unforgettable woman.
