He had always wanted a reason to get out of the Bronx and see how things looked from somewhere else. Why not go to Haiti? As it happened, the island was in the news and the news wasn’t good. He followed the coverage but couldn’t understand enough of the politics to make sense of why there was so much chaos. US soldiers were leaping out of choppers and running through Port-au-Prince like they were still in Vietnam. It wasn’t a time to visit. From his language class he learned that, if he paid a fee, he could enroll for a semester as a foreign student at the Sorbonne, in Paris. Obviously, he had the money. And the destination was romantic, an old ideal. It was where the Negro Caravan stopped on its voyage through the desert wilderness. He knew James Baldwin had gone there, Richard Wright, and others. Why couldn’t he?
* * *
—
His first days in France were unpleasant and lonely, Nathaniel said. Perhaps, in retrospect, the loneliest days of his life. His classes had not yet begun, and in that first month he mostly encountered American tourists as he made pilgrimage stops at the city’s famous monuments and museums. The Parisians were apparently elsewhere. Maybe on one of the far-flung, turquoise-ringed possessions advertised in the Métro that promised all-inclusive packages and discount airfare. The Americans dressed like they were going to the mall. He noticed that waiters, bus drivers, ticket booth operators, and strangers assumed that he was African. They always changed their expression when they heard his accent. Their faces brightened and relaxed as if a stink was gone. Apparently, in Paris his blackness was an African problem. They weren’t afraid he was a criminal; they were afraid he was colonial. Never in his life could he have imagined constantly meeting people who were relieved to discover that he was a nigger.
Nathaniel had taken up residence in a small but comfortable room in a three-star hotel on the rue de Rivoli. He wanted to live in style, to have a place that did justice to his vision, or, since he had never before really entertained fantasies of living in Europe, to what he thought his friends and family back home would imagine when they pictured him living abroad in Paris. The image relayed back home and the need to control and manage it was important to him, even if it was unpleasant to think of it that way.
Still, living detached left him prey to certain doubts that had never crept to the forefront of his mind before. He thought of his mother often. Some days he woke alone, consumed with the fear that he was becoming ill. It was a new experience. Although he had suffered injuries, even a serious injury to his hamstring that the doctors thought might keep him out of the game, he had almost always enjoyed optimal health. He took pride in his physical form, in those indomitable qualities that he deployed at will to shake his adversaries. He had always been strong. But ailment was not the same thing as injury.
The only remedy he knew was the rope. He had used the same jump rope since he was sixteen years old. He got it from the manager of a boxing club that no longer existed, a dank, funky old place near the ballpark that was always incensed with a combination of cigar smoke, Pakistani leather, and freshly spilled sweat. People said Joe Louis had practiced there, and Sugar Ray too. There were two sounds that attracted young Nate as boy on the streets. The whap of gloves rapping on the bags, and the crisp, metallic snap of skipping rope. Before long, he and his rope were virtually inseparable, his nirvana instrumental. Once he got started, he could keep time like a Rolex.
* * *
—
He never would have guessed his training would come in handy in Paris, but it did, one memorable day in September. After his last class of the day, he had tried to take the RER B, which he understood to be like an express train, back to his apartment. But he had ended up taking it in the wrong direction. He didn’t realize his mistake until the train was pulling out of the Port Royal station, outbound towards the periphery. A crew had boarded at Port Royal and immediately headed for the far end of the carriage where he was sitting. One was black, three others Arab, the last one possibly Arab or white, it was hard to tell. They were obviously riled up, perhaps not unusually rowdy, but deliberately imposing on the other passengers. Just as the train pulled out of the following station, one of the posse members said something to a young woman who was facing away from them. After a moment the crew burst out laughing, and the same guy got up and stood over her.
There was time for Nathaniel to evaluate the situation. He was outnumbered, but he was also older and stronger than any of them individually by the looks of it. And he was black. Now the same kid was shouting at the woman, obviously telling her to answer him while she sat frozen and looking straight ahead. Furious at her defiance, the kid raised his hand to her, not with much force—more like a humiliating pat on the cheek. He was laughing. Instantly, she threw her arm up and hit him back. Stunned, he came back across her face, hard enough this time that her head audibly cracked as it met the thick plexiglass window of the train.
Nathaniel jumped out of his seat. The other travelers gasped and turned, pretending to see the situation for the first time. He marched right up to the kid so that anyone in the crew would have to get through him to the girl. “You need to back off, now,” he said in English, putting a deep Don’t fuck with me into it. The English surprised the kid, and he seemed to take a second to reconfigure the scene in his mind. “You heard me, step off.” The crew was reacting with a mix of incredulity and hilarity, but they were also signaling that they were ready to back their words. Nathaniel readied himself for a blow. In a flash, the kid spit in his face. Nathaniel was so startled that he was slow to react to the first punch. It was a weak one, but the action had signaled the game on, and they jumped over the seats and started pummeling. Nathaniel lashed out, landing confused blows, trying to keep his eyes open, looking out for a knife. He cracked the tallest one with an elbow to the nose. But they surrounded him, kicking him on all sides so he couldn’t get to them. The train was slowing. They all started shouting at once. The kid who had accosted the girl did exactly what Nathaniel had feared. He pulled out a knife. Nathaniel tensed, backing against the doorway. The black dude was telling his friend to chill with it. Nathaniel could see the plan forming. They’d stick him just as they pulled into the station, then book it. But they didn’t have him pinned down; his chances were still good. Maybe he’d only get grazed. The brakes were whining. The whole train was coming to a nauseatingly slow stop on an embanked curve. The kid was still holding the knife pointed at Nathaniel’s midsection. All he needed was a good lunge.
“Je vais te niquer ta race,” the kid shouted, laughing and waving the blade. Then suddenly before the doors could open, he reached over to the girl and thrust his left arm out, putting her in a stranglehold. He put the blade up to her face. Nathaniel had seen enough to know what was said by tone. The put-down that compensates for what the knife won’t do—this time. “Vas-y, je te laisse cette fois, t’es belle, petite salope.” The doors opened. He let the girl go, and the whole crew jumped out. Nathaniel looked at the girl, then bolted. His heart was pounding. He could see them at the far end of the tracks turning off into a corridor. He sprinted as fast as he could, cursing between clenched teeth. He turned at the corridor; it was a long underground passageway. He could hear their shouts echoing from the far end. It was a straight line, nobody in the way. He put the run on like Jesse Owens, ducking his head, pumping. He reached a staircase leading up to the turnstiles. At the top of the stairs directly in front of him were the swinging pneumatic doors. He burst through them, ready to let all hell break loose. As he came out panting, he noticed figures in blue sweeping in from his peripherals. Two men with gloves and clubs tackled him from behind and sent him smack against the floor. They immediately kneeled on his back, pinning his chest to the ground so that he could barely breathe. One of them started beating him, cracking the baton over his legs and arms. They held him on the ground and told him to shut up while one of them spoke into a crackling radio. Nathaniel could feel the blood from his mouth pooling the cheek pressed to the
ground and spilling out onto the cold floor in front of him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the sneakers of the other members of the posse. They were lying facedown, side by side, with their hands behind their necks. Some more cops showed up with dogs, muzzled German shepherds yanking on their leashes. Commuters walked by, glanced without slowing down. Still more cops arrived, and long discussions ensued; everything was conducted in a dispassionate, even subdued manner, as if each of them really wished they were somewhere else. Finally, it was decided that the posse would be cuffed and taken out in a van. Then they cuffed Nathaniel and walked him out of the station, ducked him with great difficulty into the back of their blue Renault and took off.
At the police station Nathaniel couldn’t do anything right. At first, he was so furious at being taken in at all that he refused to even try to speak in French and cursed loudly in English, at which point they threw him in a holding pen and told him he could wait there indefinitely for a translator. After a few hours, since no translator materialized, they decided to try again, and this time, Nathaniel, using his broken French, gave them his basic information. This only seemed to make them even more suspicious, convinced that he was an African trying to pass himself off as an American to avoid having to confess his illegal immigration. He wasn’t carrying his passport, but he did keep a New York driver’s license in his wallet. The officers passed the little plastic card around, making faces. No one asked him about the events on the train. They asked him about drugs. Then they simply told him he was going to continue being detained until they cleared things up and he was sent back to his holding cell.
He put his head in his arms and tried to sleep. He couldn’t. Never in his whole life had he gone to jail. The only time he had ever even seen the inside of a police station was when he was seventeen and had gone with his mother down to the Forty-Second Precinct on Washington Avenue to pick up his uncle, who had been taken in on a domestic abuse complaint. His mother had told him then and he had never forgotten it: “Boy, don’t you ever do anything in this city that might land you anywhere near a police station. You can’t afford it. People disappear in this system. Don’t matter what you did or say you did. Once they have you, they can make you go away. We love you. But we won’t be able to do nothing for you. Once you in their hands, you belong to ’em. Right and wrong ain’t got nothing to do with it. That’s just how it is.”
But that was before he became a star. He found himself laughing uncontrollably. These bastards have no idea, he thought. They’ve arrested an innocent man, an innocent black American who also happens to be a famous basketball player. And they had busted him for trying to be a Good Samaritan! If only he had a Topps card. He was detained for three more hours until finally an officer came in and led him out to the reception area. The girl from the train was standing at the desk talking to one of the officers. When she saw Nathaniel come out, she was visibly moved. After hearing her story, the police captain said he was satisfied that the man they were holding was not a criminal, but that he still needed to clear up some issues about his identity and background. The young woman told them she refused to leave until he was released. She insisted he be let out from the holding cell, so they moved him to a bench in the hall. She sat down next to him. It was then he realized that she looked familiar.
“Thank you,” she whispered in English. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“It’s okay.”
“Do you recognize me, from the university?”
“Yes, it’s you—I’ve seen you, well, I saw you outside the tabac, the Ravaillac.”
“Ah yes, everyone goes there…except you. I guess you don’t smoke.”
“Hell no! I’m an athlete—or I was—I seem to be out of shape. A few years ago I would have caught those guys easy. Taught them how we get down in the Bronx. I used to play basketball.”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
“You’re so tall. You stand out in the amphitheater. I’m not the only one who noticed. All the girls talk about you.”
“Is that a fact?”
“This is so terrible. I’m so sorry they are treating you so bad. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before,” she added after a moment. “My name is Laura. Laura Petrossian.”
“Nathaniel Archimbald,” he replied. “You can call me Nate. Hey, you know, your English is really excellent,” he added after a moment.
She burst out laughing.
“Your French is very bad!”
* * *
The university courses took place in a grand amphitheater with a waxy fug. A professor would stand center stage and discharge the lecture in rolling waves of latinate complexity. Laura’s attendance was irregular, so Nathaniel never knew if he would see her. He was learning about the history of France, and Napoleon’s conquests were carefully and rather lovingly examined for their triumphs of grandeur, cunning diplomacy, and personal hubris. Inevitably, Haiti came up, though more as a footnote than a fatal and world-altering check on French dominion. Nate was primed for this and eager to intervene. But this was not allowed of him, nor of any of the other students around him, who dutifully took down their notes in the same bemused, impassive way they took down everything else. But just hearing about the treacherous and dishonorable treatment of Toussaint Louverture made Nathaniel’s blood boil. Every day after class, he needed a couple of hours just to decompress. He found a corner of the Tuileries Gardens where he could stretch and skip rope in the evening. His shoulder blades flexing, his posture proud and linear like one of the Louvre’s Egyptian statues, his feet tapping like a ballerina, Nathaniel would skip rope staring with a severe, disciplined intensity. He strengthened himself in rhythm, murmuring to himself the names of his mother’s ancestors, the heroes and generals of the Haitian Revolution. François Mackandal. Georges Biassou. Cécile Fatiman. Capois-La-Mort, the Black Achilles.
It was after such a session, returning in the evening to his hotel suite, when Nathaniel first met Claude, the new desk clerk on the nightshift. At first, Claude’s English was so good it had Nathaniel suspecting he must have an American parent or attended an international school. But Claude smiled and insisted he had only taken the usual classes in school. Everything else he learned by listening to hip-hop.
When Claude learned that Nathaniel was from New York City, he was ecstatic. His whole face, round as it was already, glowed with excitement and admiration. His questions were endless. Nathaniel couldn’t make an inch through the lobby without a symposium on the state of hip-hop, the situation in New York, the possibilities for blacks in America. Did he have a position on West vs. East? Biggie vs. Tupac?
The night clerk’s queries took Nathaniel back. All the way back to the distant memory of his father’s voice, and the voices of his friends scrapping around the blocks of Morrisania and Melrose, the Hub off Willis and 149th Street, the dead buildings that scorched the neighborhood, barbecues and summer jams, block parties. Night games on basketball courts where every drive to the hole was also a shot at someone’s character. The rattle of subways and the smell of peanut butter crunch and musty bodegas. The sound of a watermelon-red Buick guzzling up Third Avenue, and girls in high-tops sitting on stoops, laughing, calling out his name. Nathaniel spent more and more evenings hanging out in the lobby with Claude late into the night. Within a few weeks, Claude had convinced him to leave the expensive hotel and move in with him and his friends in Maisons-Alfort, a suburb to the south of the city.
Nathaniel knew what living in what they called the banlieue meant. It was basically the hood. But he wanted to be around skinfolk at least some of the time he was abroad, and that was where they were at. It would also mean spending a tiny fraction of what he was spending on hotel luxuriance and room service. It was time to see what the Other Paris was about.
Claude was renting an apartment with two other West African friends on the eighth floor of a housing block. Their unit was i
n the bottom half of an L on the far side of six identical buildings that made up the Cité Lamartine. The buildings were joined by a barren concrete esplanade, along which several rows of scooters were always parked, and where there had once been a low-rise frontage for shops (most boarded up and closed down) and a kind of gravel extension where kids played soccer. In fact, there was only one business still open—Faisal’s, a kind of café or tea shop run by Ahmed, an Egyptian, that served as the informal meeting room for the men of Cité Lamartine.
It was at Faisal’s over Moroccan tea that the new roommates all met for the first time. Claude introduced Nathaniel as his American friend, which drew large smiles. He was introduced to Ghislain, a young man from Cameroon who worked as a cook in a Senegalese restaurant in the Marais. Then to Apollinaire, a slightly older Senegalese man, nearer to Nate in age, who had arrived in Paris almost ten years before, and who had a job working as a sanitation worker for the city. And Claude explained finally that he was French, born in Sarcelles, but that his parents were from the French island of Martinique. They toasted to a new beginning.
The apartment was small but functional. Nate had his own room, as did Claude, while Apollinaire and Ghislain agreed to share a room and pay less for their share of the rent. Nate had a window that faced out onto the scrubby outskirts of Maisons-Alfort, which consisted mostly of a car-and-motorcycle dealership, more apartment complexes, and a low, flat, boxy building, which turned out to be their local Leader Price grocery store. Claude’s window faced the inside esplanade of the Cité, and in front of it, he had set up his decks, his mixer, and a synthesizer he had hooked up to a PC. His bed was often covered in clothes that he would mix and match, crisp outfits that he kept meticulously ordered in his mirrored closet. The rest of the room was devoted to his records and to the neat rainbow rows of a nice sneaker collection.
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