Fearless and Free by Josephine Baker review – ‘ten lives in one'
'Who else could ever have had a story like hers?' writes Ijeoma Oluo in the foreword to Josephine Baker's memoir. 'The dancer, the singer, the ingenue, the scandal maker, the activist, the spy – Josephine Baker lived at least 10 lives in one.' Translated gorgeously into English for the first time by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis, Fearless and Free comprises stories and reflections in Baker's own voice, drawn from conversations with the French writer Marcel Sauvage that began in 1926 and continued for more than 20 years afterwards. They cover her early life in St Louis, her adventures in Europe and eventual transformation into, as Sauvage puts it, an 'actress and French citizen of worldwide renown'.
Memoirs that span a lifetime can lack narrative drive. 'Life, when you think about it later,' says Baker, 'is a series of images … a film in your heart.' And yet Baker's matchless character propels the reader. She exudes love and life on the page. And that voice! Her younger one, bright, witty, effervescent, and her older one, wiser, angrier, and still so funny.
Her storytelling is writerly and precise, with satisfying arcs in a single sentence or a page. 'My childhood was the type where you have no stockings. I was cold and I danced to keep warm.' Starting out in Paris, she is late for shows because she's eating soup with the concierge. On tour in Europe, she throws photos to the crowd outside her window. 'I have never seen so many squashed straw hats.' Or performing for allied soldiers in Berlin in January 1945: 'They gave us piles, kilos, hundreds of kilos of German certificates for good conduct that they'd found in the basements of the Reichstag, under the rubble … Proof that we'd be Aryans, and good ones, for ever!'
She relishes food and loves her superstitions. In my favourite chapter, she shares recipes and advice. 'Ladies, sleep naked under your sheets,' dance, sweat, and don't be shy with makeup. I wrote down her flan recipe, and, I admit, one for a rheumatism ointment (I mean, look at it): 'Take a really fat rattlesnake. Then skin it – alive. Then peel off the fat in the same way … But the snake must be skinned alive, you hear. And it's hard to find the right kind of snake in Europe.'
Sauvage's presence adds a cheerful, reflective quality. She's talking to him, and to us. 'Write that down, Monsieur Sauvage.' There is a cheeky sort of intimacy in their chats; I could go barely three pages without doing a spit-take. 'We've been hiding our buttocks too much for too long,' she says. 'Buttocks exist. I don't know why we dislike them. There are also buttocks that are terribly silly, of course, terribly pretentious, terribly mediocre. All they are good for is sitting on, if that.' History, we can all agree, was on her side on that one.
As it has been for so many things. In Europe, she's stunned by the religious hypocrisy, hateful leaflets and speeches about her shows. 'People think I've come straight out of the wilderness … folly of the flesh, chaos of the senses, frenzied animality … White imagination is something else when it comes to coloured folk.' Then she gets up on stage and sings 'with all my heart, with my whole, trembling, beating heart. I sang Sleep, My Poor Baby, an old Negro spiritual from back in the slave times when Negroes were good for nothing but dying from exhaustion and despair after being beaten by their very Christian owners.'
And I haven't even gotten to the part where she spies for the French resistance! It's a delightful, nourishing read, along with the rest of her remarkable life, but the most interesting chapter is written (not spoken) by Baker herself, published first in the newspaper France-Soir. Returning to America after years in Paris, she goes undercover as Miss Brown 'to travel towards the south while doing everything that was forbidden for a 'coloured woman''. She gapes at the racism of the north ('American cities that pride themselves on being at the forefront of all progress') and the outright violence of the Jim Crow south.
In Harlem, she writes about the living conditions of black communities whose bosses and landlords were often Jewish, and her reactions to that are complex, raw, uncomfortable to read 70-odd years later. 'Why, in an ironic twist of fate for both of them, must the poor coloured people of Harlem be a punching bag for the Jews, who've forgotten their forefathers' story?' In her foreword, Oluo explains that without historical context Baker's 'blanket statements could cause harm and contribute to bigotry and antisemitism, which I do believe Baker would have opposed … power locks people into hierarchies of white supremacy and deputizes many oppressed people in the subjugation of those with whom they might otherwise stand in solidarity.'
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In most things, though, Baker is wise and innately kind. She rages on behalf of the marginalised and the poor. 'Are we just bugs to these good Americans?' She teaches us to dance, to make funny faces, that 'money never made anyone shine', that children and animals enrich our lives. 'There is a youthfulness that is free, eternal and for ever, in spite of everything … that's enough in itself,' she writes. 'As for the future … I hope we'll be able to live naked. There are only a few women, and very few men, who could live naked, show themselves naked. That's all.'
Fearless and Free by Josephine Baker is translated by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis and published by Vintage Classics (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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