JOSEPHINE BAKER

BORN: JUNE 3, 1906, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI

DIED: APRIL 12, 1975, PARIS, FRANCE

ACTRESS, DANCER, SINGER, ACTIVIST

THE YEAR WAS 2006. Beyoncé was set to perform her song “Déjà Vu” at an event called Fashion Rocks. She was the opening act, and if you know anything about Beyoncé, you know she always changes it up for a live performance. The lights dropped and she came onstage thrusting her hips from side to side. As Beyoncé twisted and turned to the beat of the drum in a custom-made banana skirt, a woman’s photograph was projected onto a screen behind her. The caption read “Josephine Baker.”

Freda Josephine McDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906. Like many other Black folks in that era, Josephine was born into poverty. By the time she was eight years old, she was working as a live-in domestic servant for white families. And when she was only eleven, she watched white mobs (similar to what we know as the Ku Klux Klan) burn down several houses owned by Black people in East St. Louis. Big Nanny, my great-great-grandmother, had her own interaction with the Klan. They showed up at her house one day. But she was armed with a shotgun and was able to protect her family.

But Josephine had to watch her neighbors run from their homes across the East Bridge with nothing but what they could carry. It was one of several incidents in which Black communities were burned down or stolen from us. Rosewood in Florida (1923). The Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). Seneca Village in New York City, a settlement owned by Black people until the city filed for what’s called “eminent domain” and took it from the Black owners to create Central Park (1857). These, too, are parts of history that get hidden from you.

Josephine dropped out of school and, by thirteen, was living on the streets. She then met Willie Wells and was married to him for less than a year. Child marriage was legal then (and still is in some states). Think of Aaliyah’s marriage to now-convicted rapist R. Kelly in 1994: She was fifteen. He was twenty-seven.

Josephine, at fifteen, was already on her second marriage. It was during that relationship with William Baker that she joined a street performance team—to her mother’s disappointment. Her mother wanted her to work at home and serve her husband rather than be a performer. That was the norm. Hell, many still think it is. My grandmother Nanny would sometimes complain about this. How women are to be seen and not heard. Catering to their man. No identity of their own outside their marriage. The women she raised were always independent. My mom, my aunts. She taught them to raise hell if necessary.

Luckily, Josephine had big ideas for her life and eventually left her husband for a traveling performance group. Within a few short years, Josephine was divorced again, dancing in a chorus line on Broadway, and living in Harlem. All before the age of nineteen!

That same year, still just nineteen, she went to Paris and truly became an international star. Her erotic style of dancing (in attire that left her damn near naked) was a major hit over there. In Paris she debuted her most iconic costume—the banana skirt with pearls—which influenced Beyoncé over eighty years later. It was also during these years that Josephine began singing.

Although her fame rose in France, she returned to Broadway in 1936 to star in the Ziegfeld Follies, but she wasn’t successful. Time magazine called her a “Negro wench … whose dancing and singing might be topped anywhere outside of Paris.” I would have had time for Time had they said some shit like that to me and mine. That kind of racism is why Josephine preferred to make her home overseas. Heartbroken, she returned to Paris and gave up her American citizenship in favor of becoming a citizen of France.

Josephine began her life anew as an expat. Expatriation is when a person chooses to live in another country that is not where they were born. Many Black Americans have done this before, from James Baldwin to Tina Turner, in order to avoid the racism and other painful aspects of living in the United States.

Now, hear me good. Racism is everywhere in this world, but it can look or feel different based on where you live. It wasn’t that Josephine didn’t experience racism in France. But in the United States, Jim Crow laws harshly oppressed Black folks. There were white-only clubs and spaces. White-only benches and fountains. White-only hospitals, which you’ll hear more about shortly. There were “sundown” towns where Black folks couldn’t be outside after dark for fear of being killed or lynched by white people. So yeah, Josephine Baker left the United States with no plans of returning.

And get this: Josephine was also a spy in the 1940s. When World War II started in 1939, she decided to work for the French. She would rub elbows with high-ranking German officers and other Axis officials during her tours throughout Europe and give any information she learned to the French resistance. She would also carry messages written in invisible ink on her sheet music between the Allies, providing them with details about airfields and German locations in France. After the war, Josephine was awarded the Resistance Medal by the French Committee of National Liberation. She was truly a badass. A rebel.

Even through all this, she was still in search of love. She had four marriages throughout her life. While married to her fourth and final husband, Josephine had a baby who was unfortunately stillborn. This moment led her to making the decision to adopt, but not just one child. Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, Josephine Baker adopted twelve children in total—each from a different religion, ethnicity, or race. She referred to them as the “Rainbow Tribe.” Other celebrities, like Angelina Jolie and Madonna, have adopted kids from various regions of the world, but Josephine was one of the first, if not the first, to believe in the vision of universalism.

She wanted her family to be a model for what the world could look like without racism and prejudice: folks from different places and religions being able to live with one another as brothers and sisters under one roof. All of her children lived with her at Château des Milandes in France, which Josephine turned into a major tourist attraction. She would charge the public money to take tours of the grounds to see how happy Josephine and her children were despite their stark differences.

Let’s discuss the problematic nature of this entire concept. I get that Josephine was trying to show the world we can all be kumbaya. But that reality requires white folks wanting equality and being willing to give up power. Josephine wanted us all to have the same-size slice of pie, and eat it with the same utensils on a shared table. But that’s not what this world has been about. White oppressors and colonizers wanted (and still want) non-whites, specifically Black folks, to make the pie, serve it to them, and have nothing for themselves but the scraps. You can’t rainbow-tribe your way out of a white supremacist vision for the world.

My great-grandmother Lula Mae Evans had ten children by three different fathers. Her three youngest passed away in a fire, but she was able to save her other seven. I can’t imagine her charging a fare to see them, though. And I get it, all my great-grandmother’s children were Black. But still, it’s not some kind of circus show to have a large family. By putting on tours of her family home, Josephine was turning her children into a commodity—mere objects—and dehumanizing them. Relating their diverse backgrounds to a rainbow reduced their identities to color alone.

To take it a step further, the terminology of Rainbow Tribe is also problematic. Growing up, I would hear people say, “I don’t see color” or “It doesn’t matter if you are Black, white, green, or blue.” I promise you that everyone sees color and it informs how they interact with people. And I ain’t never seen blue or green people.

Josephine Baker once said, “All my life, I have maintained that the people of the world can learn to live together in peace if they are not brought up in prejudice.”

That is a very real truth. Children internalize what they are taught at home and in school, and such lessons inform their worldview in adulthood. If a child grows up with racist parents, they, too, are extremely likely to navigate the world with racist thoughts and actions, whether they realize it or not. If a child grows up around homophobia, they, too, are likely to navigate the world through a homophobic lens. That’s just how it works most times. The important thing is what we do with those prejudices when we see them in ourselves. Are we willing to put in the work to refocus our worldviews for a more inclusive lens?

Josephine Baker’s legacy is full of accolades: fighting for civil rights, being a spy for the Allies, and at one point becoming the most famous Black entertainer in the world. But she was still fighting her own personal identity struggles, too. Her own prejudices.

When her adopted son Jarry was in his teens, Josephine found out that he was gay. From that moment, she began treating him extremely poorly. Eventually, she was so upset and angry that she sent Jarry off to live with his adoptive father, her ex-husband Jo Bouillon, whom she had recently divorced.

How unfortunate it is that the peace Josephine was campaigning for was not afforded to her own child and other queer people. Sadder still, she never gave this peace to herself.

The truth of the matter is that Josephine Baker was bisexual. Despite having four different husbands, it was known that she also had multiple relationships with women.

Internalized homophobia is very real. People can be gay or lesbian or queer and homophobic. Look at the Harlem Renaissance. This period of great creativity, enlightenment, art, and queerness from the norm still denied many queer people the ability to own their identity safely—either by societal constraints or self-denial. Many of the people in this book who were not open about their queerness had issues with other figures in this book being public about theirs. A lot of homophobia stems from a person’s internal struggles with their identity. Because they are unwilling to accept their own truth, due to a fear of society or religion, they enact a violence against others who are queer.

I can imagine what that internal struggle could have been like for Josephine. Singer Tevin Campbell only recently told the world he was gay—after decades of shaming and assumptions made about him. Patti LaBelle confirmed that her best friend, Luther Vandross, was gay and lived his queer life in secret. Many artists and musicians fear the social stigma of being gay.

Fame doesn’t always allow you to be who you are. Who you truly are. Josephine was a complex human. Who isn’t? We get things right. We get things wrong. We sometimes don’t get things at all. And it’s okay to talk about people in their totality.

At an event in 2019, honoring the legacy of Josephine Baker, her son Jarry spoke about his mother candidly and without malice. Although he knows what she did to him was wrong, he told the crowd that night that he had forgiven her.

Josephine herself once said:

Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul, when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.

I can only hope that in the afterlife, she has found understanding and love for the queerness of her child. And even more, for the queerness of herself.