Josephine Baker's Memoir Is Now Being Published for the First Time in English

Before she was a legend, Josephine Baker was a little girl from Missouri who loved to make funny faces. Teachers chided her for this habit; Baker paid them little heed. “Our faces aren’t made to sleep,” she later said. 

Baker’s life was so full that it’s easy to imagine she never slept. Born in 1906, Baker became one of the 20th century’s biggest celebrities, known as “the Black Venus,” an enthralling dancer and singer whose career took off when she left the United States as a teenager for France, where she eventually became a citizen. She toured the globe and became the first Black woman to star in a major film, Siren of the Tropics, in 1927. During World War II, she spied for the French resistance against the Nazis. She was also a fierce fighter for civil rights in America and memorably addressed the crowd at the 1963 March on Washington. 

A rare, intimate picture of Baker emerges in her memoir, Fearless and Free, originally published in France in 1949 and now translated into English for the first time. The book peels back the myth to bring readers the high-spirited child who grew up poor on Bernard Street in St. Louis, brought home lost animals and made faces in school.

An early and urgent drive, she says, was to help others: “I promised myself that when I was strong,” she said, “I would fight everyone who was mean to the poor, whether they were kings or not.”