Acclaimed visual artist, sculptor, novelist, and poet, as well as the first Black American woman to receive an MFA degree from Yale, Barbara Chase-Riboud has lived in Paris for decades. “Why Paris?” written in the late 1980s, places her personal story within the larger history of Black American expatriatehood to Paris. Her recent work is inspired by the 2021 induction of American-born Josephine Baker into the Panthéon— the first Black woman to be welcomed into the French national tomb of heroes.
I have lived in Paris half my life. Fresh from university, not a Francophile, and with no knowledge of the language, I came to Paris from London for a weekend. I never did catch my plane out, and in time found myself with a husband, children, and a French family so enormous that if two generations held a reunion at the same time, we ran into the hundreds. Not only did I have to come to grips quickly with the French on a sentimental level, but I also had to take a crash course in the French method of dealing with everything.
Paris can be unpredictable and infuriating one minute, and irresistible, serene, liberating and generous the next. She can be the height of civilised living and the depth of gratuitous rudeness. She is full of beauty and perfect places to live. Paris offers the best reason to spend a day doing nothing if you feel like it, without ever feeling alone. Every quartier of Paris is a little village. Old, young, rich, poor, Left Bank intellectual to River Bank yuppie, everyone meets at the bakers for their daily baguette. Fashions may change in Paris, but never Paris, its splendour eternal and unparalleled. It is a city whose magic is bestowed on both visitor and native.
Here, we can still recall the lives of all those who have come from other countries. From my house, I love to cross the Luxembourg Gardens, with its palace built by a homesick Italian queen, go past a replica of the Statue of Liberty and down the rue Tournon, where there is a plaque on the house where John Paul Jones lived and another on the house where Casanova lived. I can walk past a bookstore filled with the white-jacketed books with only a title and no illustration that Countee Cullen loved so much, or an outdoor café where Richard Wright wrote.
For more than a century, black Americans have expatriated to Paris for political, economic, artistic, and racial reasons. The African American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, son of a Philadelphia pastor and member of the black bourgeoisie, lived and exhibited in Paris between 1891 and 1900, and was acclaimed and richly rewarded by the Parisians. But it was during the First World War, when more than 200,000 black soldiers fought on European soil, that the first real immigration of blacks occurred. Although they found themselves segregated in the American army, they were welcomed by the French.
The French were intrigued by a new American art form: jazz. The 369th Infantry Regiment, known as the Harlem Hell Fighters Band, captivated French audiences everywhere with its ragtime, its military tunes, its blues, and all that jazz. After the war, a jazz band was formed by members of the Hell Fighters who, along with thousands of other black veterans, remained in Paris. This was the beginning of the love affair between the French people and American jazz that survives to this day.
This passion reached fever pitch when musician Sidney Bechet and dancer-singer Josephine Baker came to Paris with La Revue Négre in 1925. Baker became the symbol of all the beauty, verve, and energy of the Americans, and between the two world wars she became a legend. Baker strode up the Champs-Elysées with a pair of leopards and sang of her two loves: “my country and Paris.” During World War II, she fought simultaneously for the Free French and against racism in the United States. For her courage and her humanity, the French decorated her with the Légion d’honneur (Legion of Honor) medal, which was buried with her in a state funeral in 1975. Americans, however, ostracised her for her extravagant, flamboyant style for years, and she never really worked in American theatre again.
Between the two wars, all the great names of the Harlem Renaissance passed through Paris, some of them remaining for years, like the poets Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, both of whom lived here in the 1920s. Literary talents as diverse as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, William Gardner Smith, and John A. Williams, as well as dozens of theatrical people, including the actor Gordon Heath and the singer Jimmy “Lover Man” Davis, established themselves on the Left Bank of Paris.
These black Americans fled the United States to escape racial tension, discrimination and lynching, and a wave of conservatism brought on by Prohibition that was very similar to today’s atmosphere in America. Their purpose in coming to Paris was to define and consolidate their own Americanness outside of racial stereotypes and to have it changed by a European point of view. But, in truth, most of these Americans returned home as steadfastly American in outlook and culture as when they left.
Excerpted with permission from Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure, ed. Elaine Lee, Berkeley: Ugogurl Productions (1997) and Go Girl 2: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure, ed. Elaine Lee, Berkeley: Ugogurl Productions (2024)
