Dance of Resistance, The Josephine Baker Story, written by Catherine Johnson, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

 

    This is an astonishing story, all the more powerful for being true. 

    Catherine Johnson has already published with Barrington stoke two compelling stories of the lives of two pioneering black men, Olaudah Equiano who achieved freedom from slavery and recorded his own story, and Mathew Henson the Arctic explorer. Now we have the story of the breathtakingly brilliant and surprising black woman dancer, comic, actor, singer, spy Josephine Baker, here telling her own story.

    What a story it is! Wonderfully suited to a child readership because Josephine's huge show-business ambitions began in childhood, as did significant events that made her the woman she became. She became a live in maid with responsibility for a baby at the age of seven! Ran away from a sexually predatory boss at the age of thirteen ... then got married at that same age, and married again at fifteen! But all this time she would spend any money she could on going to see shows, and discovered that dancing in the street to ragtime music coming from a bar could earn her an audience and sometimes money. 

    We sweep on through a career of boldness and originality, wit, determination, hard work, a complex private life, and travel. You can look on Youtube to see Josephine in her glorious and daring costumes dancing her heart out. 

    But underlying all that is the stark realities of racial segregation in Josephine's home country, America. Even at the height of her fame, hugely rich and famous as lead attraction at Paris' Folies Bergere, a visit to America meant being turned away from hotels, not served in restaurants, bad reviews for shows. Shocking. 

    So she stayed loyal to France which treated her so much better than the US did. During World War Two she actively used her skills to spy for the French against the occupying Nazis, transmitting signals, smuggling documents, helping Jewish people escape, winning her top military honours from her adopted home country. 

    She was then active at a distance in the American Civil Rights movement. What a woman!

    A gorgeous book cover and an engrossing read.