I went and had a drink at the Café Flore. In fact, I had a few of them.
Like every musician, probably, I had often wondered what it was like to play high on drugs. All the cornball stuff crosses your mind: does the heroin unlock some door in your soul? Does it make you better? I don’t just mean, does it make you play better. I mean, are you better, however briefly.
For all my musical forefathers, it had to do more than just make the pain go away. God. Negroes and their pain. What the fuck were we going to do if suddenly it all did go away? Would we even know who we were anymore?
The waiter was looking at me, the bottle in his left hand, the smile on his lips like a question mark.
I shook my head. No more, merci
I wasn’t exactly merry, but I’d had enough wine to make me lighten up somewhat. Enough with the clichés, Nan, I cautioned myself. No more being blue in Paris. Gotta lose that “Azure-tay,” as Nat Cole sang.
So, back to work. I walked for a few blocks and then descended into the station called St. Sulpice. The crowds had disappeared. I set up and began to play again. Not many passersby, but what did it matter? The sounds of my horn ricocheted hauntingly off the tiled walls. I felt almost as though I was in my own private city, the occasional visitor dropping a few francs into my case like a toll to enter the gates.
I played “Something to Live For” and another Ellington, “Come Sunday.”
I think what happened was, I pushed it too far. One minute I was playing the break on “Ill Wind,” my eyes closed, and the next moment I was seeing stars. I had thought I heard a kind of scuffling noise farther down the tunnel, but I was so wrapped up in playing I paid no attention.
All I know is that suddenly they were on me: two white guys in denim and swastika-ed leather, short haircuts, bad teeth. And one of them was banging my head against the tiles.
I began to flail around, hit out blindly, but my fists never connected with anything. I became dimly aware of shouting—somewhere far off—and then I heard a ripping sound. They were tearing the pockets off my jeans, going after my money, I guess. The instrument case must have gotten overturned, because the few coins that had been inside it, I heard rolling up the tunnel floor. Someone was pulling at the strap of the sax now, but it was all twisted around my head. I heard the unmistakable epithet, negre, spoken through clenched teeth as I took a blow to the face. I once saw a film clip of Thelonious Monk playing at the Five Spot in New York. When the spirit moved him, he got up from the piano and spun himself around madly, like a holy drunk. That’s how I felt right then, as if someone had set me spinning, like Monk, and I was never going to stop.
My head and heart were drumming hard. I raised my hands to cover my ears. Something on my face. Something on my hands. Wet. That was blood. Blood! Was I cut up?
So this is how it ends, I thought fleetingly. Me beaten to death by skinheads. Aunt Viv starves to death in a back alley or rots in prison. Mother, grief stricken, carted off screaming to the insane asylum. Daddy, riddled with guilt, commits suicide. Negro angst turned Wagnerian.
“Ends” is the right word. One of them is coming back to finish me off now. His face comes into focus. Wish I had the strength to kick him in the balls.
But wait—it’s not a white face. And this guy’s got a mop of curly hair and wears glasses.
And, somehow, all the noise has stopped.
CHAPTER 3
I Didn’t Know About You
White sheets. Creaky bedsprings. My old suitcase open on top of the bureau. Unless heaven was a budget hotel room with no TV, I was still alive.
Oh yes. There was something else in my room that tipped me off I wasn’t dead: a fine-looking, long-legged, high yellow black man, snoring softly, sitting on a hard chair, his big bare feet propped up at the foot of my bed. He wasn’t wearing any pants. Gray T-shirt over matching briefs.
Lord-a-muzzy, I am still alive.
“How’s it going, sleeping beauty?”
Shit. He caught me staring at his shorts. How gross.
“I’m okay, I think. My nose hurts a little. Is it broken?”
“Nothing broken,” he said, a little patronizing.
There followed a long and awkward silence.
“Last night’s still fuzzy to you, I guess,” he said, yawning and getting to his feet. He reached for his trousers and turned his back while he zipped up. “I asked if you wanted to go to the hospital, but you wouldn’t do it.”
“Yeah, one member of the family in trouble is enough,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter. I remember now. You rescued me and got me back here.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he went over to the basin and began to splash water on his face.
“Damn nice of you,” I said, laughing a bit, too embarrassed to do much else. “After that scene I pulled—going out on you like that in the métro—you should have let them kill me.”
He shook his head. “Forget it.”
“God, I haven’t even asked, how are you? What are you—Hercules or something? There were two of those freaks. Did they hurt you?”
“Not really. I’m not much of a hero. I was screaming like a white lady and three or four other folks came running to help us out. The Aryan League didn’t even manage to get your wallet.”
I suddenly buried my face in my hands and moaned.
“What is it?” he said, alarmed. “Headache?”
“No, no, no. I’m just cursing my fucking karma. I don’t know why I’m so surprised when stuff like this happens to me. You know what I mean?”
“Uh—”
“What’s the story downstairs, by the way? Did you bring me in here all bloody and stuff? And what did they say—‘Be out by tomorrow morning’?”
“I told them I witnessed two thugs trying to rob you. The madame is the one who supplied the sleeping pill for you.”
“Oh.”
“Why did you ask that?” I distinctly heard lofty censure in his voice. “You think they figure anything that happens to a black person, it’s gotta be his own fault? Some flour-faced Nazis just tried to kill you. Why are you worried about how it looks to some white people? Think you’re letting the race down?”
Oooh. Touched a nerve there. Big time.
She’s a little middle-class hypocrite playing the bohemian. Was that what he was thinking? What did we have here? A truly enlightened brother? Or was he mixing me up with himself? Was he talking about his own fears? Or had he really zeroed in on mine?
I decided discretion was the better part of etcetera and—for once—held my tongue.
“All right,” I said. “You nailed me trying to be exemplary. I’ve been chastened, and you paid me back for what I said about you being bourgeois, okay? But it’s a little more complicated than that. The management here is just not having the best luck with the coloreds from Elmhurst, Queens lately.”
He looked at me questioningly but didn’t press for any explanations.
The silence fell again. “How about handing me that mirror?” I finally asked.
He plucked my makeup mirror from the bureau top and gave it to me. He stood at the foot of the bed quietly examining me while I examined my face. He was right: nothing broken. The bridge of my nose was a bit tender and there was a little lump on the back of my head. That was all. I didn’t look half as bad as I imagined. In fact, the tonic effect of a good night’s sleep seemed to be right there on my face. Satisfied, I nodded and handed the mirror back.
“Think you’re going to be okay now?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“Good. I just didn’t want to leave you until I was sure.”
“Listen,” I called out to him as he prepared to leave, “you do have a place to stay, right? I mean, you really are living—uh—somewhere?”
I saw that little smirk on his lips.
“Yes. I don’t need any help.”
“Right, right,” I said quickly. “I kind of forgot for a minute there. I’m the o
ne who needs all the help.” You’re Mr. Perfect, aren’t you, you prick? Damn, was there nothing I could do right with this guy? He just kept outclassing me. He was a living reminder of my incompetence. Bet if he was looking for his aunt Vivian she’d be cleaned up and firmly in hand by now, her ass in a seat on TWA.
“What’s your name?” he asked mildly.
I began to laugh then. That’s right. We hadn’t been introduced, had we?
“Nan.”
“My name’s Andre.”
“Okay. Thanks again, Andre. I owe you one.”
“You really do speak French very well,” he said.
“I’ve got an idea, Andre. Why don’t you start polishing your accent, like you said yesterday. Why don’t you pick up the phone there and order two breakfast trays with extra coffee.”
I got one thing right, at last. Cheerful little Marise, the maid, was sick that day. Her replacement was indeed called Josette. She had never served me before, so she didn’t even raise an eyebrow at finding two of us in the room.
I carefully moved his violin case aside and opened the shutters wide to let in the morning air.
“Keep polishing, Andre. Speak to me in French,” I said, pouring more coffee.
“I don’t know if I can hold up my end all in French,” he said.
“That’s okay. Do the best you can.” I then began to speak in my senior-year seminar French accent, enunciating clearly but keeping my vocabulary colloquial, everyday: “First off, tell me what you’re doing over here, if it’s any of my business. Are you in school?”
“No. I got a little bit of money after my mother died—insurance—and I just headed straight over here. I’m planning to be…”
“Be what?” I asked when he hesitated.
“Famous maybe.”
I cracked up.
“Well, you sure can play that violin. Is that what’s going to make you famous?”
“Yeah. Well, yes and no. I want to do something with the music, sure. But I’m also taking notes for this book I’m thinking about writing.”
“No kidding? What kind of book?”
“About black people in Paris. Musicians mostly, but others too—dancers, soldiers, poets, whoever I come across. And not just the big ones like Josephine Baker and Wright and them. I mean people who worked to get over here and would do anything to stay. They were excited—proud to be here. Not like tourists, you know? Like there was something really at stake for them. People like me.” He paused there. “And you.”
I couldn’t help it. I was fucking happy he had included me.
“I want to walk around in their footsteps,” he continued, “look up their friends and families, if they had any, visit the places where they lived. Give them their due. It’s hard to do something like that—start over in a strange place. Hard. Lonely. Scary. There’s more than one way to be a black hero—to me, anyway. I want to tell people how admirable some of those folks were.”
“Formidable,” I said. “So there is a little of the race man in you after all.”
His face went scarlet around the edges. But, thankfully, he laughed rather than bristled.
“Where’d you study music?” I asked.
“I went to Curtis.”
“You’re from Philadelphia?”
“No. Detroit, originally.” There was a sourish expression on his face.
“Sounds like you didn’t like it much.”
He shrugged. “Wasn’t just Detroit. I didn’t like anything that much in the States.”
“I can hear that,” I said.
I wanted to say something more than that, but I couldn’t quite form the words yet. The permutations of our relationship to the whole of America were endless. You could hate white people but not hate America. You could come to terms with the racism but never accept the insipid culture. You could view our disenfranchisement as a kind of massive swindle—all that blood, sorrow, loyalty, hope, and patience deposited over the centuries, and the check keeps bouncing. You could simply self-destruct. Like I said, endless. I figured I’d hear the particulars of his take on the thing soon enough.
“Like Baldwin said, ‘I had to get out before I killed somebody.’ Is that how you felt?”
“Something like that,” he answered, not looking at me. “More than likely, if anybody was gonna end up dead, it would have been me. Like I told you before, I’m hardly anybody’s idea of fierce. Keep in mind that when I was little I used to have to walk home carrying a violin. And these thick glasses. It was like wearing a sign that said KICK THE SHIT OUT OF ME.”
“Kids are real nice to each other, aren’t they?” I said, chuckling, but angry too. I was thinking about my friend Aubrey’s treatment at the hands of some of our peers. “Who was it that saw your musical stuff and put you in school?”
“My mother. She could talk you out of your teeth. Got me scholarships to everything. We didn’t have much. My father died when I was seven.”
“What was she like, your mother?”
“White. Which made things even more interesting than they might have been.”
Yeah, I thought as much. Aggressive as our DNA is, there were still little hints of the other in his face. “Tell me more,” I said.
I divided the last of the coffee between our two cups. Boy! did I want a cigarette.
“Well, like they say, nothing lasts forever,” he said. “You get over yourself, one way or another. I stopped running from fights. And the fellas stopped wanting to fight me around the time we all discovered sex. See, the girls liked me.”
I grinned. “Yaaay, Andre! So you went from being the four-eyed sissy to the neighborhood pussy magnet.”
“You got it. For however brief a time, I was a hero.”
“Fierce at last!” I raised the fist to him.
“No, I told you, I’m not. But I’ll tell you who was. My mom. I don’t know how she did it, exactly, but she’s the one who—” He stopped there and didn’t talk again until he had drained his cup.
When he spoke again, his voice had become thick. “A lot of things make me want to kill. And a lot of things I just don’t give a fuck about anymore. All I care about now is becoming excellent at my work and being legit over here. Getting my papers, steady gigs, an apartment, whatever. ’Cause I am not going back. By the way, that was a load of crap I gave you about being a legal resident and having a permit, just in case you didn’t already know.
“About the only thing that makes me want to fight now is other people telling me who I am and what I ought to be doing and who I ought to be doing it with.”
“You mean you don’t like having your blackness challenged?”
“My blackness is not open to challenge. My father was black, so that means I’m black. Period. I guess what I mean is, my people deserve to be honored by me, and I’m serious about doing that—but I deserve some honor too, right? Who doesn’t?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Who doesn’t? Are you all on your own now? No family?”
“No.”
“How long have you been in Paris?”
“Five months.”
“Made any friends yet?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Just some guys I met playing around town. The place I’m staying at belongs to one of my profs, but he isn’t there now. I’m subletting from him.”
“What are you—”
He cut me off. “Just a minute! Hold up! Question after question after question. We’re only talking about me. I want to know something about you and your stuff.”
“You will, you will,” I said. “Tell you what. Wait for me in the café downstairs while I get ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“We’re going to get seriously drunk.”
“Are you joking?”
“Seriously, intentionally drunk.”
“It’s only ten-thirty,” he said giddily. “In the morning.”
“I know. But I’m about to tell you my life story, right? That’s not something you do sober, my brother. And
you’ve got to show me your Paris before I show you mine.”
He picked up his violin and practically danced over to the door.
“It’s good to be an international nigger, don’t you find, Nan?”
“Yes, mon frère. It is kind of da bomb.”
Instead of waiting downstairs, he had run home to drop off his violin.
By late afternoon, we’d been walking and talking and drinking for hours.
I didn’t figure on another excursion to the Right Bank so soon. But that was okay. Andre and I were wending our way all over the 8th while his nonstop Negro-in-Paris history rap unreeled like a guided tour cassette. The kid was amazing.
He had just given me the complete history of the concert hall called the Salle Pleyel, on the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, where every famous brown person who had ever set foot in Paris—from the players in the old la revue Negre to W.E.B. Du Bois to Herbie Hancock to Howlin Wolf—had drawn an audience.
We stopped briefly for another drink, exchanged more life story tidbits, and pressed on.
It was Andre who pointed out the American Embassy building to me, near the place de la Concorde. But more important to him was the spot a couple of buildings away where once had stood the deluxe club Les Ambassadeurs. I heard all about Florence Mills’s success there in 1926 and how Richard Wright had brought Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe there to perform in the forties.
As we swept up the Champs Elysées, he listed what Chester Himes and his wife had had for lunch at Fouquet’s in 1959. All right, all right—slight exaggeration.
Sidney Bechet this, Henry Tanner that, Kenny Clarke this, Cyrus Colter that…Was I aware that Art Blakey aux Champs-Elysées was the only live jazz record that…Did I want to visit the site of Chez Josephine, la Baker’s nightclub, before or after we saw the cabaret where Satie, Milhaud, and Ravel used to hang with her…In 1961, you know, both Bud and Dexter backed up Carmen McRae at the Paris Blue Note, but it wasn’t called that anymore…
Who had told this child he wasn’t black enough? Not to play amateur Freudian, but his encyclopedic knowledge of our people in Paris was way past the maybe-I’ll-write-a-book stage. It was obviously at the level of obsession. Who was he trying to vindicate?
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