Josephine Baker, the American Folie Bergere dancer, who started life as a street kid in segregated Missouri and went on to become a World War II spy for France and resistance fighter as well, later, as a civil rights activist in the USA is the subject of a newly released memoir Fearless and Free. Originally published in 1949 it has been translated into English for the first time.
Never reconciled to her homeland she found a resting place in the Pantheon, a monument to national heroes. She was the first black woman to receive the honour and will lie alongside Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo and scientists Pierre and Marie Curie.
Born 3 June 1906 St Louis, Missouri, 11 am (biography?) she never knew her father, started work at 8 as a live-in domestic for white families where she was abused and eventually ran away to marry twice in her teens, at 13 and 15, before moving to Paris. ‘An unaffected exhibitionist and a natural performer’ she became an icon of the city’s Jazz Age in the Roaring Twenties (Neptune in Leo), accentuating many African stereotypes of the colonial time in a banana skirt and little else. She became a French citizen after her marriage in 1937 to Jewish industrialist Jean Lion, a man who suffered from anti-Semitic laws; and at the outbreak of war offered her services to French counter-intelligence services and De Gaulle, working as an informant.
After the war, she became involved in USA anti-racist politics, fought against segregation during a 1951 performance tour of the US, causing her to be targeted by the FBI, labelled a communist and banned from her homeland for a decade. She spoke at the 1963 March on Washington where Dr Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. Baker adopted 12 children from all over the world as part of a “Rainbow tribe”, living in a castle in the southwest of France.
She had five planets in Gemini square Saturn in Pisces – her Sun, Mercury and upbeat Jupiter with her Jupiter conjunct a formidably courageous and attracted-to-danger Mars Pluto conjunction. The Saturn square would give her problems early on with low self-esteem and setbacks but would also instil a work ethic. She emerged from a brutal childhood to become her own woman.
She also had a creative and idealistic Venus Neptune in Cancer in the signature opposition to Uranus of the time. Significantly she also had a ‘leadership; North Node in Leo so was never destined to spend a life like her mother in poverty.
Her creative 5th and especially her musical 7th Harmonic charts were well aspected. But it was her victim/healer 12th which is outstandingly strong, linking the Sun and Moon to a revolutionary Uranus Pluto and confident/lucky Jupiter.
The post Josephine Baker – an unrestrained Gemini first appeared on Astroinform with Marjorie Orr – Star4cast.
