Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart by Jean-Claude Baker & Chris Chase

Author:Jean-Claude Baker & Chris Chase [Baker, Jean-Claude & Chase, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Music, Feminism, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781461661092
Google: 4DymtqI6gf8C
Amazon: 1558504729
Goodreads: 742773
Publisher: Adams Media Corp
Published: 1992-12-31T11:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

JOSEPHINE, HEROINE OF THE RESISTANCE

“That German cow in my blue satin sheets!”

If Hitler hadn’t cast out blacks along with Jews, might Josephine have stayed on in Paris entertaining the conquerors throughout the occupation?

It’s possible, but history doesn’t disclose its alternatives, and anyway, some have greatness thrust upon them. She came back a heroine of the Resistance, untainted. Few who had remained behind could claim as much. During the four years she was gone, Pétain’s “collaboration with honor” had been seized on by many who were willing to accommodate the Nazis, so long as they could continue their own lives.

On August 17, 1944, German forces were retreating before the Allied armies. “In the rue Lafayette,” wrote a journalist, “. . . monocled generals sped past like shining torpedoes, accompanied by elegantly dressed blondes.”

On the nineteenth, the insurrection had begun. Posters exhorted citizens to revolt, people sang the “Marseillaise,” hidden guns were dug up, barricades built. To redeem their honor, citizens fought (behind ramparts made of dug-up cobblestones, old cars, sandbags, and trunks of chopped-down chestnut trees) in support of General Philippe Leclerc’s Second Free French Armored Division. General Leclerc had also asked for—and got—help from two American battalions of field artillery as he moved through Paris.

After six days, the fighting ended. Germans were coming up out of the subways with their hands in the air, and General von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris (who had ignored Hitler’s orders to blow up bridges and monuments), signed a cease-fire agreement.

Three months later, François Mauriac wrote that the city’s deliverance by the Parisians was “the thing in the world we had least imagined. . . . A too cruel contrast existed between the . . . risks of the small number who led the underground fighting, and the apparent indifference of the man on the street, the tradespeople, the sharks of the black market. . . . The resistance was a deaf struggle, carried on in the darkness where men suffered and died alone. . . .”

A new struggle posed new questions. “What was to be done about the searing shame of it all?” asked David Pryce-Jones in Paris in the Third Reich, “. . . about the damage to the nation by its loyal serving of foreign interests and its complicity in genocide as well?”

Through an accident of fate—“I didn’t choose this moment, moments always choose me”—Josephine had escaped the violence that accompanied the liberation. And when she returned from North Africa, she was, according to Alain Romans (a fellow worker for de Gaulle), “more French than Louis XVI. I said to her, ‘It was very nice of you to save France for us, Josephine.’ ”

Traveling to Paris from Marseille in an old Cadillac, she observed that half the windows of a passing train had been blown away, replaced by wood, and all along the route were bombed-out villages.

I was a tiny child during the war, and I still remember a night when the Germans rode motorcycles around our house while my mother shook and held me and my little sister Marie Jo close to her in her big bed.

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