His illustrations convey clear messages about difficult historical happenings (so very relevant to conversations being had between parents and children particularly after last week’s violence in America). The simplicity of his paintings, bringing to mind great Black American artists Jacob Lawrence (his colour palate rich in black, burnt umber, cadmium orange and yellow) and Bill Traylor (folksy form), never undermines their strength and vivacity. I rise”).Ĭhristian Robinson’s (Coretta Scott King Illustration Award- winning) artwork brings Josephine to life.
Josephine battles all odds to become a darling of the European stage and later, a sensation in America, too (but not before walking her pet cheetah down the Champs-Elysees, becoming a stunt pilot, spying for France during the war and adopting a “rainbow tribe” of twelve children from around the world - “I rise. Powell repeatedly turns the spotlight on Josephine’s ability to use humour and the physicality of dance as an outlet, “She’d let the steam out in little poofs.
“Anger heated and boiled into steam, pressing HOT in a place DEEP IN HER SOUL”.
We learn that a love of music and dance was lodged in Josephine’s being from an early age by her mother, and that witnessing extreme racism and social injustice from that same early age forged Josephine’s “volcanic core”. We snake with Josephine from the “honky-tonk town” of her birth, Saint Louis, Missouri, down through the deep South, up to the Big Apple and across the sea, until the curtain finally drops in her beloved City of Light. She plays with language and typeface, dipping us deeply into Josephine’s dichotomous being - at once playful and fierce - externally mugging, internally, volcanically seething (“Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise that I dance like I’ve got diamonds at the meeting of my thighs?…I rise”). Patricia Hruby Powell takes us by the hand and swings us through the acts of Josephine’s life. Because you were a NEGRO,” Josephine Baker set out to “CONQUER THE WORLD and show ’em all.” And that is just what she did. Born into abject poverty in an America deeply divided along racial lines “where white folk threatened colored folk, where whites lived apart, segregated from colored, where signs for one latrine read WHITE ladies and for another, COLORED women, here a white person wouldn’t sell you a cup of coffee. These words of Dr Angelou’s (notably spoken this past Sunday by Serena Williams after the world watched her win a 22nd (!) Grand Slam title) could not be a more fitting place to begin.
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