The life of Josephine Baker—entertainer, civil rights activist, spy for the French Resistance in World War II—is a story that sounds like fiction even before being dramatized, and now author Sherry Jones has woven the milestones of the dancer’s real life into a fictional narrative. Josephine Baker’s Last Dance begins with Baker heading to her final performance, then flashes back through her childhood, rise to fame, and role in the civil rights era—reimagining many of the details in between for a biographical novel.
Baker—born Freda Josephine “Tumpy” McDonald—grew up in St. Louis’ Mill Creek Valley, west of Union Station. In 1919, searching for a way out of poverty, she left the city to join a traveling vaudeville troupe called The Dixie Steppers but encountered racism in her early days of performing—“too young, too dark, too ugly,” as a character in Jones’ book dubs her.
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In Europe, audiences found Baker’s skin color and then-provocative dancing alluring. She became a French citizen in 1937 but expressed her love for both the United States and Paris in her song “J’ai deux amours.” Paris audiences flocked to watch Baker perform Danse Sauvage, which one critic of the time described as the entertainer “in constant motion, her body writhing like a snake or more precisely like a dipping saxophone.”
Jones depicts Baker’s rise as more than just the oft-told story of an eccentric showgirl with a cheetah for a pet and a skirt made of 16 rubber bananas. Baker began to use her fame as a tool for activism against discrimination. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that in 1951 she refused to play what’s now The Chase Park Plaza because black people could not attend the performance. The same year, her show at the Copa City Club in Miami was the first mixed-race nightclub performance in the South. Jones sets this scene: New York, 1935. Baker, adored overseas, tells a hotel clerk, “Je suis Josephine Baker.” She’s on the verge of tears as he turns her away. She remembers how she felt as a child, seeing the beautiful mannequins lining the windows of St. Louis department stores she could not enter because of her race. Her friend tells the clerk, “Do you know who this woman is? She’s Josephine Baker, a world-famous celebrity and a new star of the Ziegfeld Follies.”
