Josephine Baker was born poor in St. In France, Baker enjoyed freedoms inconceivable back in the United States, and she eventually became a French citizen and made her home there. The singer married orchestra director Jo Bouillon, her fourth husband, in When the couple struggled to conceive a child, they subsequently adopted 12 racially diverse children, creating what Baker called the Rainbow Tribe.
Baker built up the grounds at Les Milandes, installing games and rides for children with the intent that her home become a sort of tourist attraction. Her idea was that visitors would see, in her family, a positive vision of a future in which people of all races could coexist happily.
Over time, Bouillon became uncomfortable with the challenges of running Les Milandes, and in he moved to Argentina. The couple eventually divorced. Her idealism in some ways created a fantastical childhood for her brood. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. During Baker's work with the Civil Rights Movement, she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as "The Rainbow Tribe".
Baker wanted to prove that "children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers. Her estate featured hotels, a farm, rides, and the children singing and dancing for the audience. She'd charge admission for visitors to enter and partake in the activities, which included watching the children play.
Baker used her children as metaphors: living examples of what humanity should look like, and her diverse children were used in a sort of attack against racism.
She created dramatic backstories for them, picking with clear intent in mind: at one point she wanted and planned to get a Jewish baby, but settled for a French one instead.
She also raised them as different religions to further her model for the world, taking two children from Algeria and raising one Muslim and the other Catholic. One member of the Tribe, Jean-Claude Baker, said:. She was a great artist, and she was our mother.
Mothers make mistakes. Nobody's perfect. Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in caused a sensation in Paris. Her costume, consisting of only a girdle of artificial bananas, became an iconic image and a symbol of the Jazz Age and the s. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U. She raised her children in France. Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and is noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.
They played with knights' armor tucked into nooks along the spiral steps to the tower, romped in the gardens, built tree houses and frolicked with the dogs. Akio remembers that he and his brothers often caught flying beetles and tied them to strings to keep them from flying away. The children carried them around like balloons. Every year at Christmas, the presents were piled high to the ceiling in the castle.
Monstrous, says Jarry. It was Baker's way of showing affection for the children. Their duty, in return, was to allow themselves to be shown off to the public.
On the occasional Sunday when she was there, Baker would dress the children in white and have them line up in the courtyard, where tourists and the press were waiting behind a fence to take pictures. Jarry says that he and the other children sometimes felt like pet monkeys.
Child number 10, a small indigenous boy from Venezuela, came in The global mother needed to complete her collection. Today there are regulations governing international adoptions. Before a child is given up for adoption, authorities must verify that all options to keep the child from being removed from the country have been exhausted. This is always seen as the better solution. The situation was different half a century ago.
Besides, Baker was a star. She had influential friends, like Princess Grace of Monaco, and she had money. Not all of her children were orphans. In some cases, she simply bought babies from their destitute parents. For example, to adopt blonde Jari, the diminutive Finn, she simply paid his parents in Helsinki a few thousand dollars and the deal was sealed. It had all become too much for Baker's husband. After years of her escapades and their arguments, Bouillon left the chateau, and in he moved to Buenos Aires.
Without him and his business acumen, the estate was doomed to financial ruin. The children lost their father figure, the only person who had given them some structure in Baker's chaotic world. Baker traveled the world with the children. They met the pope and vacationed with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The situation at the chateau spun out of control.
All the employees, private tutors, monkeys and other animals she had acquired were eating up Baker's fortune. She managed to fend off bankruptcy for a few more years, stubbornly living her dream, an aging regent who tolerated no back talk and treated the children like subjects. She wrote reports about them, described their characters in detail and drafted plans for their future. Akio was to become a diplomat, Jari a hotelier. Another child was supposed to be a doctor. But none of them were to be artists.
She even banned music instruction. After they had received their education and training, the children were to return to the countries where they had come from and make themselves useful there, as Baker's envoys and as the loyal executors of her ideas.
They rebelled when they reached puberty. Baker had acquired 10 sons, with only seven years separating the youngest and the oldest, and they turned into a horde of hyperactive teenagers -- going out at night, falling in love, staying away for days at a time, rattling around the neighborhood on their mopeds, getting drunk, taking drugs, stealing and wearing hippy clothes that their mother didn't like.
But her slaps no longer intimidated them. They were as wild and unruly as a pack of young wolves, and Baker had little experience as a mother. She lost the chateau in , and when she refused to leave she was carried out against her will. She sat on the steps in the rain for two days, covered with only a plaid wool blanket. The photo quickly appeared in newspapers around the world. The children went to boarding schools or, like Akio and Jari, moved to Buenos Aires to live with their adoptive father, whose surname most of them have kept.
Akio had a falling out with his mother a few months before Baker's sudden death in His Christmas present had arrived too late, causing an argument that the two would never resolve.
Akio was the only child not to attend the funeral in Monaco, which was hosted by Princess Grace. Akio now lives in an apartment building on the outskirts of Paris, works in a bank, smokes large numbers of cigarillos and likes to watch animated films. He relates information about streets and squares as we walk through the city. He often walks around aimlessly, without any destination in mind, he says.
And he is often alone. He was in a relationship with an alcoholic for 15 years, until she finally left him, and he has been single since then. He knows nothing about his Japanese mother. Baker wanted to make sure that the children would never search for their biological families, and in some cases she even withheld information.
A Japanese journalist who recently investigated Akio's story found the woman who had worked in the small shop in Yokohama where he was left as a baby in He gave Bouillon the information and suggested that the woman might know something about his biological mother.
All he had to do was contact her, perhaps by writing her a letter. Bouillon has been carrying around the address for a year now. He says he doesn't know how to begin the letter. Did Baker do the right thing? Nobody's perfect. Bouillon says that his mother proved that people of different skin colors could live together as equals. They all keep in touch by telephone. He says he feels closest to Jarry, because they were together when their adoptive father died in The last time all 12 children were together in one place was in , shortly after the death of their famous mother.
Even in the last year of her life, Baker, to earn money, performed on a Paris stage, wearing a sequined dress and a towering feather headdress. The children never wanted to be celebrities. They live ordinary lives -- working as gardeners, greengrocers or insurance agents.
Child number eight died of cancer 10 years ago. Child number 11 became schizophrenic and now lives in an institution. Some of the siblings married and had children, while others remained single.
He and his siblings want to feel like a family, not a project. Sometimes Bouillon flips through magazines and sees the photos of today's rainbow tribes, of Madonna with her children from Malawi, of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, traveling around the world with their six small children and their nannies, in the glare of the media spotlight.
But he doesn't feel taken aback by the images. In fact, they make him feel proud. But when Jolie adopts a baby from the Third World, says Bouillon, there is also a higher principle at work.
Bouillon feels that his adoptive mother made a great and enduring contribution, and that our impression of Josephine Baker should not be clouded by her weaknesses. She was, as he says, a child of her time, a time when even stricter morals applied.
That helps to explain why she and Jari didn't get along, he says.
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