Josephine Baker’s Rainbow Tribe
To prove that racial harmony was possible, the dancer adopted 12 children from around the globe—and charged admission to watch them coexist.
Photo by French Walery/Creative Commons
Beginning in 1953, almost 30 years after her first successful
performances on the Paris stage, the singer and dancer Josephine Baker
adopted 12 children from different countries, ranging from Finland to
Venezuela. She installed what she called her “Rainbow Tribe” in a 15th-century
chateau in the South of France and charged admission to tourists who
came to hear them sing, to tour their home, or to watch them play
leapfrog in their garden.
This little-known chapter in Baker’s life is an uncomfortable one. “I
would begin to tell the story of Josephine Baker, and people would
start to laugh,” says Matthew Pratt Guterl, the author of a new book on
Baker’s later life, Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe. “And I would start to wonder what that laughter signified.” Guterl, a professor of Africana studies and American studies at Brown University, has in essence written two books in one: the story of Baker’s family, and a meditation on the meaning of that laughter.
Baker was born in St. Louis but moved to France in 1925. Her danse sauvage, famously performed in a banana skirt, brought her international fame. During World War II, she worked for the Red Cross and gathered intelligence
for the French Resistance. After the war, married to her fourth
husband, Jo Bouillon, she struggled to conceive a child. Meanwhile, her
career waned. Guterl’s book is about this period of Baker’s life, as she
built her large adopted family, became ever more active on behalf of
the nascent civil rights movement in the United States, and re-emerged
into fame.
Baker purchased her estate, known as Les Milandes, after marrying
Bouillon in 1947. In addition to the chateau, the property boasted a
motel, a bakery, cafés, a jazz club, a miniature golf course,
and a wax museum telling the story of Baker’s life. As Guterl makes
clear, the place was over-the-top, but its ostentation was a political
statement. Les Milandes, with its fairy-tale setting, announced to the
world that African-American girls born poor could transcend nation and
race and find wealth and happiness.
At the center of the attractions were Baker’s adopted children, from
Finland, Japan, France, Belgium, Venezuela. During their school-age
years, the 10 boys and two girls grew up in public. Just by existing as a
multiracial, multinational family, they demonstrated Baker’s belief in
the possibility of equality. They sang songs for paying visitors,
appeared in print advertisements, gave interviews to curious press, and
played in a courtyard in full view of what Guterl describes as “a wall
of faces, watching and taking pictures.”
You can see why this chapter of Baker’s story provokes laughter.
First, there’s a deep discomfort at her unapologetic marshaling of
children to act out her own utopian racial narrative. Second, we think
we understand what’s going on here; we see early incarnations of
celebrity eccentricities from our own time. In the big adoptive family,
we see Angelina or Madonna; in the celebrity theme park, we see Michael
Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. “The language of the strange and famous is
readily available to us,” Guterl writes in the book’s prologue. “This
same easy familiarity makes it harder to understand Les Milandes, not
easier, because we rarely allow celebrity egocentrism to be serious or
important.”
What would the Rainbow Tribe look like if we took it seriously?
Guterl steps back, seeing the Tribe from Baker’s point of view. Baker
was always an activist, wielding her international fame in the service
of the civil rights movement in the United States. When she visited the
States in the 1950s, she demanded that she be allowed to stay at the
best hotels and play to integrated audiences.
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