The first image that pops into your head when you think of Josephine Baker is probably of the Jazz Age performer dancing in a barely-there skirt made of faux bananas. Born Freda Josephine McDonald, the eldest daughter of a laundry worker and an absentee father of contested identity, Baker began working at only eight years old as a live-in maid. Two years later, in 1921, she married again while touring with a vaudeville troupe in Philadelphia, this time to a 23-year-old railroad worker named William Baker, whose name she kept for the rest of her life (they were officially divorced in 1925, a few years after they had last seen each other).