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## A Life That Was Several Lives
The challenge in writing about Josephine Baker is that the full biography contains several stories that each merit their own telling, and that are only superficially connected by the fact that they happened to the same person.
There is the story of the St. Louis child who danced on street corners for pennies and built a career out of physical talent and professional discipline. There is the story of the Paris star whose specific achievement — the construction of international celebrity through roles that were partly imposed on her by audience expectation and partly shaped by her own intelligence and ambition — was more complex than the banana skirt images suggest. There is the story of the wartime intelligence operative who used the celebrity she had built to serve a country that had given her what her birthplace could not. There is the story of the civil rights activist who refused to perform for segregated audiences when she had the leverage to insist, and who paid for that insistence with a decade of exile from the country she was trying to change. There is the story of the adoptive mother who built a family from twelve children of different races, religions, and nationalities and invited the world to watch.
These stories are connected not only because they happened to the same person but because each one grew out of the ones that preceded it. The street corner dancing produced the professional skills that produced the Paris career. The Paris celebrity produced the access that made the wartime intelligence work possible. The wartime service produced the uniform that she wore to the March on Washington. The Rainbow Tribe was the domestic expression of the same philosophy that she had expressed through her intelligence work against the racial ideology of the Third Reich and her civil rights work against the racial ideology of American segregation.