A BLACK GIRL CHASING AFTER BALDWIN

On the cover of Shay Youngblood’s novel, Black Girl in Paris, is a black woman with blue eyes, gazing into the void, it seems.  She is smoking a cigarette and her hair is infested with butterflies.  Perhaps I’m overstating the image, yet this curious cover just about sums up the cumulative message of the story.

Eden is the adopted child of a childless older couple.  They claim that they found her in a brown paper bag in the bathroom of a bus station.  My guess is that parents tell their kids lots of things in order to keep them in line in order to minimize disciplinary issues.  But then what do I know, perhaps I’m just projecting?

Anyway, in 1986 25-yearold Eden arrives in Paris with 200 bucks.  I suppose she felt that, after all, Baldwin arrived with only 50 bucks and became famous, why not give it a shot. 

Hmmm...

Eden is an aspiring writer searching for life experience, after spending time working in the tomb-like environment of a museum in Michigan.  After encouragement from a black French Parisian couple she encountered at the museum where she worked, she decided to take the plunge… as it were.

With two hundred dollars it is obvious that her experience would be a Bohemian one.   Black Girl in Paris is actually beautifully written  travelogue and guide book in a fiction format.   We follow the protagonist from her odd jobs as, au pair, poet’s helper and artists’ model.  The ups and downs of  life in Paris also leads Eden to indulge in pretty theft, lesbian love  and an  affair with an androgynous, white, American, male, expat,  jazz musician named Ving.

Her search for Baldwin eventually leads her away form Paris to the warmer climes of the South of France, where she had been told that he lived at the time.  She eventually heads back to the States after a brief sighting, finally, of Baldwin leaving a Paris café.

Shay Youngblood offers a uniquely different kind of expat novel.

author, Shay Youngblood

Youngblood is the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the Pushcart, several NAACP Theater Awards, the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award and the Astraea Writers' Award.