My Soul Looks Back

by Jessica B. Harris

  The kinship I felt to Louise probably also had to do with her occasionally bringing her mother to parties and events. It made me feel less self-conscious about appearing with my own mother in tow. My mom reveled in the bohemian life of Sam’s crowd and hungered for the intellectual stimulation that took her away from the bourgeois enclaves of Queens, where talk ran to social club doings like Links luncheons and Sigma Wives formal dances. Our maternal “charges” made for an instant rapprochement—on my part in any case.

  Rosa and Louise were friends of Sam’s and intimates of Maya’s. (In fact, Maya had roomed with Rosa on her arrival in New York.) In my mind, they formed a triumvirate with Paule Marshall, another pivotal member of the group. If Louise and Rosa were accessible, Brooklyn-born Paule Marshall was more of a cipher. Her parents were immigrants from Barbados who’d moved to Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, and her first book, Brown Girl, Brownstones, told of that immigrant experience. She wrote about her life on the hyphen between American and West Indian and was one of the first to talk of the challenges facing those who arrived from the Caribbean. She was a young mother, and perhaps for that reason, many of the gatherings were held at her apartment on Central Park West.

  Like Louise, Rosa, and indeed Maya when she was in New York, the West Side was home for Paule, and her large apartment at 407 Central Park West was often the preferred venue. The high ceilings and (I guess) music-tolerant neighbors meant that we often found ourselves in her living room with the record player going. If it was chez Paule, it was party time. Then it was all about Al Green, the Motown sound, some disco favorites, and Stevie Wonder with Talking Book and Innervisions. The bass riff would come pounding off the vinyl, and Sam would start snapping his fingers and twirling and dipping to the intro beats. “Very superstitious . . .” Don’t let Al Green’s intro to Love and Happiness come on; then it was time for some fancy footwork and special showing off. It was another night with the crowd in the era of discos and platform shoes, themed by music that transformed the world.

  Rose, Louise, and Paule were stalwarts, the central folks in the group. Others came and went with less frequency but were also members in good standing of the pack. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, or Mae or Vert, as she was sometimes known, always provided entertainment. She had already written Vibration Cooking, her first book, and had been working with food as a means of cultural expression when I met her. We were both journalists at Essence magazine, where she penned social commentary. These pieces were witty and trenchant, and she was not afraid of taking positions that were a little controversial. “I Told Jesus It Would Be Alright If He Changed My Name” was an uproarious piece on the name changing to African names real or imagined that was going on in the Black community, while her book Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off detailed her exploits in the world of domestic service with laughing to keep from screaming accuracy.

  Baldwin declared that he loved Vertamae because she made him laugh, and indeed her exploits were the stuff of urban legend. They usually involved much to-ing and fro-ing on fire escapes and enough chases through doors to create a Feydeau farce. Her gleefully embellished retellings of them were often humorous indeed. Then there were tales of her other escapades, of her playing the vibrations as one of the Space Goddesses in the Arkestra at Sun Ra concerts (no doubt the genesis of the vibration cooking concept). Her world seemed rife with possibility; even her daughter, Kali, was a child prodigy poet with a published book, and in addition, Verta was reputed to be a grand cook.

  Vertamae and I had a tenuous friendship, for like so many others in the group, she was older than I, wiser in the ways of the world than I, more volatile in personality than I, and ready to compete. With Vertamae, though, it was not about Sam. Rather, our competition began (and I’m not sure how) about my burgeoning work in the area of food and culture. I’d begun to pen a bimonthly version of my travel column in Essence under the rubric “The Go Gourmet” in which I wrote about the places I’d been and the foods I ate. The column was the genesis of my first cookbook, Hot Stuff: A Cookbook in Praise of the Piquant. Later, the culinary connections that I sampled on those journeys would form the basis for Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking, my second cookbook.

  Verta and I both traveled in the world of the African diaspora, and we were two Black women in a field that some felt could hold only one. It was not supposed to be me. In fact, I had just stumbled into an area that allowed me to combine my love of travel, my love of food, my love of history, my love of languages, and my growing love of journalism, and it was too good a fit to let go. So we often did the diva dance, trying to figure out how to both fit together on the head of the pin that was the developing world of food studies. Over the years, we learned to appreciate each other, but for more than a little while, our bourgeoning friendship was more of a hesitation step than a waltz.

  • • •

  There were others, too, academics like Eleanor Traylor, with her incisive mind and enviable wardrobe, and Richard Long, who was given to larding his erudite conversation with quotes from the early philosophers in the original Greek. Some, like Stokely Carmichael, made only rare appearances; others, like Hugh Masakela, were around for a brief period and then gone; and still others—Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, Miles Davis—appeared infrequently but made their presence immediately felt.

  And then there was Nina. “Who’s the bitch in the red dress?” Those words rang out across the room as I crossed the threshold. I don’t remember whose home it was or what the occasion was. I do remember that I was wearing a slinky red dress made by my friend Kai Lofton that flowed liquidly over my dancer-lithe body. After looking around, I realized with a start that “the bitch in the red dress” was me. I also remember that I was staggered, but those were the first words that Nina Simone ever addressed about me. Not to me, about me! Oh my; that hadn’t started well.

  Naturally Sam knew Nina Simone as well. He was the one she called when an escort was a good idea and when going alone meant there was no one to fend off the crowds that might be curious. In Sam’s case, his wit and intellect coupled with his dapper personal style made him a much-in-demand partner and one whose friendship the women he escorted guarded jealously. Nina was certainly in that number.

  Nina had been born in North Carolina, Sam’s home state, the same year and one day after Sam. Their virtual twin birth bonded them in a way that they would share and joke about. Sam had demons that she could understand, and vice versa. He had been a favorite of hers, and upon my appearance she aligned herself with the growing number of folks who felt that I was de trop. I was an interloper and certainly too young and naive to run with the crowd, but I had been brought by the man who was a pivot of the circle of friends and so claws were sheathed . . . somewhat.

  By the mid-1970s, Simone was certainly a musical icon. I had long been a fan and often boasted that I had all of her records. Her distinctive voice and her virtuoso piano playing haunted me—“I Loves You Porgy,” “Little Girl Blue,” and the mordantly humorous “Four Women.” Anyone with any pretense of social consciousness knew her song “Mississippi Goddamn,” and many had drawn solace from “Why? The King of Love Is Dead” following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. I remember listening to it over and over again in my dorm room at college, trying to make sense of the wave of madness that had seemingly overtaken the country. Her song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was the anthem for my generation of young Black artists trying to figure out the world and create a place in it for themselves from which to operate with pride. It was drawn from the title of a posthumous biographical montage of the works of Lorraine Hansberry, another member of the long-standing group of friends, who had succumbed to cancer a decade before I came along. Hansberry and Simone had been friends; Nina credited Hansberry with politicizing her. Sam knew them both.

  Simone’s opening salvo was devastating but was mitigated somewhat when she accepted the tribute/offering that I had brought: a pair of antique Senegalese ea
rrings that I’d purchased on a trip to that country. I remember little more of that evening other than I got through it, which is probably not a bad thing, but Nina would reappear in my life several times after that night.

  Sam’s international connections spread to Barbados, where Simone had traveled in 1974 and later lived. At some point, Sam had been down to visit her and met a number of folks; he returned to New York and regaled me with tales of his stay on the island. My first press trip as assistant travel editor of Essence also took me there, and through Sam’s friendships I visited some of the places that had featured in Simone’s island sojourn and met some of the folks that she’d known, including Stella St. John, wife of a former Barbadian prime minister, Bernard St. John, and her sister, Denise Hope. I saw the Island Inn hotel, where Sam had stayed, and smiled to myself remembering his commentary about the bar there and the Kingston Trio–like Merrymen who were the esteemed national musicians of Barbados of the time. That they were white and singing canned calypso-lite was uproariously amusing to us both, as it had no doubt been to the culturally attuned, highly politicized Simone. Sam described the genesis of Simone’s album It Is Finished, and told tales of her daily practice of Rachmaninoff and Bach and other intricate pieces from the classical repertoire on her baby grand piano and how she later transformed the seemingly effortless trills and flourishes into the introductions of various songs on the album. According to him, she wanted Sam in her life in a larger way, but that was not to be; both were too volatile. On that record, Simone calls out, “Exuma, you here?” to her famous Bahamian colleague, but only I knew that Sam was also supposed to be in that audience and was not there.

  My Bajan memories were not the last time that Nina intruded into my life. She would appear again, in person no less, after the heat of my relationship with Sam had transformed into cooling embers—when I was a more seasoned travel writer and journeying to Africa to report on tourism for Travel Weekly. I had garnered a press trip to the Ivory Coast in the days before it became the Côte d’Ivoire. By then, Simone had cemented her American exile and was living in West Africa, in Liberia, as suggested by her friend Miriam Makeba. Liberia was English speaking: the life, society, and culture were based on familiar American models, the American dollar was the official currency, and it was next door to Guinea, where Makeba lived. When Simone arrived there, the country was enjoying the last years of Americo-Liberian rule, with the descendants of former enslaved Americans living luxurious lives that would all end brutally with firing squads on a beach in the 1980 coup.

  For many Liberians back then, the neighboring Ivory Coast under the presidency of Félix Houphouët-Boigny provided a spot of French sophistication and a nearby playground where perfume, champagne, haute cuisine, and haute African couture by designers like Chris Seydou and Mammadou Sy were readily available. In Abidjan, the capital, Houphouët-Boigny had created a showplace city for which he had commissioned a hotel designed to match or best anything that the West could offer. No less a critic of colonialism and its aftermath than V. S. Naipaul called it the “fairground of Abidjan.” Indeed, it was.

  The Hôtel Ivoire, then run by the plush Intercontinental chain, boasted a casino, a rooftop restaurant serving Franco-Ivorian nouvelle cuisine, a lake-sized swimming pool, and an ice-skating rink. There were numerous restaurants; a massive convention center; a shopping mall featuring a bookstore, gift shop, and parfumerie; and a network of palm-fringed walks that wound their way through the property.

  By this time, I had been to Abidjan several times, as both a researcher and a travel writer, stayed at the hotel more than once, and had friends who lived nearby in the Cocody area. My article was to be about the possibilities Abidjan offered for tourists, so I had revisited the markets, journeyed down to the colonial town of Grand-Bassam, and even purchased African masks and statuary at the tourist market at the downtown center of the Plateau, where the bats hung off the palm trees in clusters and swarmed nightly at sundown. I had explored the alleyways of Treichville market at length and enjoyed the mix of items from the Sahel and the Forest that came together on the vendors’ tables there. I delight in markets in any form, and Treichville was particularly fascinating. There was seemingly everything, ranging from snails the size of fists in one alley to unidentifiable leafy greens in another; the small dark-skinned avocados that were so delicious with a French vinaigrette in the hotel’s snack bar could be found for a pittance, and if one climbed the rickety stairs, there was a wide array of fabric, including brilliant hand-woven kente cloth from neighboring Ghana in a rainbow of colors.

  One day as I was returning to my room and strolling through the hotel’s shopping arcade to search for a French magazine, I was struck by a ruckus in the parfumerie that was one of the boutiques. There was shouting, and clearly the person creating the row was an American because the raised voice was in English. Hoping to defuse the situation by translating for my obviously hapless countryman, I entered and stopped short. The person bellowing was Nina Simone.

  I would have backed out, but by then she’d seen me, and she remembered me! This time, I was no longer “the bitch in the red dress” but rather the individual soon to be transformed into temporary personal assistant, semi-griot, and full-time praise singer who translated her demands, got them serviced, and made sure that all knew just who she was. Following the resolution of the perfume problem, I introduced her to the more than slightly awed hotel manager, who graciously accorded her guest privileges to the hotel’s swimming pool, grounds, and public rooms, which were jealously guarded perquisites of any stay and given only to Abidjan’s elite who were friends of the management. He also invited her to join our scheduled dinner later in the week.

  And so for two days, she became my part-time travel buddy and full-time nemesis. The next day, I invited her to join me for lunch and an afternoon at the pool. She turned up looking regal, and before settling in on the chaise at the pool, she disrobed grandly to reveal a glacial white bikini that made the most of her sleek-toned, sun-loved body and left little to the imagination. With typical Nina barbed candor, she looked at me in my swimming shroud (I’ve never been comfortable in bathing suits) and commented pointedly, “I’m older than you are, and my body’s better than yours!” I could only nod yes in fatigued agreement, already ruing the gesture that had let foxy Nina into my personal henhouse.

  Dinner with the manager at the hotel’s gourmet roost, Le Toit d’Abidjan, continued the torture. She was totally charming. She’d arrived dressed to impress and pulled out all the stops worthy of the international superstar she was. She flirted, bantered lightly, and totally captivated the manager. I was so far in her shadow as to be nonexistent, which was understandable but a bit difficult because I was to interview the manager later in my stay for the newspaper. When the evening was over, I retreated to my room, closed the drapes, put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and took to my bed for a day, eschewing Abidjan’s pleasures in order to recover.

  • • •

  All of Sam’s friends were not always difficult for me. Others were genuine delights. Economist Mary Painter and her husband, chef Georges Garin, were very much a part of Baldwin’s world; they combined Sam’s and my love of France, cooking, and a good time all into one. During World War II and thereafter, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) seems to have been an incubator for brilliant women. Painter had worked in the research and analysis section of the OSS and devised a way of using statistical models to estimate Nazi submarine capabilities with amazing accuracy.

  After the war, Painter had been sent to Europe to help set up the Marshall Plan. She was a midwestern blonde who had a delicacy that camouflaged her insightful intelligence. Mary had met Baldwin in 1950 when she was working at the American embassy in Paris as an economist. She became his rock and often his salvation, and the woman he truly loved. He’d even dedicated Another Country to her. Richard Olney, chef, cookbook author, editor of the Time/Life Cookbook series, and good friend of both Jimmy’s and Mary’s, paint
ed dual portraits of the two of them as two complementary parts of a diptych. Baldwin once said of her, “When I realized I couldn’t marry Mary Painter, I realized I could marry no one.” Although their intense friendship could never morph into a romantic involvement, she’d remained one of Jimmy’s closest friends, seeing him through up times and down, and eventually convincing him to move to St. Paul-de-Vence in the South of France.

  After a tumultuous affair, Painter had become the second wife of Georges Garin, an irascible French chef in the grand tradition. In 1961, Garin, already a renowned chef in France, sold his Hotel de la Croix Blanche in Nuits Saint Georges, Burgundy, where he’d hosted banquets for the Chevaliers du Tastevin, and left the kitchens there to open a new place in Paris near the Place Maubert. Less than a year later, the Parisian culinary upper crust had declared him one of the country’s top chefs. Georges would have been spotted anywhere as a Frenchman: his bearded face was a map of the French hexagone, with a prominent nose just made for sniffing Cavaillon melons or fine wines.

  When Mary married Georges, he’d joined her circle of friends. With her marriage, though, she’d left the world of economics and intrigue and become la patronne of Chez Garin, Georges’s Parisian restaurant. With great pride and a nod to French restaurant tradition, she became mistress of the till or the caissière (the cashier and financial overseer) of her husband’s spot. Nightly she would use her impressive economic skills to add up the bills at the restaurant at 9 Rue Lagrange in the fifth arrondissement on the Left Bank. She was expected to be a gracious hostess, watch over the staff, write up checks, and generally oversee the front of the house; she detested it, but kept it up for a few years.