The Rainbow Tribe is a short BBC Radio 4 documentary about Josephine Baker and her family of 12 adopted children.
We hear a few old audio clips of Baker. We also hear from some of the children willing to speak in recent recordings made at a family reunion.
Baker adopts the children because she has reached a certain age and cannot produce her own. We don't really go into why it had to be so many and how is it possible to provide a quality family environment for so many. Wouldn't it have been easier on everyone had it just been 3 or 6 children rather than the 12? I think they are mostly boys too. The motivation of Baker seems to have been some sort of idealism, that she would build this merry Rainbow Tribe with all these children. It is the idea of the artist, the dreamer. Is the artist/dreamer a good candidate for motherhood, or is she just living out her ideal in spite of the effect that the process might have on others? Is it that she does it in such a grand way because she feels the power of her celebrity situation moving through her, controlling her decisions?
There are other mothers like this. There is Mia Farrow. I quick look at her Wikipedia page list 14 children with a mix of her own as birth mother and adopted. Is there something here beyond just a big heart? Is there something in the personalities of Farrow and Baker that make them alike in this way?
The Rainbow Tribe describes how Baker got herself in rather deeply, how she had to tour relentlessly to maintain The Rainbow Tribe and the castle where they all lived. We hear how she resisted the natural rebellion of the adolescent children and her desire to hide and deign the more sexually alluring aspects of her early career from them. We hear some of the boys, now men, speak. We are told that others do not want to speak. There are disgruntled, distant members in a lot of families. And these are exactly the ones who I want to hear from.
The program is available to Listen Again through Tuesday Nov 20. 2007 here:
The Rainbow Tribe
