Like many Jazz Age greats, Josephine Baker was a living symbol from the very beginning of her career. In mid-1920s Paris, she redefined erotic fantasy as a “La Revue Nègre” dancer — yet even her banana belt gyrations might have faded from memory if she had not crushed it as a French Resistance fighter during the Second World War. Her badassedness seemed boundless as she emerged from the conflict a decorated war hero and an outspoken civil rights activist.
She was also considered one of the 20th century’s more optimistic humanitarians, a position perhaps best epitomized by her postwar adoption of a “Rainbow Tribe” of 12 children from various nationalities and religious backgrounds. When she died in 1975, thousands lined the Paris streets to glimpse her funeral procession; the police locked arms to restrain crowds as her flower-covered coffin was driven by. In 2021, when she became the first Black woman to be inducted into the Pantheon, President Emmanuel Macron extolled her courage and audacity.
Given Baker’s outsize global significance, it may seem surprising that this 1949 memoir has only just been released in the United States. “Fearless and Free” is made up of excerpts from interviews conducted by the journalist Marcel Sauvage, beginning in 1926 and continuing through the war years. In his introduction, Sauvage makes it clear that “Fearless” is not a comprehensive biography: Rather, it’s an impressionistic form of reportage, a “collection of defining moments, impressions and images.”
This is an important caveat. Baker had always commandeered her own narrative, and over the years, her various recountings of her life’s events — she gave countless interviews and wrote multiple autobiographies — have created headaches for generations of historians and journalists.
“Her memories became more and more fanciful, more romantically embellished,” recalled the biographer Peggy Caravantes. “I’m not sure,” she added, “that, by the end of her life, Josephine herself could separate fact from fiction.” Baker, for her part, never apologized for embellishments: “I don’t lie,” she once reportedly said. “I improve on life.”
It’s also difficult to know how much of “Fearless” was enhanced by her collaborator, but certainly Baker’s essence and voice seem to come through. With stream-of-consciousness imagery, she describes her impoverished early years in St. Louis (“My childhood was the type where you have no stockings. I was cold, and I danced to keep warm”) and her time as a homeless, teenage aspiring performer in New York City: “The ground sweated at night; a cold fever.” By the late 1920s, Baker had established herself on the other side of the Atlantic as a joyous, controversial superstar; she recalls performing for royalty — and setting off riots of sanctimonious protest — across Europe.
“Fearless and Free”’s effervescent tone — frequently punctuated by oh là làs and exclamation points — occasionally gives way to grave, harrowing passages. Baker recounts singing in the just-liberated, typhoid-racked Buchenwald death camp: “Someone needed to try and distract them, restore their hope,” she says, describing “the poor souls there — the dying, skeletons, ghosts with burning fevers.”
With controlled but raw rage, she also recounts the flagrant racism she encountered while touring the United States in 1948: “After the war and so much unprecedented atrocity, after so much misery,” she says, “it’s heartbreaking. And I’m furious.”
Yet despite Baker’s righteous fury at what she saw as America’s “race policy” — which she describes as “more insidious, more hideous” than Nazi Germany’s — she reserves equal ire for the New York Jews who “are reducing colored people to slaves” in Harlem. Some of her characterizations of Jewish landlords have their own insidious echoes of Germanic antisemitism: “The Jews have money, too, lots, always more money,” she says, and reels off trope after trope: “It’s Jews who shout and beg for mercy the loudest” and “Don’t they see they’re summoning yet more tragedy onto themselves, onto their children, too, that when the time comes, they’ll be more blamed than pitied?”
This is not the first time these unsavory phrases from “Fearless” have come to the attention of American readers; after the book’s initial publication in France, the widely read columnist Walter Winchell accused Baker of antisemitism, citing remarks in the memoir. Baker vehemently denied the charge, noting her early support for the state of Israel. Her second husband had been Jewish, she pointed out; one of her eventual Rainbow Tribe adoptees was Jewish. What she saw in Harlem, she contended, was a legitimate civil rights affront.
In a separate foreword to this new edition, the author Ijeoma Oluo takes a crack at reconciling Baker’s language with her commitment to antiracism: Black and Jewish communities have long been pitted against each other, Oluo observes. And “without the social and political context surrounding the power dynamics” that Baker witnessed, “her conclusions and blanket statements can cause harm and contribute to bigotry and antisemitism, which I do believe Baker would have opposed.” We are all susceptible to bigotry, Oluo concludes: “a part of the human experience of our deeply flawed systems.”
Still, it is shocking and dismaying to read certain passages in “Fearless and Free,” especially in the current political and cultural climate. The Anti-Defamation League released a study in January that found that “around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust.”
Baker’s account might have served as an inspiration as we witness a global resurgence of the sorts of terrifying forces that Baker nearly gave her life, several times over, to combat. Instead, “Fearless” leaves readers with a sense of vertigo, and a fear that sometimes not even the most moral and persuasive teachers absorb all of the lessons that they try to bestow upon their students.
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