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.
A woman of impossible
courage, especially growing up
in the intolerably racist society of
early 20th Century America.
My father once said to me:
“There is a beginning and there
will always be an end. It’s what
you do in the middle that
counts”
He too, was a Gemini. He had a
book placed in his hands, when
he was laying in his open
casket.
Baker had Zosma “the victim star” square her nalal nSun.
Dandridge had Zosma opp nUranus and sextile Pluto.
Kitt had Zosma square her natal Asc…..all 3 victimized in some manner.
All 3 with BML in 10th. career.
Her chart does not show a career as a dancer until we add the asteroid
Terpsichore. Terpsichore rules dance; exercise; body image; the ego
as expressed thru’ the physical body.
Terpsichore aspects her MC giving career as a dancer and aspects BML
there giving dark sexual imagery to her dance.
She was an activist during the Civil Rights Movement like black actress
Dorothy Dandridge, also with BML in 10th. Most black actresses had to
sterotypical roles like sharecropper or servant. Black singer Eartha Kitt
also had BML in 10th her career was unfairly overshadowed by her rebellious
political stance.
https://ibb.co/GP6SYfg
Gemini is the best sign! And Virgo as your good self too Marjorie. Geminis are really cosmic explosion. Is it the bringing together and connecting things that don’t connect that sparks, I wonder?
I love women like this. They don’t color in the lines. They go for it.