✨ Josephine Baker (née McDonald) was an American girl, born in 1886 in the poverty-stricken home at St. Louis, Missouri - a mixed race of black (from her mother) and white - presumably- from her biological father). She also revealed that her aunt was in fact an Indian. Little Josephine loved to dance and perform, and at the age of thirteen she had started career as street-corner dancing. Her stars started shining when she performed in revues until she joined the Folies Bergère. Her breakthrough happened when Josephine was only 19, dancing in a feather skirt in La Revue Nègre at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. She was further more mostly famous as banana dancer - dancing in her iconic banana skirt.
✨ By 1925, Josephine Baker had been a household name, not only in France, but from aother European countries to Middle East. She was famous with her erotic dance, but more than that, by her free and passionate dance style, coupled with lively expression of her face; she loved doing silly faces during dances, which made her unique and original. Her memoir, wrote by a French journalist Marcel Sauvage, was written in her characteristic of fearless and free. It was told just as Josephine told her own story to Sauvage; you would find a lot of sentence-openings like: "You know Monsieur Sauvage...." And that gave us a glimpse to Josephine Baker's genuine personality: warm, spontaneous, cheerful, passionate.
Maybe these quotes would give you an idea of who or what kind of person Josephine Baker was:
About her love of Paris:
"Have we said enough about Paris's place in the world and life in Paris? Paris is elegance, mayhem, love, champagne and pretty trinkets, the Eiffel Tower. Spirit, and heart, wouldn't you say? And thousands of other adjectives. [...] Paris is women, sun, midnight sun. The Bois, tea, dance halls, shopping, cabaret. [...] I love Paris, how it moves, how it sounds, its mystery - its mysteries - all its mysteries. [...] Night-time, champagne, joy, frenzy, more dancing, flowers, women. Never horrid, never stupid, never ordinary... Vive Paris!"Josephine's view of performing v. money:
"I don't ever want to dance, sing, perform or shoot just because of my name."✨ Josephine Baker's passion stretched out not only to dancing - and later on also singing and acting - but also to people, especially children (she adopted not less than twelve during her lifetime), and the poor and afflicted. Josephine also adored animals; she kept exotic pets, gifted by her many admirers around the world. But maybe, the most interesting aspect of Josephine Baker which not many people realized, is her love of France - the country that had adopted her into her bosom. Josephine volunteered to be a secret agent during World War II due to her international fame, and thus had heard many hush-hush information from many influential people first hand. Later on, she became the Second Lieutenant during the French Resistant movement, and did acted in several dangerous situation (not only in the comfort of cabarets or boudoirs). ✨ After being entertained with Josephine's early career - with dances, performance on the stages, her tour around the world, describing each country from her point of views; the tone of the memoir was shifting to a darker tone when she criticized the racial injustice the Black people received after World War II. She was aghast that during the war everyone mixed happily together despite of different races, but why was it that after war, they hated each other? She was furious especially to how the Jews and the mixed race (half white and half black) treated Black people with even more severe racial discrimination than the pure White. An irony, indeed. And that later part of the memoir was enough for me to change my view on Josephine Baker. She's now, to me, not only a sensuous dancer who performed with funny-silly faces (which I disliked); Josephine Baker was a tremendously generous and affectionate human being who, during her lifetime, truly and actively practiced Christianity, despite what many Christians (and the Church) had accused her of. What a remarkable way of starting the #1949Club week! Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2
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The 1949 Club
