The Stone Face
Page 2
Yet exile alone does not guarantee this “double perspective.” It requires time, reflection, and, above all, vigilance, since—as Baldwin observed acidly, and perhaps unfairly, of Wright—the adoptive country’s acceptance, and pleasures, can prevent it from forming. In The Stone Face, Smith chronicles the emergence of Simeon’s double perspective in three briskly told parts whose titles suggest his shifting identities: “The Fugitive,” “The White Man,” and “The Brother.” When Simeon arrives in Paris in the spring of 1960, he is a refugee from America’s race war—the first physical detail Smith supplies is that he has only one eye. Haunted by the monstrous face of his attacker, a “stone face” disfigured by rage, with “fanatic, sadistic and cold” eyes, he is trying, at the novel’s opening, to reproduce it on canvas, the “un-man, the face of discord, the face of destruction.” This is, literally, art therapy: “I left to prevent myself from killing a man,” he confesses.
At first, Paris enables Simeon to heal, as he rejoices in the disappearance of the color line and falls into the soft embrace of the black American expatriate scene. In swift, deft strokes, Smith sketches the geography of what the historian Tyler Stovall calls “Paris noir”: the soul-food restaurant run by Leroy Haynes in Montmartre, the Tournon and Monaco cafés, the bookshop near Wright’s apartment on rue Monsieur le Prince, the jazz clubs. Himes makes a cameo as the grouchy novelist James Benson, a “strange cat, a sort of hermit” who “disappears into his apartment with whatever girl he happens to be living with,” and occasionally emerges to curse the white world and the American government. It’s at the Tournon that Simeon first sees Maria, an aspiring actress determined to forget her childhood in the camps, where she was protected by a Nazi guard who took a twisted interest in her: “This child-role was a mask; there were nightmares inside her head.” Smith tenderly describes the beginning of their love affair as a meeting of survivors in the city of refuge.
What shatters Simeon’s idyll is his growing awareness that while he has fled the stone face in America, it is no less present in France—in the country where he’s at last able to breathe freely. At first he’s too happy to pay much attention to the headlines in the papers: MOSLEMS RIOT IN ALGIERS, FIFTY DEAD. But when he sees a man “with swarthy skin and long crinkly hair” pushing a vegetable cart, he wonders if he might be Algerian, and remembers how a group of white people in Philadelphia “had stared at him—and how he had stared back, sullen, defiant, detesting their nice clothes and leisure and lazy, inquisitive eyes.” Soon after, Simeon gets into a scuffle with an Algerian man, and both of them end up in the back of a police wagon. Simeon notices that the sergeant addresses Hossein with the familiar tu while using the polite vous with him. While Hossein is locked up for the night, Simeon is released. “You don’t understand,” the police officer tells him. “You don’t know how they are, les Arabes. . . . They’re a plague; you’re a foreigner, you wouldn’t know.”
The next day he runs into Hossein, who asks him, “Hey! How does it feel to be a white man? . . . We’re the niggers here! Know what the French call us—bicot, melon, raton, nor’af.” One of Hossein’s friends, Ahmed, an introspective young medical student from a Berber family in Kabylia, invites him to dinner the following evening. They hop onto a bus together:
The further north the bus moved, the more drab became the buildings, the streets and the people. . . . It was like Harlem, Simeon thought, except that there were fewer cops in Harlem. . . . The men he saw through the window of the bus had whiter skins and less frizzly hair, but they were in other ways like the Negroes in the United States. They adopted the same poses: “stashing” on corners, ready for and scared of the ever-possible “trouble,” eyes sullen and distrusting.
Noticing that Simeon’s attention has wandered, Ahmed asks him, “Where are you?” “Home,” he replies.
Yet the Algerians, to Simeon’s disappointment, do not “break into smiles and rush to embrace him shouting: ‘Brother!’ They kept their distance, considering him with caution, as they would a Frenchman—or an American.” The fact that he is “racially” black does not make him an ally in their eyes; he must prove himself first. In The Stone Face, whiteness is not a skin color or a “racial” trait; it is, rather, a synonym for situational privilege. Relinquishing it, Smith suggests, is a difficult process, especially for an oppressed man who’s barely begun to enjoy it. In a pivotal scene, Simeon brings his Algerian friends to a private club that he could never have joined in America. People at other tables whisper as they enter; the host is chillier than usual: “To his own astonishment, Simeon felt uneasy. Why was that?” Perhaps “he was afraid of something. Of losing something. Acceptance, perhaps. The word made him wince. Of feeling humiliation again. For one horrible instant he found himself withdrawing from the Algerians—the pariahs, the untouchables! . . . Sitting here with the Algerians he was a nigger again to the eyes that stared. A nigger to the outside eyes—that was what his emotions had fled.” An argument erupts between a white woman and one of Simeon’s friends, but Simeon, shamed by his initial response, rallies to his friend’s defense and feels, for the first time, “at one with the Algerians. He felt strangely free—the wheel had turned full circle.”
Simeon’s black friends at the Tournon frown upon his decision to disavow his privilege: they have no desire to place their security in France in jeopardy. “Forget it, man,” one of them says. “Algerians are white people. They feel like white people when they’re with Negroes, don’t make no mistake about it. A black man’s got enough trouble in the world without going about defending white people.” Maria is even more alarmed by Simeon’s deepening attachment to his Algerian friends, one of whom—to Simeon’s horror—has expressed a violent suspicion of Jews in her presence. Why, she asks, can’t he “simply accept happiness” instead of “seeking complications”? After all, he fled a life of racism in America; must he continue to fight it here? “Perhaps the Negro who might want to marry you might not be able to flee,” he replies. “Not forever. Because of something inside . . .”
That “something inside” is Simeon’s conscience, and Smith describes what causes it to stir with extraordinary precision, in a remarkably authentic description of the Algerian War’s impact on the métropole. As Simeon is taken into the confidence of his Algerian friends, he learns of the existence of detention centers and camps inside France, and of a network of French supporters for the resistance, the so-called porteurs de valises, or baggage carriers. He meets two young women, Algerian survivors of French prisons, one of whom was tortured in front of her father and fiancé with electrodes applied to her genitals; the other raped with a broken champagne bottle. And in the last pages of the novel, Smith provides a wrenching account of the police massacre of Algerian protestors on October 17, 1961—the only one that exists in the fiction of the period. (The first French novel to broach the topic, Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire, was published in 1984.) Smith’s French publisher told him it was “very courageous to have written the book, but we can’t publish it in France.” Unlike his other books, The Stone Face, his only novel set in Paris, has never been translated into French.
The October 17 massacre took place in response to a peaceful demonstration called by the National Liberation Front (FLN) to protest a curfew imposed on all Algerians in Paris. Its architect was the head of the Paris police, Maurice Papon, who had successfully concealed his involvement in the deportation of more than 1,600 Jews in Bordeaux during the war, and gone on to serve as the police prefect in the Constantinois region of Algeria, where he presided over the torture of rebel prisoners. The FLN had killed eleven policemen in the Paris region since August, and, at one of their funerals on October 2, Papon boasted that “for one hit taken we shall give back ten.” Under his orders, the demonstration was brutally suppressed; hundreds of protesters were killed, some in the street that evening, their bodies thrown into the Seine; others were beaten to death inside police stations over the next few days.‡ A
s Smith writes, “Theoretically, French police charges were aimed at splitting demonstrations into small pockets, and dispersing the demonstrators; but it was clear that tonight the police were out for blood. . . . Along the Seine, police lifted unconscious Algerians from the ground and tossed them into the river.” Simeon sees a woman with a baby being clubbed, punches the officer who’s attacking her, and ends up, again, in the back of a police van. But this time one of the Algerians riding alongside him says, “Salud, frère”—“Hello, brother.”
The original draft of The Stone Face ended with Simeon heading to Africa, as his Algerian friends have urged him. In the final version, Simeon decides that it’s time to go home, where civil rights activists are “fighting a battle harder than that of any guerrillas in any burnt mountains. Fighting the stone face.” Some admirers of the novel have interpreted its conclusion as a regrettable failure of nerve, a retreat from the cosmopolitan solidarity it otherwise promotes—in Paul Gilroy’s words, a “capitulation to the demands of a narrow version of cultural kinship that Smith’s universalizing argument appears to have transcended.” But there is another way of understanding Simeon’s decision. The Algerian struggle has not only given him the courage to confront the stone face he fled; it has transformed his understanding of American racism by inscribing it in a wider history of Western domination. When Simeon refers to black Americans, he now calls them “America’s Algerians.”
A longing for home, if not Eden itself, is, of course, a recurring theme in the modern novel; Georg Lukács argued that the form itself is shaped by a sense of “transcendental homelessness” in a world abandoned by God. In The Stone Face, the world has been deserted not by a higher power but by justice, which humans alone can create: in its absence, “home is where the hatred is,” in the words of Gil Scott-Heron. Yet the critics of The Stone Face have a point. Smith obviously agonized over his exile from America, which separated him not only from his family but from black America at a time of revolutionary upheaval. “I sometimes feel guilty living way over here,” he wrote his younger sister, “especially when I hear about ‘freedom marches’ and the like.” But he had little interest in moving back to a country he disliked “not only racially, but also politically and culturally.” Instead he left his job at AFP and went to Ghana, where W. E. B. Du Bois’s widow, Shirley Graham Du Bois, had invited him to help her launch the independent state’s first television station. He flew to Accra in August 1964 with Solange and their one-year-old daughter, Michèle, and moved into a big house on the sea provided by Kwame Nkrumah’s government.
“For the first time in a long time I feel very useful!” he wrote his mother shortly after his arrival. “This country is going places—Nkrumah is a real African patriot, and he wants his country to develop fast. The people walk proud and tall.” He met other prominent African American writers living in Accra, including Maya Angelou and Julian Mayfield, and spent an evening talking to Malcolm X when Malcolm swept into town in November, three months before his assassination. In those early days, Smith allowed himself to dream that he’d come back home. Sounding not unlike Simeon among the Algerians of northern Paris, he wrote that on the boulevards of Accra he “felt, sometimes, as though I were walking down a street in South Philadelphia, Harlem, or Chicago. These black people in their multicolored robes, with their laughter, with their rhythmic gait, were my cousins.” In July 1965 he affirmed his bond with the African motherland when Solange gave birth to their son, Claude.
Smith’s African dream, however, disintegrated even more rapidly than his Paris reverie. While the “visible signs of black sovereignty” in Nkrumah’s Ghana still moved him, he saw that “the Black Power of Ghana” had “grave limitations.” He also realized that “the idea of black American nationalists, summed up in the phrase, ‘We are black, therefore we are brothers,’ is incomprehensible in tribal societies where the hereditary enemies have, precisely, been black. For the Ibo of Eastern Nigeria, the Hausa of the North is a much more fearful, deadly and real adversary than the white-skinned men across the sea he will never sail.” Early in the morning of February 24, 1966, he and Solange were awakened by gunfire. The army and the police had staged a coup against Nkrumah. When Smith arrived at his office, he was detained by a group of armed men and taken to a rebel-controlled police station. He and his family flew to Geneva that evening with all their belongings, before returning to Paris.
Not long after their return, Smith separated from Solange. He had fallen in love with a young Indian Jewish woman working at the Indian embassy, Ira Reuben, the daughter of a judge on the high court of Patna; they married as soon as his divorce was finalized. (Their daughter, Rachel, now a singer and actress, was born in 1971.) Restless as ever, he continued to travel for AFP. In the summer of 1967, he spent three weeks in Algeria and a month in the United States, where he saw his mother for the first time in sixteen years. This reporting became the basis of his book Return to Black America (1970), a fascinating study of the transformations among “America’s Algerians.” He interviewed not only Stokely Carmichael and other Black Power leaders but gangsters such as Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, the king of the Harlem underworld, who reminded him of Ali La Pointe, an Algerian rebel who started out as a criminal in the casbah. Youth gangs, Smith wrote, were “becoming the hard core of the black nationalist movement. . . . The same thing . . . occurred with Algerian gangs . . . during the Algerian liberation struggle.” He marveled at the confidence exhibited by young black people, their fearlessness in confronting white supremacy, even “the way they moved, the way they acted.” But “the real change, the real revolution, was inside. These black youths with whom I talked from coast to coast were much more different from most people of my generation than we were from the generation of our fathers.”
What had triggered this cultural revolution among young black Americans, he argued, was the Second World War, when black soldiers like himself were
uprooted from their tenant farms and ghettos and hurled across the ocean to do battle with white and yellow men in the name of freedom, democracy, and equality. The war opened up new horizons. Many black Americans came alive for the first time in the ruins of Berlin, the coffeehouses of Tokyo, the homes of Frenchmen or Italians. Members of a victorious army, they found respect and consideration for the first time—but from the former enemy!
Black America’s revolution, he suggested, had been fueled not only by oppression but by the enlarged perspective and imaginative freedom that displacement and exile had afforded. Nothing less than a “radical transformation of the surrounding white society itself,” he concluded, could answer the revolution’s demands for equality “in every sphere—political, economic, social, and psychological.” Like Baldwin, who drew a similar portrait of the Black Power era in his 1972 essay No Name in the Street, Smith predicted that white America would do everything in its power to resist such a transformation.
Before his death in 1974, Smith proposed a novel he called “Man Without a Country,” about (in the words of his widow, Ira Gardner-Smith) “a black American who lives in France, who also lived in Africa, and because of these three continents—which all become part of him—he ceases to belong anywhere.” He could not find a publisher. But in Last of the Conquerors, The Stone Face, and Return to Black America, Smith left us with an extraordinary trilogy about the liberation, and the costs, of a black writer’s exile in Europe. “The black person could live in greater peace with his environment in Copenhagen or Paris than in New York, not to speak of Birmingham or Jackson,” he wrote:
But he found it at times harder to live at peace with himself. The black man who established his home in Europe paid a heavy price. He paid it in a painful tearing of himself from his past. . . . He paid for it in guilt. . . . He paid for it, finally, in a sort of rootlessness: for, seriously, who were all these peculiar people speaking Dutch, Danish, Italian, German, Spanish, French? . . . What did they know about the black skin’s long, bitter, and soon t
riumphant odyssey? The black man, no matter how long he lived in Europe, drifted through these societies as an eternal “foreigner” among eternal strangers.
Yet the stranger did not regret his journey. As he wrote in his unpublished memoir, “Through Dark Eyes,” “this rootlessness has its inconveniences, but it has an advantage too: it gives a certain perspective.” Smith’s perspective—a radical humanism both passionate and wise, sensitive to difference but committed to universalism, anti-racist but averse to tribalism, disenchanted yet rebelliously hopeful—feels in dangerously short supply these days. It’s time for his books to be restored to print, and for William Gardner Smith to be repatriated to the one country where he found a lasting home: the republic of letters.
—ADAM SHATZ
*One wonders if Baldwin read Wright’s 1954 book on African independence struggles, Black Power, which contains a number of scathing criticisms of French colonialism: “It’s a desperate young black French colonial who resolves to return to his homeland and face the wrath of white Frenchmen who’ll kill him for his longing for the freedom of his own nation, but who’ll give him the Légion d’honneur for being French.”
†As James Q. Whitman has shown in Hitler’s American Model, these practices were closely studied by Nazi jurists.