Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.

By Tyler Stovall / Houghton Mifflin, 1996, pp. 366, $24.95

Reviewed by STEVEN G. KELLMAN Literary Scene Editor, USA Today, and Ashbel Smith Professor of Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Paris was a moveable feast for Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and other expatriate compatriots. For African-Americans, though, oppressed and frustrated by Jim Crow at home, the City of Light beckoned as a color-blind utopia. Poet Countee Cullen regarded the French capital as an ideal place to build his castles in Spain.

Historian Tyler Stovall estimates the current population of African-Americans in Paris at 1,000, down from 1,500 in the 1960s. Though the numbers are modest, their story is compelling, an indirect barometer of the troubled culture they left behind. Beginning with the dark-skinned soldiers who lingered after European service in World War I, Paris Noir recounts the experiences of African-Americans in Paris throughout the century. They were attracted not only by its urban beauty and cultural vibrancy, but by the city's relative lack of racial bigotry Musicians, artists, and writers, in particular, thrived in a society where color seemed no barrier to the pursuit of their work.

A quintessentially African-American art, jazz--like its performers--has been embraced by Parisians since James Reese Europe's 369th Infantry Regiment orchestra performed for them in 1918. Stovall assesses the contributions of major musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Miles Davis, Lester Young, Bud Powell, Donald Byrd, and Eartha Kitt, to African-American life in Paris, but he focuses on three--Josephine Baker, Bricktop, and Sidney Bechet--who ended up settling in Paris and becoming stars. He also examines the careers of visual...