The 1920s and 1930s were indeed the heyday of American visitors in France, both black and white. These included not only the wealthy set but also a small number of race leaders on partly official, partly pleasure, trips; a good number of artists and even more musicians; and most of the luminaries of the New Negro movement, starting with Alain Locke. Langston Hughes came even before he was an established writer, while Claude McKay initiated the fashion of living abroad. Even more than Anna Cooper, Jessie Fauset, or Gwendolyn Bennett, Countee Cullen was such an assiduous student of French culture that he spent his summers in Paris. But others also came and stayed: the older generation of Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, and also Jean Toomer, John F. Matheus, Walter White, Eric Walrond, and others.

Of French ancestry on his mother's side, Jean Toomer occasionally recalled his French connections with a degree of pride, as when he wrote in 1930: “I am of French and English descent. … I have been associated in New York and Paris with some of the men who have been trying to bring about a renaissance in American art and life.”¹ Yet when the already outstanding author of Cane first sailed for France in July 1924, he was by no means undertaking a cultural pilgrimage. He intended to stay only at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, which Gurdjieff had recently opened at the former priory of Avon on the outskirts of Fontainebleau, forty miles southeast of Paris.

In January of that year Toomer had met in New York A. R. Orage, one of the English disciples of the Russian guru. In search of spiritual certitudes, Toomer had become convinced that the cosmic view, supposed to offer the possibility of attaining higher awareness of oneself and the world, was the answer to the insecure and confused postwar Western quest. He had been moved by the dance and exercises, demonstrated on American stages, which seemed to recreate the body and shape it toward spiritual fulfillment: “Here I am in New York,” he wrote frantically to Alfred Stieglitz, “working through the details of my first trip to France! I sail Saturday the 19th of July on board the Savoie for Le Havre. How long I'm going to stay, I don't know. For I go there not to ‘stay’ but to learn something.”² Indeed, Toomer was so eager to leave that he did not wait for his friend Marjorie Glover, who was to join him later that summer in Fontainebleau.

Did his exclusive devotion to Gurdjieff deprive Toomer—who had read French authors with interest during his formative years, who quoted Baudelaire and had attended a series of lectures on Romain Rolland at the Rand school—of the pleasure of visiting Paris? In fact, Toomer was quite happy. Once in Fontainebleau, he apparently hardly left the premises. He wrote Stieglitz: “Ever since my arrival in France, I have been working with the Gurdjieff Institute. … My conjectures to you concerning its general significance have been confirmed. It is by all odds the best general instrument that I have found.”³

That summer the score of disciples at the Institute had more on their hands than they had expected: in early July, driving his car recklessly, the guru nearly killed himself and required months to recuperate. As a result, when Toomer arrived he was somewhat at a loss, as there was little organized activity—no music, no efficient meals, and little conviviality. He was lodged, however, in the “Ritz” section of the priory on the same floor as the Gurdjieff family, not in the less prestigious “corridor of the monks.” Bernard Metz, of the Ouspenski London circle, soon advised and directed him, set him to work on the chicken coops, and the new recruit became part of the routine. The disciples not only spent hours at gymnastics and spiritual exercises but also had to repair buildings, chop wood, garden, and, at times, prepare meals. At the end of his stay at Avon, he considered his training sufficient to begin teaching the method on his return to the United States.

When Toomer returned to France, from May 29 to October 16, 1926, he was less exclusively preoccupied with Gurdjieff, more willing to meet people and see places. Sailing on the De Grasse, he socialized with Mrs. Arthur Sachs, whose intelligence appealed to him and whom he planned to see again in Paris.⁴ No details about his visits to the city and about the people he met there seem to be available, but he wrote at some length on life at the Prieuré: “Gurdjieff is at work finishing his book. And every evening he composes music and then has a musician student here play it for all who are there. It is strangely vital and moving. And every Saturday we all have something one would ordinarily call a Turkish bath. Gurdjieff has built a special bath. The steam, the heat reaches a temperature of 110 but, despite this, it is amazingly possible to breathe. There is no general work going on.”⁵

Again, on his return to the United States Toomer tried to preach the gospel of Gurdjieff, this time in Chicago, again without much success. He returned to France the following summer, landing at Cherbourg on May 15 and leaving from Le Havre on July 17, 1927. This time he seems to have visited Paris frequently enough. At the Prieuré the spiritual intensity was the same, most of the day being devoted to meditation and veneration of the Master. According to Mrs. Edith Taylor, who attended that session, Gurdjieff had by then chosen Toomer as his American disciple and wanted him to be his prophet among the Negroes. In notes on a luncheon where watermelon was served for dessert, she recalled the following exchange:

Gurdjieff: “Mister, you like such fruit?”

Toomer: “Yes, yes, very much.”

Gurdjieff: “Then, eat like—how you say?—black baby, special name, ah, yes, pickaninny. You know how pickaninny eat?”

Toomer: “You mean with both hands?”

Gurdjieff: “Good, I see you very much know.”

Toomer picked up the piece of melon and ate in this fashion. When he finished, he put the rind down on the plate and looked around with a satisfied smile.

Gurdjieff: “You finish, Mister? You not finished. Eat all, even white part.”

Toomer looked puzzled but picked up the rind and proceeded to eat down to the green, then again put the remains on the plate.

Gurdjieff: “Get up, you finished, go back to garden. Work like eat. When in garden you finish I send you to America. You go special part of New York where big little pickaninny live; you show them you very special pickaninny receive it; you live there, work among them, enlighten such men how you live; and if honest you fulfill, will substantial commission give.”⁶

That summer, while dutifully obeying the Master, Toomer took time to indulge in a short motor trip to the southern Alps and the city of Briançon, combining work and leisure.

In June 1929 Toomer sailed again to France by way of Toronto. In seventeen days at Fontainebleau he completed an account of his passage, titled “Transatlantic.” He seems to have had a good time on board, especially at the captain's masquerade ball, at which he was disguised as a rajah. Apparently he fell in love with a teenager named Fay, whom he seriously considered marrying.⁷

At the Prieuré, Toomer, whom Gurdieff had nicknamed “Half-an-hour Toomer” because he was so slow, was growing restless. He took to drinking heavily. But there is no indication that he led a gay life in Paris. He probably met a few French writers the year before, since seven of his poems had appeared in translation in French magazines, notably Les Nouvelles Littéraires, and in May 1929 he contributed a “Letter from America” to the French surrealist review Bifur. Yet, when he returned to the United States in the fall of 1928, Toomer had gained nothing as a writer from his French experience. Indeed, he had stopped being a writer to become a “thinker.” As he put it in “Earth Being,” he was ready to begin another chapter of his life, to attempt to establish a Gurdjieff group in Harlem. He failed miserably among his race brothers. Sadly, the summers he spent at the Prieuré d'Avon contributed to depriving the Harlem Renaissance of one of its first-rate writers.

John F. Matheus had already contributed to the New Negro anthology when he left West Virginia for Europe in the summer of 1925. A teacher of Romance languages, like Countee Cullen, he had graduated in French from Columbia University and intended to take the language course at the Sorbonne extension. Fifty years later he would remember it with pleasure: Professor Schneider taught French medieval art; Henry Chamard, medieval literature; and M. Guignebert, French history. Matheus was accompanied by his wife, and because they stayed in the well-off area around the Arc de Triomphe, the young couple found Paris rather uncongenial at first. But Pension l'Avenir in the Latin Quarter proved more attractive, since they could easily roam the Left Bank. John visited Paris like a conscientious tourist but had interesting encounters. He attended an international conference on Esperanto and even served as an impromptu interpreter for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was lecturing to a convention of spiritualists on how to photograph ghosts. In the company of Doyle and the famous medium Karnac, he visited the beautiful mosque near the Jardin des Plantes, which was opened especially for them.

John Matheus also made a point of sampling the cabarets. Even though Paris welcomed Josephine Baker ecstatically, at the Folies Bergères Feral Benglia, the black-skinned Algerian who played the part of the Devil in the show, told Matheus about the Frenchman's own brand of prejudice. The audience objected to a black Arab appearing on stage with white female dancers in the nude. American tourists behaved much worse: Matheus saw a couple of his white-skinned compatriots leave the room in outrage when his new acquaintance the Devil entered among the white female cast.

Matheus had been brought up on the French classics, but he loved Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, Anatole France, and, above all, Guy de Maupassant, whose story of a heroic peasant woman who had been shot for burning a platoon of Prussian soldiers in her barn had moved him to tears. He had been affected just as much by reading Daudet's “The Last Class.” He made a special point of visiting Maupassant's grave at the Parc de Repose but also took great interest in a performance of Docteur Knock by Jules Romains and the more avant-garde creations of Jean Cocteau.

The young couple did not have enough money to visit much of France, but luck was with them: an American who had been called home in haste sold them a round-trip ticket to the Riviera for only fifty dollars. Marseilles was a discovery—its deep azure seascape, a visit to the Château d'If in tribute to Alexandre Dumas's hero, and also, unexpectedly, encounters with the black Senegalese, who did not even really speak French. After Nice and the splendor of Monte-Carlo, they ventured across the Italian border, having been cautioned to refrain from comments and criticism, as Mussolini had just been voted into power. In Italy, of all places, an Englishman mistook John for an African and a native refused to believe he could be a U.S. citizen, leaving him to wonder about his national, as well as racial, identity!

Back in Paris Matheus met Alain Locke briefly in a café, and he went to the Musée du Luxembourg to admire the paintings of Henry O. Tanner. This was a pilgrimage on his part: like most black visitors he was honoring an artist who had exiled himself in order to escape racial prejudice and gain recognition. Had he known that Tanner was still alive in Paris, he would have ventured to approach him.⁸

In Matheus's mind, France was clearly the land of freedom of which Cullen sang. In a poem inspired by an encounter with a West Indian girl in Paris, he celebrated liberal, sophisticated France together with a keen sense of belonging to black world culture. “Belle Mamselle of Martinique” appeared in 1927 in The Carolina Magazine. With its meter strongly reminiscent of Cullen's “Heritage,” it sings of Negro elegance on French soil:

Belle Mamselle of Martinique
Tell me why your dainty feet
Trip along the Élysées?
And your crimson turban lay
Aureoling eyes of black,
Sparkling answer rippling back
To our interested query:
“Are you homesick now or weary?”
You live here? Ah, now, I see
Why I like gay, old Paree,
You're the Romance that we seek,
Belle Mamselle of Martinique.

The girl is a “real Parisienne,” but the poet asks her not to forget her native “tropic, foliaged shores / Where the torrid sun restores / Color to the Nordic cheek.” His glorification of black beauty ends by stressing the tribute that France, among all nations, pays to blackness:

Yes, I know they put a ban
On crinkly hair and cheek of tan
Where we live across the sea,
Knowing not that Gay Paree
Worships just such nymphs as you,
Colored nymphs, whose eyes are dew,
Colored faces, copper, bronze,
Mango, olive, almond, orange.

Such feelings may account for Matheus's devotion to teaching, researching, and disseminating literature in French. After returning from France he studied for a doctorate at the University of Chicago, notably with Professor Régis Michaud, and he completed a translation of Paul Valéry's “Le Cimetière Marin”—an arduous task. In 1928 he spent a few months in Haiti, where he found material and inspiration for several works, including “Tambour,” a folk comedy about Haitian peasants, and short stories dealing with folk beliefs and superstition. Through him, his colleague Clarence Cameron White, director of music at West Virginia State College, became interested in Haitian history and life and even composed incidental music, including a meringue, for “Tambour.” White himself, a precocious violinist, had studied with the famous composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in London and had performed with him, touring Europe from 1908 to 1911. In the late twenties, White and Matheus decided to collaborate on an opera based on the story of Dessalines, the first emperor of Haiti. On a grant from Julius Rosenwald they visited the country to study its history and beliefs. The theme of Ouanga was Dessalines's attempt to purge the newly founded nation of voodoo beliefs and his assassination by mysterious means (ouanga means a spell or charm). The opera was performed in concert in Chicago in 1939 and finally staged successfully in South Bend, Indiana, ten years later.

While Clarence Cameron White studied composition in Paris with Raoul Laparra in 1930 and 1931 and had the pleasure of hearing the faculty of the École Normale de Musique perform a string quartet he composed at that time, John Matheus returned to Paris in the spring of 1930. He was acting as private secretary to Dr. Charles S. Johnson, one of the American members of the international committee entrusted with investigating the charges of forced labor practices in Liberia. The black sociologist was already well known, and they were feted in Paris, where they enjoyed several parties in fashionable salons as the guests of Robert Duncan, whom they had met on board the Roosevelt. Matheus got acquainted with sculptor Augusta Savage and took her to dinner. He realized that the Negro was indeed in vogue in Paris: dolls representing Josephine Baker were in many shop windows, and hordes of pleasure-seekers in search of exoticism were now haunting the Bal Colonial on the Rue Blomet.

Although John Matheus never returned to France, he remained an untiring propagandist for French culture among black Americans. He edited several French readers, and in 1936, in collaboration with W. Napoleon Rivers, he prepared a school edition, with introduction and notes, of Georges, the only work signed by Alexandre Dumas that has a Negro protagonist.

When NAACP official Walter White was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for creative writing, to be spent in a foreign country, it did not take long for Rebecca West and G. B. Stern, whom he saw at a party given by Carl Van Vechten, to persuade him that Villefranche-sur-Mer on the French Riviera would be the ideal place as well as the least expensive.

White entertained mixed feelings concerning French racial policies. A delegate to the August 1921 Pan-African Congress in London, Paris, and Geneva, he had been surprised to find in Senegalese Blaise Diagne, who had married into a prominent French family and been appointed High Commissioner to the Black Troops, a citizen so loyal to his adopted country that he was opposed to any open condemnation of French colonial policies—this at a time when Voyage au Congo, written by white Frenchman André Gide, denounced the country's excesses in Africa. Either the French habit of not objecting to mixed marriage and not imposing discrimination was devilishly crafty, or it corresponded to some real lack of prejudice in a nation so prone to colonize others.

In late July 1927 Caucasian-looking White and his wife, Gladys, who had just given birth to their second child in June, sailed for Le Havre. Many rich friends of Van Vechten were on board: Baird Leonard, Marjorie Worth, and Arthur Chamberlain Dodds, not to mention acquaintances like the Reverend Billy Sunday and literary critic Harry Hansen. They all traveled in style, and Gladys White passed for “everything from a Spanish grande dame to an American Indian.”⁹ In Paris William Aspenwell Bradley, the agent and friend of most American expatriate writers, took them to his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis to meet Isadora Duncan, who danced beautifully to the first recording made by Paul Robeson, “Go Down, Moses.” White also paid a visit to René Maran, who was trying to get The New Negro published in France and believed that James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones also stood a good chance of being translated, the French being so keen on Negro art and writing.

After a week in a comfortable pension near the Pantheon, the family set off for the south. Although close to Nice and the fashionable resorts, Villefranche had not yet attracted many foreign tourists, and life was inexpensive there. On August 10 the Whites moved into Villa Sweet Home on the Boulevard Emmanuel III. It was a huge house with eight large rooms, central heating, a garage, and servants' quarters—all for $250 a year. White wrote enthusiastic letters to his friends at home; their Italian maid, Vittoria, had asked blushingly for the ridiculously low wage of $16 a month; a bottle of wine cost no more than Évian or Perrier, which the family, suspicious of the local water, had taken to drinking.¹⁰ Their “lovely little villa, directly on the Mediterranean but high up in the Alps” received so much sun that Gladys had nicknamed their baby “Copper Son” because of his tan. Jane, the older child, was making rapid progress in French while her parents still barely managed to ask their way or do the shopping. In his retreat Walter was growing a “delicately fashioned beard” and donned a Basque beret. To his delight the few other tourists mistook him for a Frenchman.¹¹

These were carefree times, and the days passed quickly: “To be able to sit on the terrace and look down on the lovely bay of Villefranche and off in the distance at the constantly changing, colorful beauty of the tiny peninsula which formed the left arm of the harbor made the first leisure I had ever known in adult life a never-ending peace and happiness.”¹² For entertainment the Whites would go to Nice. There they attended a recital of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who created a sensation. A month later, while trying to secure a copy of the Mémoires of Josephine Baker for Carl Van Vechten, they learned of Isadora Duncan's tragic death—strangled by her scarf, which had gotten caught in the wheel of her car.

Gladys had a fine time, sipping crême de cacao or drinking beer in the open-air cafés while the old dandies flirted with her. This was a paradise, far from Prohibition, with whiskey at $2.40 a bottle. They were even blessed with French visitors, like Gaston Courty of the Journal des Débats and painter Georges Joubin: both Frenchmen had been very much impressed by Johnson's “Creation” poems, and Courty would try to have La Revue de Paris publish them (A Man Called White, 94).

White had received the fellowship to complete a novel about three generations of Negro life, yet he could hardly devote himself to the pursuit of belles-lettres, even in this unexpected haven. James Weldon Johnson's frequent letters and the newspaper headlines kept reminding him of racial violence and the NAACP's struggle in the United States. Did his concern turn into a kind of guilt? Instead of pursuing his plans for a novel, he was soon working eight hours a day on a book about lynchings. On October 15 he cut his beard and left for London to give a series of lectures on the question. Stopping in Paris, he paid Josephine Baker the visit he had long anticipated. Back in Villefranche by the end of the month, he worked harder than ever on the new book, and on January 19, 1928, he was able to mail the entire manuscript of Rope and Faggot to Arthur Spingarn.

Early in 1928 the Whites were disappointed to see hordes of British and American tourists invade “their” Villefranche: the prices sky-rocketed, and they no longer felt at home. In February they moved to Avignon, where for half the price of the villa they rented a furnished apartment. It was located at 37, Rue Aubanel, just above the shop of their landlord, Jules Pochy, a dealer in Provençal furniture. Thanks to the Pochys, the Whites made interesting acquaintances, like Henri, a guide at the Palais des Papes, whose demonstration of “the best echo in the world” White recalled with emotion some twenty years later:

He had so steeped himself in the history, folklore and beauty of Provence that for him the sum and summation of all human experience had concentrated there. … With a flourish, he ushered me into the hall of Clement VI. The only object in the room was the chalky sarcophagus of the long-dead pope. The late afternoon golden sunlight streaming in through tall, narrow slits of windows marked the grayish white floors and walls like the lines on a football field. Henri guided me to one of the corners of the huge room where he began to sing parts of a Mass in what had once been an excellent baritone and in which, even then, his age was noticeable only in the higher notes.

Like a response from a far-off, invisible choir the sound came back to us. It was a moment of complete beauty.

We trudged down the hall in silence, and no word was spoken even when we touched hands at parting. (A Man Called White 98)

More matter-of-fact aspects of French life and food appealed to White as well. Avignon he found a queer mixture of the thirteenth and twentieth centuries: the rather Parisian atmosphere of the busy Rue de la République juxtaposed with the awesome mass of the ancient papal palace. He appreciated both the gentle somnolence and the genuine friendliness of the old town. The Whites toured the region—Arles and Les Baux mostly—and were tempted to acquire a thirteenth-century church in which a launderette, complete with brand-new American machines, had been installed. Having repeatedly sampled the delicious wines (Clos Saint Pierre sold for only twenty francs a bottle and Tavel for eighteen), White wrote Van Vechten on March 21: “Aside from such fleshly joys we like Avignon better than any place we've seen in France.”

In this city, “the home of Mistral and Petrarch,” as he made a point of telling James Weldon Johnson, he was able to write easily.¹³ Indeed, he had nearly completed his novel when he was called back to New York by the NAACP: Charles Studin wanted him to attend a meeting with the governor of the state in preparation for a campaign designed to win the Negro vote for the Democrats. When he left France on April 4, 1928, White believed he would be back in a couple of weeks, but the repeated postponement of his return and the expiration of his leave of absence made travel prohibitively expensive.

Far from wealthy, but a man of sensibility, refinement, and literary talent, Walter White thus appreciated what France had to offer: its history, monuments, and traditions as well as its splendid landscapes and cuisine. He visited it under the best possible conditions during a vacation away from the struggle in the United States. Light-skinned enough to pass, he did not have to think of his own situation in terms of racial prejudice; yet his mind was not diverted from the racial situation at home, which he followed as an NAACP leader. It is ironic that his study of lynching in the United States, Rope and Faggot, was completed in the heavenly retreat of Villa Sweet Home in the heights of Villefranche.

After the enthusiastic public reception of his volume of short stories, Tropic Death, West Indian-born Eric Walrond had been given a contract by Boni and Liveright to write a history of the Panama Canal and the French role in the venture. In 1928, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, he traveled extensively in the Caribbean to do research. Then on an extension of the grant he went to London and Paris to investigate the French involvement in the scandal and conduct interviews with the De Lesseps family.

When he arrived in Paris in July 1929, Walround at once became part of the Afro-American smart set through his connection with Countee Cullen, whose studio he shared for a while. He apparently did a lot of partying with him and their friends while French critic André Lévinson praised Tropic Death to the skies, the better to decry McKay's Banjo.¹⁴ Soon Walrond moved to Bandol, a fishing village near Toulon, where he met the celebrated Nancy Cunard and became for a time a member of her entourage. After a visit to his parents in Brooklyn in the fall of 1931, he went back to France and settled in a small village near Avignon. There he reportedly worked on creative writing but did not make use of the setting or the people around him. The most tangible result of his research in France was a long article on the Panama scandal, which appeared in the Madrid magazine Ahora in August 1934. “Como se hizo el Canal de Panama” is a detailed account of the financial scandal involving engineer De Lesseps that nearly brought down the Third Republic.

Possibly through French contacts and with the help of his friend and translator Mathilde Camhi, a literary person in her own right, Walrond sold a few pieces to French magazines. The January 7, 1933, issue of Lectures du Soir carried his short story “Sur les chantiers de Panama.” Its theme was racial conflict among the canal workers; its plot turned on an incident in which a Spanish shopkeeper shot a couple of Negroes as a threatening mob drew near. The following week the same magazine printed an interview with Walrond, whom Jacques Lebar considered “one of the most characteristic and colorful representatives of Negro literature together with Claude McKay.” Walrond, who had read Madame Bovary repeatedly, was said to consider Flaubert a major novelist but to like Blaise Cendrars best among contemporary French writers for his “unique understanding of the world, the psychology and the art of the Negro.”¹⁵ Apparently Mathilde Camhi was to translate Tropic Death, but the book never saw publication in France. She translated only “Sur les chantiers de Panama” and a fine article called “Harlem.” It was a colorful piece of reportage on how the smart set had invaded the Harlem cabarets and how a few Strivers' Row entrepreneurs like Jasbo Brown and Jim, the owner of the Bucket of Blood, had capitalized on that fashion.¹⁶ A similar piece, “Harlem, la perle noire de New York,” came out in Voilà on May 27, 1933. Evidently intended to be the first of a series, it was probably also the last. Around that time Eric Walrond decided to settle in England, where he spent much of the remainder of his life.¹⁷

The most comprehensive, yet still rather superficial, coverage of Negroes in France was provided for a number of years by Joel Augustus Rogers, the author of half a dozen volumes recording black cultural contributions or tracing famous people's genealogies to their authentic or imagined Negro ancestry. Although his readiness to be of service and his good humor endeared him to most, Rogers was not taken seriously by many members of the New Negro movement. Claude McKay was annoyed by Rogers's perpetual wonderment at finding the French so nice, while he (McKay), who had been in contact with them for several years, knew better. Rogers did speak some French, loved brilliant conversation, and flattered himself that he was a gourmet—hence his attraction to Paris. He met a tremendous number of people there, mostly blacks from the Antilles bourgeoisie, and was thus enabled to get beneath the surface of things, or so he claimed. “American Writer Says French Negroes Have Responsible Jobs in Commerce But Pay Is Very Low; American Tourists Doing Everything They Can to Teach Frenchmen the Art of Segregation”—such was the title the September 10, 1925, Pittsburgh Courier gave one of his articles. Another article, entitled “How Fares the French Negro?” began with a retrospective of Latin treatment of blacks recalling a score of cases of individual advancement of Negroes under French rule, from General Dumas to Goncourt Prize-winner René Maran.¹⁸

To the French Negro population of Paris, with its apparently well-integrated individuals and celebrated places of good cheer and entertainment like the exotic Bal Nègre on the Rue Blomet, blacks from all over the world were a sizable and not unwelcome addition. However, Rogers was more interested in reporting about Afro-Americans in Paris. His comparisons of French and American customs were generally to Paris's advantage. To him, the most striking thing about France was her attitude toward the Negro: “Just reverse the Anglo-Saxon or cracker attitude and you have it.” He concluded:

I feel much more at home in Paris than in London in spite of the language. The French remind me more of colored folks. They are just as noisy, excitable, loveable, and light-hearted. They also take their own time about things. In the restaurants, a good thing to do is to take your bed with you between the courses. … The Frenchman is a true bohemian. At night he may be seen in hundreds of thousands sitting at the delightful little tables on the sidewalks of the great boulevards, sipping his café, wine or aperitif and taking his time to get acquainted with life. This is perhaps why the French are such an artistic people. Paris is a very beautiful city in spite of the rusty appearance of the buildings. … I cannot recall having experienced a greater elevation of soul than when I stepped into the magnificent and spacious Place de la Concorde. … Another thing that helps me feel at home in Paris is the number of colored folks one sees.¹⁹

Rogers was responding to the expectations of Afro-American readers who wanted to know what their experience in Paris might be if they ever managed to get there. And many did. In his autobiography Claude McKay mentioned a “mass migration” of the Harlem Renaissance smart set to France in the late 1920s.

An article entitled “Beth Prophet Hailed As Artist in Paris,” in the Afro-American, August 2, 1929, gave a chatty account of what Wallace Thurman liked to call “niggerati life.” Evidently an intimate of Countee Cullen, the author started on July 1 with a small party at the poet's apartment. There was card-playing and gramophone music—especially “lowdown” recordings by Duke Ellington. Artists and entertainers attended: Gertrude Curtis, Bessie Miller and her daughter Olivette, Zaidee Jackson, Caska Bond, and painter Hale Woodruff. The following day a tea was organized in honor of sculptor Elizabeth Prophet, who had just exhibited her work in Paris. Then Independence Day was celebrated with spare ribs and cabbage at Gertrude Curtis's place in Montmartre, where Cora Gray, Mary Peek-Johnson, and Mrs. Fleming joined the group. The climax of the festive week was Louis Coles's birthday party, given in Cecil Robeson's magnificent mauve apartment near the Trocadéro, with an enormous buffet and plenty to drink: Zaidee Jackson sang intimate songs; the Berry Brothers danced; Geneva Washington moaned “Tomorrow”; Elizabeth Welch sang; and the guests had a ball while Jack Maze and George McLean played some good stomps. The crowd included the Cullens, Dagmar Godowsky, Cordelia Patterson, Margery Hubbard, Carl Van Vechten, Lydia Burke, Talmadge Wilson, Blanche Howell, Henrietta Dunn, Joseph Attley, Guy Robeson, two counts, and a princess. Novelist Eric Walrond had arrived that very afternoon from London. We are told that Zaidee Jackson topped this with a cocktail party in her Champs-Élysées apartment, with such guests as the Cullens, Walrond, and DeLoach Richardson. The author concluded: “Then on to the Martiniquan ball to complete this week of fun. Here some of our group can do a mean bout of ringing and twisting, along with the Martiniquans doing their delightful dance—the biguine.”²⁰

When they left Paris, wealthy Afro-American tourists would rush to the Riviera, which was gradually becoming a summer extension of the capital. Not untypical was the gay life of Eslanda Robeson, partying and socializing in 1925 with the “high class” Americans she knew or had met on the way from London to Nice, while her husband Paul was singing or performing.

Mary McLeod Bethune was president of the National Association of Colored Women when she went to France with the National Medical Association European tour in 1927. She conscientiously filled every page of her travel diary, calling the Eiffel Tower the “Alpha Tower,” attending a performance by Josephine Baker, and signing many a “gold book” on a tour of the American cemeteries in Flanders and Champagne.

On July 23 she found herself in Nice, jotting down impressions about the more prosperous people at the beaches and resorts, or the scenery glimpsed between the scores of tunnels as she traversed the Alps. But the real surprise was Marseilles, with its vessels going to Africa and all over the world. “Saw many native Africans and dark Frenchmen,” she noted, and “the palace where Alexandre Dumas wrote his last book”—a decidedly inaccurate description of the Château d'If! But the “wonderful rose garden” excited her as much as these, or the alleys and crowded streets of the city.²¹

The splendor of Paris, the desolation and American presence on the former battlefields, a hint of black awareness: in many ways Mary McLeod Bethune was a typical American tourist who listed only one French name among her European acquaintances and who felt glad, on July 28, after this “most successful and interesting trip,” to “sail back for our beautiful America”—first class, of course, on the SS Columbus.

A contact with a French family could make all the difference in the black visitor's discovery of France. In many ways the chapters of Fifty Years After dealing with John Paynter's few weeks in Paris in 1936 read like a guide to the architectural treasures of the city, illustrating the saying, “When you have seen Paris, you have seen the world.” John Paynter was race-conscious to the point of knowing that Henry Tanner's studio stood at 51, Rue Saint-Jacques, and above all he was lucky enough to stay with educators from Martinique, the Achille family with whom he found “a home radiating from every point of view the cultural influences of the arts and social graces.”²²

Not only was the Achilles' apartment on the Rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire facing the Jardin des Plantes (which had delighted Daniel Payne) and in sight of the minaret of the mosque, but the family numbered fascinating music lovers, including Louis Achille, who had been a teaching assistant in French at Howard University, and Paulette Nardal, one of the founders of the Revue du Monde Noir, perfectly fluent in English. She took John to many parts of the city, and he attended many musical occasions, including a memorable performance at the Folies Bergères. He left full of gratitude and hope: “Soon, we trust, the Statue of Liberty, gracious symbol of real fraternity, may be known to reflect the ideals and practices of our own beloved America, as indeed has been so pleasurably exemplified through our own happy experience and observation, with the government and people of France.”²³

The most thoroughgoing analysis of the emotional impact of France on a black American at that time is to be found not in contemporary reports or travel diaries but in Long Old Road, the autobiography of sociologist and psychologist Horace Cayton, written in the 1960s.²⁴

When a Swedish classmate persuaded Cayton to accompany him to Europe, he was already a professional sociologist, had been married to a white woman, and had been published in The Nation. Torstein and Cayton arrived in Paris in the spring of 1936; the city was still in an uproar after the attempt by the Croix de Feu to stage a fascist coup. In an effort to consolidate the Popular Front, an international conference of writers had been convened for the “defense of culture,” and the two attended it. There Cayton was asked by Mike Gold, the only American delegate he knew, to speak as “the American Negro” on the stage, since there was no other present. Thus an official member of the conference, Cayton was able to meet Gide, Dos Passos, and Huxley and to attend a party given by André Malraux, whose Man's Hope and Man's Fate he greatly admired.

Cayton explored the city with Torstein, one section at a time, walking the streets in the afternoon after having enjoyed not one but two breakfasts at sidewalk cafés where they read the day's newspapers. He even tested what he called the ultimate racial taboo by having his hair cut by a white barber.

Torstein was courting a young Frenchwoman. He left his sweetheart's sister in Horace's care, and Cayton immediately fell in love with her charm and elegance. His depiction of an afternoon they spent chatting outside the Café de la Paix on the Place de l'Opéra makes it clear that it was one of the high points of his stay. Juliette, who could hardly believe he was “un nègre” because of his light skin, appeared to like café au lait Negroes and jazz, but not ordinary white Americans; she thought that Parisian women were the most beautiful in the world but greatly admired the golden-brown girls from Martinique; she was attracted to Horace but refused to have dinner with him because it would entail more, and she did not want to complicate her life. The entire afternoon was free of racial tension, and Cayton recorded “an unusual emotion”: “I realized with a start that I could compete for any of those women (in Paris) on equal terms with any other man, not just the white French girls but those of any color or culture” (Long Old Road, 230). After Juliette left, he experienced a new sense of elation that he linked with the city itself:

I walked down the rue de la Paix to the Madeleine and then down into the magnificent Place de la Concorde where I turned up the Champs Élysées. It was early evening and the air was soft and balmy. Crowds of people were sitting at the numerous terrace cafés on either side of the wide street. Paris was wonderful, Paris was beautiful, Paris was free. … Walking up the broad Champs Élysées, I was just one of a crowd. I felt free and happy as I had never remembered feeling in the United States. (Long Old Road, 220-21)

He still wanted to satisfy his curiosity about the girls from the French Antilles: he wondered how a French colored girl would think and behave around white people. One night in a Montparnasse café, one of those beautiful golden-brown creatures entered and ordered a Cinzano at a nearby table. At Horace's request, Torstein, who was fluent in French, invited her for a drink. As introductions were being made, she asked Horace, “What are you?” and in his laborious French, he answered, “A Negro like yourself.” To his surprise, “a mischievous expression came over her face. … “Non, monsieur, she said, you are wrong, I am not a Negro, I am a Frenchwoman” (Long Old Road, 224). Torstein was the one with whom the girl left. Cayton was bemused at having failed to establish rapport on the basis of race, which, in his experience as a black American, superseded any other experience in a colored man's existence. He reflected on the difference between the two cultures: “America had me conscious only that I was a Negro yet France had made this girl, though she was perhaps only a prostitute, feel at home, feel that she belonged” (Long Old Road, 225). During the ensuing conversation with Torstein, the subject of his possible expatriation from a country where he was “always a stranger” came up. He might stay in Europe and get a job as a sociologist in Sweden. Yet wouldn't he still be a foreigner? He could never enjoy the pride and assurance in country which the girl from Martinique had; yet he had no choice. “I knew even then that I would go back to America; it was my home and I was stuck with it. In a way I loved it. I was more American than most of its population” (Long Old Road, 227).

Notes

1. Jean Toomer to Mrs. Beardsley, November 1, 1930, Toomer Collection, Fisk University.

2. Toomer to Alfred Stieglitz, July 17, 1924, Stieglitz Collection, Yale.

3. Toomer to Stieglitz, October 7, 1924, Stieglitz Collection.

4. Toomer, “First Ship,” Toomer Collection.

5. Toomer to Stieglitz, June 7, 1926, Stieglitz Collection.

6. Edith Taylor Lasell to the author, March 23, 1971.

7. See Cynthia E. Kerman and Richard Eldridge, The Lives of Jean Toomer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 175, 186.

8. John Matheus, interview with author, spring 1972.

9. Walter White to Carl Van Vechten, July 30, 1927, Yale.

10. White to J. W. Johnson, August 16, 1927, Yale.

11. White to Van Vechten, September 17, 1927, Yale.

12. White, A Man Called White (New York: Viking, 1948), 94, hereafter cited in the text.

13. White to J. W. Johnson, February 23, 1928, Yale.

14. André Lévinson, “De Harlem à la Canebière,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires, September 14, 1929.

15. Jacques Lebar, interview with Eric Walrond, in Lectures du Soir, January 14, 1933.

16. Eric Walrond, “Harlem,” Lectures du Soir, February 4, 1933.

17. Many of these details were provided by Professor Robert Bone, letter to the author, December 23, 1985.

18. Joel Augustus Rogers, “How Fares the French Negro?” undated article, Schomberg vertical files, 129.

19. “J. A. Rogers Makes Comparison of French and American Customs,” New York Amsterdam News, October 19, 1925, Schomburg vertical files, 130.

20. “Beth Prophet Hailed as Artist in Paris,” unsigned clipping, Baltimore Afro-American, August 3, 1929, Schomburg vertical files. The author was probably J. A. Rogers.

21. Mary McLeod Bethune, diary, July 23, 1927, Amistad Research Center, Bethune file, box 2, 11-12.

22. John Paynter, Fifty Years After (New York: Margent Press, 1940), 64.

23. Ibid., 100.

24. Horace Cayton, Long Old Road (New York: Trident Press, 1965), hereafter cited in the text.