When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was

In the chronicles of exile and return, a voice rises like a trumpet over the river of time: “When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France… in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.” So spoke Josephine Baker, whose childhood in St. Louis was scorched by the fires of racial terror and whose adulthood bloomed beneath Parisian lights. The saying is both testimony and map: it draws a line from trauma to flight, from flight to sanctuary, from sanctuary to courage. Its meaning is simple and searing—there are lands where a soul is hunted, and lands where it is held; the difference is not in the soul, but in the soil.

To hear the depths of her words, we must first name the wound. As a child, Baker witnessed the violence that could burn a family from its doorway, the kind of public cruelty that teaches a young heart to measure footsteps by danger. Frightened, she did what the persecuted have always done: she ran away—first to stages, then across an ocean—to find a world where the night did not whisper her unworthiness. The fairyland she speaks of is not naive glitter; it is the fierce relief that comes when one’s humanity is at last unarguable, when the street no longer demands a lowered gaze merely to pass unharmed.

This is the origin of the quote’s light: France received her not as a trespasser, but as an artist. In Paris, she danced with comic audacity and radiant control, turning caricature into critique, spectacle into sovereignty. There she never feared as she had feared at home—not because the world had been perfected, but because the stage and the city together conspired to affirm her. Later, when darkness fell over Europe, she used the same fame to ferry messages for the French Resistance, proving that sanctuary does not soften the will—it steels it. Safety seeded service; adoration ripened into duty.

The wisdom of her sentence is thus double-edged. On one edge lies the child’s flight: the right to run far away from any house that will not house your dignity. On the other edge lies the woman’s return to danger on her own terms: the right to risk oneself for others once one is no longer forced to risk oneself merely to exist. The fairyland is not an escape hatch from reality, but a defensible ground from which to reshape it. She found in France the everyday miracle of walking unafraid—and from that everyday miracle she made extraordinary vows.

Let another story walk beside hers, to widen the road. Decades later, James Baldwin too crossed the water, carrying manuscripts and the ash of American scorn. In Paris he found the first quiet in which to write himself whole, not because the city was flawless, but because it did not require him to justify his breath before he could speak. There he wrote with a clarity impossible under the constant alarm of humiliation. Like Baker, he shows that the difference between silence and song is often the presence of a place that says, simply, “You may.” In such places, the human spirit does not become delicate; it becomes deliberate.

What, then, is the lesson to pass to our children? It is this: where you are belittled, you may run away; where you can breathe, you must build. Seek a circle, a city, a craft, a country—any one of these—that becomes your fairyland, not of fantasies, but of fearlessness. And when you have found it, let your safety become someone else’s shelter. Josephine’s path teaches that flight is honorable when it is flight toward wholeness, and that wholeness, once won, asks to be shared.

Carry these actions like provisions: (1) Name the fires that have touched your life—write them plainly, that they may shrink. (2) Identify your places of never feared—people, practices, rooms—and dwell in them on purpose. (3) Exchange waiting for motion—if a door is barred, knock elsewhere; if a room is hostile, leave it; if a gate opens, walk through with your head unbowed. (4) Use sanctuary to serve: volunteer, mentor, create platforms where others need not plead to be seen. (5) Insist that your institutions—schools, workplaces, stages, networks—become fairylands not by illusion but by policy: safety first, dignity always, talent welcomed, difference guarded. Do this, and you will have honored the child who fled, the woman who returned, and the prophecy in her own brave line.