Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker tells about the shattered dream

This will be the sixth woman, and the first black woman, to enter the Pantheon in a week. The mausoleum, dedicated to people who have contributed significantly to the history of France, will welcome it symbolically in a cenotaph, a tomb usually empty, but filled for the occasion with a little soil from Saint-Louis in Missouri, the birthplace of Joséphine Baker, and of course Paris, her hometown. Her family did not want to move the body of the famous artist, buried in Monaco.

“Everything that is brewing around my mother’s entry into the Pantheon has stirred up a lot in me on an emotional level, and memories.“, entrusted to Outre-mer La 1ere Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker, the fifth child of Joséphine Baker. In the reissue of his book,” A castle on the moon “, he writes in particular:”Forty-six years have passed since you are no longer. (…) Death and time have never stopped growing in the hearts of women and men. (…) Now you will shine in the sacred bosom of the Republic“.

You will hug yourself against the fraternal arms of Aimé Césaire, cantor of negritude, and also those of the malicious Alexandre Dumas, quarteron whitewashed by posterity, who would have recounted your epic sumptuously if he had known you. All three welcomed together under this solemn dome, long after the thousand and one detours of slavery which colored your skin and rebelled your spirits. (…) My one and only mother, you were not, you are.

Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker

A pantheonization imbued with solemnity, but also sadness and melancholy, for Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker. “There is everything that resurfaces, and in particular the castle of Milandes“, this magnificent place in Dordogne where Joséphine Baker had installed her adopted children, her” rainbow tribe “, as she called it, from the fifties. Arrived in Milandes in December 1955, at the age of two years, little Jean-Claude will spend his childhood and part of his adolescence there until his mother, an artist who is nevertheless world-famous and multi-medalist of the Resistance, is brutally expelled in March 1969 because of accumulated debts. .

“All this forces us to dive back into the epic and the immensity of his life“, recalls Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker.”Among all the personalities she has known (Martin Luther King, Duke Ellington, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, General de Gaulle, Edith Piaf, Louis Armstrong, Grace Kelly, Jacques Brel, King of Morocco Hassan II, to name but a few, editor’s note ), my only regret is that she never met Nelson Mandela, as both are symbols of diversity. Mandela wanted to create a rainbow nation, she created a rainbow tribe. They wanted to explode racism through a multitude of colors. These two would have loved each other. “

Extract from “A castle on the moon”, by Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker

“Irrational violence guided some of my mother’s actions. An intimate questioning accompanied her as we grew up. Were we going to show a tolerance as genuine as the one she had dreamed of by adopting us? More than anything, she feared to see the emergence of this buried part, shaped by generations of ancestors, which we call atavism. the other awakened in her the fear of denial.
(…) More than another mother, the sight of a little being who gradually extricated herself from her chrysalis overwhelmed her. As the days went by, she certainly suffered from feeling us less under her wings, protected by her laughter and her overflowing tenderness. This unique bond that she had invented and linked to the nothingness of our previous lives could not be stretched like that of other children with their parents. The miracle was not to stop or even slowly dissipate. “

► Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker, “A castle on the moon”, Hors Collection editions, 275 pages, 19.50 euros.

► To read also: the very complete biographical comic “Joséphine Baker”, by Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet (with Jean-Claude Bouillon-Baker as historical advisor), Casterman editions, 568 pages, 26.95 euros.