Pressé Comme Un Citron

The 13th adopted child, Jean Claude Baker, collaborated with author Chris Chase on the life of the most extraordinary gift America has handed over to France.

His mom, by adoption, Freda Josephine McDonald. 

Generations all over the world, know her as the legendary, East Saint Louis-born, Josephine Baker.

Renowned for her civil rights activism and the creation of her Rainbow tribe by adopting  war orphans from every place on earth and creating a home and sanctuary for them in a castle in the Dordogne region of Paris.  She is remembered  for her famous song “J’ai Deux Amours, Mon Pays et Paris”

The irony of this, in my opinion, is extraordinary considering the cumulative circumstances of her life journey.

She came into the world during the area when the status quo of the United States for black Americans was that of poverty, Jim Crow Laws (look it up, people) and ethnic torture targeted mainly at it’s black citizens.

Somehow, despite this she developed theatrical talents in the US to arrive in France in the late twenties in an all black troupe of performers in a folkloric Negro review called La Revue Nègre. 

The word “nègre” in France has always given me pause..but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Her success catapulted her into stellar heights of show business, politics and philanthropy.

First husband, and manager "Count" Abatino

First home; Villa La Vesinet

second husband, businessman, Jean Lion

I have read a number of biography’s of Madame  Baker, but her son’s book, by far, is the most informative and detailed account of  the life of a woman who survived Prohibition, racism, two World Wars, the Civil Rights war in America, the McCarthy ear, wild  personal and global economic swings, the vicissitudes of stardom, living and loving in a foreign country, and the fickle nature of international relations.

going to war

Madame Baker wins war

War Hero: Receiving the medal of the Crox de Guerre

Home and much, much more...Castle  Les Milandes

Last husband and the Rainbow Tribe

Single mother of teenagers

debt, debt, debt and mo' problems

astounding resilience!!

Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw, or ever will.”

After reading this absorbing  biography of this quintessential renaissance woman, I was left wondering what became of all the family members of the Rainbow Tribe.

Mme. Baker and the author, Jean Claude Baker

Perhaps someone out there would like to take on the project which perhaps could be called…A Baker’s Dozen.

Wouldn’t that be chouette?

Okay, all you expat writers... On your mark...get set...GO!!!!

THE MONTMARTRE BLUES

Rendez-vous Eighteenth has been considered “crime fiction.” I’m not sure I agree with this.  I’m leaning more toward classifying, if you must, Jake Lamar’s novels as “social commentary”.

You see, Ricky Jenks, the protagonist, has escaped psychotic girlfriends, humiliation and betrayal in the United States to find a new life in Paris. He has chosen the world of the 18^th arrondissement among the whores, pimps, transvestites, immigrants and tourists of the Pigalle and Montmartre, in his bloodstained walk up apartment building.

He’s finally found peace of mind in his routine as an expat musician in a crèperie in Montmartre, and the companionship of his ‘big haired’, ball busting Muslim girlfriend, Fatimah, who will only marry a Muslim man.

Dramatically upsetting his uneventful but satisfying life of bohemian freedom and independence is the arrival of his cousin Cash, a world- renowned orthopaedic surgeon, and his ban of Eastern European mobster friends. 

Cash has arrived to commission Ricky to try and find his wife, Serena (aka Little Lonnie John)  who has fled the country to hide out in Paris after having attempted to murder him in their luxurious home with a kitchen carving knife.

In the Eighteenth arrondisement, we meet the ex-singer and fried chicken restaurant owner, Marva, the enigmatic members of the Million Man Diners group, Detective La Mouche, le flic de Montmartre and a host of other characters vying for parts in the most hysterical and fun expat novel I have ever read.

author, Jake Lamar

It’s sequel is entitled, The Ghosts of Saint Michel.

A YOUNG BLACK BOY AND HITLER'S GERMANY

At the risk of understating the content of this review, this is a bit of a diversion in tone from the previous ones, but exceedingly noteworthy as an expat novel/memoir.

This story is not written by a native born American who lived abroad.    This is a reverse migration tale, in the context of Blog, of a black man, a refugee from Hitler's Europe, who eventually chose to become an American citizen.

I remember reading Hans Massaquoi's editorials in Ebony Magazine as a little girl growing up in NYC.  

He was then the managing editor.  

Ebony Magazine was the first magazine of its kind to feature the lives and accomplishments of  accomplished Negros…as we were called at the time.  

Ebony Magazine

It was required reading in my home among other similar publications and books which were my parents' supplement to the limitations of their childrens’ standard Eurocentric education in school.

Ebony Magazine was founded by John Johnson in 1945 and was dedicated to black American issues in a much needed positive and self-affirming manner.

Publisher, John Johnson

For many years, I assumed that Mr. Massaquoi was a native- born American and because of his surname and appearance a Creole from, perhaps, Louisiana.

That was until later years, when I ran across this:

Hans Massaquoi as a young boy in Hamburg, Germany

“I was six years old when I started school on 1932.  Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. I was too young then to understand what this would mean for me.  I didn’t know that my mother, a nurse, had lost her government job because of me.  The teachers who had objections to the new regime were quickly replaced by younger teachers who were openly pro-Nazi.  Some of them, including the head teacher were plainly hostile to me and did their very best to insult me and to make disparaging remarks about my race. One time – I must have been about ten – one of the teachers took me aside and said, ‘When we’ve finished with the Jews, you’ll be next.’  The most important reason why I survived Hitler and was not killed during the holocaust was that there wasn’t a large Black community in Germany.”

                                             

                                ~Hans Massaquoi, in the Anne Frank Journal, 1994

In 1933 around 5,000 Black people, mainly men and mainly from German colonies in Africa, lived in Germany. Some were married to German women and had children with them.

The Nazis, despite that fact that they found their black subjects inferior and impure, were unsure of how to treat them. Since these blacks only formed a small group who did not represent a threat to Germany they were generally less targeted than the Jews of Germany.

Ironically, at the same time, the Nazis also wanted to show that Black people were treated better than in Germany than in countries such as the USA. 

For a time young Black people were even allowed to join the Hitler Youth.

But eventually more than three thousand Black Germans were put into concentration camps. However, most of them were not arrested because of their skin colour, but because they were communists or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or because they played the then forbidden jazz music.

Mr. Massaquoi, the son of a Liberian father and German mother writes of his journey from Hitler’s Germany to his search for identity in Liberia, then his ultimate immigration to the United States where he would become involved in the American Civil Rights Movement.

He tells of life after the war where he sought friendship with black American soldiers and of his eventual  move to the States in 1950 where he found that racism was as prevalent as it had been under the Third Reich!

Hans Massaquoi

Need I write more?

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.

TRAVELLING IN WEIGHTED CLOGS

black and (A)broad:

traveling beyond 

                                                                               the limitations of identity

“Child, who’s going to do your hair if you take off with this man to Holland?” challenged a voice inside my head not even a minute after my Dutch boyfriend of two years asked me to move back “home” with him. And rightly so because Holland wasn’t exactly known as the Mecca for black hair care. It wasn’t like when I’d moved to Washington, D.C. (a.k.a. Chocolate City), where I could get my hair done on every other street corner.”

The opening chapter of this memoir brought back memories, when I moved to the South of France many year ago, before TGMOBTE  (The Great Migration of Blacks to Europe).  I had moved to an area in South Eastern France, and feared that I might have to take a train to Marseille (three hours each way back then) or fly to Paris, just to “touch up my roots”.

What I found, though, was that French people can do almost anything, with panache style and creativity.  Even when meeting  up with the challenges of black hair.

But I digress…

Carolyn Vines was raised in the United States.  Her memoir  chronicles the journey of a black American women from the restrictive baggage filled with  American racial, class and cultural  attire to the challenges of  recognizing the opportunity that awaited her outside in the larger world as a unique member of the global community.

One only has to look at her family photo at the beginning of the book to see that the cute, bright inquisitive looking child in the center would have a destiny outside of a restricted cultural climate.

The catalyst of her journey was her Dutch boyfriend and future husband, whom she met in The United States and eventually moved with to Holland.

Her novel spans a twenty year roller coaster ride of living, travelling and working abroad.

Thank you, Carolyn, for your wonderful and inspiring memoir.  

Now, I look forward to your novel.

author Carolyn Vines

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain

A MIDLIFE CRISIS ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA

Ladyfingers: a novel by Delorys Welch-Tyson

Review of Ladyfingers: A Novel

“Black folks on the French Riviera?  Get outta here!  The French Riviera is a location for F. Scott Fitzgerald characters, not Terry McMillan people,” most would probably think.

 Well, let me tell you,  us American colored folks have been living down there on the coast as well as in Paris. 

That’s how I got here myself. 

Yours truly was inspired to explore the South of France by one of my favourite American authors, James Baldwin.  Not only did he live in Paris, but he spent most of his adult life until his death in Saint Paul de Vence, on the French Riviera.  Then there was black American  entertainer Bobby Short.  There were the jazz impresarios, George and Joyce Wein, the founders of the Nice Jazz Festival who had secondary residences in Vence. Let’s not forget the fact that Josephine Baker spent her last years with her Rainbow Tribe in Roquebrunne, on the French Riviera.  Among many others who I won’t name out of respect for their privacy, I will add Miss Tina Turner, the author of Ladyfingers, Delorys Welch-Tyson as well as yours truly.

The author Delorys Welch-Tyson has taken characters usually associated with F. Scott Fitzgerald and paralleled their lives with characters you might find in a Terry McMillan novel to create hilarious midlife crisis tales of American women living on the French Riviera.

Basically, the story is that a famous American filmmaker (no…it isn’t Spike Lee) is planning a wedding banquet at the Negresco Hotel on the French Riviera.  A ban of East Somarians plan to kidnap the American guests in order to demand ransom for their Anti-Sanction Society rebel organization.  The kidnapping plan is foiled due to the lack of strategic planning and general confusion which seemed to prevail during the post 9/11 Bush Administration.

Then there's the internationally famous Pop Diva (hints of Diana Ross, maybe?) in love with both a sadistic Belgian Mime and a manipulative record mogul.  But that a whole 'nother  parallel story!

This novel is written as humour and political satire

 Is the story plausible? Yes.  Absolutely, yes!

authro, Delorys Welch Tyson

 Believable?  No.

A HO' IN ITALY: a book review

This tale is told as a back-story.

Mira and Nick , now divorced and remarried to other people, look back on the demise of their marriage.

Only a hot minute after the elaborate wedding of this golden, Ivy League couple, the wife allows herself to be picked up in the business class lounge of an airport.  You see, her husband left before her to take a job in Rome and she was to follow later.  

Well she did, and got detoured along the way, in the airport lounge, by a wizened,  aged, Italian billionaire, named Zenin.

Despite the glamorous scenes of the high life of Rome, Paris, Monte Carlo, Tel Aviv, London and Venice, it’s a pathetic tale of betrayal without the requisite love which generally accompanies it.  It’s a tale of  sterile materialism and moral bankruptcy.

Personally, I believe someone had slipped a Mickey on the golden couple back at the wedding.  The way I see it, the story makes no sense any other way.

On an even more cynical note: let me inform you that this is a triangular,  interracial romance story, with a black female protagonist, her cuckolded white husband and her detached and self-absorbed European toy manufacturer.

author Andrea lee

Lost Hearts is a most interesting novel taking place in the most appropriate setting for such a  dubious subject…Italy!

 .