Diana Ross, Beyoncé, and Rihanna have played in her silhouette Lynn Whitfield received an Emmy when she starred in HBO’s “The Josephine Baker Story” (1991). Who was she, really? Baker homages are usually unsubtle and beatifying, embodied by contemporary Black denizens of the arts who managed to do what Baker couldn’t: carve out stardom on American soil. Without actually laying eyes on the woman, a visitor to Paris would see her everywhere: in photographs and on those Paul Colin posters, as a doll in a shop window, in the style of Parisiennes palming their heads with Bakerfix pomade. As her star rose, Baker was known to stroll the streets of Paris with her fellow-performer Chiquita, a cheetah collared by a rope of diamonds. The next year, at the Folies Bergère, audiences saw stretches of brown skin intersected by pearls and a skirt strung with tumescent bananas. She first captivated Parisians in 1925 when she appeared on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, nude save for her feathers.

A dancer, a singer, and the most celebrated night-club entertainer of her era, she was at once inescapable and elusive. In this respect, Josephine Baker, who clowned her way into the heart of les Années folles-France’s Roaring Twenties-and played the civilized primitive when she got there, might have been the smoothest operator of the twentieth century. George Harris, one of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s high-yellow fugitives, attained an inscrutable foreignness with the assistance of walnut bark: “A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color of his hair had metamorphosed him into the Spanish-looking fellow he then appeared and as gracefulness of movement and gentlemanly manners had always been perfectly natural to him, he found no difficulty in playing the bold part he had adopted.” Brown skin could be cloaked in soot and stereotype or in learned airs. Harriet Tubman was called Moses for a liberator who slipped the confines of caste when his mother placed him undercover among the reeds in that pitch-daubed basket. The flight from servitude, even from an identity, involves spycraft, too. Subalterns survive by being watchful, warily gathering intelligence about those for whom they labor. The Negro, historically, has always been in the espionage business.

Wartime Girls by Anne Baker