She understood exactly what she was doing.
The scholarship that has emerged in the decades since her death has grappled extensively with the question of Baker’s agency within this framework. She was not simply a victim of primitivist fantasy; she was a performer with a sophisticated understanding of what she was giving audiences and of what she was getting in return. She played the role, and she played it brilliantly, and while playing it she accumulated the wealth, fame, and social position that allowed her to do everything else that defined her life.
Paris gave her what St. Louis had not: freedom of movement, freedom of association, and a form of celebrity that was not constrained by the specific architecture of American racial segregation. She could eat in restaurants. She could stay in hotels. She could socialize with intellectuals, artists, and aristocrats. Ernest Hemingway, who knew her when he was a young writer in Paris, reportedly called her the most sensational woman anyone had ever seen. Pablo Picasso sketched her multiple times. Jean Cocteau, the writer and artist who was a central figure in Parisian cultural life, became a friend and champion. She received over a thousand marriage proposals. She was photographed with princes and presidents.
In 1926 she appeared at the Folies Bergère — the legendary Paris entertainment venue that had been presenting spectacular variety shows since the late nineteenth century — in a production called *La Folie du Jour*. The banana skirt she wore in this performance became the image most associated with her name for the following century: a skirt of sixteen artificial bananas, worn with little else, in a performance that defined the Folies Bergère’s international image for a generation. It was simultaneously a triumph and a constraint — the image so powerful, so widely reproduced, that it threatened to reduce her to a single symbolic object.