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## Freda Josephine and the Name She Chose
One final detail about Josephine Baker deserves note: the name.
She was born Freda Josephine McDonald. The first name she discarded; the middle name she kept; the surname she changed when she married Willie Howard Baker at fifteen and kept even after that marriage ended. For the rest of her life — through subsequent marriages that might have changed her name again — she remained Baker. The name of a failed marriage, kept for professional and personal reasons that she never fully explained in the surviving record.
The name Josephine Baker is itself a construction — a stage identity built on a discarded first name, a retained middle name, and a surname from a brief marriage she had moved past. It is an artifact of the specific way that professional performers of her era built their public identities: choosing what to keep, what to discard, what to emphasize, what to leave behind.
She left behind Freda. She left behind St. Louis, in the sense of the life it would have given her if she had stayed. She left behind the United States, initially, in the sense of its racial limitations, though she returned to fight against them. She kept Josephine. She kept Baker. She kept the performing name that had become, over fifty years of international celebrity, something that the whole world recognized.
She kept, also, the uniform. The uniform of a country she had chosen, that had chosen her back, that had given her the citizenship and the honors and eventually the symbolic burial in the building that houses the people it has loved most. France called her the most French of all its daughters. She had been born in Missouri to a washerwoman, danced on street corners for pennies, written notes on her skin at embassy parties in an occupied city, and carried sheet music across European borders with intelligence written in invisible ink that no one found.