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.