"Fearless and Free" | Reviewed by Bill Schwab

"Fearless and Free" is a memoir from a black, talented, rule-breaking girl born in 1906 in St. Louis, Mo. It is a compilation of conversations French journalist Marcel Sauvage had over the course of 20 years with American expatriate entertainer Josephine Baker.

Born into poverty, Baker made her debut in Philadelphia at age 16. She moved to New York at 17, where she found a better-paying job on Broadway dancing in the Black musical "Shuffle Along." Baker left the US for the Paris stage in 1925, where she took the "City of Light" by storm. She soared to success with her uninhibited dancing, highlighted by her revealing banana skirt.

Baker was welcomed by audiences throughout Europe. Her memoir includes several delightful descriptions of her performances in favorite cities. Remembering her early years in poverty, wherever she performed, she took time to help poor children and widows. The "Bronze Venus" adopted 12 children from diverse nationalities and religions to create a "rainbow tribe" and prove that people of different backgrounds could live amicably.

In some cities, her show prompted frenzied protests, initiated mainly by the church, over her "immorality." When World War II began, Baker was recruited as a spy. Ironically, her provocative act served as a unique cover for an undercover agent of the French Resistance. She passed information about Nazi troop locations by hiding notes in her sheet music and underwear and stuffing secret messages in the costumes. After the war, for her work as a mole, she was awarded the French Legion of Honor, France's highest order of merit for civil or military service.

Baker became interested in the US civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s. She refused to perform at segregated concert venues. The activist Baker was the only official female speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baker had little good to say about her return to the United States because of the racism she encountered. She fought against Germany "because of their race policy," she remarks, but in the US, "I found it again more insidious, more hideous, perhaps, among the people who claim to fight against it," in the North as well as the South.

Initially written in French, the translation into English allows the reader to hear Baker in her own brave, convicted, passionate voice. Through her own telling, we get to know this remarkable world-renowned St. Louis native.

Locally, she was honored with induction into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 1990, located at 6501 Delmar Boulevard in the Delmar Loop. There, she is recognized for her artistic achievements and her contributions to civil rights. In 1995, she was inducted into the Missouri Hall of Fame.

Baker died in 1975. Later, in an outstanding theatrical celebration in Paris on November 30th, 2021, she became the first black woman and the first performer to be enshrined in France's Pantheon. Soil from many of the places she performed was entombed in the mausoleum alongside Voltaire, Marie Curie, and Simone Weil.

  "Fearless and Free" is published by Tiny Reparations Books. It is a fast read at only 282 pages, but it is an incomplete story of her life. Josephine Baker deserves a more extensive biography.

Buy the book.