1 of 2
Book jacket image courtesy of Harvard University Press
2 of 2
This book shimmers. The prose is spun gold, the ideas sparkle with intelligence, and the fun’s as high as Josephine Baker—topless in a banana skirt, her caramel skin gleaming—can take it.
But in the end, it’s a tragedy.
St. Louisans already know the backstory: a little girl in Chestnut Valley who scavenged for food in garbage cans and for coal in Union Station’s yards, and who never forgot the race riots of 1917. She left St. Louis with a vaudeville show, landed in New York for the Harlem Renaissance, seduced France, had quasi-royalty conferred on her in Monaco…
Matthew Pratt Guterl focuses instead on her dream. Baker bought a French castle, adopted a dozen children, and made them stand for every race and nation in the world. It went about as well as any other supersized celebrity adoption with a political agenda. But instead of reducing it to farce, Guterl shows us what it all meant. And because he’s a lyrical writer who’s also a scholar (professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University), he weaves in new ways to think about identity, success, family, race, celebrity, and Baker herself.
She stood for lust and disinhibition, burlesque comedy and high style. Her entire life was a performance. Maybe she tried too hard, rebranding herself every decade, exploiting her “Rainbow Tribe” for a private civil-rights crusade. But her ideals were far ahead of her time, and her stardom was the real thing. She just burned a little too bright.
What brought you to this subject?
Aside from the natural interest, I come from a multiracial adoptive family myself. So when I heard the story the first time, there were parts of it that resonated and parts that didn’t. And then you have the whole Brangelina thing…
So what parts resonated?
When I was an undergraduate, I remember hearing people talk about Josephine Baker as a hero. But the only Baker I knew was the Baker of the banana skirt. She was very enigmatic for me.
Right, but I meant what resonated for you personally, given your family history?
Yeah, that’s—the public-private aspect is very similar. I think multiracial families, big ones—not the pair of parents that adopts a single child, but these very large, sprawling families that are meant to make a political point—they really make what is private public. We were only six children, but I remember my father joking that we were two of every race. And I remember feeling on display when we were invariably asked to bring the gifts up at Christmas Mass. You perform a symbolic function. People watch you differently.
Did you hate it?
No child likes to be watched too closely.
Was Josephine a loving mother?
It’s a question I wrestled with whenever I talked about this project, because every parent in the room was appalled. Did she correspond to our conventional notion of a loving mother? Absolutely not. But I think she cared very deeply about the family, about the enterprise of the family, and she wanted very much to make it work.
Interesting that you use the word “enterprise,” given Baker’s brilliance at self-promotion and packaging. She put the kids in orange-juice ads and turned their family life into a theme park attraction in a French castle…
That I think is absolutely the case. She always wanted to attach a kind of emotional significance to the family, but despite her efforts to portray this as ordinary motherhood times 12, she was a commercial person, an advertiser of herself.
In terms of race, Baker was fiercely eloquent in opposing Jim Crow, yet somehow she was perceived as both black and not-black.
Blackness as a single category has always been kind of a U.S. categorization. Baker played all these different roles, in which she was Moroccan, Algerian, Caribbean… She’s quintessentially American, but she’s also very French, and she’s also kind of stateless. She positions herself as a citizen of this or that place, or nowhere, really, except her own middle domain, and that’s a really 21st-century way to be in the world.
She strolled through Paris with her pet cheetah on a very slender leash; she symbolized uninhibited wildness, and her performances carried an erotic charge. What do you suppose it would have been like to have sex with her?
Did you just ask me that question? [He laughs, a little embarrassed.] I think this would have been part of her life as a younger woman. As an older woman, she was very circumspect about sex.
That’s fine; you can answer about her as a young woman!
I think, given what her lovers in the 1920s confessed, that it would have been athletic. And intoxicating. And she's a super-intelligent woman, so her brain would have been intoxicating as well.
Why did she become such a powerful icon? Our lust, inhibitions, and boredom? Or her charisma?
If it had been just any one of those things, then any number of other people might have become the icon. She had extraordinary talents as a performer, a dancer, a film star, a singer; tremendous versatility; and the certain intangible quality called “it.”
Did you feel like you were redeeming Baker or exposing her?
I was taking someone everybody assumed was an airy, ephemeral creature and making her sophisticated, provocative, and powerful. I don’t know that I set out to redeem her. But I didn’t want to demonize her, either, because it seems to me that in a very naïve way, she had the right idea.
But when a problem’s as big as racial hatred, can you tackle it with a single family?
Probably not, right? The civil rights movement’s emphasis has been on institution building. You need more people involved.
It does seem a burden to put on a dozen kids.
Yeah. I thought a lot about child soldiers when I wrote this book.
Why do these celeb adoptive families need to be so big?
Some of it is definitional. Once you agree that you are going to have a family that represents the entire world, then the question is, how many people do you need to do that? It’s a Noah’s Ark kind of question.
How much did Baker’s childhood in St. Louis affect her?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, in reading the new biography American Cocktail. Anita Reynolds was roughly Baker’s contemporary. The difference between the two of them is that Baker comes from such extraordinary poverty and from a place that is so deeply racialized and troubled. St. Louis shaped everything about her. It shaped her bitterness. It shaped her determination. It shaped her commitment to fighting Jim Crow over such great distances and over such a long period of time.
Why was she so cruel to her mom?
Did she seem cruel? I’d use the word “distant.” There was an age gap between them, and there was a lot of history, and that history was not altogether pleasant. Baker’s childhood was not an idealized part of her life. But I also think it’s true that celebrities grind up ordinary human beings as part of their apparatus.
What does the rainbow tribe tell us about more typical families?
It reminds us that the family is always a metaphor for the nation. And Baker’s family is a metaphor for the world. And it reminds us as well that we expect that certain aspects of family should be kept private. In our pearl-clutching, we reveal what our ordinary expectations are.
If you were a social worker writing an evaluation of Baker’s adopted children, how would you say they’d fared?
That would depend on what kind of social worker I am! Marianne, for example, had a very romantic vision of what childhood at Les Milandes was like, and she clung to that and celebrated it. You could say that’s a healthy response, or you could say it’s like PTSD. Jarry has a very different sense of things. Is that healthier? I’m not entirely sure.
What question would you ask yourself?
I’d ask, “Why doesn’t the book go up to the present; why don’t we find out where the children are today?” In the middle of writing, it struck me that this was really a book about Josephine Baker and the tribe as a collective. If you made the book about the children, you’d change the story fundamentally, because Baker did not approach them as individuals. The hardest part of the book was the moment at which I realized that I was writing about the children in the abstract and not thinking about them as individuals—because there was something about the way she was talking about them and trotting them out for performances and deploying them that led me to recognize that. And then you understand why writing a book like this is sad. It’s hard to write about somebody who has so much to say, but who does things that make no sense.
Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe by Matthew Pratt Guterl is published this month by Harvard University Press. You can purchase it through the press’ website, or at local bookstores.
