Chapter 1 (excerpt), The Noir Album
Against the gray clouds of an overcast sky, the columns and spire of the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette cathedral shoot to the heavens like flora nourished by a glum god. Since the spring equinox, gloomy weather has trudged on for days, rains bucketing down every now and then like the sun showers in tropical locales. I sprint up the metro station steps two at a time to meet my wife. I’m late, again, the second time this week. Christine sits on the granite steps of the church, listening to zouk, waiting. She smiles, removing her tiny headphone earpieces. We kiss.
I apologize and Christine hands me a Paris metro map folded into eighths the size and shape of a credit card. I hate maps; she knows this. I don’t want to look like a tourist, like an obvious American. The uneven dreds grazing my shoulders already mark me as different in a city where black men are more likely to maintain conservative hairstyles. But cutting my locks is one thing, carrying around a map is another. I jut it inside the back pocket of my jeans. Tonight it goes into the garbage.
She takes my hand to lift her up. The French have seven weeks of paid holidays every year, and this tail end of May 2005, Christine takes eleven days off just on general principle. During her break I initiate her into ghostbusting, to help me dig up some spirits. Arm in arm, we turn the corner and walk down to the rue des Martyrs in search of a bank. The Crédit Agricole d’Ile-de-France we discover 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. Paris Reflections details the names and places where black American expatriates impacted Paris back in the day, and exactly when. This drab Thursday we walk through Saint-Georges and Montmartre to Pigalle, the seedy ninth arrondissement neighborhood central to black expats from 1910 till around the Great Depression.
I’m wearing a snug CBGB T-shirt, freezing, a beige Nehru jacket that I refuse to wear slung over my shoulder. I left our small apartment in Arcueil—a small ville three stops outside of the southernmost fourteenth arrondissement—in a rush, not realizing the jacket matched my tan hemp jeans a little too perfectly. The jeans and jacket together look like a Boyz II Men ensemble or a Garanimals outfit. I choose to suffer for fashion instead.
It is better to look good than to feel good, I tell Christine. It’s a tired line, an eighties catchphrase from a Billy Crystal Saturday Night Live character, and she cracks up, having never seen Saturday Night Live. Our relationship is filled with moments just like this, where I say corny things I would never think to say to an American girl. Born on Martinique island, raised twenty minutes from Paris in the town of Chevilly-Larue, Christine appreciates what made the joke funny fifteen years ago because her country never ran the saying into the ground.
Weather is hard to call in Paris; for the rest of the chilly afternoon I point out other unfortunates in T-shirts and claim them as my brethren. We turn another corner, from Saint-Georges to Montmartre, and walk down the rue Clauzel a bit before reaching a familiar restaurant with a log cabin façade. The sign reads HAYNES AMERICAN RESTAURANT but I’ve got three different Paris guides that name it Haynes Grill, Haynes Restaurant, and just plain old Haynes. Last April we approached the bistro from a different direction and so we’re 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 knows all about it from the Shark Bar on Amsterdam Ave, from the fifteen months she lived in New York City in the late nineties, when we first dated. At Haynes, she was not amused.
Moving to Paris last year, I treated Christine to dinner at Haynes, the very first soul-food spot in all of Europe, established in 1949 by Morehouse graduate Leroy Haynes. Photos from its heyday adorned the white stucco walls of the comfy eatery: 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 Miles Davis’s “So What” the minute we were seated. (And my namesake patron saint follows me around here often. Just last week his soundtrack to Ascenseur Pour l’Echafaud trailed me through a Saint-Michel card shop.)
The homely place feels like an old Southern restaurant that’s fallen out of favor and relies strictly on its regulars. Yet Haynes has no competition. African-American cooking is only available here and over at Percy’s Place, a recent challenger in the sixteenth arrondissement. Contenders Chez Inez, Bojangles, and Jezebel’s have long since closed their doors. I left Haynes last year feeling like Sean “Diddy” Combs could clean up extending his Justin’s restaurant franchise to Montmartre. This is another no-brainer. We walk.
A smallish truck ambles down the rue Clauzel, adorned with top-to-bottom graffiti. The tag reads POLO in daybreak-colored bubble letters of golden tangerine, a nice piece. I notice many fruit and vegetable trucks in the city bombed just like this, apparently with their owners’ permission, delivery vehicles for Parisian épiceries. Christine cannot read the truck, graffiti illiterate, but for me decoding the intricate ghetto calligraphy of spray paint and fat markers was a childhood rite of passage. Whereas Christine was educated on art through lycée-sponsored trips to the Louvre, I spent my youth navigating Co-op City tenement buildings appraising graffiti like a pretentious art critic.
Teenage friends crossed busy highway intersections, backpacks jangling with Krylon aerosol cans, on nighttime bombing excursions in the northeast Bronx in the mid 1980s. We didn’t imagine at the time that our adolescent amusement had even then already taken root overseas in the roughshod suburban banlieues of Paris, and as vibrant backdrops on a popular weekly French television program called Hip-Hop. Half a world away, television studios were creating an industry out of our neighborhood subculture. All I knew of France then—circa 1986—was romanticized from Prince in the musician’s maligned Nice-based film Under the Cherry Moon and the Paris-situated Sting concert documentary Bring on the Night. I was hardly raised in a household taking summertime vacations in Europe. Dad never owned a passport; Mom’s had long expired by the time I was a teenager.
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 no one in her family had yet experienced. 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 mother 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 comic books. 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 grandmother, Juanita, settled herself in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx while my father remained uptown with my great-grandparents. After briefly marrying a man not my father’s biological father, Juanita divorced, met Frank Lewis—who would later adopt my father—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 Creole 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 fair-skinned teenage boy whose parents migrated to Harlem from New Orleans, Jacques went steady with Juanita just out of high school. A month before turning nineteen, she gave birth to Darryl as a single mother. Our family name is Lewis because of a 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 father at the start of their marriage, Frank Lewis never bonded paternally with Darryl. Effectively, my father’s grandparents were his parents, another fairly regular occurrence 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 last name 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 an infamous strategy 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 during 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 rendezvous 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 New Orleans, Jacques explained that his lineage—still a bit sketchy to me, as it was only explained this once over tequila and orange juice—stemmed from Louisiana Creoles, revealing a French heritage to our bloodline.
I began this book to explore the idea of what blacks are getting up to in Paris during the premiere decade of the twenty-first century. Heavily diluted French family blood had nothing to do with my overtures to relocate here last year. I credit that decision mainly to a condition of the heart—historically the source of much Parisian decision-making, no doubt.
