Georges and Mary, the dual moniker by which they were known, journeyed occasionally to New York, where I met them through Sam. Georges was tickled with my French and with my developing love of food; Mary may have seen parallels between my role in Sam’s life and hers in Jimmy’s. Sam and I and whoever else was around would eat out together with them as Georges made his rounds of Manhattan restaurants. He was a curious eater who loved to try new things and was fascinated by the American twists on classic French food and the New York dining scene.
The restaurant scene in New York in the 1970s was breaking away from the Gallic dominance and adding a note of fun. The Forum of the Twelve Caesars used upended Roman helmets as wine buckets and referenced Roman culinary authority Acipicius in the menu listings. The Fonda del Sol was an exuberant splash of Latin American art and food that changed the palate of many New Yorkers and showcased the food of the Hispanic world in ways it would take more than twenty years to repeat. The Four Seasons, with its impeccable service, its exemplary food, and its changing seasonal decor, became a restaurant classic for all seasons, and the Brasserie brought la cuisine bourgeoise to Gotham and offered a counterpoint to the existing French restaurants that were bastions of la grande cuisine classique.
The city’s French restaurant trend had begun with the 1964 World’s Fair when the French pavilion’s restaurant, helmed by the redoubtable Henri Soulé, left Flushing Meadows and became a fixture on the East Side of Manhattan known as Le Pavillon. It in turn spawned La Grenouille, La Côte Basque, La Caravelle, and others, most of them catering to well-heeled Upper East Side socialites and politicos. They became the haunts of the ladies who lunched and of Truman Capote’s swans, as he called his inner circle, and were noted for presenting the most sumptuous fare in jewel box surroundings.
Georges Garin frequented these as well. He ordered with the authority of one who truly knew the food and weighed the taste of each morsel as though Paris were judging Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. When wine was proffered for tasting, the shaking of jowls and slurping was wondrous to behold, especially as his colleagues waited, holding their breath in anticipation of his nod of approval: he was, after all, one of the best chefs in France. At La Caravelle, one of his favorites, the long, narrow entrance alley was where those who wanted to be seen roosted. Georges could care less. Wherever he sat was the best table in the house, and it usually was the best seat in the house. At this spot, one of the high temples of classical French cooking in New York, he was received as a demigod, and we’d file in behind him, taking our place at the table that was always heaped with delicacies.
My parents had taught me that it was polite to reciprocate, and I certainly didn’t have the cash to take Georges and Mary out to a restaurant of the caliber of La Caravelle, so I invited them to my apartment for dinner. I’ve forgotten whether Sam was in attendance at dinner, but I think that had he been around, he might have had the kindness to restrain my youthful foolhardiness somewhat. In any case, choucroute garnie it was, proudly served up with much ceremony in my one-bedroom apartment with its galley kitchen and the obligatory West Village brick wall. I’d learned to love choucroute garnie on my first trip to Paris and have continued to love it in all its permutations from the version served at the resto U, the university canteen where I occasionally ate as a student, to those served at brasseries in Nancy, where I’d done my graduate studies. My version included sauerkraut straight from the can, frankfurters, potatoes, a can of beer, and a hearty slug of gin. It was the delight of all of my friends.
I served it straight from my yellow Le Creuset look-alike cast iron ware on my ersatz Dansk plates. It was eaten, and seconds were even requested. No commentary was made about taste, authenticity, the franks, the can of beer, the gin, or anything else. A few days later, when I next saw Georges, he brought me a small gift: a small jar of juniper berries, one of the hallmarks of the classic Alsatian choucroute garnie. I have no idea where he got them back then; they certainly were not grocery store staples. He said not a word of correction or of comment other than, “You might want to try these the next time that you make choucroute.” Voilà! It was the gentlest correction I’ve ever received. But it resonated with me and made me like Georges and Mary even more. I would connect with them in Paris, and, later, Sam and I would visit them with Jimmy after they moved from Paris to Soulliès-Toucas in southeastern France.
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These friends—Paule, Louise, Rosa, and the rest—were folks who turned up at parties and in conversation. Though close, they were not the heart of things. That spot was reserved for Jimmy and for the special friend of Sam’s who shimmered in the ether even when she was not present: Maya Angelou. Sam and Maya had been a couple, and although I had no idea of the length of time or the intensity of the romance, clearly Maya was important to Sam and he to her. I do not remember exactly when I met Maya; just one day, she was there in a whirlwind of activity.
My first remembrance of her is at a dinner at the Paparazzi, an East Side Manhattan eatery run by Jerry Purcell, the man Maya credits with being her patron and giving her enough money to keep her afloat while she was writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Purcell, who was a personal manager and a record, television, and concert producer, was known to those outside show business ranks as the husband of Monique van Vooren, the pneumatic Belgian actress. Through Maya, Sam knew Purcell, and we had dinner at the restaurant occasionally. Paparazzi was aptly named: it was a fishbowl restaurant with huge plate glass windows through which the diners could be seen as they tucked into their pastas.
On one occasion, Maya arrived and joined us. She was imperially tall and wore her fame like a royal mantle. By then, I had read Caged Bird and was already in awe of her. She breezed into the restaurant like a whirlwind, bringing more animated conversation, higher intensity, and the tension that comes with knowing that you are at the center of a vortex. It was palpable; the air had changed. Even though this was an informal gathering of friends, Maya arrived with all of the pomp of Cleopatra descending the Nile: there were kisses all around, introductions to those not known, raucous remembrances of those not in attendance, and an order of another round of drinks with which to salute the occasion.
She’d married Paul du Feu in 1973. Tall and rangy, with a finely honed sense of dry British humor, he was charming, fierce, and extremely comfortable in his masculinity. A self-proclaimed hod carrier, he was a carpenter and a bricklayer by trade and had not only been married to feminist Germaine Greer of The Female Eunuch fame, but had posed nude in the British Playgirl magazine displaying his endowments to the world. Oh yes, AND HE WAS WHITE, which in itself was sort of scandeleux. None of it mattered to them or to anyone else. Maya was in love; they had their own private jokes and their conspiratorial smiles. They showed up at one New York evening for dinner at Paparazzi wearing matching mink-lined denim jackets and giggling about the ridiculousness of them. Conspiratorially close, they were given to raucous behavior. Evenings might end with rousing renditions of “Knees Up Mother Brown” while dancing in lockstep down the streets or in full-throated singing of other classic pub songs. “I’m ’enry the Eighth, I am!” Paul was used to smart women, who were, as the saying went, “heavy in the head.” When he was reportedly told that Maya was a very important woman in the world, his reply was, “I can carry the weight!” and for a while, he could. If he could handle Greer’s notoriety, clearly he’d be able to take the weight of Maya’s increasing fame.
Du Feu softened Maya in many ways and brought out her feminine side. This made her less fierce to me. Perhaps it was just that she was basking in the roseate glow of the first flush of an infatuation. Perhaps she and Sam were playing new partners off each other as former lovers occasionally do. Whatever the reason, our times with Maya and Paul had a deeper intensity, as though all other things had suddenly been squared. This, I would learn, was the way of their world: profound conversations about all aspects of life, heart-felt rage tempered by equally intense laughter with heads thrown back
and their entire bodies poured into the moment. It was a time of life lived fully, deeply. Random encounters would smoothly morph into dinners or gatherings that would then be transformed into events that could go well into the wee hours of the morning, but always underneath it all, there was the heartbeat of work and writing and speaking and teaching and all of the daily madness of life.
Sam thrived on it all, and I learned like a wise moth not to fly too close to the flames, but to hover in the middle distance, close enough to be a part of the circle and yet not so close that I was likely to get burned when the intensity of the conversations or the depth of the emotion turned caustic and corrosive. And so it went. As I became more a part of the group, however tangential, I was grudgingly welcomed and then accepted as a sort of appendage of Sam. It was fine, because it allowed me to sit in the room or hang out with them wherever he went—uptown, downtown, or around the world.
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Choucroute Garnie à Ma Manière
I love the Alsatian sauerkraut dish known as choucroute garnie that I sampled on my first trip to the City of Light. Somehow it just means Paris to me. I will always cringe at the thought of my early version of this classic. Now I’m a bit more sophisticated and yes, I make a point of using juniper berries.
– Serves ten to twelve –
13/4 pounds smoked meaty ham hocks
8 ounces thick-sliced bacon strips, cut into 1-inch pieces
2 large onions, chopped
1 teaspoon juniper berries (you may substitute 1/2 cup gin)
1 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
10 whole cloves
8 whole allspice berries
3 bay leaves
2 (2-pound) jars sauerkraut, rinsed and then squeezed dry
21/2 cups dry white wine
2 pounds kielbasa and knockwurst, cut into 4-inch pieces
1 pound frankfurters with natural casings
11/2 pounds small Yukon Gold potatoes
Place the ham hocks in large saucepan. Add enough water to well cover the hocks. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until the meat is very tender, about 2 hours. Transfer the hocks to a medium bowl. Reserve 21/2 cups of the broth. Remove the meat from the bones. Discard the bones and place the meat back in the bowl.
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat a large, heavy pot over medium-high heat. Add the bacon and sauté until it is crisp. Using a slotted spoon, place the bacon in the bowl with the meat.
Add the onions, juniper berries, peppercorns, cloves, allspice, and bay leaves to the same pot in which you cooked the bacon. Sauté until the onions are tender, about 5 minutes. Mix in the sauerkraut. Add the reserved broth, the wine, and the gin, if using. Add all the meats and press to submerge them. Boil for 10 minutes, then cover the choucroute, place in the oven, and bake for 11/2 hours.
Meanwhile, cook the potatoes separately in a pot of boiling salted water until tender. Remove the bay leaves and arrange the sauerkraut, meats, and potatoes on one large, deep platter. Serve with a variety of mustards.
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Chapter Five
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OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO! WEST SIDE RAMBLES
The folks my age who still lived in Queens were either starting families or still attached to parental apron strings. In Manhattan, there was a serious disdain for the “bridge and tunnel” folks. We were identifiable by our tendency to refer to Manhattan as “The City” as though it glowed emerald on the horizon beyond our boroughs, which were in fact equally a part of “the city” in question. As a newly emancipated member of the B&T crowd, I did my best to evidence what I thought was Manhattan sophistication. My crew of friends—others who had escaped the outer boroughs like me, those from out of town, and those who had grown up in Harlem—socialized in our newly acquired apartments. We haunted local restaurants, savored the independence of our twenties, and reveled in our veneer of worldliness.
In the early 1970s, some of my friends from the High School of Performing Arts had garnered jobs at the nascent PBS, working on a show with Ellis Haizlip called Soul. The jobs allowed them the flexibility to pursue auditions and nurture their burgeoning acting careers. Working on the show also allowed them to make contact with anyone who was anyone in the world of the Black Arts. Haizlip’s show was brilliant; it was don’t-miss-television for every Black intellectual in the city. The guests ranged from political activists like Stokely Carmichael and the mother of George Jackson, one of the in-the-news Soledad Brothers, to poets like Victor Hernández Cruz, Jayne Cortez, and Felipe Luciano of the Last Poets, an early spoken-word group. Imani, a young African American poet, was an occasional guest, and his love poem “The Water of Your Bath” remained framed and hanging in my bathroom over the tub for more than forty years.
Music was an important component of the show, which introduced wider audiences to jazz musicians like pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Authors were not left out. Chester Himes, author of Cotton Comes to Harlem, Amiri Baraka, Louise Meriwether, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor all appeared, and there was a notable two-part show hosted by Nikki Giovanni with a single guest: Baldwin himself. Then there were the popular singers. Here again Haizlip excelled, and many performers debuted on Soul while others made the show their television home. Esther Phillips, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba, and Gladys Knight and the Pips all graced the stage, as did Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson before their first album was released. On occasions when Soul produced musical stars in cabaret performances and needed an audience, they’d invite me and other friends, and I’d doll up, head out, sit at one of the small nightclub tables that decorated the set, and listen to the greats perform live for free. I still can recall the frisson of being in the second row of a notable performance with Al Green distributing blood-red roses to the women in the small audience while crooning “Let’s, Let’s Stay Together.” The show ended before I became a part of the Baldwin crowd through my friendship with Sam, but Soul and its stars and hosts defined and influenced Black intellectual life of the 1970s throughout the country at a time when the cultural presence of African Americans and the civil rights movement and its ongoing struggle made us a focus of the world. I knew many of the players in Baldwin’s crowd from my time at Soul where I would hang out in the office with friends and bask in their proximity to fame. We had even formed a loose club called Roots, designed to spread the gospel of Black Arts. The club was the genesis of my writing career and the source of some lifelong friends like photographer John Pinderhughes.
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Many of my friends lived on the increasingly popular Upper West Side where the rents were cheaper than in the Village and the apartments much larger. My job in Queens, though, tethered me to the IND/Independent subway line and I was happily nestled in the West Village near the E and F trains. The taxi or subway ride uptown on the IRT became a regular weekend commute as we zipped back and forth for gatherings.
We all led peripatetic lives within Manhattan. New York has always been a city of neighborhoods that are as distinct as villages, each with its own ethos and special spots. Sam had adopted some of Baldwin’s poles as his own, and so we journeyed uptown where Baldwin had grown up and where his mother, known as “Mother Baldwin,” lived. There was the West Village where we lived, anchored by Sam’s Horatio Street apartment and mine on Jane Street, and a jazz club on the West Side of Manhattan.
Mother Baldwin’s home was special and seen only by the intimate inner circle. There, Jimmy was comfortable in the heart of his family. Fame often distances “golden ones” from friends and family. That was not the case with Baldwin; he was blessed. His family remained a family, and he was treated as another member, albeit a famous one, within the circle. His siblings, Wilmer (known to all as Lover), Paula, Gloria, Barbara, and David, encircled him with their families and friends. Jimmy in turn brought his closest into the fold and on occasions when the nights became long, we
all sometimes repaired to Mother Baldwin’s and the rooms rang with laughter and family conversation. Frank Karefa-Smart, Gloria’s husband then, told tall tales of his life in his native Sierra Leone, and Helen Brodie Baldwin, Lover’s wife, sang bawdy camp songs from her days at Camp Minisink. (This iconic camp for Black New Yorkers was in Dutchess County and was founded by the New York Mission Society; it was the first sleep-away camp for many African American children.) At these times, life affirmed the ordinary everyday existence of Baldwin’s nuclear family. Of course, we occasionally witnessed the squabbles of siblings, but we were also there for the celebrations of the stops along life’s journey: birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and more.
In Greenwich Village in Baldwin’s former apartment building at 81 Horatio Street, Sam’s apartment was also special and reserved for intimates who passed muster and could hold their own with his rapier-sharp tongue. The crowd was larger than the one that gathered at Mother Baldwin’s, and the level of discourse was often more academic in tenor, with conversation time given to English instruction, the Black Arts Movement, and comparisons of the level of education at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as opposed to that at traditionally white schools. (Sam, a graduate of North Carolina College, was a fervent partisan for and supporter of HBCUs.) Other of Sam’s friends, like Richard Long of Atlanta University and Eleanor Traylor of Howard University, were also products of these mainly southern schools and agreed on their rigorous education and their merit. I was a recent graduate of decidedly white Bryn Mawr, where my class, with the largest number of Blacks to that date, had numbered six of us. So I simply listened to their debates, thinking of the dedicated folks I met at the all-Black College Language Association meetings that Sam insisted I attend, and learned to love and began to understand and value many of the empowering elements of what was then a classic HBCU education.
My Soul Looks Back Page 8