—
## Legacy and What It Contains
The story of Josephine Baker that the twenty-first century has inherited contains multiple overlapping figures: the exotic dancer in the banana skirt who scandalized and delighted Paris in 1926, the French citizen who chose a country that had given her what her birthplace had not, the wartime intelligence asset who crossed occupied Europe with classified documents written in invisible ink, the civil rights activist who refused to perform for segregated audiences and was banned from the country she was trying to change, the adoptive mother who turned an estate in southwest France into a living argument for human brotherhood, the aging performer who gave her last show on the anniversary of her first Paris triumph and died four days later surrounded by its reviews.
None of these figures can be understood without the others. The banana skirt performance at the Folies Bergère in 1926 was enabled by the same celebrity that made Baker useful to French intelligence in 1939. The civil rights work she did in America in the 1950s was continuous with the anti-fascist commitment she had expressed through her wartime service in the 1940s. The Rainbow Tribe at the Château des Milandes was the domestic expression of the same philosophy she articulated from the stage of the March on Washington in 1963.
The honors France gave her — the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Résistance, the Légion d’honneur, the Panthéon — were recognitions of a service that was real, documented, and consequential. They were also recognitions of a choice: the choice to give everything she had to a country that had, in her own telling, given her everything she was.