Remembering Josephine Baker, by Carol Drinkwater

 

"France is Josephine." 

1906-1975

This is one of the photos I took of the facade of the Panthéon, snapped while I was queuing to pay my respects to Josephine Baker. Exceptionally, during that first weekend of December, entrance was free to everyone, thus offering citizens the opportunity to say farewell to a woman who had come to France as a teenager escaping racism and segregation, and made this country, where she found acceptance and success, her home.

Whilst I was in Paris a few weeks ago, on a cold winter Saturday afternoon,  I took myself off to the Panthéon. There I queued in the Place de Panthéon along with hundreds of others waiting to enter the Tomb of Heroes. Fortunately for us all, the rain and biting wind stayed away for those few hours we were in line. Everyone was in good spirits. A few days earlier on Tuesday 30th November 2021, Josephine Baker had become the first Black woman to be inducted into France's Tomb of Heroes. President Macron hailed the American-born dancer, singer, night-club artist and courageous French resistance fighter as a 'symbol of unity in a time of division'. 

Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St Louis, Missouri in 1906. Her childhood was spent in poverty. Her mother, who was abandoned by Baker's father, Eddie Carson, a vaudeville drummer, soon after their daughter's birth, worked as a washerwoman. To help her mother keep the family fed Josephine from the age of eight went out to clean and babysit. Most of the houses where she was employed were owned by rich white folk who didn't treat her well. 

She was also profoundly marked by the race riots, the lynchings she witnessed when she was eleven. The East St. Louis 'Race War.' At least 39 black citizens were brutally killed, many of them lynched. This and the desperate times and discrimination she encountered during her childhood years, played an important role in her work later with Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement.

Josephine quit school at 12, lived on the streets, scavenged for food, eventually running away from St Louis when she was thirteen. At thirteen she married and separated weeks later. Finally, at sixteen, after stints of waitressing, she found herself touring the United States with the Jones Family band and the Dixie Steppers. She had been teaching herself to dance and to turn her hand to a few comedy routines.

In 1921, she married for the second time, one Willie Baker, a railway worker. The marriage did not last but she kept his name for the rest of her life. By now she was in New York performing in Chocolate Dandies and, along with the renowned singer-actress Ethel Waters, Josephine was in the floor show at the Plantation Club. It took no time before she became a big hit with the audiences. By 1925, nineteen-year-old Josephine decided to take her chances in Europe, in Paris where Les Années Folles - France's equivalent of the Roaring Twenties - were in full swing. Paris was jumping to the beat of the jazz. Baker sailed to France, landed in Cherbourg and opened on 2 October in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champ-Élysées. For her role in this she was paid 250 dollars a week which was double her Broadway salary. Nineteen years old, she was a sensation. Paris brought her stardom; it also showed her that there was another way to live. There was dignity. She became a protégée and friend of Ada "Bricktop" Smith, another extraordinary black American vaudeville star who was taking the French capital by storm, making it her home.

Paris in the twenties was an exceptional city to be living in. Cole Porter, E.E. Cummings, John Steinbeck, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, to name but a few, all were present. Josephine was not only very much a part of that multi-cultural scene, she was admired, fêted. She wowed spectators when performing at the Folies Bergère wearing a skirt, a tutu, made of 16 bananas. It drew attention, while her Charleston dancing drove the audiences wild. ("I am not naked, I am just not wearing any clothes.") By the time she was twenty-two Baker was one of the highest paid performers in Europe.

                                                       Photo taken in 1920s.

She was the first Black woman to star in a motion picture, Siren of the Tropics, in 1927. A French film directed by Mario Nalpas and  Henri  Étievant. (A little known fact I discovered when I was researching for this post: Luis Bunuel worked as assistant director on this film). It was a motion picture well ahead  of its time and  ran for six months in French cinemas which was considered a great success. Baker was during these years of the twenties the leading star of the Folies Bergères cabarets. Her on-screen presence was hailed as magnetic. She was in every sense a star, and a groundbreaking one at that. 

She toured Europe, studied French, and built herself a remarkable reputation.

                                                                Josephine in her banana skirt.

In 1936, she returned to the States to star in the Broadway show, Ziegfeld Follies, hoping to replicate her European success, but she had not counted on the level of discrimination that would greet her. Time magazine mocked her, calling her a "buck-toothed Negro" whose talent could be matched by anyone. Broken-hearted, less than a year later, she returned to France resolving to make it her permanent home. Upon her return she married for the third time, a French industrialist, Jean Lion (born Levy). This offered her the opportunity to take citizenship, which she did. 

It was also around this time, before the outbreak of WWII, that Baker bought a renaissance castle overlooking the Dordogne River in south-west France, Château des Milandes. This home became a place of great significance. She organised for her family tp be brought over from St Louis and gave them a home there. She and her husband lived there until he - being of Jewish origin - was obliged to flee the Nazis. 

When France declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, Josephine immediately stepped up to participate in the war effort .She joined the counter-intelligence service, using her charms and reputation to gather information. She worked in cafes, clubs, bars and embassies. She also helped raise funds for the French army, as well as paying for her family to return to safety back in the United States. 

When France capitulated in the early summer of 1940, Baker turned her talents to gathering information for the Résistance. She passed on coded information through her musical scores. She moved to Morocco to entertain the Free French and Allied troops. After the war, having returned from North Africa and the Middle East as a second lieutenant in the French air force, she was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Résistance. France's highest civilian and military distinctions.

After the war, Baker married for the fourth time,  the bandleader Jo Bouillon. She spent most of her time at Château des Milandes. In 1947 she began to adopt children - a hysterectomy earlier in life meant that she couldn't bear children of her own. The "Rainbow Tribe" is the collective name she gave to her offspring. Twelve adopted infants from all over the world. She saw her family as an experiment in brotherhood and frequently invited people to the estate to see how happily they all lived together.

In the 50s, Baker returned to the States to take on another cause, one to which she was as deeply committed as she had been to the freeing of France: the Civil Rights Movement.  She has been famously quoted as saying that she could walk into palaces, embassies, the residences of some of the rich and famous, but back home in St Louis she couldn't walk into a bar and order a cup of coffee. She fought against segregation and refused to perform in any club or venue where segregation was in force. She marched with Martin Luther King, spoke out against the poverty and indignities suffered by the African-Americans. She was eventually accepted by America as an artist and a voice in her own right. 20th May was named Josephine Baker Day.

In 1975 back in Paris, fifty years after her first performance in the country that had welcomed her and given her dignity, she performed at the Theatre Bobino. It was to have been the opening of a series of concerts. Amongst many luminaries in the audience that night was Diana Ross, Mick Jagger, Sophie Lauren as well as Baker's very dear and loyal friend, Grace Kelly, Princess Grace of Monaco, who had given Josephine a sea-view residence in Roquebrune close to Monaco after Baker lost her chateau in March 1969, because she could not meet the bills and running costs. Tragically, there were only three performances at Bobino because Baker suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in her sleep. She was taken in a coma to the Pitié-Sapêtrière Hospital in Paris where she died two days later.

Crowds lined the streets of Paris on the day of her funeral. She was given a twenty-one gun salute. The first American woman to receive full French military honours. She was later buried in a cemetery in Monaco, which is where her body remains today. 

Her family requested that her body was not exhumed and moved to the Panthéon. In the coffin that was laid in the Tomb of Heroes on 30th November this year is earth from the soils of St Louis, Paris, Château des Milandes and, her final home, Monaco. 

I walked the echoing stone floors of the former church of Sainte Geneviève and descended to the vast, impressively vast, crypt, at the Panthéon. I walked alongside, brushed spiritual shoulders with, such giants as Dumas, Malraux, Jean Moulin, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo. Voltaire, Rousseau.

But where were the women? 

Only six women have been laid to rest in this sanctified place in their own merit.

Sophie Berthelot in 1907. Her husband was a famous chemist and the family were insistent that the couple be buried together. Polish-French physicist and Nobel laureate, Marie Curie, became in 1995 the first woman in her own right to be buried here. (Her husband Pierre, is also honoured with a place for his pioneering work on radioactivity.) Résistance fighters Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion were both inducted in 2015, Simone Veil in 2018 - Veil was also chosen by Macron - and lastly in 2021, Josephine.

Here lies Josephine:

                                                          Josephine Baker's place at the Pantheon.

Outside on the facade of the towering edifice is written: Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.

'To the great men, the nation (fatherland) is grateful.' It always fascinates and rather amuses me that the word la patrie is feminine. There is certainly a move here in France to honour the women of the nation and Macron has contributed one third of those females now laid to rest in honour at the Panthéon. Personally, I would like to see the stone outside recarved to read: Aux grands femmes et hommes ...

                       You will have to look carefully to see the gold-lettered writing above the entrance pillars.

Are there any women whose names you would put forward to join Josephine Baker and the handful of other exceptional women now at rest in the Panthéon? I would be fascinated to hear them.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

A new step forward in France, by Carol Drinkwater

We have a new President.
The whole world has learned by now that France has voted for Emmanuel Macron, the youngest man to step into this role since Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoleon III.
Born in Paris on 20th April 1808,  Louis-Napoléon became President on 20th December 1848.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew and heir of Napoléon I, was the first head of State to take the title of President and he was the only President of the Second Republic. Barred from running for a second term, he organised a coup d'etat and took the throne as Emperor of France on 2nd December 1852.  He remains the longest serving Head of State in France since the French Revolution, and died in exile in England in 1873 after the fall of his Empire in 1870.

Emmanuel Macron steps into the role of President at the age of thirty-nine and six months so just a tad younger than France's last Emperor, making Macron the youngest President in French history.  Does his age matter? Yes and no. His youth and energy are seen here as a breath of fresh air. His beautiful wife Brigitte Macron is over twenty years his senior making him, I believe, a man with an individual spirit who follows his own path, his own destiny. I watched a clip of their wedding recently and was charmed by the way he spoke so openly about embracing their age difference. I find it quite remarkable when one considers the chauvinism so often shown in politics.

I, we, hope that this mindset will bring courage and a new way of thinking to French politics. Most here are saying that the country is in dire need of reform. Yes, there is much that needs to be addressed - our very high unemployment figures (around ten per cent), the weight of bureaucracy in the public sectors - both are two concerns regularly cited.
Another urgent issue is national security. We are a country that has been living in a state of alerte rouge since January 2015. Over the last two years, France has been the victim of several monstrous terrorist attacks. In these last two and a half years, close to 300 people have been murdered during or as a result of these attacks. Macron's opponent, the far right candidate, Marine Le Pen, has been suggesting measures which would alienate the large Maghrebian (north African) population here in France, would close down our borders, take us out of Europe and do away with the euro. Fortunately, Macron has opposed all these proposed policies. During the televised debate between Macron and Le Pen just days before the second and final round of voting, Macron stood firm against her accusations when she shockingly threw the word 'traitor' at him because he had visited Algeria and stated that France did not behave well during its years as an imperialist power there and that some of the acts perpetrated against French colonial citizens were crimes against humanity. It took great courage and integrity to stand firm on national television, peak viewing, to repeat his position. I agree with Macron. Like him I also believe that until France takes responsibility for its past, healing and social meshing cannot take place.

I have written about France and its Algerian history in other History Girls posts: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.fr/2015/01/je-suis-charlie-carol-drinkwater_26.html  and  http://the-history-girls.blogspot.fr/2015/02/a-potted-history-of-french-algeria.html

The terrorists who perpetrated the appalling attacks here, from Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 onwards, are, or were, members of and trained by ISIS/Daech. They are not necessarily directly related to France's colonial past except that many of the disenfranchised north Africans living, in most cases, in very difficult conditions on the outskirts of French cities have been easy pickings for the terrorist organisations. These second and third generation French citizen youths are without work, living on the fringes of our society, despised and looked down upon by a percentage of the population and their rights and needs are not always being met. How easy then to lure them into acts against the establishment, to stoke up within them the hatred and anger necessary to commit such atrocities. The solid impenetrable establishment does not want to hear that France owes a great debt and more than an apology to the citizens of its colonial past. Macron's words were not easy to hear for many and were outrightly denied by others, such as Marine Le Pen.
It is a breath of fresh air to hear a politician say that his nation must take responsibility for its crimes before any future can be built. I applaud Macron for not buckling at the possibility of losing votes because of the position he had taken.

My new novel, THE LOST GIR, to be published in just over a month on 29th June in the UK is set in two locations and several time zones. At its heart it is a contemporary story which begins the night of Friday 13th November 2015 in Paris. That night there were six terrorist attacks all within the eastern quarters of Paris. Over 200 people were murdered many of them youngsters attending a rock concert at the Bataclan concert hall near Bastille.

How did this book come about? The evening of the terrorism in Jan 2015 really affected me and set the tone for my response to the 13 November attacks. My husband was in Paris when the Charlie Hebdo attacks took place. He was working at his office which in those days was one street away from the CH offices. Naturally, I was terrified when I heard the news before I knew the precise location. Once all was revealed, I learned from Michel, my husband, that he had worked with one of the illustrators who was murdered that late afternoon.
The fact that it was a colleague, someone just one step away, a man working in the arts, not a close friend of Michel's but a respected colleague, this really shook me up.
Freedom of speech, freedom to believe whatever one chooses as long as it does not cause harm to others, freedom to love whomsoever one chooses, as long as we are not talking about minors or unwilling partners. These are at the heart of French values, a cornerstone of this society. 2015 was a turning point for me in that I recognised how living in France has transformed me. I also realised that speaking out and mourning publicly for the victims was essential. I felt that I had to stand up and be counted.
THE LOST GIRL was in gestation, I see now, even before the night of 13th November.
That evening I switched on the television to see the news which is not something I am in the habit of doing. I was standing with my mother in the living room and together we watched the events unfolding. I was weeping. Mummy said to me, talking particularly about the young who were trapped as hostages within the Bataclan where two gunmen were shooting, picking off audience members one after another in cold blood 'Everyone of them is someone's daughter or son. Mothers are waiting everywhere to hear the news.'
My story was seeded, although I did not know it that evening. Several days later, I put aside the novel I was at work on and began to write ...

Kurtiz is an Englishwoman, a renowned photographer who has become estranged from her actor husband. Their marriage fell apart when their sixteen-year-old daughter, Lizzie, went missing from their London home four years earlier. Out of the blue, there is a sighting of Lizzie in Paris. Kurtiz's husband, Oliver, firmly believes his daughter will be at the Bataclan rock concert and he goes there in search of her. Kurtiz is waiting in a nearby bar for news, for a meeting, for a craved-for reconciliation.

THE LOST GIRL is a love story with plenty of drama. At its heart it is a tale of new beginnings, of second chances, of learning to forgive and to seize the moment and live.

France has voted, not for extremism and fascist knee-jerk reactions, not for closing down its borders, but for new beginnings, for building upon the knowledge that within its recent past, the nation, the ruling powers, have committed crimes. With an open heart, the long slow journey towards healing and creating opportunities for those who have been left out in the cold, can begin.
I am feeling optimistic.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

I wrote this blog and posted it at the beginning of this week. A day later, Manchester in the United Kingdom was hit. A suicide bomber waited to explode his foul ammunition on young people preparing to make their way home from a rock concert. First,  my sincere condolences to those who have lost members of their families. R.I.P to those who lost their lives. I pray that those who were injured may recover speedily. Lastly, huge respect to the citizens of Manchester who handled the abomination with such compassion. During my time researching The Lost Girl I spent a month watching filmed material of the events of that night in Paris and the long harrowing days that succeeded it. One of the most remarkable things I took away from all that I watched was the generosity of the Parisians, the French. Blood was given, doors left open. Everyone was on hand to help do their bit to counter the ugliness of such an atrocity. In all the war zones I have visited for my work and travels, for the research for The Lost Girl and for all that I have read over these last few days from Manchester, I have been deeply moved time and time again by our ability to express compassion and generosity to others who are suffering. Man's indomitable spirit. Our kindness, our desire to reach out and offer a hand to another in need. I hope these qualities come across in my novel and I sincerely pray that these are the energies that will overcome these appalling waves of terrorism.