11.

Looking for work took some wind out of my American-in-Paris adventure. I’d been going through the classified ads in FUSAC, a magazine full of job and housing listings for English-speaking Parisians. It advertised plenty of work for student au pairs and English teachers, but not much else. The slim pickings made me think back to Langston Hughes doing dishes at Le Grand Duc and my own college summers hauling garbage as a porter in Park Avenue apartment buildings. I had no working papers and I struggled with French, so wiping café tables wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. But then Olivier Laouchez returned my email.

Monday morning I walked the fifteenth arrondissement in search of rue des Volontaires. I stood in front of a hospital across from the Trace TV offices waiting on my nine o’clock meeting with the CEO. Weeks back, surfing the Internet for work, I’d found an online editor position at www.trace.tv and sent in my résumé. Nothing. But then I requested an interview with Olivier for “Paris Noir,” and he quickly agreed. The column still had no home—and so technically didn’t exist yet—but a rendezvous with the chairman of Trace would be great to have on tape for down the line. And if I could wiggle my way into a job, so much the better.

I soon strolled across the street and followed another early bird into the seven-story apartment building. The Trace space was one floor below the lobby; I descended some steps, turned a corner and walked into their main office. Fashion photography from Trace magazine broke up the simplicity of the eggshell walls. A receptionist smiled at my mangled French and directed me into a spacious conference room, handing me a Trace TV media kit with model Noémie Lenoir smoldering on the front.

I wrestled with the language flipping through the folder’s glossy contents, but some things were clear. Reprinted statistics gave numbers on the amount of black Africans living in the country (eight million) and estimations of the 4.7 million urban French residing in the underprivileged areas of les ZUS—zones urbaines sensibles or sensitive urban zones. Another section provided detailed explanations of reggae, zouk, hiphop and the Algerian folk music, raï.

Trace magazine had originally started in 1995 as True, based in London as sort of a European response to Vibe. I studied abroad in Britain that year, writing for True a little bit and hanging out at their large studio office on Old Street. So I already knew Claude Grunitzky, the Togolese founder of Trace. We were the same age and crossed paths in SoHo often enough after Trace opened an American office in ’98. According to the press materials, he’d joined forces with Olivier and former Goldman Sachs exec Richard Wayner last year to launch Trace TV.

Olivier entered the room with bottles of Evian in hand. A suit jacket and slacks framed his slight build. He wore an open collar dress shirt with no tie and sleek prescription glasses, his head nearly as clean as his shaven babyface. He offered water and a spirited handshake, introduced himself in English, then jumped right into the interview.

“When I started thinking about launching an urban TV channel, I was still in Martinique,” he said. “I saw urban music in a broad sense; not only R&B and rap, but also world music, zouk, ragga, reggae, all of that. I could see this music had a real appeal for many people who weren’t from the West Indies or Africa. So there was truly a kind of crossover potential. I went to see people from BET. I called them in Washington and said, ‘Look, you are based in America but there is definitely something to be done at the international level. I have some expertise in TV. Why don’t we do something together?’ But it didn’t work out.”

I interrupted to tell Olivier a little about my working as a website editor for BET back in 2000.

“Really? This is when I met with them. They said, ‘We want to do BET at the international level, but our idea is to exploit only our U.S. content.’ I told them about the urban scene in Germany, in France, in the UK. But they didn’t really believe in that. So they launched BET International by themselves and they failed. They opened an office in London, spent a lot of money. They were not successful.” It took Olivier three more years to partner up with Richard and Claude. The trio formed Alliance Trace Media, and Trace TV soon grew out of their partnership.

From a flat-screen mounted on the wall, I noticed Trace TV playing a Wyclef Jean video. I asked Olivier about the challenges of balancing French and American content on the channel. I’d recently seen Rakim on the cover of the latest Radikal magazine and thought the same thing. If American hiphop is the most well known rap around the world, don’t ratings dip when Trace plays Rohff instead of Wyclef?

“That’s the challenge actually, because in the hiphop industry, the American artists are the biggest ones,” Olivier said. “They put much more money into their music videos than Europeans, so visually it really has an impact on our company. It’s very difficult to get rid of that. But at the same time, the urban scene in France is the second biggest in the world, before Germany, before the UK. In French society we’ve got all these African and Caribbean people living in the suburbs. For them rap is a way to express themselves. It’s very important to find the right balance between the two.”

He took a swig of Evian and continued. “We’ve got some quotas. In France, you need to show a minimum 60 percent of French and European content. That means in our rotation, we have to adjust and take that into consideration. The French-speaking African countries are considered French content as well.”

I’d heard something like that was true for the radio, but not television.

“Yes, when more than 50 percent of your content is music, you have to follow these quotas. But the longer we exist, the more I think we will invest in domestic content.”

As an American, I’m ignorant sometimes about the cultural muscle that my own country flexes internationally. English is so familiar worldwide because foreign school systems prioritize the teaching of other languages higher than America does. But another reason is because the US is so rich, with a power to export its products that other countries don’t have. Practically everybody everywhere knows Superman and Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. English became such a global language partly because of commercial familiarity. I thought of the multiplex at Les Halles: fifteen of the twenty-three movies showing this week were American, while in the US, foreign-language films go straight to art house theaters. It would never be necessary for radio or television stations back home to mandate English content. Most of us don’t speak anything else. I asked Olivier about this double standard.

“No French-speaking artist will break the US market,” he admitted. “Obviously we’ve got a new scene of French artists which are quite good. But the only way they could make it is if they do something with a big American artist, then try to catch a connection through appearing in music videos.” He went on to mention a few who’ve tried just that—MC Solaar, Ärsenik and Les Nubians, the most popular French-language music group in America. (The two sisters were born in Bordeaux to a Cameroonian mother; they sing in both French and English.)

“I think what really makes the French market unique is, because of the diversity of the origins of the people here, they want to put part of their original culture into their urban expression,” Olivier said. “The rap production here, sometimes they mix it with oriental songs, with Caribbean songs. I think all this gives a very interesting flavor to what we do.”

In the end, he said that any opportunities for me at Trace would depend on their next wave of fundraising for the channel. They couldn’t afford an extra salary at the moment. I would hear from Olivier again much, much later but it wouldn’t be about a job.

10.

“Bitch bitch, money money! Pump pump, money money!”

Alva and I went slack-jawed before looking at each other and laughing. Bitches, money, guns and more money: this was French hiphop? Three rappers in baggy black clothes pranced across the stage performing their final encore. Le Bataclan, a former nineteenth-century cabaret theater, felt uncomfortably hot. The concert was standing room only, and a lot of the crowd stood at the bar in back of the smallish venue paying no attention to the awful opening act. I just started borrowing French rap from the library to load into my iPod, mainly because I wanted to be educated for my possible “Paris Noir” column. Hiphop would obviously be coming up in any habitual discussion of blacks in France. The only rap artist already familiar to me was MC Solaar. I’d seen his show in mid-Manhattan many years ago after hearing him rhyme on some songs, and he was impressive considering I couldn’t understand his language. But this?

“They’re being ironic, right? The rest of the song is a criticism of—”

“You wish!” Alva shouted over the noise, cracking up again.

I learned long ago to make hiphop history short and digestible when necessary, a music journalist skill. But I’d only recently met Epée—an editor at the Paris-based rap magazine Radikal—on MySpace, and from what he, Alva and Christine taught me, I was now able to distill French hiphop down to four points:

• During the early eighties, B-boying was the first hiphop element to make a toehold in France. Channel TF1 devoted a show called H.I.P.H.O.P. to these dancing B-boys in 1984, hosted by the popular DJ Sidney. Radio had already started broadcasting rap in 1981, when then-president François Mitterand loosened state control of the airwaves and private radio stations (which spun a lot of hiphop) got licensed.

• “Change the Beat (French Rap)” by Beside was the first French-language hiphop record, the 1982 flipside to an American twelve-inch single by Fab Five Freddy. But Beside was just a novelty; the girlfriend of the song’s producer, she was in the right place at the right time. Panam’ City Rappin’ by white DJ Dee Nasty marked the first homegrown rap album.

• The big bang of French hiphop came in 1990 when a major record company invested in releasing the Rapattitude compilation. Classic MCs and rap crews to follow included MC Solaar, Suprême NTM, Ministère AMER and IAM. This golden age reflected the country’s diverse ethnic range: Senegalese, Guadeloupan, Arab, Congolese, etc.

• Originally more of a positive grassroots movement, hiphop became both more gangsta and more mainstream pop under the influence of US rap. Booba, Diam’s, Sinik and La Rumeur were some of the major names of the next wave.

MC Solaar—the international star MC of France—recorded “Un Ange en Danger” for an AIDS-awareness album and another duet with the American rapper Guru, “Le Bien, le Mal.” I’d heard them both. But this was the only French rap I knew. Other transatlantic efforts existed, songs featuring the Wu-Tang Clan rapping with IAM for example, but I’d never listened to them. Abd Al Malik, Matt Moerdock, Disiz la Peste…they were all just names to me. Christine had a habit of playing the radio in the morning, so I’d heard some modern rap on Skyrock FM. That was all though. It felt refreshing to be dropped into a situation where I knew so little about the local rap scene, after years of being an automatic mouthpiece for the culture.

“So did you ever work with Trace?”

Alva and I had discovered a few friends in common, mainly in the media. She’d worked as a manager at Elektra Entertainment, and their publicists dealt with me all the time promoting singers and MCs. She also did a stint at sayShe, a failed website for women, and I knew some of their ex-staffers. I thought there might be another professional connection between us.

“Nah,” Alva said, “but there’s six degrees of separation, of course. New York’s so small, right? I worked with Marcus over at sayShe, and when they folded, Marcus worked at Oneworld with you. When they went out of business too, Marcus said Oneworld’s publisher, John, got a job at Trace. Like executive vice-president or something.”

“Trace magazine has a cable channel in Europe called Trace TV. It’s based here, have you seen it?”

“The family I live with doesn’t have cable.”

“Christine doesn’t either. But we had dinner with some of her friends last week and we watched a little bit of Trace. It’s like BET but with less booty-shaking and more world music. Zouk, reggae, stuff like that. Trace, the magazine, has more international fashion—”

“Yeah, the Black Girls Rule issue is hot. I buy it every year.”

“Right. Well, Trace TV is different, it’s a music channel. I’m interviewing with them next week.”

“Bonne chance!”

“Thanks. Believe me, if not for the residence card requirements, I wouldn’t be looking for work at all. I just want to write books and try to live off the money. President Chirac ain’t tryin’ to hear that though.”

“The government, they’re all about money. Unemployment checks can last for a whole two years, so they’re not trying to admit foreigners who go straight to the dole. I was born here, so my titre de séjour was issued a long time ago. But I feel your pain,” Alva teased.

I noticed the deep frown in her forehead before she grabbed me by the arm. Alva’s eyes went wide and a little wild as she leaned into me.

“Miles, do you mind?” she whispered. “I need to get away from this guy.”

“What guy?” I asked in a low voice, close enough to smell Alva’s minty chewing gum.

She let go of my arm and eased away just as quickly, back to normal.

“Oh, that’s not him. Sorry for the drama!” She laughed anxiously. “That dude over there with the beard, I thought he was a guy I know named Sébastien.”

“Sébastien?” I spun around and saw a skinny youngster with stringy brown hair, dressed in black from head to foot.

“Sébastien’s this singer, and we sorta have a thing for each other. We fooled around once last year when I was visiting. But since then, neither one of us has been able to act normal about what happened. I was living in Brooklyn before, so I was never bumping into him. It’s weird now when he acts so awkward around me, but I’m no better than he is.”

“Have you seen him since you moved to Paris?”

“Only once. I have a friend you should meet named Kristof. He plays keyboards and he’s too cool for school these days since he’s been touring with Phoenix. They’re a popular French rock band. The singer goes out with Sofia Coppola. Anyway, Kristof introduced us. The last time he invited me out with his friends, Sébatien was there. I just don’t want to see him right now. I like him, but I think maybe we fooled around too early.”

Alva quickly changed the subject.

“Well, I hear you about writing books without the nine-to-five slave,” she said. “I have my second interview soon with a quarterly trade magazine. They specialize in intellectual property rights and copyrights for songwriters. But if I could do anything I wanted, it would be this film about my grandparents. Even before I get that off the ground, I would love to start something to promote local French music to an international audience. You have a music background. Maybe we could—”

Applause drowned out Alva’s words as the lights died and electric guitar fills flooded the hall. Kelis strode out in heels, faded blues jeans and an off-the-shoulder pastel chemise, her face shrouded in huge sunglasses and big spirally curls of auburn hair. She grabbed the microphone with attitude, snarling more like a 1980s new wave punk than an R&B singer. I glanced at Alva for her reaction, and caught her staring at the Sébatien lookalike.

9.

Against the gray clouds of an overcast sky, the columns and spire of the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cathedral shot to the heavens like flora nourished by a glum god. With the end of summertime approaching, gloomy weather trudged on for days, rains bucketing down every now and then like sun showers in the tropics.

I sprinted up the métro station steps two at a time to meet Christine. I was late again, the second time this week. She sat listening to music on the granite steps of the church, waiting. Before I returned to Paris, Christine had removed her hair extension braids. She’d pressed her hair into a free-flowing Afro that I loved. An old denim jacket kept her warm, and the legs pouring out of her patterned Mexican skirt (the same cranberry shade as her lipstick) made me happy to be back. She removed her earphones, smiling as she saw me approach, and we kissed.

“Désolé,” I said, “I didn’t know the ninth arrondissement was this far from home. I thought Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was closer to the Notre Dame.”

“Miles. I told you yesterday, no, it was not. You take this.”

Christine handed me a métro map from her handbag, folded into eighths the size and shape of a credit card. I hated maps; she knew this. I didn’t want to look like a lost tourist, like an obvious American. The dreds grazing my shoulders already announced that I wasn’t from here. But cutting my locks was one thing, carrying a map around was another. I jut it inside the back pocket of my bluejeans. That night it went into the garbage.

“Merci Christine. Allons-y?” Chamoiseau finished, I was all into my idiot’s guide to learning French, trying to toss around as much of the native language as I could.

France gives five weeks of paid holidays every year, and Christine was in the middle of a few weeks off. In days she’d be leaving with Nadia for Corsica island, off the southeastern shore of France. I initiated her into some ghostbusting for the day, to help me dig up some spirits. My walking-tour book detailed the names, places and dates of black American expatriates, exactly where they impacted the city back in the day, and exactly when. We planned to walk through Saint-Georges and Montmartre to Pigalle (known as Pig Alley by black American soldiers back in WWII), the seedy neighborhood central to black expats from 1910 till around the Great Depression.

She took my hand to lift her up. Arm in arm, we turned the corner and walked down to the rue des Martyrs in search of a bank. The Crédit Agricole d’Ile-de-France on the corner was once Frisco’s, the popular 1920s jazz club of Jocelyn “Frisco” Bingham, according to the walking-tour book in my hand.

“You’re cold, chéri?”

I was freezing. I left Arcueil in a rush, not realizing my Nehru jacket matched my tan hemp jeans perfectly, and so I left it at the apartment. The jeans and jacket together looked like a Garanimals outfit, like I was auditioning for Boyz II Men. I chose to suffer for fashion instead.

“No, not at all,” I lied. “It’s better to look good than to feel good,” I said. It was a tired line, an eighties catchphrase from Saturday Night Live, but Christine cracked up, having never seen Saturday Night Live. Our relationship had become filled with moments just like this, where I said things I would never say to an American girl. Christine appreciated what made the joke funny fifteen years ago because her culture never ran the saying into the ground. Weather was harder to call now than in the springtime. The rest of the chilly afternoon, I pointed out the other unfortunates in T-shirts and claimed them as my brethren.

We turned another corner, crossing neighborhoods from Saint-Georges to Montmartre, and walked down the rue Clauzel a bit before reaching a familiar restaurant with a log cabin façade. The sign said Haynes American Restaurant but I had three different Paris guides that named it Haynes Grill, Haynes Restaurant, and just plain old Haynes. In June we approached it from a different direction and so we were both a bit surprised—like, how did it get here?

Haynes serves dry cornbread. The quality of the entrées at any soul-food restaurant in the world can be accurately predicted by the scrumptiousness of the cornbread appetizer. This is a no-brainer. Paris, of course, has no cornbread but Christine knew all about it from The Shark Bar on Amsterdam Ave, from the time she lived in New York. At Haynes we were not amused.

Months ago I’d taken Christine to dinner here, the very first soul-food spot in all of Europe, established in 1949 by Atlanta native Leroy Haynes. Photos from its heyday adorned the white stucco walls: black-and-white shots of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Louis Armstrong, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. A piano and sax duo immediately switched to some Miles Davis the minute we were seated. (My namesake followed me around often. Just last weekend his soundtrack to Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud trailed me through a Saint-Michel card shop.) The homely place felt like an old Southern restaurant that had fallen out of favor and relied strictly on its regulars. But Haynes had no competition. Soul food was only available there and over at Percy’s Place, a recent challenger in the sixteenth arrondissement rumored to be closing soon. Contenders like Chez Inez, Bojangles and Jezebel’s had long since shut down. I left feeling like Sean “Diddy” Combs could clean up opening a branch of his Justin’s restaurant franchise in Montmartre, another no-brainer.

We walked.

A small truck ambled down the rue Pigalle. We saw the same truck parked in front of a boulangerie five minutes ago and I wanted to walk back for a picture but I hadn’t mentioned it. The truck was midnight blue and bombed with graf, top to bottom. The main tag read POLO in sunset shades of orange and yellow, a nice piece. I noticed a lot of trucks bombed like this, apparently with permission, fruit and vegetable delivery trucks for Parisian groceries. The truck drove by and I instantly regretted not taking the photo again.

“Look! Yeah! She’s my sister,” I joked, pointing to a teenager racing by on roller skates. Not inline Rollerblades but skates: the old school, four-wheel, plastic kind. She wore a T-shirt with a toothy Japanimation character smiling widely on the front.

“Maybe she’ll lend you her skates,” Christine suggested. We laughed.

A neon green pharmacie sign blinked at the intersection of rue Pigalle and rue Fontaine. In 1929, fresh from singing jazz standards at Le Grand Duc (now a bistro called Miss China Lunch Box, up the block), Ada Louise Smith a.k.a. Bricktop capitalized on her popularity by opening up Bricktop’s here at 1 rue Fontaine. Now the place sold drugs. The Chicago-born Bricktop was a redheaded legend in her own time, and her club famously entertained the likes of boxer Jack Johnson and composer Cole Porter during the jazz age. I needed floss. Christine talked me out of it; dental floss costs too much at pharmacies, she said, better to try the supermarché.

Many guitar stores and music shops populated the area, Marshall amps and mixing consoles in the windows. Music and sex continued to dominate Pigalle. A sleazy looking cabaret called Carrousel de Paris still listed its prix fixe menu in francs behind a gated window. (Euros replaced francs way back in 1999.) This was the former location of Chez Josephine, the nightclub of one of the most famous black Americans to storm the French capital. Josephine Baker—born Freda McDonald in St. Louis—first arrived in Paris as a La Revue Nègre dancer in September 1925 and sped to fame and fortune so fast that she opened her own club by December of the following year.

The red windmill of the Moulin Rouge twirled languidly in the near distance of the very next street, the boulevard de Clichy. Christine asked to deviate from the proscribed path of the walking-tour book and peep inside some of the sex shops.

“We always walk around Paris,” I said. “Today the whole point was to follow the—”

“D’accord, d’accord,” she said, rolling her eyes. What a universal sister gesture.

Reaching the boulevard de Clichy, we turned down the rue Blanche, back in the direction of Bricktop’s. We walked past the site of The Music Box (the old Chez Florence, which Bricktop renamed when she briefly took it over prior to premiering her own club) at 61 rue Blanche, made a left onto the rue Chaptal, and ended up right back at the drugstore that was Bricktop’s.

We held hands, hanging a right onto the rue Pigalle, and voilà, another graffiti truck. This one was actually a van parked at the intersection of rue La Bruyère, where a favorite Langston Hughes hangout called The Flea Pit used to stand. Two writers had worked the van over, MIEL and…TRORG? TROBG? TRORC? I couldn’t handle homeboy’s wildstyle technique, it was way over my head. The spray-paint colors were great. MIEL used tan block letters outlined in a sky blue over a burgundy backdrop. His throw-up covered the van door. TRORG was all over the place though, covering the body of the van in tan, burgundy and sky blue, but also aquamarine, lime green. The colors of his piece erupted violently from the ride. I reached inside my shoulder bag for the camera.

“Miel? What does this mean, Christine?” Click.

“Meal?”

“Oui, M-I-E-L.”

“Oh, miel.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Miel is honey.”

“Yeah? What about Trorc?” Click.

“Quoi?”

“What about Trobg?”

“That says THOR. We see this jazz history all afternoon and you want a picture of a truck?”

“This is a van.”

“Let’s go. Allons-y…” Click.

We walked.

“Christine, regard: a casino,” I said, pointing.

“This is not a casino. Not like you’re thinking.”

The Casino de Paris at 16 rue de Clichy was where jazz was introduced to Paris. Louis Mitchell’s Jazz Kings, so the story goes, performed here in 1918 and started the French love affair with the black American art form. Reading this in my walking-tour book made me think of the New York City Rap Tour of 1982, the first time hiphop crossed the ocean commanding Europeans to throw their hands in the air. I had free tickets to see Kelis at Le Bataclan for later in the week, the same sweaty venue where Afrika Bambaataa, the Rock Steady Crew and others brought hiphop to France for the first time.

Christine and I passed the place D’Estienne D’Orves and the majestic Saint-Trinité church talking about Yannick Noah, the former French tennis star. He cashed in on his sports fame to start a singing career. The whole thing sounded very John Tesh, the former Entertainment Tonight host who quit to pursue a schmaltzy new-age music career. A poster announced Yannick had sold out the Casino de Paris.

“My friends saw him two years ago at Bercy,” Christine said. “He’s good, really.”

We crossed the busy rue de Londres thoroughfare and she pointed to the nearby Théâtre Mogador.

“I performed there,” she said. “Remember my salsa tape?”

“Oui,” I said. “That’s the place? This is the next stop in the book.”

“After my first year learning salsa, we had a graduation ceremony at Théâtre Mogador.”

“I remember us watching that, that was here?”

“Oui. The class was excited to perform, like we were big time.”

“The book says Josephine Baker filmed a movie here, La Sirène des Tropiques.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“It was 1927.”

“Oh.”

I recognized the Galeries Lafayette mall in the distance, down about three streets. Police officers milled around a barricade blocking the rue de Provence, a side street. Flowers were attached to the metal bars of the barrier, dead petals strewn on the ground. Ribbons of blue, white and red were tied around thin beams in the fence. A notice handwritten in marker and taped to the steel railing read of someone named El Houcine, residency papers, walking a child to school and the healing of terrible injuries. I asked Christine to translate the rest. She stared silently upward. I followed her gaze across the rue de Provence, above the deserted Délices de Fleurs shop to the Paris Opéra hotel.

Traces of black ash haloed several windows, the clear evidence of a recent fire.

“You don’t know about this,” she said softly.

“There was a fire?”

“Twenty-four people died,” Christine says. “Eleven were only children, and all of the dead were African.”

“Really?”

“They were waiting for papers to live in France legally. Paris puts people in this situation into hotels that are very cheap, sometimes for many years, but you would not want to stay in places like this. They have mice and roaches, and many of the rooms, they have no windows. The fire started because the… How do you say, the man who watches for the—”

“The night watchman?”

“Oui, the watchman, he was arguing very loud with his girlfriend in the lobby, and there were candles on the floor. I think they were drunk. She went to the police last week to admit that maybe she knocked over some clothes on the candles during their argument, but she did not do this on purpose. She left after their fight. The candles may have burned the clothing and spread up the staircase, the only staircase in the hotel. This street is behind the Galeries Lafayette stores, which are very chic. But prostitutes work this street directly behind. A prostitute noticed the fire first. Africans were jumping from the windows. Some rooms had no windows.”

“God. The watchman is dead?”

“The watchman is in a coma.”

“That’s horrible.” I stared at the blackened hotel. Rudy Guiliani hadn’t been New York’s mayor for years, but my first thought was to wonder what his typically callous reaction might’ve been to homeless African immigrants burning in a death trap Manhattan hotel.

8.

I made reservations with the cheapie airline Air India to return to Paris in August. The cash came from a literary magazine putting me on a bus to Massachusetts to talk with playwright August Wilson. Gem of the Ocean, his latest production, was about to run in Boston and we spoke for a few hours at a local Au Bon Pain. The money from the story paid for my ticket, and I’d saved enough to stay until my book tour in late September.

I awaited the next Greyhound leaving for New York sitting balled up on a bench at South Station, nauseous and clammy. What is this about?, I thought groggily, remembering the coffee and Marlboro Lights I shared with August. (I didn’t regularly smoke or drink coffee.) He was one of my favorite living writers, sure, but interviews had never given me a nervous stomach before. I barely made it to the men’s room in time to regurgitate my croissants.

I might have suddenly been anxious about moving to Paris. I spent the four-hour ride to Boston reading through a sheaf of papers I’d recently picked up from the French Embassy. The bureaucracy of becoming an immigrant in France was never something I’d considered, especially after my friend Miguel advised that a residence permit wasn’t strictly necessary. But just packing up and moving to France wasn’t that simple. My American passport officially allowed me to stay in the country for three months only, and I couldn’t work legally without a permit. In order to apply for a residence card, a carte de séjour, the embassy needed copies of my bank account balance to prove I was rich enough to live there jobless. Yet the dollar amount that would satisfy them was arbitrary, decided on a case-by-case basis. They also wanted a letter explaining why I wanted to move and a note from a landlord or lover saying I had a place to live.

I bought some bottled water and stood on line for the long ride home, thinking. My dream scenario, I imagined, was to support myself coasting from book deal to book deal. The dollar wasn’t real strong, but all my royalties could be exchanged for euros and I wouldn’t have to find work. My hopeful intentions probably weren’t enough to make the French Embassy happy, that I already knew. Reasonable doubts started creeping into my grand plans for Parisian exile, but thoughts of being together again with Christine renewed my faith. We were on the phone just yesterday, excited to be reunited soon. Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau was my Greyhound reading material on Christine’s suggestion, and the novel was a constant reminder of her.

I wondered who could be considered the French August Wilson, whose work explains the black French condition. I wasn’t a Francophile; poet Aimé Césaire was the only French artist I knew who fit that description, and I wasn’t familiar with his work, just his reputation. Being exposed to August Wilson, Gordon Parks, Toni Morrison, Romare Bearden, Alvin Ailey or any number of other black artists yields a lot of information about African-Americans. But where were the mouthpieces that could help me navigate understanding blacks in France? I asked Christine; she put me on to Texaco.

Grasping French culture through comparative analogies was the easiest way to do it at this point. I was looking for the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement of Paris, and what qualified most were négritude of the 1930s and créolité of the eighties, developed in part by Chamoiseau. The négritude phrase used to make good copy at the urban mags I’d worked at. But until googling around recently, I was never crystal clear on what it was: a literary and political movement started by Aimé Césaire (at twenty-two!), future Senegalese president Léopold Senghor and French-Guianan poet Léon Damas. Négritude was first coined by Césaire in his own L’Étudiant Noir literary journal, and stood for solidarity with Africa and a rejection of French colonialism. The shared African root of the worldwide black diaspora was its linchpin concept.

Créolité was completely new to me, an evolution away from négritude. Three Martinican writers—Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Bernabé—published In Praise of Creoleness in 1989 to play up the indigenous cultural value of the colonized Caribbean islands, rejecting the imperialistic influence of France and vestiges of Africa. Ironically Chamoiseau’s Texaco scored France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt literature prize, won in the past by Simone de Beauvoir and Marcel Proust. My bus started boarding passengers as I recalled something August Wilson mentioned hours ago.

“How specifically was the blues an influence on your work?” I’d asked him.

“Blues is the bedrock of everything I do,” he said, blowing smoke through his nose. “All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.”

August continued describing the blues as a way to learn black Americans’ ideas and attitudes toward pleasure and pain, who we are and what we think about. I handed my ticket to the bus driver wondering if anything like that existed for the black French. I’d heard zouk (the compas-like Caribbean party music) on the salsa boat, but it was too festive to be as revealing as the blues. French hiphop might qualify, but the language barrier was too thick for me to learn anything from yet. Taking a seat at the head of the bus, I formed an idea: I could pour my interest into a regular column. “Paris Noir” could explore the black side of France that nobody seemed to know a lot about, from my American outsider perspective.

Could French blacks exploit their own culture as a commodity to improve their socioeconomic standing, like we did with hiphop in America? From my grandparents’ South Bronx windows, I’d watched hiphop gradually spawn magazines, clothing companies, TV shows, literature, motion pictures, artwork, theater, recording studios and more. This all created untold opportunities for people whose options might have been more limited in a world without hiphop. (I could have started my writing career without the urban media, but it certainly helped.) Our walk, our talk, our fashion, our attitudes were all the cornerstone of a billion-dollar industry. What did the urban French have culturally to uplift their situation?

As the bus pulled out of South Station, I kept on brainstorming the column idea, with the strong feeling that I’d just given myself a cause to wander Paris like a flâneur and get paid for it.

7.

The high school wasn’t mine but I still felt nostalgic. The cafeteria, the auditorium, the gym and, finally, the library of Clinton High School up in the northwest Bronx weren’t that different from what I remembered of my own Truman High on the borough’s northeast side. I speed-walked through the halls of Clinton sweating in my grey suit from the heat, searching the five-story building for an event celebrating one of its most famous graduates, the late James Baldwin.

Being an African-American man interested in the ins and outs of black French culture, I couldn’t escape Baldwin if I wanted to, and I didn’t want to. I read through all of his essays and novels in toto back when I was finding my voice, like scores of other young black writers. His command of words and intellectual reasoning always left me in the dust, an elusive standard to chase, knowing all the while I’d never catch up. Days ago I was assigned to review a book of correspondence letters between Baldwin and his old editor Sol Stein; the two had also been teenage classmates at Clinton. The publisher invited me to this lecture featuring Stein and scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. with some of the Baldwin family expected to show, on the eightieth anniversary of his birthday. And I was late.

C-SPAN cameramen were already filming from the back of the library when I got there. Dr. Gates stood at the podium addressing the few dozen people seated in foldout chairs, giant placards of book covers erected in the background—Nobody Knows My Name, Notes of a Native Son. I skimmed these recently, looking for Baldwin’s thoughts on blacks in Paris, reading them during late-night downtime at the firm.

Baldwin left Harlem in 1948 and lived in Paris for eight years, setting a few of his novels there and becoming the most well-known black American expatriate, except for maybe Josephine Baker. Black Americans in Paris were deliberately isolated from each other, he said, because they didn’t want to be reminded of what they left behind. The French Africans, on the other hand, were empowered by sticking together because of their common culture and a shared longing for the emancipation of their countries. (Baldwin wrote all this years before most of French-colonized Africa won independence.) If what Baldwin said back then was still true, my two weeks with Christine were hardly enough for me to have any idea. From what I saw, Africans had assimilated into the French way of life a whole lot more.

I found a seat in the last row. The audience was already laughing at something Gates said as he launched into a story about interviewing Josephine Baker twenty-nine summers ago on Baldwin’s ten acres of land in the south of France.

“I was twenty-two years old, a London-based correspondent for Time magazine, and I felt like a mortal invited to dine at Mount Olympus,” Gates began, reading from notes. His Baldwin postage stamp lapel pin caught glints of light as he spoke. “My story for which Time magazine had agreed to fund my trip was to be on the black expatriates in Europe. And one of my principal subjects was James Baldwin. Another one was Josephine Baker, who, being a scenarist to her very heart, put one condition on her meeting with me. I was to arrange her reunion with James Baldwin, whom she hadn’t seen since she left France many years before to live in Monte Carlo.

“Now I don’t know what she made of me, with my gold-rimmed, cool-blue sunglasses, and my bodacious two-foot-high Afro. You know Cornel West’s Afro? Cornel West’s Afro looks like a crew cut next to my Afro! I looked like a ball of black cotton candy walking down the street. It was combed out, I had my Afro Sheen on it, it was smokin’, boy. But I was received like a dignitary of a foreign land who might just well be a long-lost son.

“So we set out in my rented Peugeot bearing precious cargo from Monte Carlo to Saint-Paul de Vence in Provence, going to chez Baldwin. But in case I was in any danger of forgetting that Josephine Baker, a living legend, was my passenger, Baker’s fans mobbed my car every time we stopped at a traffic light. Invariably she responded with elaborate grace, partly playing the star who expects to be adored, partly the aging performer who is simply grateful to be recognized.

“When Jimmy chose Saint-Paul de Vence for his home, it was a quiet village surrounding the tiny, ancient walled city in the alpine foothills that rise from the Mediterranean Sea. His house, which is still there and still owned by the family, is situated among shoulder-high rosemary hedges, acres of peach and almond orchards and fields of wild asparagus and strawberries and grape arbors. And it was under one such grape arbor at one of the long harvest tables out in the garden that we dined that night. The line from an old gospel song, a line Baldwin had quoted toward the end of his then latest novel, inevitably suggested itself to me: ‘I am going to feast at the welcome table.’ And feast, ladies and gentlemen, we did.

“At that long welcome table under the arbor, the wine flowed, the food was served and taken away, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker traded stories. They gossiped about everyone they knew and many people they didn’t know, and they recalled the details of their marvelous lives. They had both been hurt and disillusioned in the United States and had chosen rather to live in France. They never forgot or forgave. At the table that long warm night, they recollected the events that led to their decisions to leave the country of their birth, and the consequences of these decisions: the difficulty of living apart from home and family, of always feeling apart in their chosen homes, and of the pleasure of choosing a new life, the possibilities of the untried. A sense of nostalgia pervaded that evening. For all their misgivings, they shared a sense, curiously, of being on the winning side of history.”

Soon the floor was opened for questions. A familiar face from college stepped to the microphone: Trevor Baldwin, son of Wilmer Baldwin, the brother of James. Down at Morehouse, I halfway expected Baldwin’s nephew to be cut buddies with classmates Ennis Cosby and Thomas Giovanni (the sons of Bill Cosby and Nikki Giovanni), but I’m sure they weren’t. Trevor acknowledged his parents in the audience, then asked Gates to share a candid story about his celebrated uncle. I approached afterwards with a preview copy of my book in hand.

“Hello, my name is Miles Marshall Lewis— ”

“Hello Miles,” Dr. Gates said.

“How you doing? I’m a writer, actually, I have a bound galley of my first book and it’s coming out in September.” The audience clapped. I got the sense they thought I was much younger, and just happy to applaud a dredlocked young brother who didn’t aspire to be an MC.

“This is your moment on TV! What’s your book called?”

I told him, explaining that Baldwin partially inspired my essay collection.

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you. And incidentally, I’ve relocated to France also—”

Wry laughter filled the library. They might have thought I was joking.

“Well, you need a place to stay, go down to Saint-Paul, man.” More laughs.

I asked my question (something about the humor in Baldwin’s essays), Gates granted a scholarly answer, and before long the C-SPAN cameras stopped rolling. Flipping channels at Dad’s place months later, I caught the whole telecast on Book TV. People got up and slowly gathered around Gates and Sol Stein, as well as Wilmer Baldwin and Paula Whaley, two of James’s eight siblings. I sought out Paula, a Baltimore-based doll designer, right away, showing her a Baldwin quote in my book.

Having placed myself inside the drama of the event just by asking my question, I was approached by a few well-wishing folk also. I spoke briefly with Trevor, and Carol, a woman I met years ago at a writer retreat. The last person in the small group surrounding me was a coffee-complexioned woman in a clingy T-shirt wearing a kinky curly Afro. She nervously introduced herself as Alva, a recent American exile in Paris. Alva told me her grandmother had a bit part in director Melvin Van Peebles’s La Permission, an interracial romance between an American soldier and a Parisian shop clerk. She lived in Paris as a child, with James Baldwin somewhat of a family friend, and her intention was to direct a documentary about her late grandma’s own interracial marriage in 1960s France. We traded cards while students folded up chairs around us. Time would tell that I’d traveled all the way back to my hometown to make my first friend in Paris.

6.

A week later I gazed out at the Manhattan skyline from a darkened law office at three in the morning, my mind on Christine and Paris. And flight.

I was at a career crossroads, a life crossroads. From one perspective I was a freelance writer with a book being published in September. From another I’d been an unemployed editor for four months since media mogul Russell Simmons’s Oneworld magazine folded, taking nightshift temp agency assignments at law firms, proofreading tedious legal documents. From one point of view I was an imminent author with one foot in a Parisian expatriate life, echoes of James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and the rest. From another I was sleeping on my father’s couch in Harlem, a building away from the one that evicted me two months ago over three months’ back rent. Resting in the plush chair of an empty conference room, chilled air blasting through the vents, I spent my sixty-minute break staring out at a beautiful view from the fortieth floor of a midtown skyscraper, considering what I was running from and where I was running to.

I first toyed with the idea of moving abroad in 2002 after sitting through a film screening of 25th Hour. Its closing sequence showed the drug-dealing lead character dodging his prison sentence to start an anonymous life far away from the big city, raising a family under an assumed name with his one true love. Something about the idea of disappearing completely and never being found appealed to me. I sat in my Brooklyn apartment with “Simple Kind of Life” on repeat that night, listening intently to No Doubt’s lyrics about giving up the artistic routine, settling down and having children. I wasn’t romantic enough to uproot my life to another country over a song or a movie, but personal and professional issues had me open for some radical changes.

The writing life turned out to be a lot more careerist than I expected at the beginning. I grew up on the canons of writers who lived magnanimously—Maya Angelou, Ernest Hemingway—and I thought that urban cultural critics were somehow destined to lead the same kinds of renaissance lives. Instead our singular path consisted of starting out in the urban press, branching out into mainstream magazines with wider audiences, hitting a glass ceiling and finally transitioning into television as talking heads. For me this meant being published by The Source in 1995, writing for Rolling Stone by the end of the following year, and eventually being passed over for a reporter-researcher spot at Vanity Fair. But I didn’t pursue the writing life to become an idiot box personality. When I got a call from MTV to appear on a show about the bling habits of celebrities’ pets, I respectfully declined. At thirty-three my lofty belief in a wave of modern-day Truman Capotes and Paul Robesons started dying on the vine. So I was eager to go away and sit on a hill someplace to think about what writing meant for me all over again. With its history as a legendary life school for writers, Paris, I thought, could be that hill.

Kicking off my shoes I thought back to the month before I left for France. I was lying on my living room couch, contemplating an eviction notice by candlelight. Earlier that day two men in blue Con Edison uniforms rang the doorbell, then knocked gruffly on my apartment door. I welcomed them in and showed them to my kitchen, bachelor bare except for a stove, a fridge and a picnic table supporting my old microwave. An electric meter hung at the ceiling; the two Con Ed workers whipped out their tools, unfolded their ladder and removed it. They handed me a past-due electricity bill for over two thousand dollars and left.

Days afterwards I sat on a padded church-pew-like bench in a courtroom reading a Zora Neale Hurston biography while waiting to see a judge. In the hallway outside court the lawyer of my landlord and I had made lighthearted conversation under the circumstances; we almost offhandedly got around to discussing the four months of back rent I owed his client. My rejecting a career in law must have seemed sort of foolish to him. (If dude had become an entertainment lawyer, this would never have happened.) Right before my case was called I alighted on the page in the Hurston bio about her eviction from a Harlem apartment in the 1920s and getting her book deal advance payment, five hundred bucks, the very same day. My story would be different. I walked out of court officially evicted. Borrowing that kind of money from friends or family wasn’t possible.

Where would I go now, I wondered.

That afternoon I headed for a Russian bathhouse to think. Late-edition newspapers sold on the street condemned Michael Jackson, a trial for his child molestation charges in the offing. An impersonator at Union Square wearing a Jheri-curl wig, fedora and highwaters grabbed his crotch and spun himself dizzy to “Billie Jean.” Buying bottled water at a deli I heard “Beat It” pumping from a radio. Feeling guilty over my financial irresponsibility I remember thinking, We’ve got to grow up some time Michael, you and me both. Later at the hammam—nirvana like, hazy as a cumulus cloud—I sat in the sauna, sweat stinging my eyes, and made the fateful decision: I would move. To Paris.

Why not? I didn’t have a mortgage, a place to live, a car note, a permanent job… or a girlfriend. The last woman in my life was Nikki, a free-spirited music lover from Newark. We met in Brooklyn at a BAMcafé show and spent nine long months together: sprawled out on the shag rug in my home office smoking weed and having sex to jazz fusion, raiding the open bars of record industry parties and catching all the concerts we had the energy for, even meeting each other’s parents. We talked of moving to Paris together. But I started choosing women more for their marriage potential after I turned thirty, and Nikki had to deal (probably unfairly) with my figuring out just what I wanted in a wife. I ended things over a year ago and was slightly bored and somewhat lonely afterwards.

Copies of Christine’s house keys jangled in my pocket as I stood to return to work; when I left, she didn’t ask for them back. In our two weeks together we got more of a true adult sense of each other than we ever had before and we liked it. I already missed her sense of humor, her distinctly non-American perspectives. I promised her I’d return as soon as possible, after saving up money for a month or so. I focused on living in Paris, not finding another magazine job or a new apartment. Following the lead of adventurous writer heroes was a much more attractive career option than applying for a fellowship grant, going back to college for an MFA or defending 50 Cent on Real Time with Bill Maher.

5.

Christine lived her life in Paris but slept in Arcueil, a quaint, quiet commune (birthplace of designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) three short métro stops outside of the southernmost city limit. She rented a small apartment on the second floor of a three-story building at 47 rue Victor Carmignac. Around the corner, the busy two-way avenue Aristide Briand led straight to the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris ess than two miles away.

The bulbs hanging from her ceilings radiated through multicolored light fixtures she’d brought back from holiday in Morocco. On her living room wall, a framed print of Italian painter Gino Severini’s abstract Sea=Dancer took me back to when she bought the poster four years ago—at the Guggenheim museum in Venice where we shared a vacation. Like heavy drapes in hotels, the typically French metal shutters in her window gave me relief from the bright sunlight when I first arrived from New York full of jet lag. Her folded-out futon proved as comfortable as the sleigh bed I’d left behind in Harlem, her bedroom separated from the living room by long curtains the same red and orange shades of Buddhist monk robes. Christine still hadn’t upgraded to a DVD player, videotapes of favorite movies like 37°2 le Matin and La Femme d’à Côté stacked next to her TV set.

Ten nights had come and gone since I showed up again in Christine’s life; the following day I was going back to New York City. But I never saw our week and a half ensemble as a vacation. I knew my plan to move to Paris would have to unfold in progressive stages, and this was the first: finding out if Christine and I still had any heat as a couple; looking for an apartment and a job; and discovering if Paris was still someplace I could see myself living, after my earlier taste of the city ten whole years ago.

Christine turned me on more than ever with her lacy Lejaby lingerie, her love for Salman Rushdie books and a passion for cooking that I’d never known about before. Jobs weren’t falling from the sky, but I thought some freelance writing might tide me over until I found permanent work. The Internet made the world much smaller; it would be easy to edit articles with American magazine editors via email. And Paris was still Paris. I had fallen in love with Nutella crêpes all over again. The gardens of Luxembourg and Tuileries were inspirational for brainstorming in my journal. And I was an ocean away from my distracting social life back in Manhattan. My first book was scheduled for release in four months and its jacket said I already currently lived here, a “fake it till you make it” philosophy in full effect.

The City of Light was seductive. Chez Adel, a colorful bar with live music nearby the trendy Canal Saint-Martin area, gave Christine’s cousin Vincent a slot on piano and I helped him warm up with my own limited repertoire of pop songs. Being able to play “Raspberry Beret” in Paris, even for a handful of the bistro’s oblivious regulars, encouraged me even more to stay a couple of years. Miguel, a record company publicist I knew, met me for drinks at Le Fumoir to share essential info about his 2003 move here. “The last American the French kicked out was killing people,” Miguel said with a laugh. “They assume we all have money to spend, so they’re more than happy to have us. Don’t sweat the residence card.” At Pur’Grill I drank Beaujolais with Margeaux, a writer on a press junket whom I knew from back home. “I’ve never seen you so Zen!” Margeaux said. I was the first to admit that the city agreed with me.

Vincent volunteered to drive me to the airport the next morning. Christine borrowed her parents’ Renault tonight for another reason: Jean-Claude, her Martinican salsa instructor, was deejaying a party on L’Alizé, a boat docked in the river Seine. The Latin explosion that reached an American peak around 1999—when Jennifer Lopez’s booty was the latest fashion—hit Paris around three years later, and Christine joined her girlfriend Nadia’s salsa class. Newly thirty-something, they were feeling too mature for most clubs but still felt like going out to dance and meet guys, and they found the perfect outlet at Salsabor with hundreds of other students. Christine met nearly all of the friends she introduced me to this month in those classes. Romances regularly spun out of Jean-Claude’s group, including Christine and her most recent ex.

Latin music was not my thing at all, but a riverboat party on the Seine didn’t sound like a bad way to wrap up my trip. We arrived about eleven, a starry sky and full moon giving a picture-perfect backdrop to the twirling dancers and brassy blasts of Tito Puente music. Christine walked us straight to Jean-Claude, who just finished choosing the perfect Héctor Lavoe record for the sweaty, well-dressed crowd. Clean-shaven and thin in his dashiki, Jean-Claude left his chunky headphones and turntables behind, kissed Christine’s cheeks twice and greeted me with a handshake before choosing another song. His girlfriend Sophie, an equally skinny brunette with expressive brown eyes, embraced us with double bises and the three of us found Nadia outside on the deck, cooling off from a hot dance.

A changeover to zouk music evoked some cheers inside and Sophie dashed back to the dance floor. A tourist cruiser floated slowly down the Seine shining its floodlights, sightseers waving. Nadia asked what I thought of salsa, shooting an expectant glance at Christine.

“I like some of the rhythms,” I said diplomatically, “but honestly, it doesn’t move me.” Christine translated my English, as she did so often. “I don’t understand the words, and unless I’m concentrating, it all sounds the same to me.” Nadia laughed, already guessing that I wasn’t a Latin music lover.

“But there’s more,” I responded. “I heard plenty of salsa in the Bronx. I was raised around lots of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, and they would have thought I was phony or trying to steal their culture if I got interested in Latin music. Black people in my neighborhood felt that way about white kids who came to the community centers dancing to hiphop in the beginning. This party is beautiful, but isn’t salsa just a fad for all these French people?”

Now it was my turn to chuckle. I wasn’t trying to be rude to Nadia but I already knew that strong, contrary opinions were more respected here than politesse. Christine spoke up on Nadia’s behalf.

“Latin because they’re speaking Spanish?” she asked. “They’re black, d’accord? Salsa is from Cuba, and Cubans are black. Slave ships stopped there just like they did in Martinique and the United States.”

“That’s true,” I admitted. “But don’t you think Latinos in Paris might be cynical about this scene? In America, people who grew up listening to salsa since they were young would look at all these white French people and see a trendy thing happening. They would look like intruders, interested in salsa for a year or two just to meet people to have sex with. When they’re done with it and disappear again, the real people who started it might be glad they’re gone.”

“Ce n’est pas vraiment comme ça,” Nadia said. She understood more English than she was able to speak, and so no translation was necessary. She quickly responded to me through Christine.

“When Nadia went to Manhattan this year on vacation, she danced around at a lot of salsa parties,” Christine said, “and it’s not only Latinos. Just New Yorkers who enjoy salsa. There were a lot of bands playing live. These were not places with Latinos only at all. And these parties here are always very mixed with black and white people. I don’t really see Cuban people. I never even thought about it.”

A short, stocky old salsa instructor of Nadia’s suddenly appeared behind her. The man offered a bonsoir then whisked her off for a two-step. I knew Nadia wouldn’t feel out of place talking about race with us; she was Christine’s best friend. But Nadia was a fair-skinned Arab. She hardly considered herself to be a part of the black diaspora. Between just the two of us, I figured Christine might share more of her true feelings.

“Oui, as well, this is a place where you see black men entertaining the white women, ça c’est clair,” she said, raising the same métissage issue from last week. “A lot of the dancers are black men, and you have a lot of white women coming here, c’est vrai. It’s obvious that they would never meet outside of the scene. Because salsa classes are not cheap, these are financially comfortable women. It’s almost a caricature aussi: the black guys who dance sexually, the single white women. Voilà quoi.”

A pregnant blonde walked past us, perspiring and chugging an Evian bottle.

“I’m telling you—we should go ahead and have a baby,” I joked. Christine didn’t laugh this time.

“Miles! I’m not interested in being a machine for you. If that’s what you’re thinking then you can stay in America. When I’m pregnant one day, I want it to be for love.”

Her mood had shifted. Maybe I had criticized salsa too much, or I finally touched a nerve teasing about pregnancy; Christine was thirty-four and single. The reality of my leaving the next day might have caught up with us. Maybe I even eyed the cute pregnant lady a second too long. Either way, I could sense a bad attitude coming on. But I’d known Christine for ten years. She was mother material as far as I was concerned. I wouldn’t have joked about having a baby with her if I wasn’t somewhat serious.

“And so, us falling in love, this is impossible?” I asked. As a cool breeze passed off the river, I could see what French people call the déclic go off in Christine’s head. Her irritated expression softened; she almost blushed at the question.

“Non,” she said, staring me in the eyes. “Ce n’est pas possible.”

4.

Days after Sunday School night at Le Trabendo, I sat with Christine watching five Senegalese drummers play in front of a kiosk in the square Léon, pounding out rhythms on djembe drums for a large crowd. A tall dred with SENEGAL printed across his T-shirt rapped on the microphone, urging us all to shake our bodies down to the ground. Tourists with digicams recorded the dancers and drummers in front of a huge handwritten sign hung on the wall reading Nous Sommes Tous Des Africains (We Are All Africans). Waiting for Christine’s girlfriend to meet us, we watched the show sipping plastic cups of iced ginger juice and nibbling powdery beignets. An African mother eating nearby wore fabric tied around her midsection as a baby sling, an adorable baby boy wrapped comfortably on her back, asleep.

“We should have a baby,” I mentioned casually. It wasn’t my first time.

“You’re really crazy,” Christine answered, flashing a smile.

Leaving New York, I told some close friends and family that I might be getting someone pregnant soon. When Christine met me at Charles de Gaulle airport eight days ago, I mentioned a baby right away. She just laughed. Testing the waters with my playful proposition was a way to say that my light was on, something I knew she would understand as a lover of Sex and the City. In one episode (men claim we’d rather be shot than watch the show, but I always found the stories funny) the redhead compared men to taxicabs roaming Manhattan with our lights either on or off. “On” signaled that we were ready for marriage; “off” meant we were still only looking for sex and the single life. At thirty-three I was giving serious thought to settling down, and Christine was the rare ex whom I felt I could make a future with.

Christine answered her girlfriend Magbé’s texto about running late. We left the drummers behind to meet her at the open bazaar of the marché Dejean. The rue Léon runs through the eighteenth arrondissement, an area heavily populated by African residents, and it was teeming with locals. Some hustled black-market goods on the street corners: Dax hair pomade, Tenovate bleaching cream for skin lightening. Many men and women sported patterned headscarves and boubous—colorful wide-sleeved robes decorated with embroidery—while others wore smart suits despite the springtime heat.

We turned onto the rue Myrha, where shops sold discounted international phone cards, DVDs and CDs of popular African singers like Amy Koïta and Meiway, next door to seamstresses with boubous in their windows and on sewing machines, next door to food markets stinking sharply of smoked fish with palm oil and Arôme de Maggi seasoning on their shelves. I noticed a lot of Asians busy ringing up sales as I looked into the windows of the marchés, strange for such a heavily African section of Paris.

Rounding the corner, we saw a few police officers guarding the park entrance on the rue Cavé; even more stood watch on the rue Saint Luc. A century-old hotel in the thirteenth arrondissement housing immigrants from Senegal, Ghana, Mali and Tunisia caught fire recently, killing seventeen people. Thirteen were children. This heavy police presence was meant to provide a sense of security for the area, but as usual in cases like this, the officers seemed more threatening than protecting. Christine noticed Magbé approach while I watched the police demand ID from a band of possible sans papiers French-African teenagers across the street. They greeted each other with double bises.

Magbé—casually dressed, with a neat close-cropped perm—kissed me twice on each cheek.

“Bonjour, Miles! I hear a lot about you,” she said in English. Half of Christine’s friends spoke only French, and so far my vocabulary in their language consisted of ten words. Getting to know each other, Magbé started telling me about her German partner and their four-year-old daughter, and soon we started a pleasantly long discussion in Franglais about her native Africa. A resident of Paris for the past twenty-one years, Magbé moved from Dakar, Senegal, with her mother at the age of fourteen. Her family originated from Guinea, but her French dad was stationed in Senegal when she was born, serving in the marines.

“He died when I was six,” she said. Christine seemed surprised; maybe she’d never heard Magbé talk about her parents before. “My mother decided after that to come here so that she could give us the best education and social security.”

“How is it better or worse for Africans here than living in Senegal?” I asked.

“It really depends,” Magbé said. “Probably for the work and the comfort you can have here. I don’t come from a rich family in Africa. For a middle-class situation, I prefer to live here. If you can be in your own country, of course you feel stronger. You have the family around, you’re not alone. You know the rules, you know the language, and you are not seen immediately as someone different. I don’t see the color stuff in France every day. It’s only in some situations that you remember you’re black. I really feel full-percent French. As long as you are in the middle class, the whites accept you. If they have the feeling that you are getting more than what they can have, then you’ll have a question of xénophobie. So I don’t know if it’s racism or jealousy.”

Christine’s comment from days ago still stuck in my mind, about the lack of a black community in France. I wondered if Magbé agreed. “The people who live on the second floor of my building, they own a Chinese restaurant nearby,” she began, unfolding a story by way of her answer. “And I notice they only buy their things in Chinese stores. They are willing to pay a little bit more to a Chinese instead of paying less to the foreign people. But black people, they would say, ‘It’s cheaper from the Chinese? I’ll go to the Chinese, I don’t care.’ So that kind of solidarity does not exist in the black community here.”

I mentioned Carol’s Daughter and Nubian Heritage from back in Brooklyn, telling Magbé I supported these African-American businesses, even banking with the black-owned Carver Federal Savings Bank. She voiced her regret that French blacks hadn’t yet established such companies. The only French-African businesses in Paris were restaurants like Le Petit Dakar and the stores we passed in Château Rouge selling boubous and African material, she said. Walking back to the drumming at square Léon, Christine reminded me about the Asian cashiers I noticed in the African shops.

“In Château Rouge, businesses are in the hands of the Chinese, all the food and everything,” Magbé told us. “But of course, the customers are African. Business is also largely in the hands of Jews from North Africa. The only business held by black Africans is African clothes.” Magbé explained how she recently sought a loan to start her own cleaning company and was ultimately turned down. “I went to one of these special banks that are supposed to lend you money with a very high interest compared to normal banks. The difference is, you don’t need a guarantor. If the business seems okay, they take the risk. For one-and-a-half months I worked like hell to get credit through them. They just called while I was on holiday last week to tell me it’s not going to work. I don’t know why. I’m a French citizen, I studied at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, I have experience and everything. And it’s still difficult.”

Magbé bought a plate of salt fish accra and spicy creole rice from a vendor at a makeshift table near the kiosk, and we all sat down together. The drummers took a break off to the side, smoking and laughing with each other. Magbé told us about her daughter’s second year at école between bites, but I could tell she still felt challenged by my questions about a shared esprit de corps between blacks in France. When she finished her food, she jumped back into the real conversation.

“Actually, a kind of unity does exist in some African cultures, like in Mali and Senegal. It’s called a tantin,” she explained. “Every month a group of people pay a certain amount into a pot of money and won’t spend it.” I had heard about this concept of collectively pooling cash once from a Jamaican ex-girlfriend; she called it a sousous. “That’s how they start the small businesses that they do, and most of the time they also do it to help people that want to leave the country. If people want to leave Senegal, they’ll join one of these tantin and get the money. They can pay the ticket to come to Europe that way and get the money back by working here.”

When Magbé asked me in turn about the state of the black community back in America, I realized how reductive my questions must have sounded. I couldn’t expect her to speak for the entire African population in France any more than I could be put on the spot as a spokesperson for all black Americans. As the drumming resumed I thought, They’re no more of a monolithic people than we are.

2.

The first time I ever thought twice about France was at fifteen, watching Prince on the French Riviera in his Nice-based movie Under the Cherry Moon. The Paris-situated Sting concert documentary Bring on the Night came to my attention at roughly the same time, around 1986. I was hardly raised in a household taking summertime vacations to Europe. Dad never owned a passport; Mom’s had long expired by my teenage years.

My mother is from a Southern family in Virginia. Though born in Harlem, she was taken back down South and reared by her grandparents and aunts in the countryside Halifax County community of Clover till elementary school age. Her grandfather Tom had been a sharecropper, selling his own tobacco at local markets. His petite wife Emma bore ten of their children on the farm. By the time my mother, Brenda, was five years old, her household chores included pitching in to shovel firewood into the kitchen stove, helping uncles at the water sprig fill barrels for a house without plumbing, and feeding livestock. Paris was the last place on anyone’s mind. New York City was the city of dreams for my grandparents’ generation.

Bessie, my grandmother, lit out for Harlem in the late 1940s in search of the city life. She soon fell in love with Earl, a young Amsterdam Avenue numbers runner originally from the bucolic Georgia city of Baxley. The day would finally arrive when my grandfather borrowed a Cadillac, drove two hours to Clover, and reclaimed Brenda from her classes in a one-room schoolhouse. Culture shock set in for my mom from the moment of her Harlem arrival: traffic lights, running water, subways, supermarkets stocked with prepackaged poultry. On these city streets of uptown Manhattan, my mother first encountered her friend, lover, spouse, and eventual ex-husband, Darryl.

Neighbors on 145th Street, my parents met as children, my dad locally infamous for zipping down Convent Avenue like the Flash of his beloved comics. Like his future wife, Darryl was also reared by grandparents while his young mother managed an AT&T secretarial job downtown, hustling against race and sex discrimination. My grandma, Juanita, settled herself in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx while my dad remained uptown with my great-grandparents. After briefly marrying a man not Darryl’s biological father, Juanita divorced, met Frank Lewis—who would later adopt my dad—married him, gave birth to two more children, and divorced again. Jacques, the true father of my own father, never factored into our family history, and I was twenty-one before finding out anything about his Louisiana roots and French Cajun heritage.

African-American family trees splinter off into untraceable branches a lot and a missing link to my ancestry starts not even two generations back, with Jacques. A light-skinned teenage boy whose parents migrated to Harlem from Louisiana, Jacques went steady with Juanita just out of high school. A month before turning nineteen, she gave birth to Darryl as a single mom. Our family name is Lewis because of the man Juanita married and divorced before I was born, a man I don’t recognize in pictures and can’t recall having ever met. Despite adopting my dad at the start of their marriage, Frank Lewis never bonded paternally with Darryl. Effectively, my father’s grandparents were his parents, another fairly regular thing in black America.

France is in my blood. But this knowledge was far from drummed into my head growing up in the Bronx. My father’s genealogy was kept secret until I turned sixteen, something we discussed after an Oprah episode on long-lost family ties. He was born Darryl Plummer in the same Washington Heights hospital I’d be born at twenty years later, carrying the surname of a biological father he’d known merely by name most of his life. Only six years afterwards would Juanita’s second husband adopt Darryl and make him a Lewis.

Silence is the most common method for avoiding embarrassing family history swept under the rug. I broke this unspoken policy of don’t ask, don’t tell one afternoon on a rare visit with my great-grandfather, together in his South Bronx apartment in the early nineties. My curiosity set off a snowballing chain of events to locate Jacques Plummer: calls placed to a distant cousin; an unearthed New Jersey township address; photos arriving in the mail; and a meeting at the Hotel Penta in downtown Manhattan. Over drinks at the Globetrotter restaurant, my father and I both learned of this unknown family line of Plummers. Originally from Grand Coteau, Louisiana, (population: 2,000), Jacques explained that his lineage—still a bit sketchy to me, since it was only explained once over tequilas and orange juice—stemmed from Louisiana Cajuns, revealing a French heritage to our bloodline.

Diluted French family blood had nothing to do with my moving to Paris; I credit that mainly to a condition of the heart—historically the source of a lot of Parisian decision-making, no doubt.

3.

Sixteen years ago, with money borrowed from a school loan, I bought a roundtrip ticket to visit a girl I was hung up over studying abroad. The whole story involves a four-year pursuit, cheating on my girlfriend, and fictionalizing it all years later for the soon-to-be-published ebook novel, Irrésistible. Simone, the girl in question, scooped me from Charles de Gaulle airport that chilly Saturday in 1994 with her best friend.

Simone was studying at the École Normale de Musique for her junior year abroad. Her girlfriend Christine was finishing her own third year at La Sorbonne Nouvelle, and she was a vision. With all my excitement over Simone, my roving eye still caught the hot curves of her petite friend’s slender body, the chocolate-drop complexion and sexy, sleepy eyes. Her wide smile and alluring accent made her the best possible first encounter I could have had with a French woman.

And so on my first trip to Paris, my future wife picked me up from the airport.

Christine navigated her red stick shift Fiat from the outer reaches of Charles de Gaulle back to Simone’s flat in the thirteenth arrondissement. I was a law student then; I’d trimmed enough money from my tuition loan to visit Paris on a tight budget for one week only. By then I’d already been to Europe twice before, visiting an ex-girlfriend in Madrid and traipsing through London alone for a week after graduating college, but France immediately felt different. The history of Paris, the smells, the food, and the architecture overwhelmed my already romantic frame of mind.

My second night in town Simone and I went straight to the Eiffel Tower. We marched up the steps as I teased her about gnashing her teeth and farting in her sleep. Aiming for the third level, we only made it to the second due to exhaustion, but I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful view of the city. I thrilled holding her by the waist as a Parisian snapped a photo for us. We later walked the night streets hand in hand, crossing the river Seine with tiny European cars whizzing across the overpass. Strolling alongside the river, its cobblestone walkway imbedded with Heineken bottle caps, the rays of a crescent moon shimmered off the waves, illuminating the olive green hue of the canal.

Budgeting my francs carefully, we ate at relatively cheap chain restaurants I’d never bother with later—Hard Rock Café, Oh!.. Poivrier!, Le Paradis du Fruit. I ordered smoked salmon and duck accidentally at Hippopotamus, misreading the menu. Dinner went better at Chez Foufoune, a bistro popular with locals in the gay Marais district. (“Foufoune is French for pussy,” Simone delighted in explaining.) At the Louvre we skipped Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo to see an Egyptian exhibition. Fashion was heavy on my twenty-three-year-old brain; one afternoon we window-shopped at the Jean Paul Gaultier boutique, circular TV screens built into the floor replaying the designer’s latest runway shows.

The rest of my tourist trek through the city included paying respects to Richard Wright and Jim Morrison at the Père-Lachaise cemetery; shopping at the marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen flea market, where I scavenged a fitted leather jacket I’d wear for years; sampling eggplant falafels with hot sauce from L’As du Fallafel; catching Romeo Is Bleeding on the Champs-Élysées (bumping into actor Danny Aiello at the movies); searching in vain for Warhol canvases at the Pompidou Museum; and scaling the endless stairway to the Sacré-Cœur Basilica church. On my final night Simone arranged a farewell dinner at her apartment, inviting Christine and her cousin Vincent to eat with us. I boomeranged back to the Bronx scheming on how quickly I could hightail it back to Paris.

I wouldn’t return for ten years.

Twenty-one months later the ceiling mirrors of a hot sheet Bronx hotel suite reflected the naked images of Christine and I, pretzeled on a queen-size bed. A blizzard had grounded all international flights from Kennedy Airport, including Christine’s return flight to Paris.

Months after her studies were over, Simone returned to America and was soon hosting Christine’s first New York City visit. We all welcomed in 1996 together at midnight New Year’s Day, racing down the West Side Highway in my Chevy Corsica eating slices of pizza on our way to a nightclub: me, Christine, Simone and her new boyfriend. With Simone’s blessing, Christine invited me to see 12 Monkeys at a Bronx multiplex on our first date. Two hours later we were parked near the Eastchester Bay, aroused and making out in my car.

Transatlantic phone calls and international love letters followed, lasting for weeks before Christine returned to New York in the springtime. Fulfilling a longtime dream to move to the city (she studied American history and English as a dual major in Paris), she came back again for a third time in the summer to live. Subletting an apartment in downtown Manhattan from a vacationing French expat, Christine and I started a true boyfriend-girlfriend relationship down on Avenue A. Three months later she was selling lingerie at Bloomingdale’s and living in Queens; I was living in Brooklyn, freelancing for The Source and dating an entertainment journalist. Things had ended well, but they had ended. In our mid-twenties we were both too selfish and unfamiliar with the sacrificial compromises that serious relationships call for. The following year I stopped by Bloomie’s to say hello and she was gone. After a year and a half she missed her family and decided to return to France.

Three years later—November 2000—I lay with Christine in a suite at the Hôtel Violino d’Oro, exhausted after a lost weekend of sex and tourism in Venice, Italy. Planning to travel alone, I reached out to Christine in France just to tell her I’d be coming to her side of the Atlantic. Coincidentally, she was on her way to New York again on her own vacation. She arrived at my brownstone apartment for a hot and heavy reunion, and agreed to meet me days later on my solo trip to Venice. No strings attached, at the end of our passionate escapade we shook hands and parted even better friends than after our breakup years earlier. When I finally decided to move to Paris, I knew just who to call for help.

1.

I walked across the expansive grassy field of the Parc de la Villette on a starry Sunday night in the private afterglow of a fantastic pompier, French slang for a certain sex act. Trapped accidentally in a parking garage staircase for ten minutes, Christine and I called for help on her portable, and one thing led to another while we waited on our rescue. Christine’s friends—Nadia and Patoche with her boyfriend, Paco—arrived well after clothes were rearranged and lipstick reapplied, and the five of us followed the thunderous music in the distance leading to Le Trabendo.

The rust-red building with the deafening beats was host to an open-mic talent showcase. An audience of over six hundred crowded inside the concert hall blowing cigarette smoke and nursing drinks amid modern cast-iron barriers and fresco murals by American graf artist Futura 2000. Reaching the banister of an elevated second level overlooking the stage, Christine and I rested directly in the center just as another singer took to the microphone. A slight young woman with thick dredlocks flowing past her shoulders stood fronting a small band covering rock songs, lyrics from Nirvana and N.E.R.D. speaking of teen angst and nonconformity. Certain subjects translate well all over the world.

Sunday School night at Le Trabendo was my first visit to a Paris nightclub; it also marked the first time I hung out with Christine’s closest friends. She’d met Nadia, with wavy black hair and a fetish for stylish handbags and high heels, as a teenager at lycée. They hadn’t seen one another since Nadia returned from her brother’s traditional Algerian wedding in Morocco weeks ago. Patricia (nicknamed Patoche), a brunette who stood even shorter than Christine, was teasingly known for her bountiful ass, sizable for a provincial French girl. She’d been living with Louis-Phillipe (nicknamed Paco), her onetime salsa partner from Martinique, for a year. Friendly and bilingual, Paco talked up the maintenance of my dredlocks with an interest in regrowing his own.

“There’s too much métissage,” I quipped, commenting on the preferred hairstyle worn by most of the African and Caribbean women around us. The clichéd idea of bohemian poetry slams with sisters in dredlocks, Afros and various natural braided styles actually holds true at venues like the Nuyorican Poets Café back in New York City. If Parisians were trying to copy that scene, then these ladies flaunting synthetic hair extensions were overlooking an important black boho rule: hair is political. But Patoche’s blue eyes stared wide as saucers at my faux pas, her pale fingers intertwining with the darker digits of her boyfriend. Christine hurriedly explained that I meant tissages (hair weaves) and not métissage (black and white couples), which were as plentiful everywhere around us as the weaves. Everyone laughed.

“Thoughts about mixed couples are different in the U.S.,” I explained once the performances finished. Christine and I drank Monacos alone at the side of the dance floor, avoiding cigarette fumes and the elbows of dancers getting down to French R&B. “Black women look at black guys choosing white girls and think they have a problem with blackness, or they’re scared of black women, or they think they’re too good for sisters.”

“So you never had a white girlfriend?” she asked, nodding to singer Corneille’s “Sans Rancunes.”

“Just once,” I admitted. A close friend sings with his own band, and at one of his gigs on the Lower East Side four years ago, I hit it off with his backup singer’s roommate. A poet from California studying for her master’s degree, she and I had a brief affair before an aspiring writer at an Ivy League school—a black girl—caught my attention and things faded between us. But the poet’s mom was Asian, and so I never completely felt like I was actually dating a white girl.

“I think we’re growing up more together here,” Christine said. “You told me before that you grew up in the Bronx with all kinds of races. But in New York, this is not what I experienced.” She’d lived there eight years ago, staying about fifteen months before returning to France. “I remember taking the train to the Bronx, and after 116th Street there’s no more white people on the train. I’m not saying we’re going to see black people in the sixteenth arrondissement, not really. But in the average neighborhood here, you’re going to have une mixité. What makes the real difference is that we’re growing up together, so we’re going to learn the other person’s culture, and maybe enjoy the person for who they are.”

“But that’s not the only issue,” I countered. “In America it was illegal for black and white people to marry each other for a long, long time. They would hang brothers from trees for even looking at white women. France doesn’t have that history. Still, I know for a fact that when some sisters talk to each other about relationships, they feel like a large number of brothers are either in jail, on drugs, gay, or picking white girls. I don’t picture your friends having those kind of conversations.” Having drained our glasses, we paced through the crowded dance floor heading to the bar.

“At the same time,” she began with a smile, “there’s love as well. When I see, par example, Patoche and Paco, to me they were meant for each other. Paco, he dated African women in the past, and Patoche dated white and black before. But I saw when they met. They were meant to be, besides race.”

“Do you think it’s easier to look beyond race in France?” Most Americans assume this is true, but even from my few days in the country so far, I’d seen evidence to the contrary. Christine’s favorite leftist newspaper Le Canard Enchâiné regularly satirized controversial Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy and his hard-line approach to dealing with immigrants of color.

“Maybe,” she answered. “You’re less ‘not supposed to do something’ than in America. I think the pressure is stronger over there because society is not going to want you to mix in that way. Even inside your family the pressure is going to be stronger. And not every mixed couple lives in Manhattan either. Imagine if you live in Arkansas; your life can be hell! In France it can be the same thing if you live in a small village. Mais, the less you are together, the less they are going to expect you to be together, and in France we are not as apart from each other. You don’t have a separate black school here where they’re teaching you how wonderful it is to be black and what black people did to make humanity grow.”

Feverish debate is the French national pastime, so Christine would gladly lean on the bar with me discussing métissage for the whole rest of the night. Her last point was a reference to my all-black, all-male alma mater, and our talk of blacks and whites took me back to similar conversations I had in college. As undergrads under the influence of nationalist thinkers and our own civil-rights-era parents, we felt a responsibility to marry only African-American women, to make our culture stronger and reverse trends in our community that weaken the black family, like absent fathers.

Some of us matured away from the idea of a black culture that thinks with only one point of view about things like interracial marriage, and others never would. My opinions now are a lot different than they were before I graduated, but I tried explaining to Christine—the product of a supposedly colorblind society—my younger attitude about preserving and protecting the black community from being watered down. She laughed.

“To me there’s no real black community here like you have,” she explained. I noticed the DJ switch from French to American music for the first time: “Yeah!” by Usher. “Living in France, I think what we lack is a real community. I come from Martinique, but Martinique is far. The cuisine, the music, these are my only links.

“The fight that you had in the United States became the fight of black people around the world. For your parents and grandparents, I understand they feel responsible to keep fighting. But here, there was no such fight. Slavery ended aux Antilles in the nineteenth century, and then people came to France from Martinique and Guadalupe to work. There’s no fight that happened here on the territory. La France, the Republic, is no race! There’s no statistics of how many black people are here. We have an idea but not really. That was shocking to me when I was in New York, to fill out stuff and see race questions. C’est incroyable.”

Most people only come to Sunday School night for the singing and spoken-word. After the open-mic closed, barely half the crowd stayed to dance, flirt and hang out. A lot of the clubheads had already left for the last métro of the night at nearby Porte de Pantin. I realized that I had turned the night into another dialogue on race, something I managed to do fairly often since I arrived in Paris a week ago. Christine didn’t seem to mind, but I knew that she was more intrigued by the idea of racial identity than the average French black person. Maybe she craved discussions like this after a lifetime spent in a society turning a blind eye to the matter.

As Patoche, Paco and Nadia approached us at the bar, I quickly reviewed in my head the friends and family of Christine I’d met so far. At least seven couples were interracial. Back in New York I knew of only one mixed couple even peripherally, an old classmate from high school I hardly spoke to anymore who’d married a white guy. No one in my own family had gone there, while several of Christine’s cousins and aunts had. This made me even more curious about the reality behind France’s colorblind reputation, and the truth of black Parisian life beyond all the good publicity.