Josephine Baker, the artist who hid anti-Nazi documents in her underwear

The 2021 Baker She was honoured to be buried in the Pantheon in Paris.. She was the first black woman to be buried there. It was a fitting tribute to an artist who broke barriers and lived a thousand lives, the first outside France. Born in the United States, in St. Louis, she never knew who her father was. Her mother had been adopted by a family descended from slaves and never told her who the father was, although she suspected he was a married white man. She must have been a half-breed, then. Baker seemed destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps, working as a domestic servant for the wealthy and raising a family. In fact, she was married off when she was just 13, but when she was 15 she ran away and joined a trio of street performers. While performing in concerts, she made it to Philadelphia, where she met Willie Baker, whom she married in 1921 and with whom she established herself as a dancer. A woman of character, at 17 she left her second husband for New York, wanting to make it on Broadway. After participating in various shows, he met Caroline Dudley Reagan, the wife of the commercial attaché of the American embassy in Paris, Donald J. Reagan, who saw great potential in Baker and suggested that he go to live in Paris to star in the show that would make her famous: Negro Magazine (Black Magazine). And what a success it was. France went crazy with the seduction and provocation of Baker, who performed in a simple fake banana skirt, half-naked and dancing to rhythms unknown to the French. Baker charmed intellectuals and artists, and triumphed on stage as he changed lovers, one of whom was a Sicilian life-seeker played by Giuseppe Abbatino.

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Ambitious as she was, she opened her own shop in Paris, appeared in the first musical films and scandalized the French when she bought a cheetah, named Chiquita, and paraded it through the streets like a kitten. It danced to Charleston, jazz or Caribbean rhythms, claiming the music had African roots, without asking permission from any man for what it was doing. In 1937, a year after Apatino died of cancer, Baker obtained French citizenship by marrying a young sugar businessman, Jean Léon, who was Jewish. Her tours of the United States did not go well—she encountered racism and misunderstanding there—so she felt increasingly French and less American. She became politicized, her husband being the subject of anti-Semitic attacks. And so, when World War II broke out, she became a counterintelligence agent, recruited by the French counterintelligence chief, Jacques Apetit. When the Nazis occupied France, she remained committed to working for the Free French Intelligence Service, also under the command of Commander Apetit, which is to say she was part of the Resistance. Her job was simple: go on tours, go to dinners, parties, and listen to what the politicians and military were saying. Baker would go to parties at the Italian embassy, ​​where he would talk to the Nazis and the Japanese to get good information. These men wanted to get close to one of the most beautiful women in Europe, and she took advantage of that. In addition, Baker used his castle in the Dordogne region to hide people who had to flee the Nazis.

Baker put his neck on the line with his actions. He initially settled in Vichy France, where the Nazi-dominated regime ruled. Being so well-known, she was never deported, as happened to many black or mestizo Frenchmen. She was allowed to wander around neutral countries like Portugal or Switzerland, trips he used to pass on information he had obtained about troop movements or the construction of military airfields and port expansions. At the border, the authorities had no doubt that he had information hidden in his underwear or written in invisible ink on his sheet music. During a mission in Lisbon, she managed to hide a microfilm in her bra containing a list of Nazi spies, which she handed over to British agents.

At the end of 1941, he went to Morocco, where he gave concerts and took refuge, partly to take care of his health, which was beginning to cause him problems, and partly to distance himself from the Nazis, as some of his contacts with the Nazis and the Resistance had declined and the siege had intensified. In the last year of the war, Becker stopped spying and accompanied Allied soldiers to the front, giving concerts to cheer them up. She became one of the most beloved French women, and in 1945 she was awarded the Order of the Resistance with a rose and a few years later the insignia of Dame of the Legion of Honor and the War Cross.

After the war, with his health increasingly weak, he continued to work, although he did not know how to save and was always short of money. She became friends with designers such as Christian Dior and married twice more. The list of lovers, it is impossible to explain. In addition, he began to adopt children of different races. He adopted 12, whom he named My Rainbow Tribe. He continued to work tirelessly without giving up the struggle and returned to the United States frequently to fight racism. In 1963, she supported the civil rights movement of Rev. Martin Luther King by participating in the famous March on Washington for civil rights, during which she gave a speech, wearing her old military uniform and medals. In France, she also fought racism by striking strange political balances, supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba, but admiring the conservative General de Gaulle, because she shared his struggle against the Germans. Despite running out of money and going so far as to ask friends and admirers for help so as not to lose the property he still owned, Baker managed to continue on stage and fill theaters with artists he admired until his career ended in 1975 when he died of a stroke at the age of 68. The funeral was bizarre. A great artist was buried, but also a war heroine. The seductive rhythms of personal freedom were joined by hymns played by fully dressed military personnel. Baker was surprised even after his death.