She was a single person who was also a kind of argument: that the limits placed on human beings by the accidents of their birth — the country, the race, the economic class — are not destiny. She had been born into poverty and violence in a segregated American city. She had built a life that ended with 20,000 people lining the streets of Paris for her funeral, with France providing a 21-gun salute, with the coffin draped in the tricolor of the country she had chosen and served.
The sextant pendant that Tami Oldham Ashcraft wore to remind herself how she got home has its equivalent in Baker’s uniform: a physical object that said, in its material presence, something that words could not fully convey about what a person had been through and what they had come through it knowing.
Josephine Baker wore her uniform to the end. She had earned it.
## The Records That Survive
A note on the evidence base for Josephine Baker’s intelligence work is warranted by the nature of the history.
The primary sources for Baker’s wartime activities are limited and require careful handling. Baker herself wrote and spoke about her wartime service across multiple decades; her accounts, while consistent in their major outlines, contain some variation in specific detail across different tellings. Jacques Abtey, her intelligence handler, wrote about their collaboration in a memoir published in 1948; that memoir is a primary source for the wartime period but is also an account written by a participant with his own perspective and his own interest in how the history was remembered.