The Banana Skirt and the Spy Ring (Josephine Baker)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You left St. Louis
at fifteen
because St. Louis
had decided
which doors
you were allowed
to walk through
and you had decided
the list
was too short
for the legs
you had been given,
so you took the legs
to Paris
and Paris
lost its mind.

[Verse 2]
You danced
in a skirt
made of bananas
at the Folies Bergère
and the room
could not decide
whether it was
the funniest thing
or the most beautiful thing
it had ever seen
and you knew
it was both
and you had designed it
to be both
because the room
that is laughing
and the room
that is staring
are not watching
the same woman
at the same time,
and you needed
at least one of you
to be free.

[Chorus]
The country
that would not
let you eat
in its restaurants
asked you
to spy for it
during the war
and you said yes
because the country
was not the restaurants
and the war
was not the country
and the notes
you pinned
inside your underwear
and carried
across the border
in your bra
were going to save
more of the country
than the restaurants
had ever
fed of it.

[Verse 3]
You pinned
the intelligence reports
in invisible ink
on your sheet music
and you walked
through checkpoints
smiling
because the guards
had already decided
what a woman
in a sequined dress
carrying sheet music
was capable of
and they were wrong
about every part
of that sentence.

[Outro]
You adopted twelve children
from twelve countries
and called them
the Rainbow Tribe
and you raised them
in a castle
in the Dordogne
and you went broke
doing it
and you did not
stop doing it
because the doors
in St. Louis
were still
too short
for the legs
and the castle
had enough doors
for everyone.

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