Paris. September 1986. Early morning. She is lying
on her back in a hard little bed with her eyes closed, dreaming
in French. Langston was here. There is a black girl in Paris
lying in a bed on the fifth floor of a hotel in the Latin
Quarter. Her eyes are closed against the soft pink dawn. Delicate
maps of light line her face, tattoo the palms of her hands, the insides
of her thighs, the soles of her feet like lace. Jimmy was
here. She sleeps while small, feminine hands plant a bomb
under the seat of a train headed toward the city of Lyon.
James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Milan Kundera all had lived in Paris as if it had been part of their training for greatness. When artists and writers spoke of Paris in their memoirs and letters home it was with reverence. Those who have been and those who still dream mention the quality of the light, the taste of the wine, the joie de vivre, the pleasures of the senses, a kind of freedom to be anonymous and also new. I wanted that kind of life even though I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.
. . . In 1924 at the age of twenty-two, Langston Hughes, the Negro Poet Laureate of Harlem, author of The Big Sea, arrived in Paris with seven dollars in his pocket. He worked as a doorman, second cook, and dishwasher at a jazz club on rue Pigalle. He wrote blues poems and stories and lived a poet’s life. He wrote about the joys of living as well as the heartache.
My name is Eden, and I’m not afraid of anything anymore. Like my literary godfathers who came to Paris before me, I intend to live a life in which being black won’t hold me back.
. . . It is 1986. I am twenty-six years old. I have 140 dollars folded flat and pressed into my shoes between sock and sole. It is what’s left of the 200 dollars I arrived with two days ago. I have no friends here and barely remember my two years of college French. I think that my ticket to Paris will be the beginning or the end of me.
