As told to Marcel Sauvage in Le Vésinet, France, 1930

The Netherlands

What I like about success, Monsieur Sauvage, is the love that goes into it—not so much the surprise or the wonder, and certainly not the admiration. So, being a curiosity was a very tough job for me. Yes, what a thankless job. I can show you the contracts from my European tour: each time, after the theater and music hall shows, I had to go and dance in the cabarets, doing my own special numbers and entertaining people like I did in my cabaret in Montmartre. It was written in the contracts: “Entertain people” … Tweaking the beards of good old gentlemen, flattering the fat ladies, making them dance in their fancy coats and stiff outfits—you know the sort of thing. People really need their fun these days. And they thought I was having fun too, naturally. Sometimes I did, but not in the way you might think. I’ll start in 1928, with the Netherlands.

Dutch people are serious and rosy. They eat well and don’t smile often, but when they do, they really mean it. Nearly all of them are strong, like the sea walls of their country. Everyone can speak three or four languages without a fuss.

I soon became known around the Netherlands. Once, in a small, clean town—and quiet, so quiet—some people stopped me in the street. They tugged at my sleeve and asked me to dance. So I danced. Everyone was happy. There was a woman watching me with a small child in her arms, a pretty baby, and I picked him up. I wanted to kiss him, to rock him a little; I would have liked to dance with him a little too, but his mother gave me a dirty look, and before I knew it she’d snatched him away … Do you understand? She took her child away from the savage.

People think I’ve come straight out of the wilderness. I believe that, in certain areas of the Netherlands, and the other countries I visited, people would have happily fed me ground glass. Primitive instincts, of course, folly of the flesh, chaos of the senses, frenzied animality—was this all they could say? White imagination is something else when it comes to colored folk. And the prejudices are the same everywhere.

But now Paris is my wilderness. I love it with all my heart, and that love is like wine—which I can’t drink, because it goes straight to my little head. I can’t drink at all. But Paris gets me drunk. 

Forgive me … we were in the Netherlands.

The Hague is the capital of bicycles and red bricks. The policemen have big white gloves like Negro comedians wear in revues.

Rotterdam and Amsterdam: there’s a lot more happening, they’re livelier; boats, trade, and they’re full of color, patches and fragments of every color, like pieces of glass in those telescopes you twist around, you know?

The Dutch like big colors, real colors, like red and yellow. I spent one month in that country of water, sand, and pine trees. August to September 1928. And I learned to love it. I’d like to love all countries. To do that, you must also dress like they do in those countries. So I dressed like a Dutch lady, with a white bonnet, a big long voluminous dress, and yellow clogs. Yes, I danced the Charleston in yellow clogs! And I carried milk in big iron churns. 

Denmark, Sweden, and Norway

Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, and Gothenburg: forty-five days, from the month of June to the month of August, 1928.

Copenhagen: “Following the performance at the Dagmar Theater, to sing, dance, and entertain the clients at the Adlon club, in the same manner as at her cabaret on rue Fontaine in Paris.”

Stockholm: “Following the performance at the Oscars Theater, to sing, dance, and entertain the clients in the Winter Garden at the Grand Hôtel, in the same manner as …”

Oslo: “Following the performance … to sing, dance, and entertain the clients …”

That way, everyone is happy.

These are the cleanest countries I know, and the politest. So polite it scared me at first. But it’s crazy just how clean everything is in those countries, Monsieur Sauvage. It’s wonderful: you can lean against anything you like. What’s more—and it’s true, I swear to you, I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t—I was very successful there. You’ll see for yourself.

In Copenhagen, I danced for the royal family, to great applause.

In Stockholm, I performed for the king himself. But if you asked what he was like, I couldn’t tell you. When I dance, I dance— I don’t look at anyone, not even the king.

There were so, so many people packed outside my hotel in Copenhagen, waiting under my window. It was nice weather that day. I had the not-so-clever idea to throw some photographs down … And with what happened next—I have never seen so many squashed straw hats. 

Every evening in Oslo, two handsome policemen on horseback would accompany me from the exit of the theater to my hotel. It was nice. But they’re always embarrassing, are policemen, especially on horseback, and I was a little worried. People would look at us. And so I would make little jokes to the policemen, to show people I hadn’t been arrested. Casually, you see?

In Stockholm, I had six policemen, on foot, to protect me from curious people. They saluted me like I was a general. I had to crane my neck to look at them. They were enormous, those policemen. I was so small in Sweden.

Romania

This is where it started to heat up.

In Central Europe and Germany, I was—without my say, as you can imagine—used either as a warning sign or a “flag” by different political factions. Everything is fair game for politics and politicians, I suppose—I didn’t know at the time. But now I have my own two cents on the subject. It’s funny and sad at the same time. The old Catholic groups hounded me with their Christian hate, from station to station, from town to town, from one stage to the next. People fought and clashed and got injured. Hundreds, no, thousands of policemen and soldiers had to be called in. In Vienna—even in Vienna, you understand, which is a sister to Paris in many ways—they rang all the city bells at full peal to warn the churchgoers that Josephine Baker, the demon of immorality, the Devil herself, had arrived. In Central Europe, I saw policemen charging with swords drawn, and men running past me holding guns … I will never forget it. Neither will I forget that there were leaders stupid enough to get worked up over me, my dancing and my freedom, for reasons I didn’t and will never understand at all. None of this, you see, stops me from saying my prayers every evening from the bottom of my heart, or from praying earnestly for all the people who think I’ll never be anything more than a poor little black girl who dances like the Devil.

Plus, all this turned my love for France into a wiser love. There you have it.