# The Twelve Adopted Children *A Biography of Josephine Baker* — Legendary Biographies No. 081 - **Subject:** Freda Josephine McDonald (Josephine Baker) - **Written by:** Calvin Renard - **Shelf:** Music / Jazz - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 195 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 195 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-085-0) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-178-9) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/081-the-twelve-adopted-children.html ## About this book A long FBI surveillance file follows Josephine Baker through her American years, and Calvin Renard's biography declines to treat it as the hidden truth beneath the performer. The book does not rank the roles against one another, or pick which of them was the act. Chorus girl, Paris sensation, Resistance courier, mother of twelve: they are set down in order, and the distance between them is left standing. Freda Josephine McDonald grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of a single washerwoman, abandoned by Eddie Carson. She was a vaudeville chorus girl at thirteen and married for the first time at fifteen. Shuffle Along led to Paris, where she arrived in 1925 with La Revue Nègre. Her Danse Sauvage at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on October 2 of that year made her, at nineteen, the most famous American Black woman in Europe. The Folies Bergère and the Casino de Paris held her for years. She married Pepito Abatino, and in 1947 bought the Château des Milandes in the Dordogne. In 1939 she joined the French Resistance and carried coded messages through Nazi-occupied border crossings inside her sheet music; the Croix de Guerre came in 1946. Across the 1950s and 1960s she adopted twelve children of different races and religions and raised them as the Rainbow Tribe. Renard follows the comeback concert at Carnegie Hall in 1973, the four-day Bobino engagement in Paris in April 1975, and the cerebral hemorrhage that killed her on April 12, 1975, at sixty-eight. On November 30, 2021 the French Republic put her under the dome of the Panthéon: the first Black woman, the first American-born person, and the sixth woman ever interred there. She was born in St. Louis on June 3, 1906, and ended inside the national memory of a country that was not hers by birth. The one that was kept a file. ## Contents 1. Freda Josephine 2. The Circuit 3. The Machine 4. Leaving America 5. La Revue Negre 6. The Banana Skirt 7. The Queen of Paris 8. The Performances 9. The Deuxieme Bureau 10. The Invisible Ink 11. The Croix de Guerre 12. The Return of the Soldier 13. The Rainbow Tribe 14. The March on Washington 15. The Fall 16. The Children 17. The Final Years 18. The Last Curtain 19. The Panthéon ## Questions **Who is The Twelve Adopted Children about?** Freda Josephine McDonald (Josephine Baker). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Twelve Adopted Children — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,583 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 195 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Calvin Renard is a Detroit-born jazz critic and biographer. He has spent over three decades documenting the musicians who shaped American sound from the bebop era through the 1980s soul-pop crossover, working closely with archival recordings and musicians' estates. His deeply researched biographies include The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House and The Twelve Adopted Children. Both books focus on the private lives, creative struggles, and enduring cultural legacies of legendary mid-century artists. He lives in Detroit, Michigan, where he hosts a weekly late-night jazz program on public radio and collects vintage vinyl records.