My Goddess - Josephine Baker
I know my family must think I’m some blasphemous fool when it comes to me calling human beings Gods and Goddesses. I once said that Josephine Baker was my Jesus Christ equivalent, and my overly religious grandmother stopped talking to me for weeks.
Little did she know I appreciated the silence!
But most people, especially black people never fully quite understand the depth of love and admiration that I have for this woman. In 2006 St. Louis celebrated her centennial birthday with weeklong festivities at the Sheldon Art gallery on Grand, and I had the honor of meeting her eldest nephew Richard Martin Jr. who was in his late 70’s at the time. And God forgive me for saying this but her biological family was a hot ghetto mess. Ugh! No wonder she had little to do with them.
I mean, here is a woman that took the world by STORM in the 1920’s, all the way up until she died in the 1970’s. Ernest Hemmingway loved her, Picasso painted her, she had affairs with kings, and her best friends were Fidel Castro, Evita Perone, and Grace Kelly. It was nothing for her to call up Coco Chanel in the 1930’s, and have an outfit custom made for a dinner party. This woman was like ROYALTY in Europe, and here in the States her biological family knows little to nothing about her life besides her dancing nude in bananas. Her nephew got on stage and either made things up or read a passage from a book that he bought. How insulting? They didn’t own any of her music nor seen her movies. It took super fans like me and few others to stand up and talk about our vast knowledge of her life and career. They should have added us to the syllabus when we got up and spoke at the symposium on her life, but everything was so impromptu.
One of the main reasons why I think her family knows so little about her life is because she had become a creature of Europe for 50 years, and many African American’s felt that she was out of touch with their issues. My parents even say that she was out of touch, but they failed to realize that when she did tour America she:
-Refused to sing to segregated audiences, or places that had curfews for blacks.
-Refused to sing in places where blacks had to sit in the back.
-Refused to sing at venues that didn’t hire black stagehands, and this was done in the 50’s where McCarthyism was rampant.
But since she was a French citizen, she didn’t give a fuck so Kudos to her bravery!
I guess for me it was her accomplishments and adventures that captured my attention as a teenager; the fact that she had done so much with her life and had done it better than any woman that came before her. And the fact that she’s been dead since 1975 her presence is still monumental in France, and how she was elevated to mythical status even before she died is AWESOME…
(The picture below was taken in 1927)
Little did she know I appreciated the silence!
But most people, especially black people never fully quite understand the depth of love and admiration that I have for this woman. In 2006 St. Louis celebrated her centennial birthday with weeklong festivities at the Sheldon Art gallery on Grand, and I had the honor of meeting her eldest nephew Richard Martin Jr. who was in his late 70’s at the time. And God forgive me for saying this but her biological family was a hot ghetto mess. Ugh! No wonder she had little to do with them.
I mean, here is a woman that took the world by STORM in the 1920’s, all the way up until she died in the 1970’s. Ernest Hemmingway loved her, Picasso painted her, she had affairs with kings, and her best friends were Fidel Castro, Evita Perone, and Grace Kelly. It was nothing for her to call up Coco Chanel in the 1930’s, and have an outfit custom made for a dinner party. This woman was like ROYALTY in Europe, and here in the States her biological family knows little to nothing about her life besides her dancing nude in bananas. Her nephew got on stage and either made things up or read a passage from a book that he bought. How insulting? They didn’t own any of her music nor seen her movies. It took super fans like me and few others to stand up and talk about our vast knowledge of her life and career. They should have added us to the syllabus when we got up and spoke at the symposium on her life, but everything was so impromptu.
One of the main reasons why I think her family knows so little about her life is because she had become a creature of Europe for 50 years, and many African American’s felt that she was out of touch with their issues. My parents even say that she was out of touch, but they failed to realize that when she did tour America she:
-Refused to sing to segregated audiences, or places that had curfews for blacks.
-Refused to sing in places where blacks had to sit in the back.
-Refused to sing at venues that didn’t hire black stagehands, and this was done in the 50’s where McCarthyism was rampant.
But since she was a French citizen, she didn’t give a fuck so Kudos to her bravery!
I guess for me it was her accomplishments and adventures that captured my attention as a teenager; the fact that she had done so much with her life and had done it better than any woman that came before her. And the fact that she’s been dead since 1975 her presence is still monumental in France, and how she was elevated to mythical status even before she died is AWESOME…
(The picture below was taken in 1927)
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