The specific Black American performers who found success in Paris in the 1920s were navigating this terrain with different strategies. Some, like Baker, used the primitivist framing as a vehicle for other ambitions — building a celebrity platform that could then be used for purposes that exceeded the original framing. Others found the trade-off too costly. Still others found in Paris a genuine, if imperfect, freedom that the United States could not offer at any price.
Baker’s specific strategy — radical visibility combined with persistent expansion of what she was allowed to be — was not the only possible strategy, but it was the one that produced the specific outcomes her life documented. She was the most visible Black woman in Paris, and she used that visibility relentlessly: to build the financial resources that made the Château des Milandes possible, to develop the social connections that gave her access to wartime intelligence networks, to establish the celebrity that protected her intelligence work, and to build the platform from which she later spoke about civil rights.
The contradictions of the Jazz Age — the celebration and the condescension, the genuine welcome and the limits on what that welcome included — were contradictions Baker had been navigating since she arrived in Paris at nineteen. By the time the war came, she had been managing those contradictions for fifteen years. The specific skill involved — the ability to inhabit a role that the audience has constructed for you while maintaining an interior self that the audience does not see — is not a small skill. It is precisely the skill that intelligence work requires.