“Fearless and Free: A Memoir” by Josephine Baker, translated by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis, foreword by Ijeoma Oluo
c.2025,
Tiny Reparations Books
$32.00
304 pages
You march to the tun of your personal drummer since you just like the beat.
It’s the identical cadence you carry in your coronary heart and soul, and it units your tempo and your path. Nobody else’s pulse matches yours, nobody else’s rhythm will do. You march to your personal drummer and as within the new memoir, “Fearless and Free” by Josephine Baker, translated from the French by Anam Zafar and Sophie Lewis, you dance to it, too.
When he first met Josephine Baker in 1926, journalist Marcel Sauvage advised that she would possibly wish to write her memoirs and the 20-year-old Baker laughed at his concept. Later that yr, when he sat down to listen to her story, he discovered that Baker was susceptible to laughter.
She was born into poverty in 1906 in St. Louis, and he or she instructed Sauvage that she started dancing to maintain heat. She grew to like being a performer, however incomes cash was extra vital so Baker left faculty at age eight to work. For the remainder of her life, she carried a painful lesson and a love of animals from her first job.
She made her official debut in Philadelphia at age 16, and labored her option to a better-paying job in New York earlier than leaving for Paris, the place she was a nationwide sensation. Audiences couldn’t get sufficient of her humor or her then-scandalous “banana dance.” Oooh, la la!
Baker was welcomed, not simply in France however round Europe, the place her performances have been celebrated. She shared with Sauvage all of the locations she’d been, and which have been right here favorites. She reminded him that she’d as soon as identified poverty, which is why she tried to assist poor youngsters and widows within the cities by which she carried out. She instructed him in regards to the individuals she knew and people she beloved, although she promised that she wouldn’t give particulars.
She had little good to say about her return to America…
As biographies go, “Fearless and Free” is superb, however solely to a degree.
Although journalist Marcel Sauvage briefly touches on Josephine Baker’s later life and he hints at her work throughout World Warfare II, that work just isn’t addressed, neither is Baker’s well-known “Rainbow Tribe.” Lacking, additionally, is her later life. Briefly, the ebook is just too quick.
And but, what’s right here is stellar. Baker was humorous and sensible and single-minded and that every one comes out in her phrases, as Sauvage saved them. You’ll be delighted in that, however chances are you’ll be shocked on the almost-gentle approach she talked in regards to the racism she skilled on return visits to America. Readers might get the sense that Baker was completely the sort to face up for herself, however she additionally understood that stardom, within the Jim Crow period, demanded discretion.
That is the sort of ebook that’ll make you search on-line for movies of its creator onstage, and it’ll ship you in seek for different books about Josephine Baker. Although it doesn’t embody sufficient years, should you love biographies, “Fearless and Free” can’t be beat.
