The Twelve Adopted Children

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.