Josephine Baker arrived in Paris in 1925, danced on stage wearing a skirt made of artificial bananas, and became the most famous entertainer in France overnight. She was nineteen. She was from St. Louis. She had left America because America would not let her eat in the same restaurants as white people, and France, whatever its faults, would at least let her eat. What she did after the bananas is considerably more impressive than the bananas.

She Became the Highest-Paid Entertainer in Europe

Baker's performance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in La Revue Negre was designed to shock, and it did. She danced with an energy that Parisian audiences had never seen. She mugged, she improvised, she moved with a physical freedom that critics described in terms that ranged from ecstatic to racist, often in the same sentence. Cultural historians at the Musee National de l'Histoire de l'Immigration in Paris have documented that Baker was simultaneously celebrated and exoticized by the French public. She was brilliant and she was othered, and she used both to build an empire. By the 1930s, she was the highest-paid entertainer in Europe. She had a pet cheetah named Chiquita that she walked through the streets of Paris on a diamond-studded leash. She was not subtle. But beneath the spectacle, she was strategizing. She learned French fluently. She became a French citizen. She moved from the music halls to legitimate theater and cinema. She was building a career that would survive the loss of youth and novelty, and she was doing it in a country that was about to be occupied by the Nazis.

She Spied for France and Carried Secrets in Her Underwear

When Germany invaded France in 1940, Baker joined the French Resistance. She used her celebrity to travel freely across Europe, attending embassy parties and gathering intelligence that she passed to the Free French. She smuggled messages written in invisible ink on her sheet music. She pinned notes inside her underwear, correctly calculating that no border guard would search Josephine Baker. Military intelligence researchers at the French Defense Historical Service have confirmed Baker's contributions to the Resistance. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Resistance, and was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. She is one of the most decorated civilian women in French military history. After the war, she adopted twelve children from different countries and ethnic backgrounds, whom she called her Rainbow Tribe. She settled them in a chateau in the Dordogne and attempted to prove that children of all races could be raised together in harmony. The experiment was expensive, chaotic, and sincere. She returned to the stage repeatedly when she needed money. She marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington in 1963, the only woman to give a speech at the March on Washington, wearing her Free French uniform. She died in 1975, the night after a triumphant comeback performance in Paris. She was sixty-eight. She danced in bananas. She fought Nazis. She raised the world's children. She did not do these things in sequence. She did them simultaneously, which is the only way to explain a life that refuses to fit in a single sentence.